EASY RIDER| REBEL YELL | FEATURE 07.2009
So spaced out were the first few scenes in this film and so eerie, the combination of silence and trippy jump cuts that I wasn’t actually sure if this film had started at the beginning when I turned it on. You witness two friends already on a journey yet inexplicably stationed in the middle of a desert. No one really knows where it will end or what’s going on until the soundtrack suddenly cuts in wailing “I smoked a lotta grass, I popped a lotta pills!” and the two bikes careen into the distance, spewing out dust in their wake. The soundtrack mesmerises you, then you realise you're watching a tube filled with money and narcotics being fed into the fuel tank of a bike. You wouldn’t be blamed for thinking this is another stoner adventure film, two guys in country America, skinny dipping with beautiful girls and taking a lot of drugs but Easy Rider smacks you with a surprising message about American bigotry, small mindedness and fear of the counterculture. As Nicholson’s character explains to his long haired associate “Those hicks aren’t scared of you, they're scared of what you represent to 'em. You don’t represent somebody who needs to get a haircut, what you represent to them is freedom. Talking about it and being it is two different things”. The film boasts a great cast, a killer soundtrack and some iconic footage of the American landscape. This is the ballsy kind of stuff Hollywood should be doing again but generally doesn't. It is rare to find a large scale movie that sends such a clear "fuck you" to the establishment and these days, it seems to feel like it has greater relevance now than in the sixties.
-Amanda Van Elk.
TRUE ROMANCE | REBEL YELL | FEATURE
From sex in a Nevada phone booth with Patricia Arquette to Elvis appearing as shamanistic vision to Christian Slater, True Romance digs it's own self referential culture and hams the schmaltz up entirely. The story goes that Alabama Whitman (Arquette) meets Clarence Worley (Slater), the two fall inexplicably in love, she renounces her four days of prostitution and the pair decide to have a highway chapel shotgun wedding. Making sure their new horizons are squeaky clean, they decide to kill Alabama's ex pimp and subsequently escape in a purple Cadillac with the Detroit mafia and the local cops on their tails. Arquette plays the perfect vulnerable sex kitten who suddenly kicks ass halfway through the film and actually manages to nail a man to the floor with a corkscrew during the climax. Gary Oldman also plays a surprisingly convincing drug lord street pimp with dreads and a black accent. Cameos from half of Hollywood’s current A list are included and typically, Tarantinos' screen play makes you laugh at things you know you normally couldn't laugh at. The backward humour plays out perfectly as the couple ride a great arc out of Detroit, past the left hooks and oozy sprays of the mafias’ henchmen and into the safety of New Mexico. The film doesn't exactly boast shots of rolling hills and wide open spaces every second, but it is one of the most underrated, violent and typically Americano road trip movies of the 90's, so reckless in spirit it almost makes you wanna run away and commit a couple of crimes in a stolen Cadillac yourself.
-Amanda Laver