The Last Movie

They want me to die in the movie like Dean did.

Deconstruction of the classic Hollywood narrative with a sledgehammer in one hand and a couple of pounds of cocain in the other. Hopper's catastrophic flop is like a non-intellectual, more instinctual version of Greenaway's "A Zed and Two Noughts". The antinarrative urge shreds conventional plot points to pieces, focusing instead on a movie within a movie within a movie, genders politics, colonialism, capitalism and, well, everything else. Conventional wisdom says flawed. I say masterpiece.

Hopper's meta-meta non-narrative is an impulsive exercise in seeing just how far you can demolish the method of film and retain any type of meaning, and that it does to great, infuriating effect. Apparently Jodorowsky encouraged Hopper to go balls-to-the-wall in the editing process, and it certainly shows. That there's any meaning in this movie at all is proof that film is a miracle mouthpiece of the human condition.

A wet noodle. But who's this John Buck Wilkin fella, and why aren't his albums available on Spotify?

An insane piece of American surrealism, just when you think you've got the movie figured out, it changes track again. Fascinating meta-film about violent cowboy Hollywood filmmaking and how it's perceived by the Peruvian locals -- apparently, Jodowrosky had a profound affect in the film's editing stages and it shows. This really could've been the last movie.

The Last Movie is not nearly as incoherent as some people would lead you to believe. In fact, it is actually quite brilliant at times. I'm not entirely sure how to rate it or what else to say about it but I will be rewatching this sometime in the future. RIP Dennis. They just didn't get you. "They want me to die in the movie like Dean did."

This is one of the self-annihilating destructive movies, it even shares the spirit of Herzog's Aguirre. The destructive power inherent to gaze, the colonizing hierarchy of cinema. And the dreamlike and schizophrenic destruction of Hollywood logic imposed on us. Parody, Neo-realism, and surrealism come together in this great post-colonial meta-cinema. Yet I wish it was either shorter or more unshackled in its destructive imagination.

Neither the disaster critics in the 70's made it out to be or the lost classic that revisionists claim. It's nonetheless an original, if highly discursive, attempt by Hopper to critique American 'ambition' that shoots more from the hip than the head. It has stood up better than Easy Rider, which is essentially a museum piece, and makes some interesting connections between film and reality, showing how the former serves propagandistic purposes, especially in the developing world. Respect!

Motion pictures are evil

It's certainly filled with ideas, all of them smashing into each other. As a result, it's like nothing else, but it can also be extremely difficult to wrap your head around, and it's never quite clear what Hopper was trying to do, if he was trying for anything at all. Glad I watched it though.

(...)Wir erleben ihn in einer ungemein pathetischen Szene, wie er sich wohl selbst sieht: Stoned, total verwirrt. Zu Hölle mit allem! Dennis Hopper als Regisseur dürfte in seltenem Einklang mit seiner Figur stehen. (...)

"They were surprised themselves at how good it was." http://illusionpodcast.blogspot.com/2014/03/episode-7-part-one.html

worth a watch

I'm in the interesting position of not thinking this film is very good, but kind of loving it anyway. I think the idea behind it is trite, and the kind of thing that a guy on A LOT of drugs will think is profound. There's clearly too much improvisation going on, and Hopper is sometimes so wasted on camera that he can't possibly in charge of what's going on. Yet I enjoyed this. Why? Probably because Hopper seems incapable of not being interesting. Interesting is not the same thing as good.