Word: rafelsons
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...feel compelled to tell you that the mood of the seventies has at last filtered down into the American cinema. After a year of indecisiveness from our American moviemakers (to wit, such products as the Perrys' Diary of a Mad Housewife and Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces, films which serve the purpose of marking time rather than moving on), two major (and generally successful) works expressing the funereal feeling of the decade ahead have arrived in time to brighten up the holiday season. I say brighten up because while these two films-Paul Morrissey's Trash and Carl Reiner...
...drug movies with his friends Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper. Easy Rider could have been, of course, just another in the cycle cycle. Fortunately for Nicholson, Rip Torn, originally cast as the Southern lawyer, bowed out and Nicholson's friends from Head, Producer Bert Schneider and Director Bob Rafelson, suggested Jack for the role. "I went immediately to work on the dialect. Drew a lot on L.B.J." For the campfire scene, his favorite, he says: "I smoked about 155 joints. Keeping it all in mind stoned, and playing the scene straight and then becoming stoned-it was fantastic...
...direction, by Bob Rafelson, leans toward the mediocre. Rather than devising a consistent visual approach to the material (and surely there was one to be found), he tries a lot of things-some of which work, many of which do not. Much too often he falls back on photographer Laszlo Kovacs' repertoire of American scenic vistas to punctuate scenes-a device that seems intended, for whatever reasons, to invite comparisons with Easy Rider. Occasionally, Rafelson cuts to moments back and forth in time; this invites comparisons to another, thematically similar American film, Richard Lester's Petulia -comparisons which Five Easy...
...movie is nearly flawlessly executed, and its emphasis on story and detail makes it much more textured, far more moving, than a film like Five Easy Pieces. Perhaps a comparison of the two movies is unfair; Rafelson is just beginning his career, Bunuel is ending it with years of fully sustained excellence. But because both men are dealing, in the end, with the same kinds of problems-Is a person defined by himself or by his intimates? Is there such a thing as redemption through passion? Does geography have a personality-vindictive, liberating, or purely evil?-it seems appropriate...
Bunuel is an artist, and he knows he's a sinner; Rafelson makes movies, and has a saint's deadly obsession with truth. "What you can, do," goes another Yiddish proverb; "what you have, hold; what you know, keep to yourself...