One Week

One Week, the AMC movie we’ll be screening Sunday at 11:45 am, is a classic road movie, one of my favourite movie genres. Here are 17 reasons why:

Apocalypse Now – certainly in my top five Best Movies ever
Bonnie and Clyde – Warren and Faye robbed banks
Butch Cassidy – vintage Redford/Newman
Diarios de Motocicleta – early Che, nomadically finding himself
Duel – Spielberg’s classic student movie – a man, a car and a semi…
Easy Rider – Dennis Hopper’s trip with Fonda
Goin’ Down the Road - Don Shebib’s beauty…
Grapes of Wrath – John Ford’s John Steinbeck’s dust bowl odyssey
Into the Wild – Sean Penn’s extraordinary rending of that Krakauer book
It Happened One Night – Gable and Colbert and Capra
La Strada – the Fellini bildungsroman,
Little Miss Sunshine - a family's trip to a kidlet beauty pageant
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert – three Aussie drag queens
Raising Arizona – vintage Coen Bros.
The Wizard of Oz – the yellow brick road movie of course…
Thelma and Louise – Babes on the run…
Two For the Road – Audrey Hepburn & Finney caper across France

The Road Movie’s a form that traces all the way back to Homer’s Odyssey, I suppose – that questing nomadic soul, traversing a landscape in an endless search of himself/herself. Innocent beginnings. Suffocated by mere existence. No specific destination. Spectacular landscapes. Haywire adventures. Encounters with characters even odder than themselves.

Top Ten Lists on the Internet abound, debating what makes which road movie qualify as the greatest. Here are some sites:

http://www.filmsite.org/roadfilms.html
http://www.greencine.com/static/primers/road.jsp
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Road-Movies-Made-70s/lm/1GZT0JLA8QJ8Z
http://images.imdb.de/keyword/road-movie/

I’m not the only one that loves the genre. One Week is a modest entertaining movie, with no great aspirations: a guy in trouble, quests after an understanding of the land and the body in which he lives. And the lives that surround his own. Canada the landscape, is a major costar, filmed with all the loving adoration cameramen used to reserve for Katherine Hepburn. John Griffin of the Gazette gave One Week ***** - a high compliment indeed - and people flocked to it since. One Week opened last weekend. This Friday, the AMC is adding a second print, an almost unheard of compliment for a Canadian movie.

So we’ll see you at 11:45 a.m. at the AMC. The movie runs 94 minutes, so that we’ll be into the Comedy Nest before 2 p.m. For those wanting to purchase or pick up extra vouchers, we’ll be in the AMC Atrium Sunday by 10:30 a.m.

Peter