Word: rider
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...seems to be having much trouble embracing Easy Rider. Rex Reed, no less, thinks Easy Rider "is a bold, courageous statement of life seldom matched in motion pictures." The current WBCN ad (BCN moves closer and closer to Krackerjacks every day) for Easy Rider starts with quotes from Life and moves on to include forty other critics who feel that Rider is the film you can't afford to miss. This review is dedicated to all those who expected a shuck...
...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...
...EASY RIDER is born of the natural union of American International motorcycle epics and all those westerns whose aging heroes have outlived their era. The two protagonists are as painfully inarticulate as any western idol; their sluggishness of mind is of course intended to be read as sensitivity and moral integrity. Billy's even decked out in a fringed suede jacket, boots, and cowboy hat. The beautiful Southwest landscapes of photographer Laszlo Kovacs turn hostile each night around the campfire, where a lot of authentic marijuana dialogue goes on. Like Western heroes, they are isolated in travel from their natural...
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...