On the Road (2012)

I re-watched this movie lately and was (again) somehow disappointed - the movie felt over-stretched, somehow artificial and mostly I was just bored. As the cinematography and the cast are working well, also the nice jazz and the occasional recitation of Kerouac's words fitted well, I wondered why I can't enjoy this movie more.Imo this movie got one main problem - On The Road is imo mainly a work of poetry, relying on the power of words, the emotions and pictures it evokes in the reader. Second, I think this movie should have been made in the 60s or 70s, now in times of Youporn, legalization of weed in the U.S. etc. etc. all these guys boozing, making free love etc. are not looking like rebels or avant-garde but low-life junkies. Also, literature nowadays is mainly entertainment, there are no real ground-shaking writers like Henry Miller, Kerouac, Sartre, Kafka etc. anymore. Today people read Harry Potter, Twilight etc. Literature in the beginning and in the mid of the past century was important to society, like HipHop to the 90s, nowadays it is mostly just business and giving some entertainment to the masses in their leisure time. Also jazz today just don't work as an expression of rebellion, in times where even bands like Sonic Youth are mainstream, and certain black metal artists cooperate with classical orchestras. For me, I am no lover of jazz or have any interest in it, the music sounds mostly like music for the elevator or some background noise for shopping in a hipster store. The book, the words of Keroauc I would recommend to everybody to read, but if you want to watch some aimless guys and gals boozing and drugging themselves to death, watch the semi-autobiography of Charles Bukowski called Barfly from 1987 with Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway - it is much more powerful and much more honest as the adaption of On The Road on the screen is. Booze, drugs, sex - in the 50s the Beat generation was the predecessor of the Love & Peace movement, as the movie does not give us any "feel" of that rebellion and conflict against the rigid rules at those times where the book was written (e.g. the separation of the races), this movie is mostly redundant.

I give this film 3 out of 10 stars because I was extremely bored with the subject matter of the film. It felt like it would never ever end. It was a constant cacophony of meaningless conversations. I could not connect to any of the characters. The protagonist played by Riley was likable enough, but the whole ensemble felt like they lacked depth. Having never fully read the novel because I felt the same painful boredom from it, I'm not really sure if the characters are meant to have any depth or if they represent any particular archetypes. I can say I felt absolute nothing during my viewing of this film and it is a shame. I am a fan of Hedlund.

It's the late 1940s, and young writer Sal Paradise's father has just died. He hangs out with friends in bars and struggles with writers' block. But when he meets charismatic Dean, Sal decides to follow his new friend's lead and take to the road on a cross-country trip across America.Let's start with the good, shall we? The supporting cast are excellent, and special mention should be given to Tom Sturridge. He plays Carlo (Allen Ginsberg's alter ego), who spends much of the film intensely brooding over his broken heart, his writing, his wild ambitions. A quiet scene in which he tries to articulate his feelings towards Dean is one of my favourite in the whole film. Elisabeth Moss and Amy Adams also have blink-and-you-miss-it supporting roles, and they both easily outshine their higher-billed co-stars.Unfortunately, that's about all the praise I can muster.We are informed, time and time again, that Dean is charismatic, charming, infectiously reckless and dangerous and sexy. Sal, Carlo and Marylou can't get enough of him. He makes their lives better, more complete, more exciting. And yet Hedlund, for whatever reason, completely fails to shine on the screen. Good looking, yes, but charming he is not.Reading the film's trivia page, previous attempted adaptations of Kerouac's book had the likes of Marlon Brando and Brad Pitt in mind to play the role of Dean. It makes me disappointed, embarrassed and slightly angry that the film's producers, in their search for our generation's equivalent to Brando and Pitt, settled on Garrett Hedlund. Was there really no one else available? What about Aaron Taylor-Johnson? Or Sam Claflin? Or Miles Teller, maybe? Or anyone who actually manages to make beautiful lines of prose sound more exciting than the phonebook? Objections have also been raised about some of the other main cast members, but although none of them - with the exception of Sturridge - lit the screen alight, none of them ruined the film either.But of course, this film was always going to disappoint. It was always going to disappoint because it was built on a shaky foundation. The film's underlying problem, the problem that was always going to be a problem even if everything else was perfect, was what the script isn't good enough.Any film worth watching tells you what its characters want. It's a character's pursuit of his/her personal goal that drives the whole plot. There was no sense here that the characters wanted anything in particular. There was talk of writing, but only in passing, as a way to spark a conversation in between drags of a joint. The characters talked, and laughed, and drank, and danced and travelled. But none of it really mattered because, in the end, none of them really changed.I'm aware, of course, that Kerouac's book is a much-loved piece of literature, which leads me to conclude that it must be much, much better than this film. If that's the case, then fine. Read the book. Love the book. But it's not enough to trust that an audience's love for a story told in one medium will necessarily transfer into a love for the story in a different medium. The film feels like it relies too heavily on people knowing - and liking - the characters of the book, and in doing so fails to deliver an adaptation worthy of its source material.

On the Road (French: Sur la route) is a 2012 Brazilian-French-Canadian adventure drama film directed by Walter Salles. It is an adaptation of the 1957 novel of the same name by Jack Kerouac. The film stars an ensemble cast featuring Garrett Hedlund, Sam Riley, Kristen Stewart, Amy Adams, Tom Sturridge, Danny Morgan, Alice Braga, Elisabeth Moss, Kirsten Dunst, and Viggo Mortensen. The story is based on the years Kerouac spent travelling the United States in the late 1940s with his friend Neal Cassady and several other figures who would go on to fame in their own right, including William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. On The Road is the story of Sal Paradise, an aspiring New York writer, and Dean Moriarty, a devastatingly charming ex-con, married to the very liberated and seductive Marylou. Sal and Dean bond instantly instantly upon meeting. Determined not to get locked in to a constricted life, the two friends cut their ties and take to the road with Marylou. Thirsting for freedom, the three young people head off in search of the world, of other encounters, and of themselves