Easy Rider: A dated road movie about two hippies (Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda) that travel cross country from Los Angeles to New Orleans, the embodiment of freedom riding around on their motorcycles and encountering various situations and individuals along the way. It’s like Cheech and Chong, but with a message. A celebration of counter-culture of the 1960’s, including free love, drug use, the music, and general profligacy, while everything not counter-culture and anyone over 30 is portrayed as racist, violent, and/or homophobic. So, a fairly one-sided world view. They are heroes because they “think” they stand for something, beset by people who don’t understand them, yet they display just as much ignorance and hypocrisy about those they don’t understand. Well-made, sure, and I can see how this was so popular in the 1960’s. The problem is, 40 years on, the sentiment doesn’t hold up under close scrutiny. A lot of this film is idealistic hype, about two free spirit stumblebums trying to find the “real America”, when they are actually two drug dealers funding their trip with their ill-gotten gains from a cocaine shipment they facilitated (so indeed, they are capitalists). Still, worth a look as it did break the Hollywood mold during its time. Woodchuck sez, “Check it out.”
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