Sorry I missed you last night. It was my birthday and I had gone to the movies with Grimsley, then had come back to Pearl's where I tried to blog about it during my usual late night writing session, but I found myself so sleepy that I couldn't finish. So I just now completed my movie review and here it is. I also added a little bit about another movie I watched tonight:
(from April 16 2019) I had a very nice birthday today, with kind wishes sent from friends on Facebook and in phone calls and cards in the mail. If you are reading and wished me a Happy Birthday, thank you so much. I am grateful for your friendship, and for your readership too! :) Much love, from Me to You, and thanks again. ////
It was also a working day, so I took Pearl to her Golden Agers meeting as I do every Tuesday. Today she had good energy, so that was another blessing. Here I've been, pondering my last year in my 50s, while Pearl will be turning 95 in four months. Working as her caregiver, I can see what 95 looks like, so to speak, but I can't imagine what it feels like. And so for her to have a good energy day is quite a remarkable thing at the present time.
I did see a movie tonight, at an actual movie theater. For a birthday present, Grim took me to see "Easy Rider" (1969), the iconic counterculture movie that is now a half century old. It was playing at the Granada Hills Theater for tonight only, just a single showing, maybe to mark it's 50th Anniversary.
Before we went in, I said to Grim that I had seen parts of "Easy Rider" over the years, on broadcast TV or more recently on TCM here at Pearl's. I estimated that I'd seen two thirds of the film, all viewed in separate chunks, but I'd never watched the movie as a whole.
Seeing it tonight from start to finish, on the big screen, gives me a new appreciation for what I'd long considered (based on my haphazard viewing history of the film) as merely a Hippie Flick. You know what kind of pictures I am talking about, the low budget psychedelic works of directors like Roger Corman, that were produced in the late-60s/ and seem hopelessly dated now with their depictions of group LSD trips created by warped camera and lighting effects, and the bygone imagery of unwashed youthful dropouts hitchhiking around the country in a stoned-out haze. Though it was widespread, the Counterculture existed only for a short time in America, and while the idealism of the Hippies and students was admirable, because they actually tried to live their beliefs, the lack of practicality in their approach now seems hopelessly naive. You can't overthrow the Establishment with Flower Power, though it was a nice sentiment and produced a lot of colorful art and clothing.
That idealistic philosophy is present in "Easy Rider", and the two main characters encounter several different groups of hippies and other individuals who are living their lives in communes, far off the grid.
1969 really was a weird time in that respect. It seemed that the Hippies really were trying to make a go of living apart from the cities and trying to form self-sustaining small farms and the like, but overall the downfall of the movement was the use by many young people of heavy drugs like LSD and cocaine. Even the constant use of pot is a very destructive thing, as I could testify to and would warn the kids of today against. To go on a brief sidetrack, I think the legalisation of pot in it's current highly potent form is a very bad thing. But to get back to "Easy Rider", the movie gives a fair portrayal of the 60s youth culture, however, showing a couple of communes that are Christian based and have nothing to do with drugs.
"Easy Rider" stars Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper (who also directed) as two young men who are crossing the country on their motorcycles, heading to New Orleans from California. They have just completed a cocaine deal that has netted them a substantial amount of money. Fonda is the more stylish of the two. He is tall and handsome, wearing black motorcycle leathers and riding a custom chromed chopper. His image in the movie is one of the most iconic in all of American film from the last fifty years. Hopper is the scruffy, buckskinned longhair, who could more easily be mistaken for a Hippie by rural onlookers - and he is perceived that way - but in truth, his character is anything but. Though he smokes marijuana throughout the film and is constantly laughing like an idiot, when he does assert himself to the more serious Fonda, or to Jack Nicholoson's liberal Southern lawyer character, it is always to stand up for capitalism in one way or another. Hopper may look like a freak, but on the inside he is pure Establishment. His main goal in the movie is to get to New Orleans in time for Mardi Gras, party it up with some hookers and then take his share of the dough and "retire in Florida".
Fonda smokes pot constantly as well, but he broods his way through the trip. Something is bothering him and we will later find out what it is. Along the way, as the two leave the wide open West and get closer to the poverty stricken South (which was still in pretty bad shape in the 1960s), the resentment against their "kind" begins to show itself. They are refused service or ignored in cafes. Rednecks mutter insults and threats. Local girls, however, find them cute and sexually interesting, but this only enrages the local men further.
I wasn't expecting "Easy Rider" to be anywhere near as well written as it is. There is a long campfire scene in the middle of the movie, where Nicholson - who has met the two bikers in a small town jail cell and is now hitching a ride with them - begins to talk about a wide range of ideas, on everything from his belief in UFOs and Aliens living among humans here on Earth, to the root causes of Conservative America's disgust at the Hippie youth movement. "They fear you because of what you represent", he tells Hopper and Fonda, and then goes on to explain in articulate detail the social and existential reasons why this is true. It's a riveting scene, and the movie as a whole is just as interesting, though there is a scene or two, early on at the communes, that could have been tightened up. Overall, though, the movie never stagnates.
