Hodgepodge 71/365 - Road Trip Movies

Last night I was on my own and felt like a movie. But none of the several dozen already on my Netflix streaming queue appealed. (Will they ever? Why are they even there if I always scroll right past them? Well, that's a question for another day.) So I scanned new arrivals, and a little Australian movie jumped out at me: Last Cab to Darwin—a road trip movie. I love road trip movies!

It's also a movie about a man with only a few months to live: he decides to drive from his home in Broken Hill, NSW, to Darwin, NT, where a bill has just passed allowing the possibility of euthanasia. He's hoping to become the test case. That part of the story puts this film in another very small category of movies, shared by, as far as I know, only one other: the Spanish film The Sea Inside with Javier Bardém (highly recommended). (I guess Million Dollar Baby includes euthanasia too, but not in a state-sanctioned context.)

Road movies, though: there are lots of them. I love them because they move you through amazing landscapes, where you meet all manner of folk. They allow for long philosophical (or otherwise) conversations, because there you are, trapped in a car (or RV or bus—there are a few motorcycle road trip movies too, of course, and one lawnmower one). They often involve a hero's journey. Unexpected things happen, and the characters have to cope. There are epiphanies. What's not to love?

So here, to join my post the other day of time travel movies, is a list of 22 road trip movies I've either seen or (marked with an asterisk) I'd like to see. In no particular order, except the first one, which is generally accepted as the best American road trip movie ever.

▹ Easy Rider (1969): A dark story of America that may have just as much relevance today, almost fifty years later, as it did then. Or perhaps, renewed relevance. I'd like to see it again.

▹  Thelma and Louise (1991): What starts as a girls' two-day getaway transforms into a journey of feminist redemption and revenge. Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon are epic in the roles. This is a movie I can watch over and over.

▹  The Straight Story (1999): This road trip extends only from Iowa to Wisconsin, but it all takes place on a lawnmower. It's based on the true story of Alvin Straight, who learns that his estranged brother has suffered a stroke and decides to go see him one last time, to make amends. Starring the wonderful Richard Farnsworth and, amazingly, directed by David Lynch, it's a touching, lovely film.

▹  Y tu mamá también (2001): Two teenage boys and a woman in her twenties traverse Mexico in search of a certain secluded beach. It's a coming of age story, with sexuality, adventure, and wisdom embodied in the (slightly) older woman, Maribel Verdú.

▹ Almost Famous (2000): A teenage journalist follows a rock band around the country in this semi-autobiographical film by Cameron Crowe.

▹  The Motorcycle Diaries (2004): The story of Che Guevara's travels across South America during his last year of medical school: road trip as revolutionarily transformative event.

▹ Rain Man (1988): Tom Cruise plays Charlie, a slick salesman hampered by debts, who learns that his father has left his fortune to a brother he did not know existed: Raymond (Dustin Hoffman), an autistic savant. They travel from Cincinnati to Los Angeles, and Charlie, you know, finds his better self.

▹ Little Miss Sunshine (2006): A large, varied, and of course dysfunctional family travels across the country to enter their little girl in a beauty pageant.

▹ Stranger Than Paradise (1984): A character study by Jim Jarmusch about a New York jazz hipster and his Hungarian cousin who travel around New York and then from Cleveland to Florida together. A b&w gem.

▹ Leningrad Cowboys Go America (1989): A Finnish film about a Siberian band that, unsuccessful at home, is advised to try their luck in America, where "they'll buy anything." They set off on a road trip from New York to Mexico, stopping for bar gigs along the way.

▹ The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994): Three drag queens (Hugo Weaving, Terence Stamp, and Guy Pearce) get a cabaret job in the middle of the Australian desert and set off from Sydney. One of my favorite movies ever (one of the very few I own).

▹ Into the Wild (2007): Chris McCandless tries to escape society and find his own wild frontier on an abandoned bus in Alaska. Based on the true story as told by Jon Kracauer.

▹ *Cannonball Run (1981): An all-star madcap comedy centering on a cross-country car race.

▹ *Two-Lane Blacktop (1971): The inspiration for the real-life Cannonball Run race (see above), this existential road movie features two nameless drag racers—James Taylor (yes, that James Taylor) and Beach Boy Dennis Wilson—competing against Warren Oates for girls, car titles, and glory as they travel from the Southwest to Washington, D.C.

▹ *Midnight Run (1988): Annoyed bounty hunter Robert De Niro drags annoying mob accountant Charles Grodin across the country, with rival bounty hunters and mobsters in hot pursuit.

▹ Sherman's March (1986): It's a stretch to call this a road trip movie, but it's one I love, and this is my list. It's a documentary by Ross McElwee that ostensibly sets out to trace the effects of General Sherman's scorched-earth campaign during the Civil War—but mutates pretty much immediately into a chronicle of McElwee's own romantic failures. Adding it to my Netflix queue right now for a re-see.

▹ Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2001–2003): In a sense, the road trip to beat all road trips.

▹ *The Wages of Fear (1953): Leave it to the French to turn the road trip genre into an exercise in existential dread—a nail-biting one along bumpy mountain roads in a truck carrying a cargo of nitroglycerine.

▹ *The Lucky Ones (2008): Three soldiers coming home from Iraq find themselves thrown together by unforeseen circumstances and hit the road cross country.

▹ *Scarecrow (1973): Two vagabonds, a sailor and an ex-convict (Al Pacino and Gene Hackman), meet in California and travel east across the U.S. to start up a business together in Pennsylvania.

▹ Five Easy Pieces (1970): A blue-collar worker in California (Jack Nicholson) travels to the Pacific Northwest to attend to his ailing father, the patriarch of a well-to-do musical family on the coast of Washington.

▹ Badlands (1973): Directed by Terrence Malick, this films traces a teenage couple (Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek) fleeing their South Dakota hometown after Kit murders Holly's authoritarian father.

The following are ones that I'd be hesitant to see because I'm not into broad comedy, but I'll include them in passing because they're consistently on best-road-movie lists: Dumb and Dumber, National Lampoon's Vacation, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, and Borat. Maybe the road element would make me like them, who knows? And then, of course, there are the Bob Hope–Bing Crosby Road movies—Road to Rio (1947) arguably being the best.

There no doubt are others (Bonnie and Clyde doesn't seem inappropriate for this list, for example), but that's enough! Let me know if I've forgotten any that you find especially enjoyable.