EASY RIDER is dated. It has a meandering plot and passes off a load of drug-fueled gibberish as dialogue. It goes nowhere and ends abruptly. The title, which refers to a man who lives off of a wealthy woman who provides for him, has no bearing on the narrative. Though it is a crucial film in the history of Hollywood, it isn’t well regarded as much of a piece of art. I would dispute none of this, and yet I cannot help but feel taken with this strange, beautiful film.

The only event of any narrative significance occurs before the opening credits. Two bikers, a red, white, and blue-loving, leather-wearing dude named Wyatt (Peter Fonda), and a shaggy haired, Crocodile Dundee-looking guy named Billy (Dennis Hopper), score a load of coke in a Mexican junkyard, then resell it for a huge cash score. They hide the dough in Wyatt’s gas tank and head off towards Florida where they plan to retire. And that’s it; EASY RIDER merely follows the pair on their cross-country journey. A good portion of it features nothing more than shots of the two riding their choppers on the open road.

But what beautiful images they are. The photography, by Laszlo Kovacs, looks and feels like pieces of late 1960s America as it really was, captured cinema verite style. I’ve seen plenty of bike movies, and plenty of road movies, but few films in either genre romanticize the idea of traveling this country with your buddies and your ride as effectively as EASY RIDER. I have never ridden a motorcycle before, and never had the desire to before, but something about this film’s idealized image of the open road appealed to me. Though Steppenwolf’s classic badass anthem “Born To Be Wild” backs the opening credits, EASY RIDER is not about being cool. It’s about being poetic while looking cool.

Few films have more famous production horror stories. The DVD includes an insightful hour long documentary on the making of the film, and there are lengthy pieces on it in Peter Biskind’s book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, as well as the documentary of the same name. By all accounts, the shoot was a mess, the equivalent a train running too fast, threatening to derail at any moment. Hopper, who was heavily using drugs and booze during the period, was an megalomaniacal director. Most of his crew quit in protest while they were filming the Mardi Gras sequence, and an argument over the exposed stock led to a fistfight that spilled into Peter Fonda’s room where he was, according to certain accounts, in bed with both of RIDER’s leading ladies. Though the cocaine they score in the prologue is actually baking powder, all the marijuana in the movie - and they smoke the stuff in every scene - was real. The entire movie was made under a haze.

Yet despite, or perhaps because of, all that excess, the movie has an undeniable authenticity. Enigmatic authenticity, but authenticity nonetheless. The commune of pathetic hippies, the bigoted rednecks in a Southern diner, the violent poachers, all feel more real that staged (in many cases Hopper preferred untrained locals over professional actors). There’s plenty of visual metaphors that link EASY RIDER to the Western and the last ride, and these quirky, seemingly pointless episodes send us on a strange trip through an American hell: visually beautiful yet emotionally and personally hollow; clearly of its era, yet simultaneously timeless. It has this genuineness of content, but Kovacs’ photography - all lens flares and endless tracking shots - is very obviously constructed for a fictional film. EASY RIDER is tied up in contradictions, but from those contradictions spring a unique, elusive charm. It is all of its flaws, and a great film because of them.

IF YOU LIKED EASY RIDER, CHECK OUT: BLOW (2001), with Johnny Depp as George Jung, one of the key early cocaine dealers in America.

THE BAD

It should have come as no surprise that of all its characters, it was Matt LeBlanc’s Joey spun off from the sitcom FRIENDS. After all, it is LeBlanc who has had the worst film career since FRIENDS’ 1994 premiere, and that’s despite the fact that the entire cast was notorious for their poisonous box office impact. But Jennifer Anniston has earned critical acclaim in THE GOOD GIRL and has already starred in two recent blockbusters: BRUCE ALMIGHTY and ALONG CAME POLLY. Lisa Kudrow, Courtney Cox, and Matthew Perry have each appeared in a film so successful it garnered at least one sequel (ANALYZE THIS, SCREAM, and THE WHOLE NINE YARDS respectively). David Schwimmer...well...all right, so David Schwimmer’s Ross will probably be the first to guest star on Joey.

