Two-Lane Blacktop

"Let's make it fifty" is a phrase that screen writer Rudy Wurlitzer, billed as Hot Rod, says right before he gets one-upped and gets his ass handed to him by James Taylor's The Driver and Dennis Wilson's The Mechanic when he races against The Car in Monte Hellman's iconic 1971 art-house road movie Two-Lane Blacktop.

This is a hell of a movie and most obnoxious film fanatics, yours included, have seen it and somewhat studied it. I came about it a little more organically, through the car angle. I had friends that were almost just like The Driver and The Mechanic in my life. This movie isn't really a documentary however.

Internet Car Movie Database link http://www.imcdb.org/movie.php?id=67893 So let's get the car stuff out of the way. I'm deeply in love with this car and like Three-Six Mafia I'm about Ridin in the Chevy. That's definitely one hook. But looking under the hood, pun very much intended, this movie is much deeper than just a road race. The characters are archetypal, maybe. Various aspects of screen writer Rudy Wurlitzer and directory Monte Hellman, perhaps. The circumstances are allegorical--a tension between Warren Oates' character GTO and the Driver/Mechanic team. I very strongly suggest watching this movie and, if possible, watching the Criterion version which does have a 5.1 mix that doesn't sound half bad. It's a good transfer but it doesn't seem to be terribly high res due to the Techniscope ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techniscope ) cameras it was filmed on but it does provide massive panoramas of America to set this story up against.

Stick around and I'll talk at ya a while about this movie in an underproduced podcast because I'm a barely functional human being. As always @coolmarkd on Twitter markd20 on Letterboxd