I remember watching this in the theater when it came out, in a privileged college town. When Nicholson abuses the waitress in the iconic scene that everybody else seems to love, all the well-off punks in the theater cheered ecstatically. How heroic to humiliate a poor waitress in a lousy diner! Nobody involved in the movie could be bothered to see the world from the waitress's point of view. And classical music as a symbol of privilege, a short-hand for the bad guys--isn't this the tiredest cliché in movies (The Bond villain in "The Spy Loved Me", Hannibal Lechter, etc etc etc etc....)? The movie also features one of the worst sex scenes in cinematic history. Jack Nicholson puts the moves on his brother's lover (The brother is a graceless geek, cause, you know, that's what all classical musicians are like) by destroying some of her possessions and going all he-man and violent on her. She explodes with passion! Because that's what women want, after all. In a scene near the end, an insufferable bitch at an insufferable party condescends to Nicholson's girlfriend. And he goes out of his mind with Nicholsonian rage. Maybe the falsest scene of this whole fraudulent movie--he has been treating her with utter disdain for two hours on the screen already. What does he expect? This movie still makes me sick.
Review of Five Easy Pieces
