60s counterculture classics

[Remember (Quaco)]

It never occurred to me that there was anything scary/creepy about it - I always loved it! No doubt because of its Monkees association, more than anything else.

It used to spook me out a bit. One of my earliest memories was asking my mom if that thing meant "born". I knew it meant something!

[Matt Wilson]

Psych Out is pretty cool. It's on the same DVD as The Trip over here.

Riot on Sunset Strip is pretty weak, I'm surprised Charlie likes it.

Here's my top ten biker flicks:

Easy Rider (nuff said)
The Wild One (started it all)
Wild Angels (set the standard all following bikers flicks would follow)
Hells Angels on Wheels (great pre-stardom Nicholson role)
The Glory Stompers (unhinged Dennis Hopper performance. The top three films all lead to Easy Rider)
Born Losers (the first Billy Jack film)
Devil's Angels (Corman's follow-up to Wild Angels, though he didn't direct. John Cassevetes is Peter Fonda's opposite in terms of performance)
Chrome and Hot Leather (with William Smith and Marvin Gaye!)
Run, Angel Run (actually, as close to a romance as biker flicks get)
Angel Unchained (Hawaii surf legend Don Stround and a young Tyne Daley in another romance)

[The Fish]

One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest is a fantastic film. Passive aggressive and claustrophobic in the extreme, but such a great performance from Nicholson. Maybe his best movie ever.

I'd add Five Easy Pieces too. Just about fits the theme here as well , although clearly a different kind of "antihero", moody and ennui ridden.

"I want you to hold the chicken"

[The Fish]

Here's my top ten biker flicks:

So who else wants to see Matt's top ten rom-coms.

[Matt Wilson]

I'm sharing my wisdom with the uncultured masses and you mock.

Pearls before swine and all that.

[Snarfyguy]

I honestly don't recall what I made of Jodorowski's El Topo when I saw it back in the 80s, but I suspect that now I'd find it pretty tiresome.




Putney Swope, anyone? Button-pushing, for sure, but I didn't care much for it as it seemed to throw the baby out with the bathwater, cinematic convention-wise.

[mentalist (slight return)]

Here's my top ten biker flicks:

Easy Rider (nuff said)
The Wild One (started it all)
Wild Angels (set the standard all following bikers flicks would follow)
Hells Angels on Wheels (great pre-stardom Nicholson role)
The Glory Stompers (unhinged Dennis Hopper performance. The top three films all lead to Easy Rider)
Born Losers (the first Billy Jack film)
Devil's Angels (Corman's follow-up to Wild Angels, though he didn't direct. John Cassevetes is Peter Fonda's opposite in terms of performance)
Chrome and Hot Leather (with William Smith and Marvin Gaye!)
Run, Angel Run (actually, as close to a romance as biker flicks get)
Angel Unchained (Hawaii surf legend Don Stround and a young Tyne Daley in another romance)

howabout Stone?

[inthenextlife]

My favs.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962)
Bande à part (1964)
The Graduate (1967)
Barbarella (1968)
Head (1968)
If... (1968)
Alice's Restaurant (1969)
Midnight Cowboy (1969)
The Strawberry Statement (1970)
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Harold and Maude (1971)

Great selection. The pick of the bunch there is 'Midnight Cowboy', 'The Graduate' and 'A Clockwork Orange'. I wonder if 'Catch 22' can be added to the list also?

[Six String]

This film is defined as being part of the Acid Western genre. More precisely, in its own publicity releases, it was called, "the first electric western." Gunfights and electric guitars in the Old West? You bet! Zachariah gets a mail order gun, practices a little, and kills a man in the local saloon. He and his friend Matthew set out to become gunfighters, joining with the Crackers, a rock band who are also (pitifully inept) stage robbers. Having quickly outgrown that gang, Zachariah and Matthew set out to become bigtime gunslingers. Before long, they part company and a rivalry grows between them. The film is loosely based on Herman Hesse's novel Siddhartha, surrealistically adapted as a musical Western by Joe Massot in collaboration with The Firesign Theatre.

That was pretty great as far as this genre goes. I saw it in the theater when it was released. Elvin Jones was particularly superb.

[Jimbo2]

Rosemary's Baby was a superb film. Miya Farrow's full frontal nude walk in hell was wonderful.

I Am Curious Yellow was radical.

[savoirefaire]

I saw Blow-Up last year in Berlin and still can't see the fuss. Hemmings is just a wanker, and the plot isn't especially involving anyway. I don't get why it's seen as a classic of its time.

