road movie

A movie subgenre, some people argue even a genre unto its own. Always involving characters on a journey to somewhere, quest for something, or means of escape from someone. There are some arguments to what a road movie really is, but I'm generally all-inclusive as far as influences and placemarkers in the genre go.

Some examples of road movies include:

• It Happened One Night, 1934, Frank Capra
• Grapes of Wrath, 1940, John Ford
• Road to Singapore, 1940, Victor Schertzinger
• Sullivan's Travels, 1942, Preston Sturges
• Gun Crazy, 1950, Joseph H. Lewis
• Bonnie and Clyde, 1967, Arthur Penn
• Week-End, 1967, Jean-Luc Godard
• Easy Rider, 1969, Dennis Hopper
• The Last Detail, 1973, Hal Ashby
• The Muppet Movie, 1979, James Frawley
• Mad Max, 1979, George Miller
• Paris, Texas, 1984, Wim Wenders
• Stranger than Paradise, 1984, Jim Jarmusch
• Lost in America, 1985, Albert Brooks
• Down By Law, 1986, Jarmusch
• Dudes, 1987, Penelope Spheeris
• Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, 1987, John Hughes
• My Own Private Idaho, 1991, Gus Van Sant
• Thelma and Louise, 1991, Ridley Scott
• The Living End, 1992, Gregg Araki
• Simple Men, 1993, Hal Hartley
• Dumb and Dumber, 1994, Peter Farelly
• Cold Fever, 1994, Fridrik Thór Fridriksson
• The Doom Generation, 1994, Araki
• Natural Born Killers, 1994, Oliver Stone
• The Daytrippers, 1996, Greg Mottola
• Another Day in Paradise, 1998, Larry Clark

Road movies are one of the archetypes of movie making in 1970's, which produced some of the finest examples of the genre, films littered with brooding loner outlaw heroes speeding across the highways of America.

Two classic examples from this period are Vanishing Point (Richard C. Sarafian, 1971) , -the story of an amphetamine fuelled car delivery driver, and Two-Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman, 1971) - the latter starring Beach Boy Dennis Wilson.

There european equivalents can be found in the work of Wim Wenders, - the movies Alice in the Cities/Alice in den Städten (1974) and Kings of the Road/Im Lauf der Zeit (1976) in which the (always) male heros are transformed into an angst ridden figures plagued by existential crisis, a typically european phenomenon of the time, rather than thier outlaw American counterparts.

Road Movie is also the title of an R.E.M. concert movie. The movie was filmed at the last two stops of the Monster tour during summer 1994 in Atlanta.

The cinematography is a little irritating, but the movie is good over all because it includes a good mix of old stuff and at that time unreleased material, which would make up the album New Adventures in Hi-Fi. (It should also be noted that this is before Bill Berry left the band, and so this documented the last two times he played with R.E.M.)

The setlist:

1. I Took Your Name
2. What's the Frequency, Kenneth?
3. Crush With Eyeliner
4. Undertow
5. The Wake-Up Bomb
6. Revolution
7. Losing My Religion
8. Binky The Doormat
9. The One I Love
10. Strange Currencies
11. Tongue
12. Man On the Moon
13. Country Feedback
14. Find the River
15. Orange Crush
16. Star 69
17. Let Me In
18. Everybody Hurts
19. It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)