Still, even Schwimmer’s wan cinema resume looks AFI Lifetime Achievement Award worthy next to LeBlanc’s. His one meager success is a minor cameo appearance as Lucy Liu’s boyfriend Jason in the two CHARLIE’S ANGELS pictures. Otherwise, things have been pretty LeGrim for Matt. He played second banana to a baseball playing monkey in ED (a hilarious ugly movie). He played Major West in the LOST IN SPACE film. He was in a movie I’d never heard of before entitled LOOKING ITALIAN. And in 2001, he played a cross-dressing soldier undercover behind enemy lines in ALL THE QUEEN’S MEN.

This very poorly executed comedy-slash-war-film places LeBlanc, as overly macho soldier O’Rourke, at the center of a gang of incompetents who are given the task of sneaking into a Germany factory and recovering an Enigma machine, the coding device the Nazis used to encrypt their secret messages. But because all German men were called to serve in the army, the factory is manned - wait, better make that staffed - entirely by women. In order to infiltrate the factory and recover the Enigma device, the men must dress as women. I’m laughing already! Wait, no I’m not.

The rest of this regiment consists of Tony (Eddie Izzard), a cross-dressing lounge singer, Johnno (David Birkin) a language expert with a bladder the size of a walnut, and Archie (James Cosmo), an old desk jockey. None of the men look convincingly like women, and perhaps that is intended as a joke. What concerns me is the fact that no one can spot these dudes a mile off; and the fact that there appear to be no moderately attractive women in all of Berlin save Allied spy Romy (Nicolette Krebitz). This appears to be some sort of cruel stereotype of German woman: they all look like burly men in frumpy dresses. As bad as the Nazis were, I don’t think we need to lower ourselves to debasing their women.

ALL THE QUEEN’S MEN’s sense of humor is generally pretty weak, and many scenes are about as funny as TRIUMPH OF THE WILL. After he’s received his briefing, O’Rourke is told that the factory is entirely female. “And where would I be inserted?” he responds. And that’s one of the funnier lines! Nor do the gags jive with most of the second half of the film which introduces a tender homosexual love story for Izzard’s character, and includes scenes of air raids, torture, and murder. Part of the problem could be blamed on choppy editing. One scene concludes with O’Rourke writing a heartfelt note to Romy, professing his love to a woman he will never see again. Then we cut to the squad in full drag leaving Romy’s apartment and when the camera swings past LeBlanc, he fiddles with his bra for laughs. One second he’s distraught over the thought of the loss of the love of his life, the next second he’s in a commercial for Hanes.

Using more brainpower than the filmmakers intended, one can quickly uncover a key flaw in QUEEN’S entire concept. The men are to infiltrate a factory, and must dress as women to do so. But the factory is not where they expect it to be, so they have to search through Berlin for clues to the true factory’s whereabouts. In all of these scenes they dress as women when they could just as easily dress as Nazis which would make a lot more sense and require a lot less eyebrow plucking. Of course then you have no movie. Which would not be a bad thing in this case.

Note: ALL THE QUEEN’S MEN has a truly peculiar ending. There is a final shot, then a title card that reads “The End.” Then after a moment of black, the image fades up and another scene begins! But you just said it was the end! I got excited for nothing!

INSTEAD OF ALL THE QUEEN’S MEN, CHECK OUT: THE DIRTY DOZEN (1967), another war comedy about another group of unseemly recruits, including Charles Bronson, Telly Savalas, and Jim Brown.

THE UGLY

Some movies just don’t make any sense. ASSASSINATION is such a film. The idea makes sense - some terrorists trying to assassinate the First Lady - but the execution contains many confusing idiosyncrasies. This piece is less a review than a catalogue of errors and blunders.

