Thank you, David Thomson.

Hey, it's Good Friday, why not continue with great verbal bitch slaps?

I need to stop lingering on IFC's A Decade Under the Influence. Every time I flip past it, I have to go back and watch a couple of minutes and inevitably some asshole director will say something so arrogant and out-of-line that they give me a migraine. Last night was no different.

First offense: William Friedkin announces that he feels a creative kinship with Antonioni. Pause. Pause. Um, yeah, OK Billy. I guess the elliptical ennui of Jade is pretty Antonioniesque.

Second offense: Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper on Easy Rider. Full confession: I've never seen it. To be fair, I guess I should... but it looks like such posturing, trust-fund-hippie claptrap. Anyway, Hopper and Fonda are quite content with themselves because they're convinced that they've made the great film of the '60s and a bold cinematic statement becuase, in the words of Fonda, "[they] were really smoking that weed and really riding those bikes." Yeah, great.
At this point these fuckers are making me see red, so I pull out my trusty New Biograpgical Dictionary of Film by Mr. David Thomson. I can usually count on Mr. Thomson to rain-on-almost-anyone's-parade.
His entry on Hopper/Easy Rider didn't let me down:

Then came Easy Rider, a disaster in the history of film to set beside the loss of Technicolor, the invention of gross participation, the early death of Murnau, and the longevity of Richard Attenborough.

And exhale.