The Last Movie

A little credit is due (I guess): Dennis Hopper made it huge with Easy Rider, took his momentary carte blanche and made, for all intents and purposes, a movie he wanted to make. No holds barred is putting it lightly. It's like Hopper stumbled over the bars while on acid and just let the natives come around and stomp on it till the term 'hold' was soaked in alcohol and set on fire. It's cinematic anarchy that reigns with a sword of originality and hubris, and it's always coming right from Hopper's soul. The Last Movie, this said, is not a very 'good' movie. I'm not even sure it's "anything" of value. But it's surely one of those must-see "personal" movies all the same. For any film buff it's simply stunning - and I don't mean that fully as a compliment.

In a way I feel sorry for this production. Hopper did have a script, somewhere, and even had a writer with him as well, Stewart Stern, and the opening 25 minutes of the film is fractured but feels contained in its "meta-movie"-ness. It seems actually clear enough to follow: a film crew is in Peru filming a movie, a western, directed by none other than Samuel Fuller, and there's lots of intensity on the set and, at other times, weird vibrations in the off-hours. Hopper is a stuntman who works on the production, but once it ends he sticks around, and sees the Peruvians re-enacting the film that has just been made, only with "equipment" made of sticks and stones and other things. So far, so good, more or less, and, again, Samuel Fuller directing a movie in a movie! It can't get much cooler than this can it?

As it turns out, there is even more story and scenes that make sense, such as the romance (or lack thereof) between Hopper's Kansas cowboy and a Peruvian woman, Maria. These scenes, along with the rough seduction of Kansas to another woman who happens to wear a mink coat, rang true past the weird intentions of the film-making and into the personal for sure. Hopper in real life shouldn't matter in the course of the movie itself, but it is so self-reflexive on the end of making the meta-movie that it spills over into his real life with women (when you see it you'll understand). That, plus an allegorical storyline involving a foolish and failed attempt to go gold mining, seem to at least add emotional grounding for chunks of the picture.

And then, other times... it's just drivel, repetitive movements and rhythms and sudden things like "Scene Missing" cards. The problem that Hopper didn't see while editing, not while hopped up (no pun intended) on enough drugs to run a mega-pharmacy on the moon, is that the meta-movie qualities and his flourishes and mad jump cuts and time reversals and non-linear-ness don't always serve in favor of the actual story. There are certain moments and scenes that stand out wonderfully, and are even filmed and edited with scary precision and capturing the beauty of Peru (oh, and the opening gunfight as part of the movie-in-movie is amazing). Other times, it's just tricks and things, devices and obstacles that just add dead weight to the running time. It's non denying it's art, but is it always interesting? No. Sometimes, it just sticks out way too much as being "important" art, forced when at other times it could be natural and fitting for the already strange premise.

It's basically this: a very talented filmmaker (and for all of his ups and downs in his career, more downs than ups, not least of which the stigma that followed Hopper after he made this movie and didn't direct another for nine years) and an unlikely and electrifying actor, got loaded with all of the praise that someone like him didn't need, already cooking with loads of free-loader friends sticking too many hands in the creative pot, and, in the end, got in the way of himself. A lot of The Last Movie burns with raw energy and crude dramatic thrills. And the rest of the time, it just looks like it needed an editor, ONE editor that was sober to go along with the one other sober cadet on the production, the late-great Laszlo Kovacs as DoP. Alejandro Jodorowsky might be a kind of genius, but an editor for someone else's project he definitely isn't.

So should you see it? If it's available (it's hard to find) and you're willing (maybe do a coin toss) and you aren't expecting a John Ford movie (please don't), give it a shot. It's not an easy movie to defend, and I probably can't on a reasonable level. But as a personal statement of an artist on the edge, you could do worse (i.e. Southland Tales, the only thing that comes closest in ambition and faulty technique).

This movie isn't nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be. But I don't know how to recommend it, or to whom. Do you like Dennis Hopper? Well, here he is, in almost every scene, and he never looked better. A beautiful face, the graceful cowboy. In fact, he appears so genuine in this film that I begin to realize what an acting job he was doing in Easy Rider. The scenery is haunting, and the movie has a poetic, lyrical rhythm....yet sometimes seems to go on too long, and the mind wanders....but I loved the feel of it, the primitive environment of the Peruvian village, the ever-present mud....contrasted with the lewd and crude wealthy Americans. And I happened to enjoy the home-movie aspects of this film, also. I delighted in picking out Dean Stockwell, Peter Fonda, John Phillip Law, etc. in the Hollywood on Location shots....I loved the spontaneity of the last scenes of dialogue....hell, I loved seeing Kris Kristofferson sitting on a rock singing Me & Bobby Magee....but would anyone else?

