Two-Lane Blacktop [Masters of Cinema] [Blu-ray] [1971]

This is a great movie! First of all it stars Singer Songwriter James Taylor an Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson in their first and only acting roles. They are two drifters who race their Ol' 55 Chevy for money. Warren Oates stars and steals the show as the driver of a Pontiac GTO who races them across the backroads of america for "Pinks"(car docs) picking up various weirdos on the way. They pick up a (Laurie) "Bird" who joins them for a ride. You never really know what's going on or what might happen next and the film does have an abrupt ending. This can all be explained in the director voice over option. It's a shame this appears to be in short supply. Maybe get it from amazon.com. It's a classic buy it! IMPORTANT I can only play this on my PC dvd player and not on my multi-region DVD player for some reason(maybe my dvd player isn't too hot)

Read the comments on the IMDB site and you'll find plenty of people who obviously watched it thinking they were getting another "American Graffiti" or 1971 version of "The Fast And The Furious" and came away hugely disappointed - little action, monosyllabic and underplayed acting, no real story and a strange unsatisfying ending. But it's all those things that make the film so wonderful! It's a perfect late 60s/early 70s road movie. Two guys who just drive about in a 1955 Chevy (so stripped that it doesn't even have a paint job) challenging local hotshots to street drag races until they bump into a strange bullshitter who challenges them to race across the US, and off they go. James Taylor and Dennis Wilson beautifully underplay their parts. They just exist to race and so anything else, talk included, is really superfluous. A girl hitcher gets picked up at one point and ends up walking away from the pair of them obviously bemused and somewhat pissed off that despite her attempts to make one jealous of the other they really just don't care about her. And you get all the talk you need from the wonderful Warren Oates, who plays the GTO driver brilliantly - the character's just too old to have `gotten' the sixties and knows they he's missed something. Every hitcher he picks up as he races across the country gets told a different story, and his sense of jealousy for what he thinks Taylor and Wilson has is palpable. It's beautifully shot and proceeds at a langorous, leisurely pace. The ending is what one can only describe at "cinematic". If you want thrills-and-spills then give it a miss. If you want to see a cult gem, one of the coolest films ever made, check it out. I first saw it twenty odd years ago and it became my favourite film; the nice thing is, twenty odd years later it still is.

I've been waiting for this to be re-released in this country for years. I remember seeing it a couple of times on TV. For anyone who's into this period of American movie making this can be considered a classic. For anyone who's interested in James Taylors' career it's very interesting to watch. Why it's taken until 2006 to get a release seems strange, although I expect it'll only appeal to niche markets and true movie lovers unless there's some promotion. Shame.