Weekly Theme

Weekly Theme for July 21: Road Trip!

With the summer months waning and my own plans for vacation steadily approaching, it seemed apropos to dedicate this week's theme to that equally loved and despised category of film known as the road movie. From the family-friendly RV to the magnificently perverse Natural Born Killers, the road movie appears in countless incarnations and across all genres.

Personally, Almost Famous has remained not only my favorite road movie but overall one as well. The aforementioned Natural Born Killers, Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, Dogma, Little Miss Sunshine, Boys on the Sideand Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas round off the list. Others include Gregg Araki's The Doom Generation and The Living End; the various Aussie flicks like the Mad Max trilogy and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; the Indie hits such as Easy Rider and Buffalo '66; and lastly Alexander Payne's About Schmidt and Sideways.

So bring out the map and let us in on some your favorite road movies!

Re:Weekly Theme for July 21: Road Trip!

Kiss or Kill - An often forgotten favorite of mine.  The real stand outs for me are the spastic editing and the absence of score.  A unique and fun flick.

Wild at Heart - David Lynch's original "Natural Born Killers."  Just when you thought things were weird in New Orleans... they get to Texas.  "They're gonna make a pornographic movie... Texas style."  Yeesh.

Re:Weekly Theme for July 21: Road Trip!

Of corse "Fear and Loathing" is a true road trip. Adding a whole new meaning to the second word of that phrase. Hunter Thomson is a classic road tripper as well as an acid tripper. Interestingly, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" does not feature allot of moving. They are in Las Vegas. But that sometimes is half the point of a road trip, not going any where. "Cars" and "Local Hero" do this far more benignly.

Just to add to the list now, there are some classics that come to my mind as road trip movies; "It Happened One Night" a perfectly enjoyable comedy that is in many ways the original road trip, and "Two for the Road" where a more than a dash of drama is thrown into the mix of the comedy that is often in road trip movies, and "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" as a road trip version of perhaps the first road trip ever; The Odyssey.

Re:Weekly Theme for July 21: Road Trip!

It Happened One Night!  Great pick!  In that vein I would like to add Sullivan's Travels.  Make my screwball comedies with social commentary please.

Re:Weekly Theme for July 21: Road Trip!

My kids liked RV and Are We There Yet a lot. This theme seems to be commonly used for comedies. (I know Road Trip is just too obvious for Mercurial to mention so I'll leave it out too.) The newest Wes Anderson, The Darjeering Limited is somewhat of a road trip, only without the road, and you can't forget about Tommy Boy, "Brothers don't shake hands.......................brothers gotta HUG"

Then there's the road trips that don't end so well, such as House of 1000 Corpses, Freeway, Themla & Louis, and one of my favorites: Kalifornia.

And I can't leave out Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries. The road trip in this film was paralleled by the main character's life story.

Re:Weekly Theme for July 21: Road Trip!

"Wild Strawberries"! A favorite for sure. Probably Bergman's best as he takes on, not Isak's own life but also parallels a general loss of love and goodness in the world (something Bergman does in his other movies as well). This movie is a great one for showing how much more than the journey on the road can be in a road trip. Another on like that would of corse be "Apocalypse Now", but that is much more of a boat trip (amongst other things) than a road trip.

Re:Weekly Theme for July 21: Road Trip!

My quick, off the top of my head, five for this one:

Lost in America

It's just like Easy Rider if Captain America was a middle aged Yuppie driving a Winnebago!

Vacation

Just can't leave it off. "The moose outside should have told you, the park is closed."

The Out of Towners

Why Mid-Westerners hate to drive to New York. (I couldn't find a link to the 1970 Jack Lemmon movie on Spout, so the link is IMDB.)

If Its Tuesday, It Must Be Belguim

Have you ever been stuck on one of the buses that take you through 18 countries in 10 days? The oinly thing worse is watching the slideshow.

Rat Race

If Lost in America is going to end in Vegas, Rat Race shows why people would be desperate to get out of it.

Doesn't quite fit the theme: The Man Who Knew Too Much Sure the vacation goes wrong, but not really a road trip.

Re:Weekly Theme for July 21: Road Trip!

I'm not sure how, but so far  Planes, Trains and Automobiles has slipped through the cracks thus far. There's really no excuse.

Re:Weekly Theme for July 21: Road Trip!

leeroy711:

I'm not sure how, but so far  Planes, Trains and Automobiles has slipped through the cracks thus far. There's really no excuse.

Fantastic! I was trying to think of the Steve Martin movie that should have gone on this list, but came up with his disappointing Out of Towners remake.

Speaking of Steves... Steve McQueen's The Getaway is a great road movie.

Re:Weekly Theme for July 21: Road Trip!

Sorry I've been really under the weather and preoccupied so I've gotten behind on a lot of these threads.  I just opened this one up however and was suprised at how few of the movies that immediately came to mind for me (other than my favorite, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) had not been mentioned yet at all!

Although not one of my favorite movies, the quintessential road movie for me is Two-Lane Blacktop.  I can really appreciate the purity of it I think, and the kind of people you'd really find living on the road.

Jim Jarmuch's first film Stranger than Paradise is a favorite of mine that I think would qualify.  And I think his most recent film Broken Flowers does as well.

Many people mentioned Natural Born Killers which is really a more specific genre of a crime spree on the road type movie.  There area couple movies that I think far surpass this film in this genre.  Specifically at the top are Badlands and Bonnie and Clyde.

For my favorite comedies that feature road trip elements, I'd mention Dumb & Dumber, and Borat.  And also The Wizard when I'm feeling nostalgic.