Review of Five Easy Pieces (1970) by Tom B — 16 Jan 2011

Impossible not to think of Royal Tennenbaums, but existentially fatal by comparison. Jack is enormous fun to watch, vulnerable within all that toughness, and everyone else, the direction, and often luminous cinematography.

It seemed as though you could freeze the picture every few minutes and get an album cover or a poster. All from 1970, of course. Yet it seemed contemporary. No different now, really, although more crap, as predicted.

Wonderful to laugh, to see, to almost smell the mist in the trees, the sounds of gravel crunching and big old cars, the extraordinary Karen Black. She drove me crazy when I was a kid, and now I love her as though she was a part of me somehow, my memory-scape.

I saw this probably thirty years ago on TV and thought it was incredible, meaningful, it spoke to me, resonated, meant the world! Then I forgot what I'd seen. Now I've seen it again and it still does all that.

And my kids felt the same, more even than I. Funny how it doesn't seem to age. After watching we took our old dog Jack out to the park to walk in the snow, light and fluffy fresh-fallen snow, glowing in the night with a three-quarter moon in the dark haze, three in the morning and the park empty, a perfect end throwing snow and watching the dog burrow his nose in every now and then, with the taste of the movie still in our thoughts echoing a sense of time and place in multiple layers, then and now, and already a memory.

Will this still be on facebook in fifty years for my grandkids to read? If it is, then kids, go watch Five Easy Pieces. I was a little like that guy in the movie. Maybe not much, but a little. Ask your elders to tell you more, if they haven't already.