The acting is raw and unglued, the guest-star appearances of aging 60s icons (Arlo Guthrie, Timothy Leary, David Carradine) are self-conscious and arch, and the sprawling episodic construction is underlined by conceptions that are sentimental to a fault. But this odd little road movie — a first feature written and directed by Abbe Wool, who cowrote Sid & Nancy — still got to me, mainly because of its sincerity and its relative novelty in trying to locate the dregs of American counterculture in various portentous and philosophical roadside encounters. The semifantastical plot concerns the absurdist journey of two bikers (John Doe and Adam Horovitz, members respectively of the bands X and the Beastie Boys) from southern California through parts of Nevada. Doe, the older biker, is a grizzled factory worker literally searching for a place called El Dorado, where he wants to scatter the ashes of an acquaintance (David Anthony Marshall) who died in a freak accident; Horovitz is a younger biker with a Motel 9 fixation who insists on tagging along. At its worst, this registers like an unconscious parody of Easy Rider; at its best, it suggests a flea-bitten yahoo version of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Hawks and Sparrows. Read more
Query: How do you make a satire about contemporary corruption in the U.S. Congress, much of it based on real-life abuses, with a former speechwriter for Walter Mondale (executive producer Marty Kaplan) as cowriter, and somehow ensure that it never intersects with reality? Answer: Cast Eddie Murphy in the lead. Murphy plays a con artist who scams his way into the Senate, then (you guessed it) belatedly develops a conscience; the filmmakers treat all the characters, not to mention the audience, as sitcom puppets. Jonathan Lynn (My Cousin Vinny) directed, and the costars are Lane Smith, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Joe Don Baker, Victoria Rowell, Grant Shaud, Kevin McCarthy, and Charles Dutton (1992). (JR)
From the Chicago Reader (September 1, 2001). — J.R.
One of the great transgressive moments in 50s Hollywood was Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” playing over the opening credits of this black-and-white melodrama (1955, 101 min.) about unruly boys in a slum high school. This was released a year before the movie Rock Around the Clock, and the fact that the earlier film was an MGM release only added to the punch. A crew-cut Glenn Ford, the squarest of teachers, tries to tame Vic Morrow and Paul Mazursky, among other hoods, and win over Sidney Poitier (in one of his best early roles). As Dave Kehr suggested in his original Reader capsule, the kids are better actors than the adults (who also include Anne Francis, Louis Calhern, and Richard Kiley). Writer-director Richard Brooks had a flair for sensationalism, and his adaptation of Evan Hunter’s novel is loads of fun as a consequence, but don’t expect much analysis or insight. (JR)
