Dennis Hopper
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Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019)
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
influenced by Easy Rider (1969)
Themes
We get an affectionate look through their eyes at the workings of an industry transitioning from the star system of Louis B. Mayer to the era ushered in by films like Easy Rider.
In the year of the release of Midnight Cowboy; They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?; Easy Rider; The Wild Bunch; Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, why are all of Tarantino’s movie marquees confined to marginal throwaways like Three in the Attic; The Night They Raided Minsky’s; Krakatoa, East of Java and the like?
By the year 1969 – the year of Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy – Rick is reduced to playing the villain in other people’s shows, fearing that he is already a has-been.
Arthur Penn’s Depression-era gangster romance considerably upped the level of acceptable onscreen mayhem, and by 1969 two more extreme examplars, Sam Peckinpah’s ultra-violent Western The Wild Bunch and Dennis Hopper’s openly countercultural youth film Easy Rider, were in post-production and screened later that year.
In those months following the release of “Easy Rider,” which dropped like an atom bomb in Hollywood, Dalton’s quaint action persona is a relic.
Lo hace a su manera; situando el relato en un año clave para la historia estadounidense: ese 1969 en el que el movimiento hippie perdió su inocencia, se ahogó en la sangre de Sharon Tate y en su cuerpo torturado, pero también el año en que el éxito de una película como Easy Rider (Dir.
The same year, some homegrown Hollywood guys hatched Easy Rider, another road movie about two guys who pick up a strange dude (though then it was Jack Nicholson).
The “in” references — to “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Duel,” “Easy Rider,” “The Empire Strikes Back,“ “Star Trek,” “Spider-Man,” etc., etc. — are plentiful and painfully obvious.
And on a marquee at a movie theater are the titles Easy Rider and Duel -- a Spielberg film.
"Paul" borrows heavily from so many movies -- "E.T." obviously, but also "Jaws," "Aliens," "Easy Rider" and many more -- but while it definitely takes their lines or plots, it doesn't quite replicate their emotional stakes or dramatic payoffs.
Zhao’s flair for the open road recalls Dennis Hopper’s “Easy Rider” (1969), while her magic-hour skies rival Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven” (1978), offering Fern as a successor to Jack Nicholson in “Five Easy Pieces” (1970) and Harry Dean Stanton in “Paris, Texas” (1984), a masterpiece so profound that it’s hard to put into words.
It turns out that the film had less in common with “Grapes of Wrath” than it does with road movies like “Easy Rider” or “Five Easy Pieces”.
X (2022)
Directed by Ti West
influenced by The Hot Spot (1990), Easy Rider (1969)
Characters Visuals
The filmmaking group consists of Maxine’s boyfriend producer Wayne (Martin Henderson shedding his “Grey’s Anatomy” image to play the role in seedy Matthew McConaughey fashion), nerdy director RJ (Owen Campbell), a fan of Godard who wants to create artistic erotica, his naïve girlfriend/boom operator Lorraine (Jenna Ortega), who has no idea they are about to shoot a porn film, blonde starlet stripper Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow), striving for Marilyn Monroe but channeling Virginia Madsen in “The Hot Spot,” and Vietnam veteran turned porn star Jackson Hole played by Scott Mescudi (better known as rapper Kid Cudi).
The picture’s most personal humor comes from the charming idealism and naïvete of junior filmmaker R.J., who insists “It is possible to make a good dirty movie,” and tells anyone who’ll listen that he plans to class the movie up with some “avant-garde” editing – and then, of course, West fills his film with “Easy Rider”-style stutter cuts.
And second, that in the decade from the late 1960s through the mid-'70s, filmmakers often hatched extreme, unique, original visions — among them Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend, Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool, Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie, Dusan Makavejev's W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism, Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris, Werner Herzog's Aguirre the Wrath of God and, we might say, Gerard Damiano's art-porno Devil in Miss Jones.
The director barrels down that same metaphorical highway that a stoned Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda took in 1969's Easy Rider, a film more important for what it wasn't than was.
He appears to have been imitating the low-budget indie films of an earlier era — I did occasionally think of “Easy Rider” — but without the underlying substance those movies usually had.
It’s telling that the movie ends not with a shootout or its aftermath, but two cops talking about a hilarious dating mishap (much the same way Dennis Hopper ended his 1988 cop drama “Colors”).
