Indulgent claptrap (Easy Rider (DVD))

Member Name: shaneo632

Product:	Easy Rider (DVD)
Date:	26/07/09 (10 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good visuals and actors

Disadvantages: Indulgent and self consciously cool

note: also appears on The Student Room in part

Easy Rider is one of the most culturally significant films of the 1960s, but it's also a rather self indulgent and self consciously over-stylised effort that's got some decent insight, but is so often suffocated by the intrusive direction by Dennis Hopper, who also co-stars in the film with Peter Fonda.

It's a very easy film to summarise - two bikers go on a road trip across America, getting extremely high, and attempting to fornicate with as many women as possible. In fact, it can be seen as something of a primitive "teen comedy", except it caters to a SLIGHTLY more mature crowd, given that it has something to say about the cultural state of affairs of the 1960s. Obviously this makes the film significant, in that it takes place as the liberal upheaval was taking place, but it's hard to excuse the film's indulgences, chiefly that it's very much scant of much plot, and seems to be little more than a platform for Hopper and Fonda to indulge a drug-induced sex fantasy.

That said, some of the visual motifs are quite entrancing, and do reflect the drug-addled escapism that these men have assumed. Unfortunately, it's nothing pungent enough to excuse what is undoubtedly a virulently self indulgent vanity project by a usually very talented man.

This hedonist road film is as self-indulgent a film as you'll ever see. Its first half is minimalist and uninspired, but the film's second half features an excellent (but very brief) performance by Jack Nicholson, and the film's social commentary becomes apparent. Hopper's frenetic editing is irritating, but admittedly befits Easy Rider's trippy aesthetic and thematic origins.

Summary: A pretentious but somewhat important film