Showtimes:
MONDAY, JUNE 7 at 7PM
THURSDAY, JUNE 10 at 9PM
(No Saturday Show)
EASY RIDER 1969 Dir. Dennis Hopper. Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, Karen Black, Phil Spector. 95 m.
"(Hopper's) most influential accomplishment was directing and starring in 'Easy Rider,' the 1969 biker film about two alienated souls who (as the tag-line said) went 'looking for America.... and couldn't find it anywhere.' Made on a $400,000 budget (it grossed $60 million worldwide), it blew the hinges off the big studios' doors. It helped open American movies to contemporary content and new styles of acting and storytelling." (Michael Sragow) Read "Dennis Hopper 1936-2010" at Mike Sragow Gets Reel
"The formative film of the new Hollywood.... When he got the chance to make Easy Rider, he poured a decade's worth of desire, liberation, nihilism, despair, and hunger into it, and the freedom of the movie is there in every image."
(Owen Gleiberman)
In the oldest, finest tradition of teenpics, Easy Rider (1969) became a hit with kids mainly because adults found it unwatchable. Director Dennis Hopper borrows from the avant-garde to suggest the LSD experience, and some of the trips have a definite flavor of Kenneth Anger and Maya Deren. The film may be a relic now, but it is a fascinating souvenir—particularly in its narcissism and fatalism—of how the hippie movement thought of itself. This was the same year, remember, that Hopper played a heavy offed by John Wayne in True Grit. (Dave Kehr)
