MOCA and Cinespia have partnered with Cinefamily to present a month-long retrospective, Wasn’t Born to Follow, of Dennis Hopper’s filmic magic. While I have a feeling that MOCA’s Scnaubel organized?/curated? retro of Hopper is going to feel a little off base, Cinefamily will have the real Hopper, doing his “Hopper Thing”, showing ten amazing films. The series kicks off this Friday with a double feature of Easy Rider and The American Dreamer at 7:30 & 9:30. Cinefamily was kind enough to invite me to write the synopsis for Easy Rider, and in my pre-synopsisation watching, I was reminded of just how powerful the film was. L.M Kit Carson will be in attendance for the showing of The American Dreamer, and will be sharing “voluminous Dennis Hopper stories”. Can’t beat that.
The “don’t miss” film of the entire series is the July 30 showing of Out Of The Blue, in which returns to directing in 1980 to cast himself as one of cinema’s most disturbingly abusive parent to a disaffected and nihilistic teenage girl whose curios conflation of Elvis and punk rock iconography is simultaneously disjointing and a revelatory turn of aesthetics. A friend turned me on to this film when I was in high school, and it legitimately and seriously changed my life.