Easy Rider Is A Fascinating Melancholy Look at The Cost of Being A Rebel

SPOILERS FOR EASY RIDER AHEAD
I’d heard from a lot of people in recent years that Easy Rider was incomprehensible to modern viewers due to not having aged properly. It's a sentiment so widespread that Craig Ferguson even made it a joke between himself and his mute horse Secretariat. Having finally watched this landmark motion picture, I can its' certainly a product of the era in which it was made, Easy Rider is as deeply interwoven into the fabric of 1960s culture as any movie. But as someone young enough to have not known what was going on with Tonya Harding before seeing I, Tonya, I was outright shocked by how much I outright adored Easy Rider, it's a great film in its own right as well as a remarkable exploration of those who belonged to the 1960s counterculture movement.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid Offers Some Thrills But Struggles With Characters And Atmosphere

At the tail end of the 19th-century, Butch Cassidy (Paul Newman) and the Sundance Kid (Robert Redford) are legendary robbers who steal from trains and get away without anyone even knowing they were there. They've had remarkable good luck over the years and maintain a mostly friendly relationship with a number of their associates ranging from fellow crooks to important townsfolk. But their luck runs out when an unknown group begins to chase after the duo relentlessly. This time, they can't seem to shake whoever it is that's on their tail. If anyone could get out of this scenario, it's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid...but what if all of their luck has finally run out?

Everybody's Talking About Midnight Cowboy, Though I Can't Hear A Word They Say

The end of the 1960's saw American cinema getting to really strut its stuff as the Hayes Code, which put restrictions on what kind of material American films could cover, collapsed and the floodgates opened in terms of major American films suddenly being able to deal with aspects of reality that had previously been off-limits. One movie that certainly would never have been allowed to exist in the days of the Hayes Code existing was Midnight Cowboy, a John Schlesinger directorial effort whose content was so explicit that it was given an X-rating (the equivalent in that day and age for the modern-day NC-17 rating) from the MPAA.

Glimpse of Potential In Chappaquiddick Fail To Be Fully Realized

It's borderline impressive that someone made a politically tinged piece of media like Chappaquiddick in the year of 2018 and have it say so little, even inadvertently. I'm not saying this because this new John Curran directed movie doesn't reinforce my already held political beliefs, rather, because it struck me as strange how this movie could spend so much time on a real-life event like the Ted Kennedy Chappaquiddick disaster and not come away with something to say, even just in an esoteric sense instead of commentating on specific modern issues. Chappaquiddick as a film isn't bad, at it's worst moments it's just "meh", but it's lack of substantive themes do speak to the more paint-by-numbers nature of the production that ends up leaving it feeling more underwhelming than engaging.