Word: hopperful
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Easy Rider is basically the filmic diary of a motorcycle trip through the Southwest to New Orleans. The travelers are two young hip types, Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) who have managed to smuggle in a large quantity of cocaine, and, having bought two Harleys, are heading for Mardi Gras to celebrate. The two meet up with George Hanson (Jack Richardson), a drunken Southern lawyer, while in a Deep South Jail. Hanson, yearning for some legendary whorehouse and dominated unto middle-age by his Daddy, decides to accompany them to New Orleans. But camped out one night they...
Written by Hopper, Fonda, and Terry Southern, arch prostitute at large, Easy Rider inherits from the Western a large quantity of corn, what intellectuals like to call folk poetry, and a simplistic moral schema. There are good guys, like Captain America, drooled over in infatuated close-ups, and bad guys, the yahoos of the South and over-thirty America in general. The good guys are warding off the yahoos (a young commune member prays to God "Thank you for a place to make a stand.") Billy and Wyatt die because they are free, like all good guys. (Hanson says: "They...
TECHNICALLY Easy Rider is a clumsy first picture. Hopper breaks directorial line in almost every sequence to no valuable effect. Kovacs' landscapes and wide-angle shots of the two motorcycles crossing the Southwest are quite marvelous; but the LSD sequence is predictable--lots of fish-eye shots, weeping, and intimation of death--and boring, and doesn't do justice to the drug (compare Conrad Rooks' sublime hallucinations in Chappaqua or in any film by Jordan Belson). Hopper also has an irritating editing affectation: when indicating the passage of time he'll cut two frames of the next sequence in twice...
From the motorcycle subculture movies Hopper has brought rock music, but instead of The Ventures he has given us known songs by top rock artists. Attempting no structural integration between sound and image, his musical allusions are literary: Hoyt Axton's "The Pusher" after they make their connection, Steppenwolf's "Born to Be Wild" as they hit the road on their bikes. Billy and Wyatt travel through these pulsating songs the way they do the countryside--the Band, the Byrds, Dylan, Jimi Hendrix et al are employed as a musical landscape, part of the backdrop of the youth subculture...
...Hopper's frankly commercial use of rock gives us one more insight into his real sensibility. Easy Rider may be a hippy vision, but it's a bourgeois hippy vision, concocted with both eyes on the market place. Just listen to how Hopper treated sex, and why: "I knew that Peter and I the girls we meet would never be seen totally nude in the nude swimming scene, because I wanted to show the over-forty crowd that it is possible to play like innocent children in the nude without getting into sex." In the echo chamber of our Hollywood...