Watch On the Road For Free

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

best movie i've ever seen.

A lot of fun.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Walter Salles's On The Road is so close to being incredible. Unfortunately, the few things that stand in its way are enough to leave a sour taste in my mouth. Firstly, this movie shows us a lot of debauchery without delving into the philosophy behind it. The Beats were all about the idea that there's this other America out there, this more visceral, more honest way to live besides the 9-to-5, wife-and-kids suburban existence. Granted, the quest for this "other, free, holy America" loses some of its profundity when the characters feel the need to be smashed out of their minds 24/7 to find it. But they were onto something more than just drunken banging and shoplifting.The movie certainly delivers on conveying the Beats' lust for life, their sense of adventure. That feeling of excitement and ecstasy I get from the novel translates to the screen pretty well. Everything from the soundtrack to the lighting to the dirt under the actors' nails makes me wish I was there. Sam Riley is great at giving Sal some personality, which doesn't seem like it'd be the easiest thing to do. I was also surprised to find just how much I enjoyed the typically loathsome Kristen Stewart as Marylou. Tom Sturridge as Carlo is the crown jewel of the film for me; he's exactly how I imagine Ginsberg would have been at that age, and his lines and energy get the closest to the heart of what the beat generation was on about. Of course, the fact that one of the supporting characters carries the thing would imply that the lead was a sad, soul-crushing disappointment. And guess what! In Kerouac's novel, Dean Moriarty is the embodiment of the Beat Generation - intensity, enthusiasm, humor, eccentricity. He squeezes every drop of joy and wisdom out of every experience in his life; there's profundity in every interaction he has. In the novel Dean is manic. Everything he says is an exclamation. Sal is in awe of his magnetism, his energy. He's almost other worldly. There's a force inside Dean so powerful that you think it's gonna explode up out of him any second. His spirit is the lynchpin of the entire story. This seemed to be completely lost on either Garrett Hedlund, or the casting director, neither of whom I assume bothered to read the book. Here, Dean is still speeding down the highway, drinking and rolling joints, talking about his "kicks"...but without any of the character's electricity. There's nothing special about Hedlund's Dean. He's just a caffeinated Sal. He's the center of the whole story, he's got great actors playing great characters all around him, and he's still an overwhelming letdown. I don't recommend watching this before you read the book, lest it just seem like you're watching a bunch of losers getting drunk and jumping in and out of bed with each other. Mr. Hedlund seemed more interested in playing a rebellious rock star than a mesmerizing savant, and although he doesn't cause the ship to sink, it's definitely taking on water when it comes into port. Despite everyone else's best efforts, this only gets a 6 out of 10 for me.

Wasn't Mary Lou supposed to have curly blonde hair? A part of me expected more, but not really, everyone always screws up the movie. Read the book before you watch this butcher babe flick. If you're a tourist you won't care but, you'll get more. He's one of the most important writers of his time. He defined the entire beat generation. Creative licence is one thing, and this is buffoonery. You guys are not cool enough to be called dingledodies. I want to make a movie that includes everything, all 307 pages. This creates a very inauthentic experience. It's not something to be taken with causality. This was written with vision, a vision which changed everything. It was hungry for more, but the writers of the script for the movie make me sick... It wasn't their story. I demand they remake it.

Apparently it was a difficult screenplay to write, which didn't surprise me. I read the book decades ago and it had a profound affect on me as I was about the age of the characters. I had hoped a movie could be made of it, and alas, decades later one was and it was available on my TV. For me, it was a near perfect a re-creation from the book as one might hope for. The actors & actresses were excellent. That said, reading the book is important in order to follow the chaos that ensues "On the Road". It does leave out too much of the "Beat" generation background that provides the personal motivation for a lifestyle of its characters. Youth running away from a lifestyle that had become so entrenched around family, friends and community, some youth rebelled and looked for their own idea of utopia. Yet, it seemed, only Dean Moriarty had attempted, among all the male characters, to have some semblance of family life as he tried to balance the "old way" and the chains that bind, with a desire to live irresponsibly but totally free. A wild and exciting adventure that is tempered by the lesson, for the reader, at the end.

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.