Arts & Manners: Son of Easy Rider

I’ve a soft spot in my heart for Easy Rider, the most loathsome travesty of a film in my memory. In my heart, I said, not my head, since my negative reaction to Easy Rider inspired me to write my first movie review since, as a high-school student, I had a column in the local rag called, egad, “DB Takes Look-See.” At any rate, the propaganda piece trumpeting the glories of mindless drug-crazed hippiedom and denigrating the rest of society became the subject of a review in another journal, and since then I’ve neither stopped writing reviews nor watching for the next abomination to issue from Mr. Peter Fonda and his partner in crime, Mr. Dennis Hopper. The long wait is over, and Mr. Hopper has now managed to patch together a worthy successor to Easy Rider.

It is optimistically called The Last Movie. Or, rather, I am optimistic that it will earn Dennis Hopper so many sheckels that he will happily retire to Tierra del Fuego and thrust no more movies our way. Somewhere in all the seeming thousands of minutes of film, Mr. Hopper may have had the makings of a film. Possibly, but not necessarily. What he’s done is paste together a whole range of movie bits, trying now this shtick, now that, smoothed over with some more of that How Ghastly Is This America drivel that distinguished Easy Rider. The tone of unremitting hate gives at least a common denominator to all the disparate scenes; if nothing else holds Last Movie together, that at least does.

DB

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David Brudnoy

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I’ve a soft spot in my heart for Easy Rider, the most loathsome travesty of a film in my memory. In my heart, I said, not my head, since my negative reaction to Easy Rider inspired me to write my first movie review since, as a high-school student, I had a column in the local rag called, egad, “DB Takes Look-See.” At any rate, the propaganda piece trumpeting the glories of mindless drug-crazed hippiedom and denigrating the rest of society became the subject of a review in another journal, and since then I’ve neither stopped writing reviews nor watching for the next abomination to issue from Mr. Peter Fonda and his partner in crime, Mr. Dennis Hopper. The long wait is over, and Mr. Hopper has now managed to patch together a worthy successor to Easy Rider.

It is optimistically called The Last Movie. Or, rather, I am optimistic that it will earn Dennis Hopper so many sheckels that he will happily retire to Tierra del Fuego and thrust no more movies our way. Somewhere in all the seeming thousands of minutes of film, Mr. Hopper may have had the makings of a film. Possibly, but not necessarily. What he’s done is paste together a whole range of movie bits, trying now this shtick, now that, smoothed over with some more of that How Ghastly Is This America drivel that distinguished Easy Rider. The tone of unremitting hate gives at least a common denominator to all the disparate scenes; if nothing else holds Last Movie together, that at least does.