Easy Rider (1969)

 "I'd like to try Porky Pig."

If I'd seen this in my late teens I'd have devoured it in the same way I devoured all that old "counterculture" literature back then- Kerouac, William S. Burroughs,  Hunter S. Davies- so uncritically. Anything counterculture was cool to me back then, and I vaguely assumed to to be progressive, free thinking, an unalloyed good thing.

But I didn't. I saw the film tonight, at forty-three, much more ambivalent about a hippy movement that owed as much to right wing rugged individualism as it did to socially progressive causes. Billy and Wyatt may seem like free spirits, but their money comes from a cocaine deal, and Wyatt expresses admiration for both a poor Arizona farmer and a commune for their self-reliance in living off the land, and they end the film in a brothel before dying. Yes, the bigoted, corrupt and racist South that taunt and eventually kills them is much worse morally than they are, but these two men could easily have voted for Reagan or even for Trump if they'd lived.

Poor George (you can see why Jack Nicholson's surprisingly small but incredible performance elevated him from prominent actor to movie star overnight) is simultaneously much more intelligent (he has a clearer idea of freedom) and more naive than either of them, and probably too innocent to live.

This is a beautifuly directed film, obviously looking ahead to the Hollywood auteur films of the next decade. Surprisingly, much of it is just pocaresque rod movie stuff with as much music as dialogue. It's superbly shot, though- there's a particularly good panning shot of the peole of the commune- and the film deals with a great deal of themes- the ambivalent nature of the counterculture and the uneconsruced nature of the Deep South among them. This is a unique film, but a sublime one.  It reminds me of the literary works I mentioned above but, unlike On the Road or Fear and Loathing, it still has an appeal to this forty-three year old with long hair.

Apocalypse Now (1979)

"I love the smell of napalm in the morning..."

 I may have waited until I was forty but at last I can claim to have seen this troubled yet magnificent and iconic film, and now at last I know where the phrase "Charlie don't surf" comes from. But there#s so much more, and not just the well-known set pieces with eccentric warfare, surfing chat and Ride of the Valkyries.  No; this modern take on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (which I read long ago, in Florida, when I was nineteen) doesn't just transplant the events from the Belgian Congo to Vietnam but imparts added meaning. There's far more going on in this film than a single viewing can pick up, but there's the barbarity and ethics of warfare, misogyny, mortality and so much more, and it all feels so much more profound for the extraordinary skilled direction from Francis Ford Coppola.

It doesn't feel over-long; yes, Kurtz (a magnificent Marlon Brando, always filmed in some degree of shadow as metaphor for the character's ambiguity) is held back to the end, being built up slowly until his final, iconic appearance, but the film is equally about the events that happen to Willard (an extraordinary and very young Martin Sheen) along the way, alongside such characters as Chef, Clean (a teenage Laurence Fishburne) Dennis Hopper's nameless fawning photojournalist and the unforgettable Colonel Bill Kilgore. There's more than a hint of Aguirre: Wrath of God in how the journey along the river is shot, but the characters feel real and human; this isn't some aloof art flick.

There's a surprisingly small part for Harrison Ford but the cast as a whole is magnificent and entirely worthy of what must surely be one of the finest films ever made, however difficult it's creation.

Blue Velvet (1986)

"Why are there people like Frank?"

It really is about time I got round to blogging a David Lynch film, frankly. It's inevitable when you review a large number of films (Blue Velvet is my 377th, quite shockingly) that certain omissions get more and more embarrassing, and David Lynch was at the top of that list.

Blue Velvet is, of course, at once very, very good and very, very weird. It may not break the fourth wall or break its linear narrative beyond a few minor flashbacks, and it may make narrative sense, but that uncomfortable sex scene with Dorothy and Frank goes beyond just weird and deeply uncomfortable into just plain weird, and just as weird are the whole scene at Ben's and, well, the entire characters of Dorothy and Frank. Into this very odd world come the picket fences and more or less wholesome characters of Sandy and Jeffrey.

But Jeffrey is no innocent, literally driven by morbid curiosity and having an affair with Dorothy at the same time as he tries to woo the very innocent and very vulnerable Sandy. It's tempting to see this as a film about the male gaze, centred on Jeffrey's spying voyeuristically from Dorothy's closet but essentially driven throughout by Jeffrey asserting his male gaze on the female sexuality and female life that surrounds him.

There's a lot more going on here than I've spotted, of course, not least the significance of the music, but there's no doubting that this is a splendidly shot, deeply multilayered and utterly superb cinematic classic. With some very '80s decor.