It’s December, so that means that it’s everyone’s favorite time of year: Road Trip Time!….?
Stay with me here.
Christmas is a time to see family.
The kids are out of school. The adults (if they have a good job) can take time off. That means that it’s time for a road trip to see people that you don’t care about the other 364 days of the year! Sometimes it’s great. Sometimes it’s awful.
Always it’s…an experience.
These aren’t Christmas road trip movies, unfortunately.
I’m sure there are some of those, but I don’t really know of any. Planes, Trains And Automobiles is about the closest I can think of, but that’s Thanksgiving. So these are just general road trip movies.
This list was super long and had to be pared down to five.
Expect a sequel at some point. (I kinda love road trips and the movies made about them.
EASY RIDER (1969)
Directed by Dennis Hopper
Written by Peter Fonda/Dennis Hopper/Terry Southern
This is pretty much the granddaddy of all road trip movies. It certainly wasn’t the first (there’s a much older one on this list that also probably wasn’t the first), but it’s one of the ones that everyone remembers. That could be because it’s a great film, but it could also be because it changed everything.
The film industry was never the same after Easy Rider.
The story is pretty simple. Two hippies (Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper) drive across the country on their motorcycle trying to find the American dream. Instead, they find a burned out lawyer (Jack Nicholson), drugs, crazy women (Toni “Oh Mickey” Basil and Karen Black) and, of course, nothing. “You know, Billy? We blew it.” That’s one of the saddest lines in film history. These guys were really looking for happiness and, instead, they found a screwed up country that hated them. If these free spirits can’t find it, can any of us?
Easy Rider isn’t for everyone.
I know a lot of people who think it’s highly overrated. But it’s importance can’t be over-stated. Not only was youth culture suddenly a viable option for Hollywood, but so was independent film. The hippy generation was given free reign for a while in Hollywood and they basically made way for the film school generation. So, yeah.
Without Fonda, Nicholson and Hopper, there would be no Spielberg, Coppola or Scorsese.
IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT (1934)
Directed by Frank Capra
Written by Robert Riskin
Based on short story by Samuel Hopkins Adams
It’s been years since I’ve seen this movie, but it’s always stuck with me. Claudette Colbert as a runaway heiress. Clark Gable as a reporter without a story. The two meet on the road, hate each other, then slowly fall in love. All stirred in the pot by Capra at his best. What’s not to like?
Classic scene after classic scene pile on top of each other as the two lead characters meet other people crazier than they are. Watch as Claudette teaches Clark how to properly hitchhike! See the Walls of Jericho! Marvel at two of the fastest mouths in early film history trading barbs!
I love all of the films on this list and think they’re all very well written, but It Happened One Night is probably the most intelligent. It certainly has the best and fastest dialogue. No one could have two people yell at each other while falling in love quite like Capra.
LOST IN AMERICA (1985)
Directed by Albert Brooks
Written by Albert Brooks/Monica McGowan Johnson
Speaking of people yelling at each other. David and Linda Howard (Albert Brooks and Julie Hagerty) decide to do a yuppie version of Easy Rider.
Well, actually, David decides this. He quits his job, sells everything and buys an RV, dragging poor Linda along for the ride. The RV has every amenity…but it’s an RV. Not a house. Linda is supportive, but she kind of hates it.
Then they hit Vegas. And all hell breaks loose.
David Howard is everything that you hate about yuppies and he knows it.
That’s why he wants to drop out of society and hold on to the nest egg. (His rant about the nest egg to Linda is still one of the funniest rants ever filmed.) He wants a new life away from his old life. Just start all over. Linda, on the other hand, is a complete mess. She’s so supportive of David, but knows that everything he does is just plain wrong. He’s forcing her to do this thing that makes almost no sense. That’s when she (maybe) sabotages everything.
Albert Brooks is definitely an acquired taste. He’s been called the LA Woody Allen and that makes perfect sense. He’s neurotic, but in a very LA way. I hate LA, but I love Albert Brooks. He’s fast, funny and dry. He’s also really good at exasperated. Even in Finding Nemo I can see his face as he’s trying to make sense of Dory.
