Capital Celluloid 2017 - Day 160: Sat Jun 10

Two-Lane Blacktop (Hellman, 1971): Close-Up Cinema, 7pm


This brilliant film is part of the Close-Up Cinema 'On The Road' season. You can find the full details here. Two-Lane Blacktop is being screneed in a double-bill with the much-praised short film 'The French Road, Detroit MI. You can find all the details of the programme, which is also being shown on June 22nd, by clicking here.

Chicago Reader review:
This exciting existentialist road movie by Monte Hellman, with a swell script by Rudolph Wurlitzer and Will Corry and my favorite Warren Oates performance, looks even better now than it did in 1971, although it was pretty interesting back then as well. James Taylor and Dennis Wilson are the drivers of a supercharged '55 Chevy, and Oates is the owner of a new GTO (these nameless characters are in fact identified only by the cars they drive); they meet and agree to race from New Mexico to the east coast, though an assortment of side interests periodically distracts them, including various hitchhikers (among them Laurie Bird). (GTO hilariously assumes a new persona every time he picks up a new passenger, rather like the amorphous narrator in Wurlitzer's novel 
Nog.) The movie starts off as a narrative but gradually grows into something much more abstract—it's unsettling but also beautiful.

Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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