Not A Happy Laugh
Not enough room to swing a cat...

I'm not sure I can stretch this out for two hours.

That's where them movie review things come in handy.

You can stretch them way out. A little research. Some synopsizing. Funny comments and whatnot. A humorous anecdote. The excitement of explaining what an aspect ratio is. That sort of thing.

Well, I watched half a movie last night. It's pretty good. But it's not as though I can write a review on half of a movie.

That's not entirely true, although I still have to has seen the whole movie.

For instance, take A.I.. It wasn't a totally brainless bunch of fluff, but Lord it wasn't good. For one thing, it never figured out where to end. The Pinocchio thing seemed like too big a copout and too literal. And once they lost Jude Law's character, my interest waned. Not because I've got some closet thing for Jude, he was just incredible to watch with the ticks and whirs onscreen. I've already said too much.

If I was to write half a review, it'd go like this. I'd stop when the boy crashes in front of the Blue Fairy, and repeats the puppet's litany over and over again. It still wouldn't have been a great movie, but I would've felt better about it. At least at that point it hadn't degenerated into 2001 meets Close Encounters.

Another good example would be Gangs of New York. If it had just stopped about an hour and a half into the movie, I would thought it was pretty good. The second hour and a half gave it plenty of time to ruin itself. Without Daniel Day Lewis's great performance, I would clicked it off long before I got to the ending. If I just reviewed the first half, the movie'd probably sound pretty good.

Not to get totally catty, but I could make some movies sound good if they stopped after the opening credits.

I was thinking about writing a piece on late 60's early 70's road movies.

I'm not sure I've got it in me.

It was sort of a comparison piece between Easy Rider, Electra Glide in Blue, Vanishing Point, and then the ethics of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Strictly in terms of the movies, mainly because I don't feel like researching the specific history of the era. Besides the fact that, it's such an overdone, over-mediated era to begin with. (On a tangent, I read a great article about the fact that most movies at the time were not reflective of the hippie counterculture, but rather of the hip and hipsters.)

Easy Rider of course is one of the most prominent documents of the counter-culture of the 60's. Said counter-culture eventually became the mainstream. Many of our attitudes of today have pretty direct lineage to that time period. Like I said, it was the first truly mediated movement of its type. The Beat Generation of the 50's wrote books, they weren't plastered all over TV getting blasted with firehoses, or frolicking naked at a concert. The Beats for all their jazz, drug abuse, and what have you weren't any less threatening to their respective status quo, they just weren't as visually represented.

The funny part is that as the children of that generation or the survivors of the time, we can't watch it the same way as the older generation at the time would've seen it. Because of many of our leanings, by and large, we side with Hopper and Fonda. Yup, they make look strange, but their basically good boys. They're certainly not as judgemental as them backwoods cracker squares.

That sort of thing. I don't think that's a fair representation exactly.

I think if you never seen Hopper's movie, you should watch it back to back with Electra Glide in Blue. In it, Robert Blake plays a motorcycle cop in the middle of nowhere in Arizona. There's a sort of mystery murder plot that's a vehicle primarily for Blake's ambition to rise above his station, but mostly, it's the story of a good non-partisan guy that can't catch a good break. He's judged by the hippies because he's a cop. He's judged by other cops because of his diminutive size. Mostly he's faulted for trying his best to adhere to the rules, and gently keep everyone else on the straight and narrow.

It's a wonderful film, and wonderfully sad film.

Here's a square character who's a good human being, but who might have still had beef with the easy riders. He's not represented in that film. Of course Jack Nicholson's character would be close in some respects, but being a drunken lawyer doesn't exactly paint the picture of an average stand-up citizen.

Which leads me to Vanishing Point, which oddly enough is sort of a strange bridge between the two. Barry Newman's character, Kowalski, is a former cop who now transports illicit goods cross country. It just keeps adding nuance. Kowalski left the square world, but he doesn't really fit in with the counter-culture world either. He's too bit, too smart, and too bored by both of them. However, the fact that Kowalski won't align himself with anyone, makes him a difficult hero to accept despite the movies pro-counter-culture message.

Vanishing Point is more indicitive of the ideas posited by Fear and Loathing... which essentially point to the eventual collapse and sellout of the counter-culture. I wanted to say something about it, I honestly did...Now, I'm just no longer in the mood.

Anyhow, you could always go out and see this for yourself (but you may have a little trouble finding Electra Glide. C'mon MGM, it's time for a nice DVD). I'd recommend that you do.

The funniest part to me is the forceful nature in which counter-culture attempts to get itself forcibly accepted by the status quo. Some of the more obvious cases would be the punks, and more recent still, the goths. Not all of them feel this way, but the general sentiment seems to be: "We're so weird (*that we all look alike most of the time*)...so accept us, or we'll make you feel like a lame ass. Give us jobs. Don't restrict us (*cause were so damn different, we can't survive without trying to find our way back into your lame culture). Etc."

As you can see, I don't have a whole lot of respect for it. You've already seen though where I find must sub-groups tend to be crying for help and attention more than they cry for change, justice, or revolution.

I like to see myself in the Kowalski part, as part of any crowd but not belonging to any of them.

There was somewhere I was going with all this, but I've more or less completely lost my way. In any event, don't believe what any one thing tells you about a subject. If you really wanna know something shop around for a minute. If you don't think you have time, you need to figure out that there are a lot of things in the world that you can filter out because you don't need to know them in the first place.

History is written by winners, baby...