Getting Away from Things That Get Bad: The ILX Road-Movie Poll Results Thread

So much questionable shit in the 70s lol

That's it. I'm not excusing it, but you could spend a week picking out similar transgressions in '70s American films. Besides the times, that was a really self-styled macho group of directors--Altman, Peckinpah, Eastwood, Walter Hill, etc. Not all of them, but a high percentage. Probably comparable to the '50s abstract expressionist painters.

huh that's an interesting parallel

Yeah, I wasn't at all saying "lets burn Vanishing Point, or anything. I get that a lot of the films of this era were characterized by some combination of a masculinist homophobia (and misogyny) and a general not-qutie-thereness on queer issues. And it isn't like there aren't moments in this body of films that trouble this: the kooky yet non-stereotypical lesbian couple in Five Easy Pieces, the observation of a happy gay couple in The Last Detail (ridiculed by one character, but defended by the film's most sympathetic one), and probably several others that I can't remember right now.

Then there is the homoeroticism that has been read into "buddy" films like Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (which I haven't seen). So, yeah, I'm probably doing a disservice to Vanishing Point by mentioning this, but it has been tainted for me by the Celluloid Closet clip being the only thing that I knew about it for many years.

Relevant:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVXIK1xCRpY

^^Should note: Video has spoilers for anyone who hasn't seen Vanishing Point.

22. The Wages of Fear
51 points/7 votes

http://phildellio.tripod.com/22-wages.jpg

I'll carry on to #11 over the next couple of hours. I'm trying my best to take the world's mind off Washington.

Another one I saw so long ago (along with Diabolique, on the aforementioned Elwy Yost's show), I don't remember anything. I saw the re-release of Sorcerer three or four years ago and thought it was okay.

21. Breathless
54 points/4 votes

http://phildellio.tripod.com/21-breathless.jpg

There's a great close-up of the gun just before they murder the guy; couldn't find it online...First time I saw this, in 1979, it was on some contraption at a campus library that played cartridges that were twice the size of a VHS cassette.

Breathless feels like more of a car movie than a road movie, not sure how I'd define the distinction though.

I've never seen most of these Euro films that are placing. I am an ignorant savage I guess

I mean I've seen Aguirre and Wild Strawberries but Godard and the Italian neo-realists like Antonioni never appealed to me

Breathless feels like more of a car movie than a road movie, not sure how I'd define the distinction though.

― devvvine, Thursday, May 18, 2017 11:56 PM (yesterday)

Actually, I would probably agree with this (still voted for it tho').

I think road-movie and car-movie is a meaningful distinction (obviously with lots of overlap.)

yeah Christine is not a road movie, for ex.

20. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
56 points/6 votes/one #1

http://phildellio.tripod.com/20-brother.jpg

Surprised this finished so high. I think it's okay.

Will fix that date posthaste...

19. American Honey
58 points/4 votes/one #1

http://phildellio.tripod.com/19-honey.jpg

Still think about this periodically; will see it again next time it shows up in a theatre. I think it'd make a great double-bill with Boyhood, although I'm not sure I could explain that.

YUP

(one of my top votes)

Hate leaving Sasha Lane out of the image, but I used up the best one in the previous thread. The one above is the second screen-shot of my own.

18. La Strada
60 points/5 votes/one #1

http://phildellio.tripod.com/18-strada.jpg

I've seen it. Long ago. Remember nothing.

It's great altho tbh I prefer Nights of Cabiria

Haven't seen that. Of the five or six Fellinis I've seen, La Dolce Vita is the only one I want to see again.

17. Wendy and Lucy
62 points/6 votes

http://phildellio.tripod.com/17-wendy.jpg

Love this. I don't think her three since have come close, although Certain Women finally gets an opening here next week, and I expect it will look great on a big screen. Took me about twenty tries before I stopped referring to this as Wendy and Lisa.

You're being a bit hard on yourself, Οὖτις, saying you've not seen much of the Euro stuff when you've watched Herzog and Bergman and Fellini! I obviously have a Euro bias but I haven't seen a lot of these films either, and am trying hard not to point the finger of disgusting savagery and filmic naïveté at myself.

xpost lol, clemenza, going through the list I wondered what 'this film about Wendy & Lisa' was, multiple times.

Just a beautiful film, have been putting off watching this for years and had to read the ending first as well.

It's outtakes from the Purple Rain tour, with random backseat shots of Michelle Williams mixed in.

Spoiler alert.

16. Two-Lane Blacktop
62 points/7 votes

http://phildellio.tripod.com/16-blacktop.jpg

Lol

Yay! for Wages and Brother, both of which I voted for. Boo for the first hour of American Honey, which I got through about an hour of before abandoning (it was during a stressful time of my life; I probably would have watched the whole thing at any other time, though I highly doubt that I would have liked it).

