Word: hopperful
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Hopeful eyes were fixed upon Dennis Hopper's new film, Out of the Blue, expecting it to do for punk what Hopper's Easy Rider had done for communes and cocaine. Unfortunately, Out of the Blue keeps slipping back into country flowerhead basics with New Wave trim. It takes its title from Neil Young, dresses up Linda Manz (Days of Heaven) as a rebellious punkette who alternately sings Supertramp songs and punches safety pins through her face, and it glaringly dates the death of Elvis Presley incorrectly, somehow linking him with Sid Vicious...
...Hopper also stars in the film as Linda's father, whose alcoholism and sexual perversity have contributed to Linda's spiraling decline, obviously. Linda, suited for the part but laboring under the random references to last year's chart listings and a script that forces her to embody a homicidal punk metaphor, finally snuffs her folks while singing "Teddy Bear...
Although it was filmed in Vancouver, someone at Hopper's flippant press conference had to ask where the film was supposed to take place. Was it a contemporary Western, an urban melodrama in cowboy drag, or just another Canadian tax shelter project...
...Hopper never lost his grasp of the poetic possibilities of such utterances. It stayed with him right to the end and produced some miraculously unsparing images, notably the figure of his wife Jo, A Woman in the Sun, 1961, standing like a middle-aged caryatid on a plinth of golden light in the bare Hopperian room, wearing nothing but a cigarette. In it, the distances between wall and wall, window and sky, or the lit edge of the curtain and the worn radiant torso, take on something of the strangeness of the space in a good De Chirico. The body...
...Hopper, one learns from Levin's catalogue, used to carry a worn quotation from Goethe everywhere with him, in his wallet. As well he might have done: for his paintings are (in the words of Goethe's title) Dichtung und Wahrheit, poetry and truth, the dignified utterances of a near genius whose modest attachment to the commonplace freed him from triviality, though not from doubt...