Two-Lane Blacktop 1971

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• buckyogi@fedora ༗on TMDB · May 202310/10

  <strong>Those Satisfactions are Permanent</strong> As the film opens we meet the Driver (James Taylor) and the Mechanic (Dennis Wilson). They live to race and race to live. We never learn their names nor their relationship to each other. The Girl (Laurie Bird) joins them by removing her duffel bag from another guy's car and moving it to their car. Where are you heading? she asks them. East, the Mechanic replies. Her name, we learn, may be Higgins. They encounter another driver, GTO (Warren Oates), and engage him in a cross-country race for pink slips. GTO talks about himself a great deal, but because he contradicts himself at every turn we learn nothing about him. Other characters (hitchhikers, drag racers, a grieving grandmother, a driver in a fatal accident) drop in, ghost-like, just long enough to register their presence; we learn nothing about them. And then there are the cars. Two of them are given cast credits: a custom 1955 Chevy and a stock 1970 Pontiac GTO; we learn far more about them than we do any of the human characters. Along the way the Girl plays musical fellas and the fellas play musical cars. There's a whole hell of a lot of racing and a whole hell of a lot of goi

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• Wuchakon TMDB · Nov 20226/10

  **_The metaphoric endless highway of meaningless life_** A driver and mechanic of a souped-up ’55 Chevy (James Taylor and Dennis Wilson) have one-track minds as they drive across the American landscape, picking up a searchin’ teen girl who’s into casual sex (Laurie Bird) and setting-up a non-race to nowhere with a man in a GTO from an earlier generation (Warren Oates). “Two-Lane Blacktop” (1971) was hyped by Esquire before its release as the next counterculture hit in the same league as “Easy Rider” (1969). They based their praise solely on the script, but it was a dud at the box office because it’s a route-less odyssey across America undertaken by society’s outcasts with the two protagonists being one-dimensional motorheads and therefore boring characters. As my title blurb suggests, this is more of an existentialist art flick with a few laughable dialogues than conventional entertainment, which is why most people find it tedious and disappointing. The story and subtextual insights just aren’t as compelling as predecessors “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) and “Easy Rider,” not to mention the later “Dirty Mary Crazy Larry” (1974), which used the same basic material for a far more enjoyabl

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