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During the 80's and 90's home video was an unexpected but explosive new entertainment medium. (Can anyone forget regularly scanning your nearby video store for something new to rent?) It gave writers and producers much more room to produce films that never would have made it to the screen. Production money may have been spare, but sometimes B-level movies are the best of all and "Flashback" applies. It wasn't a trip back in time as the title suggests, it was a look at the Establishment winning the culture war. Yuppies had replaced the Hippies. Perhaps the most poignant line was when the wizened old hippie, Huey (Dennis Hopper), reminds the yuppie FBI agent John Buckner (Keifer Sutherland) that the 1980's (the Reagan Administration) created two classes of people - the Rich and the Poor. More true today than it was then. As the story plays out in a comical and entertaining way - Buckner escorting Huey to jail but unexpectedly fleeing from a murderous small-town sheriff - we learn that maybe Huey wasn't as much a hippie as we thought. And we also learn that Buckner was the son of a hippie commune family and his real name is 'Free'. By the end of the movie Huey finally gets his book published and loves the fame (yet keeps his brazen attitude), and Buckner realizes the hippie liberalists were pretty good after all. He quits the FBI and sets out to re-discover his roots. One downside is watching Free/Buckner ride off into the sunset on a rice-burner bike instead of a Harley, but acceptable considering the movie was to bridge the 60's to the 90's. The other is seeing Huey propound his belief that the 90's would be so radical socially that it would put the 60's to shame. Sad to learn that it would never happen. Altogether, "Flashback" is a first-rate film worth owning, not just seeing. Greats like Dennis Hopper and Keifer Sutherland are at their best, it's a clever story, very entertaining, and thought provoking enough to make you wonder what the heck happened to a once bullish youth not afraid to get nose-to-nose with a Fascist-style government.
score /10
perjensen-2 20 August 2011
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2477080/ |
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27-2-2021 00:06:11