After a Hollywood film shoot wraps its principle photography in Peru, the unit wrangler, Kansas, decides to give up his profession and stay in the village where he begins a relationship with Maria, a local prostitute. Kansas seems transfixed at the allure of an unspoiled existence which Peru seems to provide but it's quickly interrupted when a local priest points out the locals are killing each other re-enacting scenes from the film they just witnessed. Dennis Hoppers' The Last Movie is a challenging, bloated and borderline nonsensical film which has far too many ideas and not enough time to actually explore them. The Last Movie themes vary from American Imperialism, the artifice of filmmaking and how audiences interpret cinema, and a christian allegory, among other themes. With all of these facets the structure of the film is fractured, leading to something to feels more like rambling thoughts, some of which are interesting, than any concise ideas. Early on Hopper uses a barrage of cinematic devices (flashbacks, flashforwards, projectionist cue-marks which look out of place) with the intent to disorient or confuse the viewer. These tactics certainly speak to the artifice of cinema and how it can manipulate the viewer. This coupled with the American imperialism aspect of the story are interesting, but I wish the film was a little more focused on this theme, dumping the others completely. Dennis Hopper's The Last Stand is a certainly a film that is interesting to look at, but it's just too overloaded with ideas to have much of an effect on me outside of questioning how much drugs Hopper was on when he made it. Though, I could certainly make an argument that Hopper's bloated film of ideas is still far more interesting than most cinema. 5.5/10
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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