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Easy Rider

Easy Rider

List Price: $14.94
Your Price: $11.21
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Wild, man!
Review: Usually, self-indulgent films are about as entertaining as a barn of hayseed, but Easy Rider works - perfectly capturing its era. The acting is fine, and the photography is super. Dig that soundtrack. All in all, a good ride.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: There are some things Hollywood can't think of
Review: With a low budget and an inspired mind, Hopper and Fonda created a movie which is all raw talent, youth,and freedom. A philosophical/psychadelic script (nominated for an academy award) describes precisely a unique part of modern society with nothing on their mind, but aspiration for creating a better future. Whether they are right or wrong, the film is an interesting document about America at the time of crisis, and the wishes of man to be released from cables of time and age.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: It Has An Audience
Review: I did not love this movie to death but did not dislike it intently either. Sort of middle of the road. I actually like Jack Nicolson's character. Easily the least sleazy between him, Fonda, and Hopper ...

Truthfully the story line is quite annoying. The ... haze isn't really my style but I wanted to see what all the hype was about. Liked the scenery of the guys riding through America. The film sets a mood for the 60's biker ... culture and I can relate to what its trying to say.

People who grew up in the sixties or who can related to the ... counterculture will like this film. Nonetheless, I cannot agree that Easy Rider is the universal all time classic that it is reverred as by all these film societies.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Easy Rider will ride on forever in history.....
Review: I had just gotten back from Viet Nam when this came out (69)... I understood it then and still love it's theme of 'freedom'... When Peter had the idea for this movie and Dennis jumped in, they were making a movie showing what was happening with the youth of the 60's that was truely great... Peter's line, toward the end, "We blew it!" showed how money and desire for material wealth ruined the movement... This is a historical movie telling of the dreams of a lot of us baby boomers... I will continue to watch this DVD, and think of how the world could be now with Peace, Love and Sharing and not following someone elses design for society... A fantastic movie made exactly as it should have been made by exactly who had to make it... Wish I was there again... ~~~Peace and Love~~~

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Bloody Awesome
Review: Having seen the movie early 70's and then buying the tape the
none of the above do justice to the DVD. All I can say is
awesome, the surround sound, the widescreen effects, I sat
there shattered to see a whole new perspective of this movie.
In 1991 I was in the USA for two months. During that period I rode a Haley-Davidson through the States for five weeks and as I said at the Virginia State HOG Rally, 'When I saw the movie Easy Rider for the first time "One day I'm going to go to the States and ride a Harley" and I am doing it now'I will keep watching this movie and also listen to the great music which is part of the history of my generation. Hey and I'm still riding
Harleys

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Get your motor running
Review: Most of the negative reviews here criticise this movie as being dated and for idolising the waster culture - possibly related criticisms - but it's difficult to see how you could justify either except on a very cursory consideration of the film.

Easy Rider absolutely refuses to idolise the sixties ideal, and it is not to my eyes even vaguely dated (I say this having seen it for the first time last night, thirty three years late).

The golden thread running through this film is that THE PARTY'S OVER, DUDES.

Fonda states this explicitly ("we blew it...") and it's firmly implied in a devastatingly funny caricature of a dead beat hippy commune (as the city dropouts joyously commune with nature, scattering their seed on the barren land of the New Mexico desert, Fonda asks wryly, "do you, ah, get much rain up here?")

And (without wishing to spoil the ending) by the time the credits roll, our heroes haven't exactly profited from their wild lives. The ending of the film is profoundly pessimistic about the prospects for freedom and independence.

The film is certainly critical of the intolerant "establishment" (which nevertheless prevails), but if there is one character who does smell of roses, it is the farmer who takes the boys in for the night and who, says Fonda, should be proud simply for living off the land.

For my money this makes Easy Rider ahead, rather than behind its times. It's also rooted in a number of great cinematic traditions, aside from the Road Movie genre which it helped to invent. I like the idea (expressed in a review below) that this is a latter day western, even down to the character's names, Wyatt and Billy. Also, were you to draw a line between Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid and Thelma & Louise, it would intersect Easy Rider.