The ending to "Easy Rider" is notorious and shocking, and if you know it you'll know why, but I will not reveal it. I will say, though, that it holds it's power all these decades later and the statement that it makes in just a handful of indelible images is just as frightening.
Two very big Thumbs Up, then, for "Easy Rider", not the low-budget and dated "Hippie film" I was expecting, but rather an exceptionally well written, expertly photographed Road Movie about two men in search of something to believe in during a tumultuous time in America. It is a film that has stood the test of time. ////
(this part is from tonight, April 17 2019) : Tonight I went back once again to the Armer Theater at CSUN, to watch a movie called "Y Tu Mama Tambien" (2001). It was on the roster of Latin American films included in this semester's Cinematheque retrospective. Rather than covering the career of a single director, as Professor Tim always did, the professors of the last two "post-Tim" era retrospectives have chosen to have an Umbrella Topic as their theme. The first prof did "women in film" last Fall, and the new prof is doing "Latin American film". This was my first attendance at one of her screenings and she did a good job as the host, giving a thorough and informative introductory lecture to the movie, though for me and the old 2009-2018 "regulars", no one can compete with Professor Tim.
You may know "Y Tu Mama Tambien" yourself, because it was a fairly popular crossover Art House hit in America when it was released in 2001. The critics loved it, and their adulation propelled director Alfonso Cuaron to major industry status. He is now one of the top directors in all of film as you know.
Much of the critical excitement over the film came from the blatant enactment of it's many sexual scenes. In this way it is just shy of being pornographic. In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, this daring approach could have looked cheap and trashy, but because Cuaron is a complete auteur in the technical sense, meaning that he is a high level editor and a cinematographer as well as being an artistic director, and he is a master of all three abilities, he knew just how to film these graphic sex scenes, and in what particular context (often using a light comedic overtone) to soften the hard-core blow.
The sex appears as light-hearted and fun, then, even though the imagery looks like the real thing minus the close-ups
Cuaron's context is, like with "Easy Rider", two young men in search of themselves. In this case they are teenagers in Mexico City whose girlfriends have just left together on a trip to Italy. These guys are boyishly macho, for them the whole world is about sex and competition. Because they are not as confident in their manliness as their banter would indicate, they mutually assume that their girlfriends went on vacation to cheat on them, with notoriously oversexed Italian men.
Because of this assumption, when they have a chance to get back at what they think their girls are doing to them, or at least to get something in return, they hatch a plan to convince an older woman (of 28) to accompany them on a vacation of their own, a road trip to a mythical beach that may or may not exist. The woman is the married cousin of one of the youths. She is from Spain, an exotic quality that excites the young friends, but though she is smoking hot, she has had a very difficult life that they cannot begin to understand because they are a couple of sheltered goof-offs. Their objective on this road trip, once they have convinced the woman to go with them, is......you guessed it.....to have sex with her, even though she is married to one of their cousins.
She is older and turns the tables on the friends as they drive cross country, asking them direct questions about their girlfriends and their sexual conquests. It seems she is playing a game with them, toying with them to tease them, but because of the movie's sexual openness, you always know what is going to wind up taking place. There can only be so much talk about sex before it finally happens. This was the purpose for the trip in the first place, not only for the two teenaged boys, but for the 28 year old woman also.
Like Peter Fonda in "Easy Rider", our other Road Trip movie, something is bothering this beautiful lady. I do not want to go into detail because anything I say will cause the plot to unravel, but I will add that Cuaron presents an undercurrent to all the sexual fun and games in the brief images of police state action we see by the Mexican roadsides as the friends travel along on their journey. Out of their car windows are briefly seen shots of Federales and Army soldiers lining up peasants on the side of the road. Are they to be arrested for some minor indiscretion.....or do they face something even worse?
Cuaron, who later expanded on this Mexican government fascism in "Children Of Men, only hints at what might happen here, but it is enough to offset the dichotomy of the hot blooded but comedic sexuality and place it all against a threatening backdrop. Poor people are being detained and arrested for no apparent reason, in the background, by the roadside, as the friends drive along.
Just like in "Easy Rider", the ending in "Y Tu Mama Tambien" packs a powerful punch. Here it is especially profound, and you can see why Alfonso Cuaron has gone on to have the career he has had.
With "Easy Rider", what could be a typical "Hippie Movie" turns out to be well developed on several levels, and with "Y Tu Mama" we are also surprised, because what at first seems to be a sex romp slowly turns into a deeply profound meditation on eternal life.
Both movies aptly take place on the Road. Two huge Thumbs Up for "Y Tu Mama Tambien" also.
See you in the morning.
Love. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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