A few nights ago I met up with my
Flying V Managing Director Jon Rubin and his girlfriend Hannah to move forward on #221 - Watching all 100 of the AFI Greatest 100 Movies of All Time. After some deliberation we've decided, and this is a change, that I'm going to watch all the movies on both the original list and the 2008 update, as there have been people making strong cases for both list to be the definitive one. Hannah is a major cinephile with a pretty extensive collection of films, and we were able to amass a pretty substantial pile of AFI movies I haven't seen yet. We decided that evening's film by way of a Movie Draft.
THE POWER OF THE DRAFT
The Movie Draft is a long-standing tradition in these parts, a bond of honor among participants, a low cost battle for pride and entertainment. In most cases each participant picks three movies out of a larger collection to submit to the draft itself. After all these movies are entered, three rounds commence in which everyone takes out a movie they don't want to watch that night. Finally one film remains which, theoretically, no one did not want to watch. This film is the main event for the evening, and it is a solemn bond and promise that once a draft starts ALL participants will stay through to watch the film in its entirety, no matter what it is. It's a matter of great personal pride to win a draft, and I've heard of a number of drafts that have become host to intense political maneuvering and rivalries. Unlikely winners have forced themselves on large crowds of unsuspecting men and women.
Choose carefully, and remember to play the movies just as much as your opponents.
This draft was somewhat different, as we included every available option from the AFI list I had not seen, rather than personally choosing entrants. The field was a strong one, including Fargo, 12 Angry Men, and Some Like It Hot. The draft is a powerful thing, though, and the sole survivor ended up as Easy Rider.
I can honestly say, based on the moods and expectations of the crowd that night, that I sincerely doubt Easy Rider would have been the winner if ANY one of us understood how different the actual film was compared to the vision in our heads.
That's the power of the draft, baby.
WHAT A WEIRD MOVIE
I'm not nearly as sophisticated a film-goer as I am to when it comes to Theater, Comics, and Professional Wrestling - where my knowledge is extensive and my tastes run from the mainstream to the fringe, experimental, and independent. But similar to my love of Music, I think my appreciation and understanding of the art is at least a bit wider than simply the mainstream - deeply rooted in the popular culture but with a strong appreciation and knowledge of certain out of the way niches. Maybe I'm not nearly as developed a viewer as I'd like to imagine myself to be, though, because this film left me in a bit of a daze. While there were a number of strong moments that made an impression, it never felt like more than the sum of it's parts. I spent most of the first half waiting for 'something to happen.' Then things did happen, in violent and high speed fashion, but I still didn't really care. I just never got invested. It was a lot of style but maybe, or especially, compared to my expectations it left me a bit cold.
It's a weird, weird film, man.
MAN, WE ALL STILL SUCK
The most powerful lesson from the film is that now, some 50 years later, so little has changed. Ugh. Maybe dumb rednecks don't shoot Hippies in the street anymore (or maybe they do and we just hear about it less), but the spirit that 'different is sub-human' still exists every time there is a gay beating in Columbia Heights or a radio show host berates a woman for wanting birth control, or now ESPECIALLY people blaming Hoodies for murders. Maybe America was once a great country, like Jack Nicholson says in the film, but man has that promise been squandered in so many ways. I appreciate that we have it better than a lot of places, and we do, but as a culture we make so many excuses for some many backwards philosophies it leaves me extraordinarily aggravated.
The targets may be different but the hate is the same.
PETER FONDA
Dude is a good looking man. Just sayin'.
SOUNDTRACK
This is one of the first movies to incorporate a soundtrack of pre-existing recordings rather than a dedicated original score, and in that arena it's a big success. The music adds substantially to the film, and particularly by way of it's placement. I was listening to the soundtrack on it's own while writing part of this post and was much less impressed. In conjunction with the film, though, it rocked.
THE BROWN BUNNY
The Brown Bunny is a truly horrendous film I watched several years ago, and while it still sucks, having seen Easy Rider I now understand what it was trying to do a LOT better. Providing even a bit of closure to the Brown Bunny experience is what I'm really going to take away most from Easy Rider.
The Brown Bunny is a film by Writer/Director/Actor/Narcissist Vincent Gallo which famously includes a scene where Chloe Sevigny performs genuine tongue on penis oral sex on Gallo on camera. He stars in, wrote, and directed the film, and gets head from Sevigny on film in what I have to assume is the ultimate Artiste power trip. Good work if you can get it, I guess.
