Word: hopperful
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...DENNIS HOPPER has lost the naivete which made Easy Rider's self-serving romance palatable. But one can't deny that the young director is a sordidly fascinating cultural figure. Two of his friends, director Larry Schiller and writer L. M. Kit Carson, have made a film based on that assumption...
...American Dreamer , a "first person documentary," is frequently incoherent. Events slide past the screen with little connecting tissue. Though all the narration is spoken by Hopper himself, and though he makes clear that he approved of what is shown, the film's point-of-view is established only by the random placement of the camera. Its subjects unashamedly play to it, and it unashamedly records them. But it is placed pretty stupidly (by former photo-journalist Schiller); only when it fades into the background to record some extravagant event does the film achieve an authentic portrait of Hopper...
What is most ironic is that the successful scenes were set up by director Schiller and writer L. M. Kit Carson to evoke a characteristic response. It appears that the filmmakers had deemed Hopper a human phenomenon worth studying; had then requested his participation in a film which would show the reality behind his publicity image; and had finally realized that even the most idiosyncratic creator is too busy concretizing his thoughts in his work to dramatize them personally. So, at various points throughout the film, Carson and Schiller work to catalyze into film actuality a character...
...Cocker/Mad Dogs and Englishmen is a road movie like Hope and Crosby, or for that matter, Hopper and Fonda, never dreamed of. Last year Cocker, his compatriot Leon Russell and a few dozen musicians, singers, wives and assorted girl friends set out under the collective name Mad Dogs and Englishmen to make music all around the country. They played some 65 gigs in 57 days while a camera crew recorded the whole scene, onstage and backstage. The result is a 114-minute carnival of high spirits and solid rock 'n' roll that is almost as much...
...method often works, though, because Gregory is both meticulous about tone and texture and dryly amusing in his recollections of Eliot, Yeats, Edward Hopper and Dorothy Richardson...