Posted on 08/22/2019 8:35:44 AM PDT by Rummyfan
The August 16 death of actor Peter Fonda comes as a jolt to Baby Boomers, including this one. Most of us will always think of Fonda as the young and vigorous star of the 1969 film Easy Rider.
Perhaps Fonda, dying of lung cancer, willed himself to live long enough to see the golden anniversary of that movie, which earned him an Oscar nomination. Indeed, over the last half-century, Easy Rider has made an epochal transition, from counterculture-ish critique to time-burnished classic.
And yet to re-watch the movie after five decades is to see some time-specific assumptions that haven’t aged well—making the film more anachronistic than timeless. Such discordancies tell us a lot about how the nation has changed since the film’s release in the United States on July 14, 1969.
For instance, there’s the breezy assumption that drug use, including LSD, is not only a good thing for its mind-expanding (sic) properties but also, crucially, a marker of social superiority. Moreover, the lead characters, played by Fonda and Dennis Hopper, are actual drug dealers, trafficking in cocaine from Mexico. That’s a bit much, to be sure, even for progressives. And come to think of it, today’s audience will also notice that Fonda and Hopper are both white males—they’re not the least bit diverse.
(Excerpt) Read more at theamericanconservative.com ...
Can these articles get any more absurd? No jolt felt here, instead this boomer cracked open a cold one and laughed as he descended into an eternal fiery hell.
Fonda was dying of lung cancer when he made the disgusting comment about Trump’s son? What a truly horrible person. Good riddance.
I kinda miss Dennis Hopper. Not the man himself, but the roles he used to play.
Just as big a jolt as a fart in a wind tunnel.
The stupid is strong in this one!
Roger Ebert did a retrospective on ‘Midnight Cowboy’ many years after the film’s release. I think it applies to ‘Easy Rider’ also. He said there were individual scenes that were classic (’I’m walking here!’), but also a lot of meaningless filler. He said as the years passed everyone edited the film in their mind, only remembering the great scenes, and suddenly the film was thought of as a towering landmark in the history of movies.
I remembered Nicholson’s performance and a few other highlights in ‘Easy Rider’, and the music was great, so I tried to watch it again on VHS maybe 12 years after it was originally released in 1969. I couldn’t make it to the end it was so boring. Fonda and Hopper made a fortune from it, and it remains one of the most profitable films in movie history, but a great film it ain’t.
Then you missed the best part.....
*sniff* I love a movie with a happy ending. *sniff*
But of course. Hollywood and the music industry are packed full of junkies, of course a lot of the stuff they put out is going to rationalize it. There's a lot of people who say that the music from the 60s and 70s is so good because of the drugs they did. That is total crap. My contention is: imagine how good it could've been without their brains being addled by drugs. Too bad we'll never know. Drugs are the reason that the 1980s are so full of one-hit-wonders. People hit it big with a great song, they suddenly have enough money that they can be high every waking moment instead of it being just a once-in-a-while Saturday night thing, and they never produce anything meaningful again. The longevity of Hollywood careers is proof that being an actor isn't that hard, those people do it just fine as long as they can sober up enough to work on a movie for a few months, then go back on the junk when they're done.
Slow boring movie and I was a biker at the time. Hope his back hurt every moment on that hard tail (no rear suspension) while filming. With his mean sadistic comment about Trump’s son, glad he went out the way he did. Hope it hurt.
To be honest, I was never real impressed with that movie. It had a 3-4 scenes that were very well done and stand the test of time, the rest of the movie is boring crap. I’d do fine to watch a 15-minute montage of the best scenes on YouTube and forget the rest of it, most of the movie is a sleeper. The people that are all nostalgic of the movie tend to be disaffected liberals who blame somebody else for their problems. It’s the old, “I would be rich and doing all these great things if I had gotten the same breaks as [INSERT THE NAME OF SOMEBODY SUCCESSFUL HERE].”
51 years ago was TET 68 and later John Hanoi Kerry’s attack against America. That was a jolt.
I never considered the guy particularly “vigorous”.
.…The August 16 death of actor Peter Fonda comes as a jolt to Baby Boomers, including this one...
Much more of a jolt to him than me.
John Lennon’s death was a jolt, this guy’s death was a fart in a windstorm.
“death of actor Peter Fonda comes as a jolt to Baby Boomer”
Is his daughter, Hanoi Jane, one of the jolted?
I was 14 when the movie came out and was 17 before I actually saw it.
I have a completely different take on the movie from a lot of people.
I find it ironic Dennis Hopper is a big conservative and Peter Fonda lost his way.
I still enjoy the movie for the music and the scenery despite it’s fatalistic view of America and sometimes cartoonish caricatures of people and places. It is what it is and it was a big departure form the big studios movies of the time.
RIP Peter Fonda and may he find peace, love and truth that he did not find in life.
back when we built them ourselves ...
His daughter?, I don’t think so, sister maybe.
What we see in that movie is the nascence of a cultural shift that over half a century has boiled down to its bitter dregs. Many of its counterculture presuppositions have turned from manifestations of free thought to either mandatory or forbidden, and the cultural upshot is not one of increasing liberty but of strident suppression. These days the boys would still get shot, but not by rednecks. At least they weren't beheading them in '69.
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