DON'T GET CAUGHT WATCHING THE PAINT DRY: Did anyone do crazy/intense on screen better than
the late Dennis Hopper?
Manohla Dargis penned a fine appreciation last month, and my words feel so inadequate to capture the brilliance of someone who delivered so many memorable performances --
Easy Rider,
Blue Velvet,
Apocalypse Now,
Hoosiers, hell,
Speed ... just mentioning each evoke so many strong memories for me of vividly real, hard-lived men functioning in a different reality from the rest of us. We're talking about an actor so compelling in his craziness that when he described Kevin Costner in
Waterworld as being "like a turd that won't flush," you bought his anger even though he was evoking this metaphor
in a world without running water and, hence, no flushing.
[Via the first link. Among his many marriages, Hopper was married to Michelle Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas for eight days. "Seven of those days were pretty good," Hopper said. "The eighth day was the bad one."]
Below the fold, the man at work with Christopher Walken in
True Romance. Decidedly NFSW, but so worth it. RIP to a true American original, whom
Roger Ebert and
Matt Zoller Seitz places in proper context with text and video:
Heineken?
ReplyDeleteI believe he prefered PBL.
ReplyDeleteHopper changed the paradigm in movies (Easy Rider) and art (his support of California conceptualists like Wallace Berman and Ed Ruscha). But for me, Adam, although he was palpably creepy in Hoosiers and River's Edge and Blue Velvet, most of his mid-career performances were of the Method Melodramatic sort, like his villain in Speed.
ReplyDeleteHoo, River's Edge. Hopper is tremendous in that movie. His scenes with the inflatable doll ought to be ludicrous, but they are not, proof that he could really act and not just be crazy while the camera rolled. Yet that extraordinary performance tends to get overlooked, it appears.
ReplyDeleteI am very nervous about who is going to be #3 after Coleman and Hopper.
ReplyDeleteIt's unclear whether Linkletter or Dio was the first of this trio, or whether there's more to come.
ReplyDeleteWe were just having this same conversation... we concluded that Dio was an anomaly and did not count as one of The Three.
ReplyDelete@Ichi -- I agree with you on "River's Edge", if you're reading this and you've never seen it, do. Crispin Glover is equally psycho in that movie, which is disturbing, to say the least.
ReplyDelete