Rating: 
Summary: It Makes You Think
Review: This movie, is exceptional. I wish I had more powerful words to describe it, but its quality goes beyond verbal description. This is easily one of the best movies ever made.
In addition to providing a great view into the late 60's counter culture movement(which EVERYONE learn about... don't so readily accept the things being fed to you about the 60's being just a bunch of hippies doing drugs and having sex...it was MUCH more than that), the movie makes you think....about freedom(Jack's piece on true freedom, and why people are afraid of it, is genuis), about hatred, about ignorance , about the way things should be...and many more things. The movie is jam packed with symbolism. it has a very powerful message... and for those that believe the movie is "dated"... well, its hardly true. This movie is timeless. Everyone should see it, at least once.
Rating:
Summary: An epic road trip
Review: What an iconic movie this one was. For viewers who weren't even alive during the 60s, this incredible and unforgettable film with Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Jack Nicholson is an important one to watch. For those of us who can remember that era all too well, it's worth a trip down memory lane.
Captain America (Fonda) and his buddy (Hopper, playing a paranoid Billy) set out on long, loud, flashy motorcycles, heading across the heartland of the US. Along the way, they pick up a drunk (Nicholson) in a small town and turn him on to, well, sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
A horrifying and all-too-plausible ending is what the movie is really about.
If you've never seen it, see it now; if you saw it way back when, see it again. And notice how YOUNG these guys look. It's scary.
Rating:
Summary: Freedom
Review: It is as simple as this. There's nothing, really, to "get". This movie is about freedom and peace. It's about how the tyranny of the "Status Quo" stifles the spirit of man, and with bleak outcome, illustrates how this wreckless hatred of difference, and unacceptance of our fellows, ends in destruction of peace. Those with baseless pride, always quick to judge and condemn, are the real villains, despite the protagonists' lawlessness, they bring no harm to anyone, which is in stark contrast to the majority of those they encounter. I keep reading reviews on how many "sided with the rednecks". All I can say is that if you find yourself doing just that, then you really must delve further into the nature of freedom. *REAL* freedom. That is the essense of this film. It is the one word of description to label it and define it. The protagonists' are on a quest to discover what it is to be free, whilst indulging in it. The realisation of the farmer's existence is an example of where they see how freedom is manifest in different forms. Despite the choice of the expression, the farmer and the (anti)heroes share a similar viewpoint on life. This may very well be the most patriotic film ever made. It is a shame that so many can't look past the surface to see that fact.
Rating:
Summary: The Odyssey flashback
Review: I was rifling through my Dad's dvds over the holidays and I decided to try this one out. I wasn't born yet when this movie was released. We have a winner! This movie does an excellent job of chronicling the late 60's: it is adventurous and it shows many of the values and customs of that era. Yes, the script is a little loopy and hazy at times. The ending is abrupt and surprising, yet I like it better with these rough edges. I would not want to see a movie about the late 60's that has a storyline that is overly neat and predictable. Fonda and Nicholson have stand up performances. My only complaint about this movie is that there is too much footage of the characters eating. I don't understand why the filmmakers felt that it was necessary to show 5+ minutes of the characters eating.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding ! The Road Movie that you will never forget !
Review: How to make a movie with almost no money ? Watch Easy Rider ! It's a terrific journey ! The story is simple but the actors (if they really are ;) are really fantastic. The Nicholson performance is unforgettable. EASY RIDER is a CULT movie and it still explains very well how the US society was in the 70's. Try to get the 30th anniversary remastered version including a very funny retrospective documentary to better understand the whole concept of Easy Rider.A once in a life !
Rating: 
Summary: "This used to be a helluva good country."
Review: A film reel of Dennis Hopper's "Easy Rider" should be in every time capsule buried in 1969. You would be hard pressed to find another film made during the Sixties that so vividly captured the essence, lingo, spirit, and rebellion of that era's counterculture. Every viewing of this film is a voyage in a time machine back to a time when society was undergoing a significant cultural transformation. However, that is part of the problem with "Easy Rider." Due to the fact that it so effectively captures a moment in time, it feels tremendously dated when looked at in the present. After Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) make a drug sell in Los Angeles, they head toward New Orleans. They stop at a commune along the way and then hook up with a lawyer named George Hanson (Jack Nicholson) after spending time in jail. Hanson decides to join the duo in their journey but is brutally killed when all three men are attacked by intolerant locals. Wyatt and Billy press on and eventually make it to Mardi Gras. However, death awaits them on the road after they leave New Orleans for Florida. "Easy Rider" will always be an important film because its success helped make it possible for more and more independent films to be made. Yet in terms of entertainment value, "Easy Rider" no longer gets the job done. Its narrative is disjointed and lumbering and its famous psychedelic sequence has lost all of its punch. There is still something liberating about watching Fonda and Hopper thumb their nose at everything conventional but their performances are the only aspect of the film that continues to endure. Everything else about "Easy Rider" just feels old. Time simply has not been kind to it.