Lost In America is what the whole yuppie thing was really about.
Yes, David Howard was trying to avoid being a yuppie, but he was a yuppie.
You can take the yuppie out of LA, but you can’t take the yuppie out of the yuppie.
Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN (2001)
Directed by Alfonso Cuaron
Written by Alfonso Cuaron/Carlos Cuaron
Alfonso Cuaron has had one of the most varied film careers of anyone lately. To go from a sweet children’s film like A Little Princess to a rather adult version of Great Expectations to this sexually explicit political drama, then back to kiddie land with one of the best Harry Potter movies (complete with a quick reference to Y Tu Mama!) and then to great sic-fi with Children Of Men and Gravity…lots of range in this guy and I love it.
Y Tu Mama was the first of his films where people truly stood up to take notice. Those first two films were well received, but no one really knew who directed them. (There was a Mexican film before called Love In The Time Of Hysteria. Never seen it. Barely heard of it.) Suddenly, though, the name of Alfonso Cuaron was on the tip of everyone’s tongue.
Julio and Tenoch (Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna) are the best of friends. They’re on break from school and decide to head out together on a trip around Mexico. They both have girlfriends, but they figure that what happens on a road trip stays on a road trip. That’s when they run into Luisa (Maribel Verdu), a beautiful older woman who is running away from an abusive relationship. She ends up coming with them and…well…remember how I said this movie was sexually explicit? There ya go.
Along the way, we see the real Mexico. Poor folks are lined up along the street. The narrator tells us their stories. The main characters are looking out the windows of the car seeing the poverty around them. (They’re all pretty well off, so they’ve been insulated from all of this their whole lives.) Eventually, it just seems like it’s time to start really enjoying life. No matter what that might mean. Everything is so fleeting. They’re rich today. Tomorrow they could be destitute.
Funny, heartbreaking and, eventually, life-affirming in a sort of sad way, Y Tu Mama Tambien is a movie that everyone should see. Even if you’re afraid of a little sex in movies, see it. You’ll get over it once you realize that this is a great film.
THELMA & LOUISE (1991)
Directed by Ridley Scott
Written by Callie Khouri
There are those who see Thelma & Louise as a great feminist rail against the system. After all, it’s about two women who kill a rapist and then go on the run, gaining their freedom the further they get from their old lives. There are also those who have a real problem calling it feminist. After all, these two women are still sort of defined by the men in their lives.
Personally, I don’t really care if it is or isn’t feminist. That’s up to the real scholars to decide. To me, it’s one of the few road movies based around women (especially at the time) and it’s a damn good movie.
Thelma and Louise (Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon) are two down on their luck ladies who just want what’s best for themselves. Louise has an ok life with her boyfriend, Jimmy (Michael Madsen), but she doesn’t see him as much as she’d like. Thelma, though, is in a pretty bad marriage to Darryl (Christopher McDonald, who can never seem to play a nice guy). The two of them decide to take a little break on the road. Unfortunately, a man tries to rape Thelma. Louise kills him and that’s when the chase begins. The two women see the dead man and just know that they’re in trouble.
The chase begins when the police find the body. Hal (Harvey Keitel) leads the cops on the trail, but he soon starts to figure out what really happened. He just wants to talk to the two women to get the whole story. Thelma and Louise, though, don’t think they have a chance.
They just keep running…and running…and running.
Oh yeah, this is the movie where people really noticed Brad Pitt for the first time. He’s Thelma’s road boy.
The movie has been parodied so much over the years that it’s almost hard to see how revolutionary it was in 1991, but this was huge.
Besides Ripley and a few horror heroines, there really weren’t very many action movies with female protagonists. Sure, Thelma and Louise weren’t really shooting up hundreds of dudes with machine guns or kicking ass in the standard sense, but they were having an real adventure and were creating their own lives.
That makes it not just a great road movie, but a great movie about women.