Charles Bronson plays Secret Service Agent Jay Killion. For a guy like Bronson, who became synonymous in the last two and a half decades of his career with movies featuring exorbitant body counts, playing a man named “Killion” is amusing enough. But Killion has an even funnier nickname, “Killy.” KILLY! His coworkers call him this! Calling a guy this proficient at firing an Uzi while driving a motorcycle and keeping his hair in place “Killy” is just perverse.

On the eve of the 1989 inauguration, Killion is assigned to protect “One Mama” also known as First Lady Lara Royce Craig (Jill Ireland, Bronson’s real life spouse). Obviously, this is a fictional woman with no relation to any real First Lady. Yet strangely, ASSASSINATION decides to make numerous references to the former (or at the time the film was released, current) First Lady Nancy Reagan. Killion himself notes how much he misses protecting her. Since the filmmakers chose to ground the film in our universe I can’t help but make this side-by-side comparison, between Jill Ireland, who plays the First Lady in 1989 and our real First Lady in 1989, Mrs. Barbara Bush:

In the inaugural parade, a policeman’s motorcycle blows a tire and explodes. At first everyone but Killion is convinced it was an accident. Hey it sounds reasonable; lots of policeman’s motorcycle tires explode ten feet away from the most powerful woman in the world. Craig refuses to believe anyone would want to kill her. Rather than erring on the side of caution, she decides to continually puts herself in harm’s way. So she slips her protection and heads to California where she has a boat docked she wants to take out on the ocean. Killion refuses to let her board until the ship has been properly checked. She impatiently refuses. Screw proper security measures; she wants to board the boat and die now! Immediately after she tells Killion that her boat is “perfectly safe!” it explodes in a huge fireball that kills everyone onboard. Not the sharpest point in the crayon box, she doesn’t even want to return to Washington, she wants to stay and help clear wreckage and look for survivors. Sorry lady, DEATH WISH was a different Bronson movie.

When Killion is off-duty, he makes time with a fellow agent named Charlotte (Jan Gan Boyd). This attractive woman, at least twenty-five years Killion’s junior, is head over heals for this insensitive, violent, and dare I say, physically repugnant man. He rebuffs her advances because of the business-and-pleasure principle, then later reverses himself and sleeps with her. After their one night of apparent toe-curling ecstasy (I don’t buy it either), she asks him to move in with her. In the next scene, before they’ve slept together a second time or even kissed each other, she proposes they get married. After one date? Charlotte, what did your therapist tell you? Surprisingly, Killion’s not put off by her stalker-style possessiveness. He laughs it off and tells her they can’t move in together because, “I don’t want to die from a terminal orgasm!” Too much information Killy.

When the assassination attempts keep coming, Killion and Craig sneak away and go on a cross-country jaunt to evade her captors. That’s right, instead of sticking the First Lady in a secure location where she can be protected and kept out of harm’s way, she goes out on the road with no help but Bronson, who is too good at killing people in extremely vicious ways to stay out of sight for very long. Not to mention that the First Lady disappears and nobody seems to notice. One of the most famous women in the country travels Greyhound without a disguise (she buys a wig then never wears it!) and only one person recognizes her, but not well enough to accurately identify her. Don’t you think if you bumped into Laura Bush - even if she was sitting in the passenger seat of a neon yellow dune buggy, as Mrs. Craig does at one point - you’d at least do a double take?

The terrorists keep on coming and keep on failing in the inept attempts to kill this death-crazed nut and Bronson and his legion of stunt doubles, who don’t even have the star’s hair color or style, continually foil their plans. These generic terrorist guys, they’re all the same, just out for some easy money. “Terrorism is a very expensive game!” one warns. At these rates, I’d rather have played Scrabble. Bronson even kills the final villain with a gun we have seen him give away and never retrieve.

This whole mess is laughable, laughable enough to recommend as an ugly movie in the right context. In this case, nonsense is good sense. It’s just common sense, simple common sense.

IF YOU LIKED ASSASSINATION, CHECK OUT: SUDDENLY (1954), from the same screenwriter as ASSASSINATION, an obscure Frank Sinatra film in which Ol’ Blue Eyes plays a would-be assassin. Scary stuff.