Rating: 
Summary: Easy Rider
Review: By the mid-60s, the traditional movie audience had changed from a middle-aged, high school-educated, middle-to lower-class viewing group to a younger, college-educated, more affluent, middle-class audience. This is the movie that revolutionized and redirected the industry by proving that phenomenal returns could be made from a modest investment, if it appealed to its new audience, as well as launching an interest in producing youth-cult pictures. At a glance, Easy Rider appears to be and has the charm of a cheaply made underground flick seeking to exploit the iridescent youth movement. Well it was cheaply made, as far as money goes, costing a meek $350,000, but it returned $60 million worldwide. It was the first independent film to be distributed by a major company, Columbia, and it remains one of the most vital additions to film history because it best articulated the angst and energies of this alienated mass we call the counter-culture.
Directed by Dennis Hopper, produced by Peter Fonda, and starring both as two shaggy haired, reefer-reveling vagabonds inhaling the southwestern countryside atop their motorcycles, an excursion financed by an earlier cocaine deal, the movie is fueled by a caustic, equally rebellious soundtrack. Indeed, the first half hour seems more like a continuous rock video, commenced by the ultimate road song, Steppenwolf's Born To Be Wild. They leave L.A., headed for Mardi Gras, and pass through various towns, a hippie commune, and the boundless, sun drenched American landscape, but also through areas where local residents are increasingly narrow-minded and hateful of their longhaired freedom and use of drugs. Watch as Fonda casts away his wristwatch in the beginning, a symbol of an inner escape from the constraints and complexities of modern living. The title also points to our anti-heroes' rootless natures, who's capricious decision to discover their world directs them to the road's infinite freedom.
There's an interesting distinction to be made between Fonda's and Hopper's characters. Fonda plays the cool and introspective "Captain America" Wyatt astraddle a gleaming, low-riding bike with a 'stars-and-stripes' tear-drop gas tank, clad in tight leather pants and a black leather jacket with an American flag emblazoned on the back. Fonda said he actually soaked in a tub while wearing these pants, striding around in them afterwards until they had dried to give them the worn appearance. Hopper is the mustached, longhaired Billy, with a tan-colored bush hat, fringed buckskin jacket, and an Indian necklace of animals' teeth. Their names refer, of course, to the Western legends of Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid, and this is indicative of their personalities. Wyatt is quiet, more mature, and content with any surrounding; the jive-spouting Billy is restless and easily irritated. It's easy to imagine these drifters instead as idealistic gunslingers trotting across the immortal, sun-dried West, seeking out the untarnished American Dream in a corrupt, conformist environment. A quote from the coarsely brilliant George Carlin comes to mind, who wrote "The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it." As our exploration of the great civilization deepens into the bowels of the bigoted paranoia of the South, this becomes increasingly manifest.
Relish also Jack Nicholson in the performance that made him a star. After a decade or so of anonymity, he was contemplating giving acting up - lucky for him, and us, he did not. Playing the part of the jovial, rustic, and alcoholic lawyer, George Hanson, a part originally intended for Rip Torn, our hippie friends discover him in a jail after a night of obvious, though unstated, inebriation. He joins Wyatt and Billy on their quest and is bludgeoned to death one night as they camp in a forest on the outskirts of a terribly prejudiced, volatile Southern town. Think about what this represents: George, while he shares their longing for escape, is the least like Wyatt and Billy - he doesn't dress like them, doesn't speak their lingo, and doesn't have a shaggy mane. Even his addiction to alcohol seems to separate him even further from this equation - grass was a substance whose popularity belonged to the youth; alcohol was a more ancient addiction. So in him, we have a combination of both liberal and conservative values, in whose death the distinction between those dedicated to the rebellion (Wyatt and Billy) and those who're only innocent concomitants (George) diminishes. The locals are sort of killing a native son. Pay attention to what George tells Billy in campfire palaver: "They're scared of what you represent to 'em (freedom)... But talkin' about it and bein' it - that's two different things. I mean, it's real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace. 'Course, don't ever tell anybody that they're not free 'cause then they're gonna get real busy killin' and maimin' to prove to you that they are. Oh yeah, they're gonna talk to you, and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedom, but they see a free individual, it's gonna scare 'em." Really, a fascinating picture. Once you get through Hopper's esoteric directorial methods and the rambling, improvisational nature of the script, I think its greater message will truly affect your viscera.
