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Review: ‘The Last Film Festival’ is not a fitting tribute to Dennis Hopper

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The late Dennis Hopper’s IMDB acting credits are 200-strong, but any qualitative ranking of those titles would put his last completed movie, “The Last Film Festival,” somewhere at the bottom.

A thoroughly amateurish un-comedy about show business, it was filmed in 2009, but its notions of Hollywood satire (starlets are dumb and sexed up!), edginess (transvestite jokes! puking!) and race humor (what is it, “African American” or “black”?!?) are infinitely older and more tired.

Hopper, cursing his part into existence, plays a desperate filmmaker whose latest opus was accepted only at a podunk Midwestern film festival taking place at a high school, and yet it’s the cheapness of the filmmaking itself that stands out.

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One is tempted to weep openly at why Jacqueline Bisset, as Hopper’s venal ex-wife with a fake Italian accent, and JoBeth Williams, as the town mayor, are in something that wouldn’t pass muster as a home movie. Other strong urges are to look away whenever Chris Kattan fails to get a laugh, and to speculate whether the camera was just on all the time, and co-writer/director Linda Yellen didn’t know what was intended and what wasn’t.

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‘The Last Film Festival’

Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes

MPAA rating: R for language throughout, some sexuality and drug use

Playing: Laemmle Royal, Laemmle Playhouse 7

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