He has an intuitive sense of the omnipresence of urban danger and the virus-like nature of poverty and crime, and his screenplay for End of Watch evinces a fascination with the detailed in’s and out’s of policework and the tense relationship patrol officers have with the mean streets they are sworn to protect (in this regard, it is similar to Dennis Hopper’s Colors from 1988).
Building on the innovations of the landmark releases The Graduate (1967) and Easy Rider (1969), Harold and Maude explores outsider mentalities through fragmented cutting, using those music montages to embellish its themes and create a feeling of emotional suspension.
Mainstream audiences also steered clear, suggesting that the trail for artful, left-of-center Hollywood films blazed by The Graduate (1967) and Easy Rider (1969) was already starting to shut down long before Spielberg’s little shark movie launched the summer blockbuster craze four years later.
The unlikely romance between 20-year-old, moon-faced, proto-goth Harold (Bud Cort) and uber-sprightly 80-year-old Maude (Ruth Gordon) remains one of the cinemas most memorable love affairs and the films idiosyncratic character and atmosphere make it one of the least-dated counter-culture titles churned out by Hollywood in the aftermath of Easy Rider.
Despite the action and the tension, being light-hearted, it is a welcome addition to the motorcycle genre, which includes Marlon Brando�s The Wild One (1953) and Dennis Hopper�s Easy Rider (1969).
Even 1969's "Easy Rider" capitalized on such anxiety.
One does not get the impression that Von Trier is unaware of the Easy Rider echo; quite the opposite, in fact.
Mr. Seal was also the subject of “Doublecrossed,” a 1991 HBO docudrama starring Dennis Hopper (which is vaguely amusing if only because Mr. Hopper played a very different coke smuggler in “ Easy Rider ”).
There's an obese former soccer star with a tattoo portrait of Karl Marx covering his back; a skinny masseuse with braces and Alfred E. Neuman ears; an old couple who never speak to each other; a young method actor (Paul Dano) groomed to resemble the "Easy Rider"-era Dennis Hopper.
In a variation on "True Confessions" and a hundred old crime stories, Doc's frenemy from the old days is Bigfoot Bjornsen of the LAPD, who makes Jack Webb look like Dennis Hopper in "Easy Rider."
When Jack Nicholson was chosen to play roustabout mental patient R.P. McMurphy, the actor was already firmly etched in the public mind as a real-life icon of free-thinking, anti-establishment, rebellion thanks to his unforgettable performances in such topical films as "Easy Rider" (1969), "Five Easy Pieces" (1970), "Carnal Knowledge" (1971), "The Last Detail" (1973), and "Chinatown" (1974).
After Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Detail, and Chinatown, he'd become the ideal leading man for the Vietnam/Watergate era.
Keep in mind that at the time Nicholson wasn't well known to mainstream audiences, since he had played quirky characters in more independent films like Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces, but we all are fortunate that the original owner of the rights didn't stick to his plan to star himselfKirk Douglas.
It can encompass countercultural classics like Easy Rider (1969), feminist dramas like Thelma & Louise (1991), gonzo drug-addled odysseys like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) and even apocalyptic father/son bonding sessions like The Road (2009).
What sets “Thelma & Louise” aside from the great central tradition of the road picture -- a tradition roomy enough to accommodate “ Easy Rider ,” “ Bonnie and Clyde ,” “ Badlands ,” “ Midnight Run ” and “ Rain Man ” -- is that the heroes are women this time: Working-class girlfriends from a small Arkansas town, one a waitress, the other a housewife, both probably ready to describe themselves as utterly ordinary, both containing unexpected resources.
It's as if he'd taken all the famous movies about two self-destructive outlaws films like Easy Rider, Badlands, The Sugarland Express, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Zabriskie Point, even Russ Meyer's Faster, Pussycat!
The three-word epitaph for the ’60s — “We blew it” — was written in both “Easy Rider” and “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.”
What follows looks from a distance like one of those culture clashes that has sustained many an American independent venture since Easy Rider : on one side of the screen, straggly longhairs who make a point of celebrating Noam Chomsky Day, on the other, well-fed squares guzzling on capitalism’s teat.
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013)
Directed by Ben Stiller
influenced by Easy Rider (1969)
Themes
In the ‘60s, films like Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces suggested that the road and the journey from point A to point B could be far more rewarding than any answer at the end of the trail.
An essay on storytelling and spectatorship within When Inanimate Objects Attack schlockone infused with the haunting aura and disillusionment of a postEasy Rider road movieRubber is some kind of miracle.