The Last Movie

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?

Dennis Hopper's now notorious second feature fulfilled the promise of 'Easy Rider' by doing to his career what those Southern rednecks did to his character at the end of the earlier film: blasting it to an early grave. Given the disposition of its maker and the attitudes of his era it's not surprising the film took shape the way it did, but unlike the more unified mess of his debut feature (in retrospect a happy accident) this sophomore effort is merely chaotic: an ill-conceived, sloppily executed, helplessly edited riot of unintended laughs.

There's a germ of an idea here about the essential artifice of movie-making (in which the film itself finally disintegrates into random outtakes), but the director painted himself into a creative cul-de-sac by envisioning a project that had to fail in order to succeed. And fail it did, famously so, putting all of Hopper's drug-induced limitations on public display. Seen today, it's a fascinating example of professional self-destruction, and a laughable catalogue of hippie flotsam scraped from the bottom of the '60s barrel.

I didn't know but I am not surprised to learn that over 40 hours of footage was shot in the making of this movie. Virtually any kind of movie can be made with that much material to work with. Screwball Comedy, Dark Comedy, Light Drama, Melodrama even Horror. It all depends how you edit it. Kind of like the manufactured plots in reality tv shows. It's all down to editing

What you get here is something that is sort of like a precursor to Wicker Man but in another part of the world and with different results. Locals mimic the making of a Western that was just shot in a strange ritualistic way. How we get to that point is a bit of a surprise because much of the story seems to be about one of the stars of the western staying on the location to settle with a local woman and discover gold mines. Then comes the bamboo film equipment.

If the goal was surrealism, Hopper nails it. If the goal was to be anything else specifically speaking, then that's still unclear. I was interested enough to keep watching and was surprised with how things shifted. The ending felt a little open ended. I can't call this a great movie but it has alot in it for me to want to revisit it and make more sense of it or a different sort of sense of it. Maybe my interpretation was a little off. Visually, it is fantastic. Peru is a genuinely beautiful country and very well captured here.

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.

The Last Movie would have been much better if Dennis Hopper hadn't let his hippie friends in the editing room. If the scenes where rearranged in a chronological order rather than being non-linear as it is, it would have stood a chance. However, the late 60's/early 70's (which many critics consider a "golden era" in filmmaking) was a time of experimentation, so if Hopper wanted to be self-indulgent he was in the right time at the right place. This is one title that begs to be recut. I would suggest a DVD with the original cut on one side and a new directors cut on the other. It would be fascinating to hear Hopper's audio commentary for further insights into where his mind was at the time (if he is capable of remembering, that is). By the way, this movie won first prize at the Venice Film Festival, so it wasn't the total failure (artisticly) that many critics have tried to make it out to be. I personally like it. The only other non-linear film I can think of from that era is HEAD(1968) which was far more succesful in terms of structure, or rather, non-structure. Had these films been commercially successful they might have revolutionized filmmaking, or at least spawned a non-linear film genre.