Need to see La Strada, and I guess I need to see Wendy and Lucy as well, though it never looked that interesting to me.

Breathless is not a road film.

Sorry for the redundancies in my above post. Too much wine with dinner.

I haven't seen 2LB either, though it is the film that I often confuse with Vanishing Point.

15. Something Wild
63 points/5 votes

http://phildellio.tripod.com/15-wild.jpg

This was really lagging for the first half of the ballots; picked up towards the end and finished about where I thought it would, maybe a little lower. Missed my own ballot, but not by much.

The complete surprise of Two-Lane Blacktop's last minute remains one the best dumbfounding experiences I've ever had in a movie theatre. (It and Vanishing Point and Drive, He Said have always existed alongside each other in my mind, although I still haven't seen the other two.)

A shameful blindspot. Particularly in light of recent events.

Ray Liotta's terrifying in it. Not even sure if I made the connection to his character here when Goodfellas came out.

14. Wanda
64 points/6 votes

http://phildellio.tripod.com/14-wanda.jpg

"Goddamn it, it was 'Wanda, Wander.'"
"It was 'Wonder, Wanda.'"
"'Wanda, Wander'! 'Wanda, Wander'!"
"'Wonder, Wanda.'"
"What difference does it make? It was a hit!"

(Henry Gibson and Barbara Baxley in Nashville.)

Would love to read a book on the making of this.

Well, yep. Only saw it for the first time during nominations but it went straight into my top five. Barbara Loden is amazing.

She made two more shorts, both 1975, and nothing else till her death in 1980 (age 48). Married Kazan in 1968, was still with him when she died. I got some of the background when I saw someone introduce this a couple of years ago, but what a story.

13. Paris, Texas
64 points/8 votes

http://phildellio.tripod.com/13-paris.jpg

As good as it gets when Ry Cooder's playing and they're driving at night. Some of the last third loses me.

Two more I need to see. I PVR'd Wanda a while ago and must have accidentally erased it.

12. Weekend
67 points/6 votes

http://phildellio.tripod.com/12-weekend.jpg

There's a road, and there are cars.

Another one I've never seen, but I'm right in the middle of reading Laura Mulvey on Godard, so I'm gearing up for a big JLC catch-up soon.

Paris was another one of my top votes, love it.

also hoping this gets some kind of uk release: http://variety.com/2017/film/festivals/lucky-sxsw-film-review-1202008227/

John Carroll Lynch, wow. His parts in Fargo and Zodiac make for one of the most schizophrenic pairings I can think of.

xp
I remember seeing a DVD of Wanda in a Tower Records when they were doing their going out of business sale, and I thought if a waited a few more days it'll be cheaper, but when I went back it was gone. They also had a Ross McElwee box set I planned to do the same with, also gone.

11. Five Easy Pieces
67 points/9 votes

http://phildellio.tripod.com/11-easy.jpg

Perfect place to end for today. I had it fifth on my ballot, but any one of my top five could have been #1. I realize that part of why I think of this as a road movie actually has to do with the first paragraph of Stanley Kauffmann's review, reprinted in Living Images:

Two months ago I was driving down through the Grand Tetons and gave a lift to a young man. He turned out to be a Ph.D. candidate from an eastern university who had just finished his course work and couldn't get up enough interest to write his dissertation. The whole process had turned futile on him. He had come out to Wyoming to get a job with his hands; he didn't know how long it would be before he went back. Perhaps never.

I thought of him when I saw Five Easy Pieces.

I'm conflating an anecdote in a review with the film itself, but that opening has always stayed with me. In my mind, the part of me that wishes I were Bobby Dupea has this whole separate life that bears little resemblance to the one I actually lead.

Weekend or The Freewheelin' Jean Luc Godard is the bratty inversion of the genre i think, kind of a big fuck you to the romance of the car and the road, but it still manages to be soaked with the romance of the car and the road. i love how at this point onwards in his career JLG pushes boredom as a formal quality and still fills up on beautiful shot-framing. plus the notorious tracking shot near the beginning is everything that a road movie ought to be and kids really love it if you make them sit and watch it all in class. think i'm just back in a phase where he chimes with my shitty mood, wd've made this my own number 1 i think.

oh and that song the female protagonist sings periodically sticks in my head all day

I come at Weekend from two angles: the experience of watching it, and conceptually. I've seen it four or five times: sequences and images that stay with you forever, also boredom and impatience and befuddlement. It's not one of my favourite films, or even one of my favourite Godards.

Conceptually, though, everything NV says and more--as one person's response to 1968 (something that clearly starts building in his work as the decade goes along, all of it coalescing in Weekend), there aren't many films I hold in higher esteem.

10. Lost in America
68 points/8 votes

http://phildellio.tripod.com/10-lost.jpg

"Why are you treating me like an animal?"
"I'll explain it to you later."

If that makes you inexplicably smile, you're on this film's unique wavelength.