Two Lane Black Top AKA WTF?

Two Lane Black top stars James Taylor and one of the Beach Boys as drag racing drifters. It's from that period in the seventies when they made really deep pictures about who we all were and where we were going and what it meant to be free. This picture is soooooo deep. Too bad it wasn't a little deeper though - then it might not have been found. The most astonishing thing about this film is that it's been released on DVD by the Criterion collection. I imagine the reason that the film might be considered by anyone to be important is due to the last frames, in which rather than resolve the story (not that there is much of one), it shows the film getting jammed in the projector and melting. If you boil the story down to it's simplest nugget, then you'd have to say that plot-wise the film is a race between the drifters and a compulsive liar for the pink slips for their cars. Of course the film ends before the race does, so the only conventional aspect of the narrative that the audience has to grasp onto is left unresolved. By the end you don't really care - the real reward is that it's over. I think it wants to be the car version of of Easy Rider, with James Taylor in the Peter Fonda role, and the Beach Boy [a Wilson, but not Brian (that's how much I care about this movie. I can't even be arsed to look that detail up on IMDB.)] in the role of Dennis Hopper. Some other guy who they are racing to D.C. must be some sort of Nicholson surrogate. The twist is the female hitchiker, whom they also compete for (why I have no idea - she barely talks and seems like a nuisence). Story wise it's no Easy Rider. Of course what made Easy Rider so great for me was the feeling it achieved about what it's like to cross the country on a motorcycle (close as I'll ever get - Ali wont let me have one). Now imagine those shots in cinemascope of America and Captain America on thier bikes, riding through it...now picture that through a muddy windshield. Not really the same feeling at all. D+