Anybody seen this? They were screening it in NYC recently at the Anthology Film Archives. And it's awesome.
It’s amazing that many of the greatest American filmmakers of the seventies took advantage of the entire decade before becoming commercial kryptonite, but all it took was one movie for Dennis Hopper to become persona non grata in the industry. Heck, Robert Altman was putting out low-grossing stuff nearly every year and people still wanted to work with him, and the experimentation of the likes of Nicolas Roeg and Hal Ashby, among many, held up during the most exciting era of American cinema. It’s telling that “The Last Movie”, following Hopper’s wildly popular “Easy Rider”, hasn’t screened in NYC for over thirty years after its premiere- it truly lives up to its name.
Hopper plays Kansas, a quiet extra on the set of an ultra-violent Sam Fuller western filmed in Peru. Once the production finishes filming, and ostensibly exhausting the area’s resources, the natives remain to resume their lives, though Kansas finds himself assimilating into their ranks, finding sanctuary in the mountains with a local village girl. Together they build a fully furbished home, but when Kansas’ new bride complains about wanting a more American lifestyle, he falls in with a group of indeterminate American businessmen and their promiscuous mates, making some sort of deal while they ingest drugs, fornicate and mumble dialogue that sounds entirely like unfinished sentences and made-up words.
Kansas soon finds himself kidnapped by the natives, who force him to participate in a ritual where they built movie equipment out of sticks and cornstalk in order to film “The Last Movie”, which would conclude with the death of a white man. The already-distant narrative spills into a dreamland at this point where Kansas alternately quibbles with his captors and instructs them as if he were directing the film itself, and the actors periodically drop in and out of character to respond. The close of “The Last Movie” finds Hopper rehearsing his death scene countless times while hashing out cinematic theory with anyone around who’ll listen. In other words, it deconstructs itself constantly until there is no film left, and it truly becomes what you’d imagine The Last Movie would be like. To get a fuller picture of what the film is like, I’d recommend seeing it and pausing every five minutes in order to sketch a paragraph or two of what you think just happened. And that would be your first novel.
It’s amazing that many of the greatest American filmmakers of the seventies took advantage of the entire decade before becoming commercial kryptonite, but all it took was one movie for Dennis Hopper to become persona non grata in the industry. Heck, Robert Altman was putting out low-grossing stuff nearly every year and people still wanted to work with him, and the experimentation of the likes of Nicolas Roeg and Hal Ashby, among many, held up during the most exciting era of American cinema. It’s telling that “The Last Movie”, following Hopper’s wildly popular “Easy Rider”, hasn’t screened in NYC for over thirty years after its premiere- it truly lives up to its name.
Hopper plays Kansas, a quiet extra on the set of an ultra-violent Sam Fuller western filmed in Peru. Once the production finishes filming, and ostensibly exhausting the area’s resources, the natives remain to resume their lives, though Kansas finds himself assimilating into their ranks, finding sanctuary in the mountains with a local village girl. Together they build a fully furbished home, but when Kansas’ new bride complains about wanting a more American lifestyle, he falls in with a group of indeterminate American businessmen and their promiscuous mates, making some sort of deal while they ingest drugs, fornicate and mumble dialogue that sounds entirely like unfinished sentences and made-up words.
Kansas soon finds himself kidnapped by the natives, who force him to participate in a ritual where they built movie equipment out of sticks and cornstalk in order to film “The Last Movie”, which would conclude with the death of a white man. The already-distant narrative spills into a dreamland at this point where Kansas alternately quibbles with his captors and instructs them as if he were directing the film itself, and the actors periodically drop in and out of character to respond. The close of “The Last Movie” finds Hopper rehearsing his death scene countless times while hashing out cinematic theory with anyone around who’ll listen. In other words, it deconstructs itself constantly until there is no film left, and it truly becomes what you’d imagine The Last Movie would be like. To get a fuller picture of what the film is like, I’d recommend seeing it and pausing every five minutes in order to sketch a paragraph or two of what you think just happened. And that would be your first novel.