The performances of the cast are delightful - Nicholson's is rightly feted, and Hopper's is very Dennis Hopper - fans of Apocalypse Now will recognise this style in which Hopper doesn't really act so much as simply looning around - here in total contrast to Fonda's studied coolness, which holds the film together, reinforced with a cracking soundtrack (in this regard also, Easy Rider was well ahead of its time).

If you fancy a dash of counterpoint, try watching Easy Rider back to back with David Lynch's stunning recent work The Straight Story - as a compare and contrast job, I think they'd make a fascinating study.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Great American Movie
Review: If you love America as much as I do you will love this. Even by watching this movie it makes me love America even more. Makes me proud to live here. If you love motercycles hey this is it.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Wanna Be A Bird?!
Review: The Easy Rider DVD provides viewers of this classic anti-establishment film with an in depth commentary from its key players. Hopper and Fonda discuss the physical and mental experience of making such a two-wheel classic.

As many reviewers have indicated, Easy Rider is very much of its time. For bikers and longhairs that meant overt rejection that is not as widespread in the 21st century.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: The 60's are over!
Review: In 1969 "Easy Rider" caused quite a stir, but it started aging fast. Within two years it started to look dated, as evidenced by the clip they showed on the AFI top 100 movies award show (Dennis Hopper's "nobody wuvs me 'cause I have long hair" speech). After more than 30 years, Easy Rider has decayed to a point where it is more than laughable, it is positively moldy. Fans of the movie describe it as a movie about freedom. However, the freedom of this movie is the same freedom a 2 year old feels when he learns to say, "no"; it is ignorant, self-centered and very irritating to mature onlookers. This childish spirit permeates the movie on all levels. One can almost hear the director saying, "I'm gonna make a movie without a centralized plot, 'cause I can!" The actors, for their part, seem to be saying, "I'm gonna do drugs, 'cause I can!" and "I'm gonna ride around aimlessly, 'cause I can!" What it amounts to is a pointless exercise in pretentiousness that is so in love with its own rebel spirit that the audience is quickly forgotten. Nothing comes of the character's self indulgence. They do not grow, they do not learn, heck they don't even seem to enjoy a lot of what they do. Yes, I realize that talk of responsibility and growth is exactly what would peg me as a "square" by the movie's characters, all the more evidence of its datedness I say. While whiny, self-indulgent boorishness may have been fashionable 30 years ago the "message" rings hollow today when you see all the ex-hippies in rehab or safe in their corporate jobs.

People who claim that negative reviewers "just don't get it" should consult their history books. The Human Potnetial Movement of the 60's was founded on the idea that putting less restrictions on people's behavior would make them better. "Easy Rider" seems to depict the opposite, suggesting that given more freedom people will just indulge themselves and waste away. If anything, "Easy Rider" is anti-freedom, anti-life affirming, basically anti everything except its own narcissistic vision.

I give the movie 2 stars for the cinematography and the musical score.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: One of the top 5 movies from the 1960's
Review: Dennis Hopper should've gotten the golden palm for this movie, make that picture (he did win for best new filmmaker, but he deserved the bigger prize too), that give sweeping cinematography, a superb soundtrack, acting believable: alternately funny and tragic, and a feel that is all it's own (and those that ripped it off aren't any better).

Here, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper play two small time motorcycle guys from L.A. (LA? yes, Los Angeles) who go to a La Contenta bar, whether it is really in Mexico or not you be the judge, and buy a good deal of coke from a dealer. They sell it to a guy right next to an airport and then starts the triumphant tunes The Pusher and Born to Be Wild by Steppenwolf as they go on the road with a load of money in Fonda's gastank. On the road, they run into an understanding farmer, a quirky commune leader, a commune with some really strange folks (reminds me why I occasionaly indulge in the cannibus culture but not communism), two nice girls posing as skinny dippers, a parade, an ACLU attorney who says "Lord have mercy, is that what that is?" when Fonda passes a joint, witty and deadly southern folk and estranged prostitutes.

Fonda and Hopper represented something amazing to the generation that they were about, and that's what made the box office bucks; that and Jack Nicholson in one of his abloslute most memorable roles as the drunkard ACLU attorney George Hanson. Must See, if only once, for anyone.


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