Word: rafelsons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Easy Rider (1969) and in the freer, more personal films that flowed from its success, Nicholson became a kind of figurehead for a loose group of actors and film makers who were trying to expand the commercial genre. Nicholson, Actors Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, Writer-Directors Bob Rafelson, Monte Hellman, Carol and Charles Eastman-none of them then well known-all cheered and boosted each other. Their work was almost always full of aggressive invention (Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces, Hopper's The Last Movie, Nicholson's own Drive, He Said), but the new Hollywood passed...
...never seen any other actor do it," says Mike Nichols. "Usually everyone has their own cliques-the camera crew, the electricians, and so on -but when Jack's around, that feeling disappears." Occasionally, Nicholson's competitiveness gets in the way of the general bonhomie. Bob Rafelson recalls that during the shooting of The King of Marvin Gardens, all of Nicholson's bottled-up energies would come out in a series of demon Ping Pong games with the crew. Says Rafelson: "He demolished everyone who dared to take him on." Nicholson is smart enough to know when...
...KING OF MARVIN GARDENS. Bruce Dern and Jack Nicholson are superb in Bob Rafelson's tenaciously fascinating rendering of the dead end of the American dream...
...Rafelson's raw materials are first rate: sensitive acing (except for Julie Anne Robinson). Lazlo Kovacs's cinematography, a glib sharp-tongued script. But he Jumps them together without logic or order. The "no exit" situation would seem well suited to psychic drama. But Rafelson leaves unexplored Nicholson's talent for tempestuousness and dwells in a tone of wistful resignation. The problem again is Rafelson's self-conscious world-weariness. He shows Nicholson improvising in the bathroom. "The form of the tragic autobiography is dead. I have chosen radio...because my life is hopefully, comically unworthy." If this...
...flesh and muscle fabric. It is a blood brother of the genre established with Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces. These films bore the double burden of avoiding Hollywood debris and finding a voice independent of more practiced European avant-gardism. And they emerged as wholly American. Now Rafelson feels it his aesthetic duty to be new again. The problem is that his basic landscape hasn't changed, and so as be remodels his methods he sacrifices sincerity. The onetime pace-setter is pacing anew having lost his bearing...