Two-Lane Blacktop (Hellman, 1971): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.45pm
This screening, with an introduction by Alex Cox and Nick Freand Jones, is part of the great Moviedrome: Bringing the Cult TV Series to the Big Screen season. The other screening of film takes place on July 19th.
Chicago Reader review:
This
exciting existentialist road movie by Monte Hellman, with a swell
script by Rudolph Wurlitzer and Will Corry and my favorite Warren Oates
performance, looks even better now than it did in 1971, although it was
pretty interesting back then as well. James Taylor and Dennis Wilson are
the drivers of a supercharged '55 Chevy, and Oates is the owner of a
new GTO (these nameless characters are in fact identified only by the
cars they drive); they meet and agree to race from New Mexico to the
east coast, though an assortment of side interests periodically
distracts them, including various hitchhikers (among them Laurie Bird).
(GTO hilariously assumes a new persona every time he picks up a new
passenger, rather like the amorphous narrator in Wurlitzer's novel Nog.) The movie starts off as a narrative but gradually grows into something much more abstract—it's unsettling but also beautiful.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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