Rating:
Summary: Uneven icon, but worth the trip.
Review: This is an enormously famous movie, one that has achieved iconic status. That means it's great, right? Well, not necessarily. It's an incredibly amateurish and uneven flick, with gaping holes in the plot, in the dialog, in the editing. The performances are (quite literally) stoned and dazed. But in this birds nest of oddness there are enough true gems to put it firmly in the forefront of classic cinema. These are the scenes we've all seen before: the famous "This used to be a hell of a good country" scene at the campfire comes to mind. That soliloquy alone is worth the price of the DVD. I think it all boils down to the fact that there is basically nothing worth getting too sentimental about from this time period. The crazy crack pot adolescence of the American nation doesn't bear too much scrutiny or it becomes painfully obvious that if you weren't stoned, you didn't get it, and you won't get it now. In other words, you have to believe it to see it. I do believe some of it, sometimes, and this movie helps me glimpse that small part. But it also shows me how painfully vaccuous and dreary and empty and pointless so much of the youth counterculture truly was. Any way, good flick, and it rings with an historical authenticity that is almost unequaled. Its great contribution is that it was made at the peak of the era, and commented on that era very eloquently. Usually the good commentary doesn't come along for many years, but Easy Rider pretty much hits the nail on the head. Plus the bikes are great. I highly recommend a very similar film called "Vanishing Point", which is a better film, and another dose of very authentic and high-proof 60's/70's nihilism. It ends just as happily, too.
Rating:
Summary: The Heroes Of A Generation
Review: The characters portrayed in this great film represent the very epitome of the 1960s baby-boomer mindset, along with the spirit of the masses who used the Vietnam War as an excuse to be bums. The progeny of the folks who won World War II, these young boomer-drifters were aimless and lazy; the film opens with two of these bums equipping themselves with money via an illegal heroin deal (trashing, no doubt, the lives of the drug users and their families, not to mention the folks they had to rip off in order to fund their addictions). We then watch this pair, one a sedated pot-head and the other a lunatic pot-head, drift toward New Orleans for a big drunk party, picking up along the way another equally purposeless bum (the great Jack, in a stunning role!). The plot plays out in an appropriate fashion for people who live their lives in this repulsive manner. This is a great film, don't miss it. It's the anthem of a generation, the once-bums who are now approaching retirement, preparing to drain the life out of Social Security. Always bumming off somebody else, these dudes.
Rating:
Summary: Oh, I've got a helmet.
Review: Easy Rider is not a movie for the masses. It can seem to be sluggish, and it can seem to be pointless. It might not have much of a plot - on paper - two guys buy and sell drugs to get rich and retire, essentially. However, I believe the movie captures a time and attitude in America that for better or worse, is gone - the last of the hippie/counter-culture era. Made for a low budget of 350,000-400,000 bucks, it nevertheless has some big names - the two leads, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, plus Jack Nicholson in a best-supporting-actor Oscar-nominated role, and Karen Black, Robert Walker and Luke Askew. Opposing the big names are the local talent of rednecks, sherriffs and hicks, all convincing in their parts. Besides Nicholson's oscar nomination, the screenplay (by Fonda, Hopper and Terry Southern) was also nominated. A large portion of dialogue and action is improvised, and most of the cast and crew is stoned much of the time. Directed by Hopper, the movie does feature some unusual edits and cuts. The soundtrack features Steppenwolf, Bob Dylan covers, The Byrds, Jimi Hendrix and others. If you are Jack Nicholson fan, you must see this movie.
"Yee-ahhh. Nih-nih-nih. Feh-feh-feh. Indians." There is much scenic countryside shown throughout the movie, but the last shot from the helicopter is amazing for both its beauty and its ugliness. The DVD has an excellent recent cast-comment feature with Hopper, Fonda, Askew, and some crew. The full-length commentary by Hopper is rather sparse, however. I give it a solid 4 stars.
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