I don't think he's meant to be a sympathetic character, and the essence of the film is drifting from one thing to another. The world Antonioni shows is one where nothing is of value, not a dead person in a park, not a smashed-up piece of a guitar that two minutes earlier everyone was clamoring for. Scenes trail off into nothing. Similar stuff happens in Zabriskie Point, for example, the scene where the young man, Mark, is in a deli using a pay phone, and he puts the phone down in the middle of the call to ask the proprietor if he'd trust him for the price of a sandwich, to which the guy says no, and immediately we see Mark walking outside the deli. The thing was, that phone conversation was pretty important, and it's weird that we didn't hear the end of it! Nothing matters any more, nobody finishes their sentences, nobody means anything by what they say, everything is in flux, nobody knows anything anymore, everything is subjective (like the imaginary tennis game).

I think a lot of the greatness in Antonioni's films is purely the visual, the way a certain color appears in a certain scene. There is some incredible-looking lilac in one of the scenes in Hemmings' studio with Vanessa Redgrave, just as there is some beautiful pink in the desert in The Passenger. It's these sheets of color that pop out of the frame. Plus the occasional moment of transcendent beauty, such as that central scene when Hemmings is actually in the park. When he actually found something real in his life, and for once had a goal. But even that got frittered away, the body disappeared, his blow-ups got swiped, he goes to tell his manager and he's too stoned to hear anything, and so he just lets it go, like everything else.

I like it, but I think the reason it was popular was that it showed things people wanted to see: the Swinging lifestyle, models, rock and roll, London, a trendy guy driving around, etc.

I watched Blow Up at the student cinema tonight, and it's interesting what you have to say here, Q. I thought the guy was a bit of an asshole but reminiscent of some people I have met. Careless with cause and consequence, but fixated on their obsessions. Some things were too detailed (I am referring to the scenes where he works with very expensive, advanced photography equipment), but in an almost endearing sort of way. It's was weird how static and almost uncharismatic the lead actor was, almost like an everyday sort of person, stuck in an unrealistic world. I could almost hear someone utter "Oh look his life is so hard and terrible" ironically. Also, what's up with the scene with the two teenage girls? It starts off as attempted rape only to turn into a threesome?

[Matt Wilson]

So many of Antonioni's films are like that though. That 'nothing has value in today's society' theme is all over L'Avventura. In fact - I'd say it's the overarching message of the picture. Felini has a similar vibe in La Dolce Vita and its antecedent, Satyricon, but handles it much differently. The spiritual isolation of mid twentieth century Europe provided grist for many fine films and is increasingly entering into many American pictures as well.

[savoirefaire]

So many of Antonioni's films are like that though. That 'nothing has value in today's society' theme is all over L'Avventura. In fact - I'd say it's the overarching message of the picture. Felini has a similar vibe in La Dolce Vita and its antecedent, Satyricon, but handles it much differently. The spiritual isolation of mid twentieth century Europe provided grist for many fine films and is increasingly entering into many American pictures as well.

L'Avventura is on my list of films to watch now. I figure I should watch his two supposedly best films at least. I don't mind the "nothing has value in today's society" as a theme in general. Just a week ago I caught the Iranian flick Taste of cherry by Kiastomi and it had the same sort of vibe in abundance, but to very very different effect of course. This film to me was more of an exposition on the bizarreness of life, and adventure is wherever you look for it, no matter how absurd, which a good dose of how a glamorous life can be very boring. I read that Antonioni didn't like "method acting" and picked David Hemmings because he was a fresh-face, which I found interesting because it might be the reason we found the lead character static.

[The G Experience!]

. It's was weird how static and almost uncharismatic the lead actor was, almost like an everyday sort of person, stuck in an unrealistic world.

It's always hard to know with Antonioni how deliberate these things are. I think Hemmings was meant to be charismatic (he was based on Bailey) but in a rather 60's glib way. He's meant to be quite a superficial character I think. Mind you I need to watch it again - it's been years.

[Matt Wilson]

If you found the Hemmings character static, wait until you encounter the L'Avventura cast. After that you can move on to Last Year at Marienbad or maybe even Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie.

