Sunday July 21th 2013, Movie night. Can Dialectics Break Bricks Cinema by Jeffrey Babcock. Door open at 20:00, film begin at 21:00
Who’ll stop the rain (Karel Reisz, USA, 1978, 126 min.) In English
Hey, what ever happened to all those powerful films that came out in the 60s and 70s which have totally disappeared….. and why have they been killed off? Based on Robert Stone’s Award-winning novel “Dog Soldiers”, “Who’ll Stop the Rain” is both a great thriller and a meditation on the chaos and disillusionment of the Vietnam war era in America. The film centers on a journalist called Converse (Michael Moriarty) who went to Vietnam looking for a heroic story but instead finds only madness and abject fear. He also discovers that, in a world where nothing makes sense, people are just naturally going to want to get high. So rather than getting a story, he instead gets involved in the heroin market, and attempts to head an operation to smuggle drugs back into the United States…. and that’s where the story really kicks off. The film encapsulates the end of the 60s, employing the novel’s biting, cynical perspective on the despair and chaos surrounding both the war in Vietnam and the end of the counter-cultural revolution after Charles Manson and Altamont.
The author of the book was a fringe member of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters group, which included Neal Cassady (who was made into a legend in Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road”). This film stars Nick Nolte, whose character is modeled after Neal Cassady, and also stars Tuesday Weld (whose career was soon ruined by addiction and mental illness). The film’s soundtrack (as the title suggests) consists mostly of songs by American music icon Creedence Clearwater Revival. This will be a very rare screening of this cult film which nowadays is all but totally forgotten.
“Who’ll Stop the Rain” is a fine piece of vintage seventies memorabilia, a nail-biting thriller, and a useful lens into the confusion of American life during the last years of our military presence in Vietnam.
Film night at Joe’s Garage, warm and cozy cinema! Doors open at 8pm, film begins at 9pm, free entrance. You want to play a movie, let us know: joe [at] squat [dot] net
