Under Childhood is a column on children’s cinema—movies about and for kids.In 1983, a characteristically intense Dennis Hopper remarked to the New York Times: “Most of the people I knew in my 20's are dead. [...] Forty-year-olds are survivors.” Fatefully Hopper’s punk bildungsroman Out of the Blue (1980) has found new life at 40 thanks to a crowd-funded 4K restoration. Formerly available mostly through faded reels and VHS rips, the film’s difficult but enduring passage through history repeats its story’s own narrative, though rescued from its hopeless end. In the film, sixteen-year-old Cindy “CeBe” Barnes undergoes sexual abuse by her alcoholic father (Dennis Hopper) and the neglect of her heroin-addicted mother (Sharon Farrell). Faced with what feels like the dead end of her short life, she chooses to leave the world behind in an act of self-immolation, taking both parents with her. As the Neil Young song that...
- 12/15/2021
- MUBI
The new 4K restoration of Dennis Hopper’s mad-wheeling 1980 feature Out of the Blue opens with text detailing the fascinating behind-the-scenes turmoil that led to its creation. Hopper was only to star in the film, intended as a family-friendly drama about a rebellious young girl named Cebe (Linda Manz) and her reform by a kind therapist. Unhappy with the footage they were seeing, producers fired writer-director Leonard Yakir and planned to shut production down. But Hopper, still in director jail after the notoriously chaotic production and dismal reception of his previous feature The Last Movie, convinced them to not only continue, but restart it from scratch with him as director for an entirely new, far more provocative tale.
In the opening scene we see Cebe’s father, Don (Hopper), drunkenly barrel his big-wheeler truck directly into a school bus full of children, with Cebe right up front in the seat next to him.
In the opening scene we see Cebe’s father, Don (Hopper), drunkenly barrel his big-wheeler truck directly into a school bus full of children, with Cebe right up front in the seat next to him.
- 11/17/2021
- by Mitchell Beaupre
- The Film Stage
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