It's difficult to see why people have such a hard time with this movie. Anyone who is interested in European art cinema of the '60's or even the novel since Joyce should have no trouble reading the film on at least some levels. Hopper's method here is to try and get inside the head, to put thought and memory on the screen, not just pictures.

Part of the problem may be the sheer complexity. There are probably enough ideas crammed in here for a dozen movies, and Hopper throws them all at us, often simultaneously. There's a story about American imperialism, there's a story about the artifice of film-making, there's a story about the way audiences view cinema, there's a Christ allegory wrapped up with a general sacrificial victim theme, a story about men and women, sex, money and power, there's Hopper's own story, the story of cinema itself, there's a satire of Hollywood conventions in general and the Western in particular, very notably there's a story about the Peruvian landscape, ravishingly shot by Laszlo Kovacs. There's even the story of Hopper's gofer lost in a society he doesn't understand if you want a simple narrative to hang on to. The film combines all these facets into a structure which can only be described as crystalline.

Devotees of "folding" should find plenty to occupy them here - there's the film about Hopper's character "Kansas", the film Sam Fuller is making, the villagers' "film", "The Last Movie" itself, an on-set home movie and probably several others besides.

Hopper gaily references (and steals from) everyone from Fellini and Godard to John Huston and Nicholas Ray, and of course goes bonkers in Peru well before Werner Herzog got around to it (and appropriates tribal culture in a strikingly similar way).

Definitely not a film to be missed by anyone interested in fractured narratives, postmodernism in film or the beautiful image. Vastly underrated and well worth its Venice prize, this is to "Easy Rider" what "Pulp Fiction" is to "Reservoir Dogs". Hopper as a director has never been better.

The biggest problem with viewing The Last Movie is that it actually has two parts.

The first part of the film where the citizens of a Peru village try to duplicate (for real) the violence of a western that has just been filmed in their village raises some interesting question (some put forth by the town's priest).

The problem is at a critical point for the main character (the only member of the crew to stay behind) the movie suddenly and without warning shifts gears into the second part which can best be described as 'the making/behind the scenes of the Last Movie.' Worst yet this part of the movie doesn't have any rhyme or reason in the order in which things are shown so it can be a confusing 5 minutes before the viewer figures out what has just happened. And even after the poor viewer does figure out what has just happened trying to follow this part of the film is next to impossible as it is so disjointed.

It is a pity as the premise of the film is a good one and if the film had stayed with that premise it would have been a great film. Instead you have part of a great film followed by a disjointed mess.

Rarely does an opportunity come like this. I would like to encourage you to share it.

First, you should know that I am not representing this as a "good" movie. At the same time I am putting it on my list of "films you must see."

How can this be?

This thing fails to engage emotionally. It is unlike, say "Blue Velvet" which had both a visceral connection and an ephemerally complex narrative. Each reinforces the other way past the horizons we can see and understand, and you end up with a life altering experience. Most of the films on my "must see" list are like this.

But this is different and the missing factor is "The Other Side of the Wind." That movie is Orson Welles' last project, what he considered his greatest reach and most perfectly conceived. Welles' innovation was the exploration of multiple narrative techniques in the same weave, and then denoting them by distinct visual modes. Sort of a meta-"Peter and the Wolf," but with light.

We'll never see that movie and it is just as well because it is more life altering in the imagination than it ever could be in the real theater experience. While Welles was noodling around with windsides, he engaged every intelligent filmmaker then living, Godard, Huston, Franco and yes, Hopper.

Hopper is an absorber of ideas, not a generator and I believe his sponge absorbed some of that wind and that is what we have here.

There are a few clever notions:

—A movie as a re-enactment of a history that is a re-enactment of history of a movie.... all as religion.

—A man whose life is a bad movie, the guy behind the faux movie within, portrayed by someone whose life is a bad movie.

—A style of revealing that critics bluntly tag "nonlinear," though it is anything but. It just doesn't follow any timeline in a single reality but jumps realities.

Each of this represents a phenomenon I call folding and the three are themselves folded. That it doesn't emotionally engage us is a minor sin. That much of the construction was incompetently done by the drunk portrayed in it is less a sin than a charm.

Now. If you have clever moviewatching skills, you can add a fourth and fifth engine to this. Your own movie, of course. Any serious watcher will do this anyway, with any movie, but there is a seductive socket here for you to enter, much like the testy prostitute Kansas finds.

And of course, on the other side of your film, you have Welles'.

Ted's Evaluation -- 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.