The Last Movie

From the December 1, 1989. Chicago Reader. — J.R.

The least that can be said for Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie, made nine years earlier than his 1980 masterpiece, Out of the Blue, is that no other studio-released film of the period is quite so formally audacious. After the surprise success of Easy Rider, Hopper was given carte blanche by Universal Pictures to make this disjointed epic in Peru; although it was given a special prize at the Venice film festival, the film was withdrawn from circulation in the U.S. after a couple of weeks and has rarely been screened since. After working in a western directed by Samuel Fuller (playing himself), during which one of the lead actors (Dean Stockwell) has been killed, an American stuntman (Hopper) remains behind with a Peruvian woman. He is eventually drafted into an imaginary movie being made by the Indian villagers; before or after this — the film isn’t very explicit about chronology — he is enlisted in a scheme to find gold in the mountains. The curious thing about this freewheeling allegory is that it is simultaneously about many things (the fakery of moviemaking, mutual exploitation, ugly Americans in the third world, Hopper as Jesus) and nothing at all. Read more

Smile

From the Chicago Reader (August 23, 2002). — J.R.

This 1975 satire about a Young American Miss beauty pageant and the middle-class mentality of small-town southern California is Michael Ritchie’s best feature, though it hasn’t won anything like the reputation it deserves. Dave Kehr’s original Reader review was less than enthusiastic (Ritchie’s rage doesn’t bring much insight with it) but conceded that a few of the supporting performances are surprisingly deep — Michael Kidd, Annette O’Toole, Barbara Feldon, to which I’d add Bruce Dern, the lead. (The film also features early performances by Melanie Griffith and Colleen Camp.) Screenwriter Jerry Belson supplies an unexpected amount of pain and even horror as well as comic nuance; Martin Rubin of the Gene Siskel Film Center aptly notes that Waiting for Guffman owes a lot to this picture, and I might add that in certain respects it also anticipates American Beauty. 113 min. (JR)

Time-Tasting Places in 3 Current Releases [THE POWER OF THE DOG, PASSING, NO TIME TO DIE]

There’s an uncommon number of period films

among the end-of-the-year releases and screeners,

a clear indication that we don’t want to spend more

time than we have to in the present moment. Who

could want to? But the problem with most period

films in this country that are insufficiently inflected

with the usual genre reflexes (the beloved ahistorical

escape hatches of noirs, Westerns, and even musicals)

is that most of us know too little about the past

to make it believable enough to feel inhabitable.

A good case in point is Jane Campion’s sluggish The

Power of the Dog, which tries to critique the Western

genre’s gender stereotypes but winds up stranded in the

present almost by default, in its dialogue as well as its

overall ambience. One simply can’t imagine the

offscreen space of a Montana in the 1920s (e.g., the

nearest town) because the imaginative investments are

too meagre, relating more to the visible landscapes than

to the societies and cultures that the characters

supposedly inhabit.

A far more persuasive view of the U.S. in the 1920s is

found in Rebecca Hall’s densely packed and even

claustrophobic Passing, which is visually and

psychologically far more invested in interiors than in

exteriors, and where the novel being adapted is

contemporaneous with the action being shown. Read more