Somewhat, and maybe only somewhat, less notoriously The Brown Bunny is the story of an interminable road trip taken by Gallo's motorcycle riding character across the country (the similarities begin here) to potentially meet up with a woman named Daisy. For MORE THAN AN HOUR we have loooooooong shots of Gallo riding a motorbike in circles on a track, or in a car, or shaving if I remember correctly. Occasionally a song plays. Genuinely - NOTHING HAPPENS. I mean it. Nothing. There are three scenes in the first 2/3 of this movie with any dialogue, plot movement, anything, in which he meets three other woman with flower names. One, he almost takes with him. That scene, when it happens, feels fucking monumental because it is A) more than a minute or two minutes long (maybe - time becomes fuzzy during Brown Bunny, like being caught in a black hole in slow motion while also waiting for a blow job) and B) Something almost, sort of happens. These three scenes combined make up maybe ten minutes out of over 60 minutes of footage. Maybe longer.
It is excruciating.
Then, at the end, you're suddenly blind sided by the most intense thirty minutes of film, maybe ever. Gallo meets up with Daisy (Sevigny) and gets his onscreen blowjob, all the while crying and screaming and ranting bloody murder at her for leaving him and fucking some other dude, while aggressively pushing her head down as she sucks him off. It is really, really intense and primal stuff. Then after he talks about how she fucked these other dudes at a party, she reveals the truth - he walked in on her being horifically gang raped and left her there, rather than DO ANYTHING. We see this gang rape in pretty precise detail too. He finally realizes what a terrible, terrible person he's been only to discover that she DIED FROM THE RAPE and he has been blown by a ghost figment.
Then he heads out and starts driving again.
Long shot.
Holy Shit.
I may have gotten some of these details wrong as I'm going from memory based on watching this once about four years ago, but it has been indelibly scratched into my mind since. Those last 30 minutes are some of the rawest, most primal and savage moments I have EVER seen on film, and it comes after you have been bludgeoned into a semi-conscious near comatose state from watching the filmic equivalent of paint drying. We are talking 0 to 60 in the span of time it gets for Gallo to get an erection and have a breakdown and man, it's quick.
Honestly, describing it, it sounds kind of brilliant in its own mind fuck way - only you, as the viewer, are the one getting fucked. Chloe Sevigny too, I guess, and watching this movie did feel somewhat like Gallo tricked me into sucking his metaphorical director cock as well. At the end of a different movie that on camera blowjob could have even been earned, it's that powerful an image juxtaposed with his verbal diatribe. The rape scene is one of the most brutal and horrific reveals ever, and if it had been the culmination of some kind of journey then maybe this extraordinary vision of cruelty from all sides could have been something more than a shocking horror story. But it's not. It's 30 minutes of Avant Garde Torture Porn, only the porn is real, and the torture is not fantastical at all, and the setup was a meandering medley of 'The Road.'
It is a really terrible film.
But now, after watching Easy Rider, I see what he was trying to do, or emulate, or at least the inspiration. Because from a formal perspective, Brown Bunny is like Easy Rider on horse steroids. It's so clearly trying to be the Easy Rider of a MUCH more cynical generation filtered through both a desire to be 'indie' for the sake of being so and a clear narcissist at the helm. As we already know, Easy Rider is not all that optimistic a movie to start. It's a pretty strong condemnation of America. Maybe Brown Bunny is trying to be a condemnation of humanity in its entirety. In that respect, it may succeed admirably.
There is that same sense of 'when is something going to happen?' that Easy Rider pulls off much more charmingly. The same cross country journey, with a focus on 'The Road' as a place of its own. Long shots of riding with music playing. Really heavy shit just kind of exploding out of the landscape. Even Daisy as an imaginary figment can track back to the Easy Rider acid trip scene. But what Easy Rider tries for, I'm not sure it even succeeds in. Brown Bunny takes out everything that takes Easy Rider watchable or enjoyable (a likable protagonist with a moral center, really interesting supporting performances, some nice little character moments) and replaces them with the unending stylistic quirks that makes ER such an odd little piece of cinema, and nothing but Gallo.
As failed an attempt as it is, I finally understand the actual cinematic basis behind The Brown Bunny - a mystery I never knew I needed to solve.