[Matt Wilson]

There are screaming kids running around my house at the moment while my wife chats away with her friend and I crack open a bottle of Jim Beam. I'm too lazy to start a new thread so I'll just list a few non-American classics which were quite the bee's knees in film studies classes when I was in school in the eighties. Consider these a primer for an intro to World Cinema:

Bunuel
Viridiana
L'Age D'or
Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie
The Exterminating Angel
Renoir
La Regle du Jeu
La Grande Illusion
Eisenstein
Battleship Potemkin
Ivan the Terrible parts I & II
Aleksandr Nevskii
Fellini
8 1/2
La Dolce Vita
Amarcord
Le Notti di Cabiria
La Strada
Bergman
Wild Strawberries
Fanny and Alexander
The Seventh Seal
Kurosawa
Rashomon
The Seven Samurai
Ikiru
Truffaut
Jules et Jim
400 Blows
Tarkovsky
Andrei Rublev
The Sacrifice
Mirror
Vigo
L'Atalante
Zero de Conduite
Dreyer
La Passion de Jeanne D' Arc
Ordet
Mizoguchi
Ugetsu Monogatari
Sancho the Bailiff
Life of O-Haru
Antonioni
L'Avventura
Blow Up
Visconti
Senso
La Terra Trema
Rossellini
Roma, Citti Aperta
Viaggio in Italia
Paisa
Resnais
Hiroshima Mon Amour
Last Year at Marienbad

Honorable mentions:
Bicycle Thieves - De Sica
Les Enfants de Paradis - Carne
Sunrise - Murnau
Madame de... - Ophuls
Ashes and Diamonds - Wajda
Apu Trilogy - Ray
The Scarlet Empress - Von Sternberg
Casque D'Or - Becker
Napoleon - Gance
Claire's Knee - Rohmer
Earth - Dovzhenko
Das Kabinet des Dr Caligari - Wiene
Greed - Von Stroheim
Ai - No Corrida - Oshima
Heimat -Reitz
Signs of Life - Herzog
Tokyo Story - Ozu

[pcqgod]

I love 'The Trip' and 'Blow Up' but I don't like a lot of the movies that would properly fit in this category. 'Zabriskie Point' and 'The Wild Angels' I found particularly awful. 'Riot on Sunset Strip' is more a glorified Dragnet episode than anything truly counter-cultural. At some point I would like to see 'Wild in the Streets,' however. That one seems like it could be fun.

[Matt Wilson]

Wild in the Street in borderline awful.

[Charlie O.]

I love 'The Trip' and 'Blow Up' but I don't like a lot of the movies that would properly fit in this category. 'Zabriskie Point' and 'The Wild Angels' I found particularly awful. 'Riot on Sunset Strip' is more a glorified Dragnet episode than anything truly counter-cultural. At some point I would like to see 'Wild in the Streets,' however. That one seems like it could be fun.

Wild in the Street in borderline awful.

Yeah, I mean, I guess it all depends on what you're looking/hoping for. How many of yer actual '60s counter-cultural types were even interested in making movies? And if they did make movies, how many of those movies were watchable?

I recently watched a quasi-documentary built around silent color footage shot by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters on their first big bus trip. Did I enjoy it? Of course I did. But was it really more entertaining than Riot On Sunset Strip - or a Dragnet episode, for that matter? Debatable. Believe me, I'm not of the "bad = good" school at all, but sometimes kitsch can have something of inexplicable value to offer.

(And yes, Wild In The Streets is borderline awful. But it will hold your attention.)

[pcqgod]

I love 'The Trip' and 'Blow Up' but I don't like a lot of the movies that would properly fit in this category. 'Zabriskie Point' and 'The Wild Angels' I found particularly awful. 'Riot on Sunset Strip' is more a glorified Dragnet episode than anything truly counter-cultural. At some point I would like to see 'Wild in the Streets,' however. That one seems like it could be fun.

Wild in the Street in borderline awful.

Yeah, I mean, I guess it all depends on what you're looking/hoping for. How many of yer actual '60s counter-cultural types were even interested in making movies? And if they did make movies, how many of those movies were watchable?

I recently watched a quasi-documentary built around silent color footage shot by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters on their first big bus trip. Did I enjoy it? Of course I did. But was it really more entertaining than Riot On Sunset Strip - or a Dragnet episode, for that matter? Debatable. Believe me, I'm not of the "bad = good" school at all, but sometimes kitsch can have something of inexplicable value to offer.

(And yes, Wild In The Streets is borderline awful. But it will hold your attention.)

I have a high tolerance and even appreciation for kitsch, which is why I think I would enjoy 'Wild in the Streets.' And I do like 'Riot on Sunset Strip' for that matter -- I was just pointing out that it's more exploitation that real counter-culture. Really, I don't give a hoot about authenticity. I hated 'Zabriskie Point' because it took itself so seriously and tried to be shocking and profound and it just came across pointless and boring. (Great soundtrack though!) 'Easy Rider' is everything that 'Zabriskie Point' tried to be and failed to convey. I hated 'The Wild Angels' because I hated the main characters. I do like a lot of Roger Corman, though.