Director: Dennis Hopper
Year Released: 1971
Rating: 3.0
Experimental anti-Western made out of apparent anger for moviemaking (which is a 'fraudulent' medium), the international sex industry (the only thing in Peru to do 'for fun') and the negligence and ignorance of Americans in other countries, pulling up to shoot a movie and then running out just as fast and not dealing with the consequences (the natives re-enact their own 'fake' movie with a camera and boom). But while Hopper's creative juices were flowing at the time, his movie is an absolute mess - a beautiful mess, maybe, but a mess all the same. He and his editors had to cut down approximately forty hours of footage to the slim 108 minute mark, and the picture's structure, which disassembles the chronology, eliminates most dialogue and leaves you with mostly images and songs is a challenge to process and assemble (it's as if he's asking the audience to piece together the picture in their own minds and, unlike 21 Grams, it actually has more than a few thoughts in its head, so reconstructing it isn't a worthless chore). The result is a fascinating but frustrating movie that deserves more credit than it's gotten, a lost piece from the seventies and the kind of movie that would never get made again.
