BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA

year: 1974

cast: Warren Oates, Isela Vega

writer/director: Sam Peckinpah

rating: ****1/2

The bizarre journey of a loser and his guitar-playing heart-of-gold whore girlfriend, driving across Mexico to cut off the head of a (dead and buried) gigolo named Alfredo Garcia and return it for money, is offbeat like a bum is untidy. Everything makes its own sense and there's a lotta neat violence, slow-motion deaths, and best of all, Warren Oates, giving the performance of a lifetime. Isela Vega is the epitome of a supportive role, and while this isn't Sam Peckinpah's best film, through all the tortrous insanity it definitely FEELS like his most personal.

TWO-LANE BLACKTOP

year: 1971

cast: James Taylor, Dennis Wilson, Warren Oates

director: Monte Hellman

rating: ****1/2

James Taylor and Dennis Wilson's non-acting doesn't matter as they're part of the car and feel as the car feels on a first-person i.e. first-vehicle narrative through America. To counter-balance the purposeful non-acting there's legendary Warren Oates, providing not only the baseline but acting as both catylist and antagonist as two cars: the Chevy (Taylor, Wilson) and the GTO (Oates) "race" cross country for pink slips; stopping along the way in various small towns for local races. Laurie Bird is a pretty, dim-bulb hitchiker whose acting's on par with Wilson more than Taylor; yet if real actors sat in Taylor, Wilson, or Bird's seats perhaps the documentary real-life aura would be gone. What we have is an ueber-realistic, organically textured, subtly spellbinding journey with one basic (if primal) objective: to keep moving.

EAST OF EDEN

year: 1981

cast: Timothy Bottoms, Jane Seymour, Sam Bottoms

rating: ***1/2

Although flawed, this is a sometimes delicious soap operetic version of the novel, covering almost everything in the book in three parts. Timothy Bottoms plays Adam Trask, Warren Oates his father: they both do a wonderful job as both are wonderful actors. Oates gives the movie a great jump-start, and Timothy Bottoms takes the reigns nicely. Bruce Boxlitner as Charles Trask... well, let's just say he wasn't great, but wasn't bad either. He can pull-off the sexy-lonely-stud aspect in the bedroom scenes, but doesn't seem mean enough, scary enough, or tough enough for the other scenes involving the sibling rivalry. But the story is classic and this adaptation sticks to it nicely. And it was a nice treat seeing Timothy Carey in a cameo: playing a screaming tent-preacher. Carey, one of the greatest cult actors of all time, played a bodyguard in the original film who beats up James Dean, star of the 1955 film that, centering on the last quarter of the novel, pales in comparison.