✮ Lights, Camera, Action! ✮You know, I had fantasies like that, about being beat up. Did you ever have a fantasy about women beating you up? Or don't cowboys have fantasies?
Reviewing The Last Movie is like trying to describe the taste of the color red while someone is sanding your eyelids. Dennis Hopper, instead of making a film, committed an act of spiritual terrorism in the heart of the Andes, and the result is an exquisite corpse that still breathes under the Peruvian sun.
The plot is merely an excuse for time to fold back on itself like a Möbius strip bathed in mezcal. The wicker cameras of the indigenous people understand what Hollywood forgot: that cinema is a blood ritual where the image captures the soul and returns it chewed up. When the "film within the film" ends, what remains is reality invading fiction like a hungry parasite.
It is a masterpiece because it is impure. It is a film that hates itself as much as it loves the possibility of being something else. It is cinema chewing its own tail, a 35mm ouroboros choking on its own prestige.
Cinema is dead. It has three possible killers: Hopper, Godard, and Hollywood. Maybe it's all three, maybe it's none of them, maybe cinema is alive but hiding somewhere and pretending to be dead. Who knows? Cinema is dead and streaming killed it, or we killed it, or the industry and awards killed it, or maybe it never died and is stronger than ever, but we say it's dead to feel superior for consuming "old-school cinema" or "good cinema."
I don't even know what I'm saying anymore. My brain is fried after this film. This review is a hodgepodge of what little knowledge I have.
