peteg's blog - noise - movies - 2022 02 18 FiveEasyPieces

Five Easy Pieces (1970)

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Second time around with this Jack Nicholson classic. Prompted by Matthew Spektor's Always Crashing in the Same Car which I'm midway through. He's fascinated by scriptwriter Carole Eastman. As before I enjoyed this as a time capsule but less so for the characters. Nicholson was, as always, very generous with the ladies playing opposite him: both he and squeeze Karen Black got Oscar noms, and his scenes with sister Lois Smith felt genuinely warm, something not so easy to achieve with all the womanising.

Roger Ebert: four stars at the time and another four in 2003. Roger Greenspun was more skeptical.