Watched a 1974 movie called "Thunderbolt and Lightfoot" yesterday, and it inspired me to start this new blog. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot stars Clint Eastwood and a young Jeff Bridges as an ex-bank robber and an over-enthusiastic drifter who wants to help Eastwood do one last job.
I remember this movie as a funny, sexy tale of two guys getting together to rob a bank. Instead it was true 70's movie: An amoral, misogynistic tale, which seethes with hatred for the law and authority, and unabashedly celebrates violent solutions fatalistic . Despite it being nothing like the movie I remembered, I still thought it was brilliant. No surprise that the writer/director Michael Cimino would go on after that to make The Deer Hunter.
Sometimes I think to myself that we simply don't make movies like this anymore, but we do. Only now, it would barely make waves at Sundance these days.
Anyhoo, worth checking out for very early appearances from Gary Busey and Catherine "Daisy Duke" Bach, and the weird people they meet on their travels: an exhibitionist housewife, a biker chick with a hammer and an attitude, a guy with raccoon in his passenger seat and a trunk-full of white rabbits... It takes more odd turns than a CGI car commercial.
Yes, sir. Highly recommended for anyone looking to enter the strange wilderness of American 70's cinema. If only the DVD had a commentary track. I'd love to know what was going through Cimino's mind when he wrote the bunnies in the trunk scene.
Because there is already a "That 70's Blog", which has one entry and was last updated in 2005, welcome to Made in the 70's, a little blog about that long overlooked era of (mostly American) culture that made me the person I am right now. I was born in 1971, and missed much of the early 70's due to being very small and not very popular, so this is as much a journey for me as it is a repository for stuff and ideas that were Made in the 70's. Hope you like it. - Ridski.
NEW FEATURE: Feeling a little competitive? Check out the bottom of the page in the central section. We've added the classic 70s game Connect 4 to the site. Play against the computer or player vs. player (not against online players, unfortunately). It's so groovy!
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