Easy Riders, Raging Bulls : How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood by Kenneth Bowser (Dir.)
Reviewed by Nia Rodgers, Evenings and Weekend Services Coordinator, RIS
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood is a long title for a book, and an even longer title for a film. Adapted from a book of the same title by Peter Biskind, this documentary combines still photos, film clips, and live interviews with a pantheon of acting notables – Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Cybill Shepard, as well as numerous screenwriters, producers, and directors.
The basic premise of the film and book is that television was killing the Hollywood studios until the mid-1960s, when wunderkinds like Roman Polanski, Peter Bogdanovich, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, and George Lucas arrived on the scene. An exploration of the idea of auteur primacy in the creation of a film is balanced by the various reactions of these highly pressured individuals, including heavy drug use and suicide. The interviews feel intimate and honest, but some of the interviewees are clearly hostile to one another and less inclined to travel down memory lane.
There are only two downsides to this film. The first is that Coppola, Spielberg, and Lucas do not appear in the film (they did allow interviews for the book). This is especially glaring in the case of Steven Spielberg, who created the first modern blockbuster with Jaws and has been the most commercially successful director to date. The second is that this is not a serious history of film. Many films, and filmmakers, are left out of this production, giving it a gossipy feel that might not appeal to some.
Overall, this film provides an excellent opportunity to hear a variety of personal anecdotes from a remarkable set of people who changed forever how Americans see film.
In her first novel, Jhumpa Lahiri addresses themes of cultural identity and the immigrant experience with a quiet grace. Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli are Bengali immigrants living near Boston with their American-born children Sonia and Gogol, the namesake of the title. The novel follows Gogol Ganguli from birth through early adulthood as he struggles with his identity, embodied by an Indian surname, a Russian pet name that was never meant to be his first name, and his desire to be an average American boy. Gogol tries to distance himself from the Bengali immigrant community to which his parents remain tied by changing his name and traveling first to Yale and then to New York, where he works as an architect and dates Maxine, a woman whose upbringing and lifestyle is vastly different from his own. He appears content, yet the question of identity continues to haunt him – “he is conscious of the fact that his immersion in Maxine’s family is a betrayal of his own” – and throughout the entire novel Gogol searches for a place where he can truly belong.
The story of 
Election is elegant, funny, and eminently readable at 200 pages, and it made me want to read more of Tom Perrotta's work. The story is an engrossing stew of angst, backstabbing, politicking, jealousy, ennui, and sex, all set in the midst of a high school election. For various reasons the election turns out to be unusually hotly contested, and readers get to watch the lives of various students, teachers, and parents implode and expand in a variety of colorful ways.
The book is a subversive statement in itself, masquerading as a book of graphics about the last great age of illustrated movie posters. It is really an examination of the so-called “Blaxploitation” movies of the 70’s and what they meant to the community of filmmakers then and now. The poster art is beautiful in a way that modern poster art for movies is not. It is heroic and informative and showcases the best of the illustrator's art of the period. The book, however, is so much more. It is a collection of interviews with the artists who made the black movies of 70 and the artwork that helped define them.
Most Westerners grew up hearing the word Gypsy, understanding it to portray a colorful sort of people who travel in caravans and read palms. In reality, they are an ethnic group of at least 15 million people, properly called "Romani." They have their own 
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