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10 Things That Happen in 'Tammy' That You've Seen in Other Road-Trip Movies

If you’re one of the millions who watched Tammy this weekend, you probably found parts of the movie to be strangely familiar. That’s because road-trip movies — like any popular film genre — follow a set of time-honored rules and conventions. Indeed, a few things that Tammy’s two main characters don’t do are: run out of gas, pick up a hitchhiker, and have a good old-fashioned sing-along. Here are a few examples of other road-trip “truisms” from their long journey through Trope Land:

Warning: Tammy spoilers ahead.

1. Our Heroes (or Heroines) Drive the Wrong Way Tammy (Melissa McCarthy) and her grandmother Pearl (Susan Sarandon) are driving an eastbound route from Illinois to Niagara Falls — they end up in Missouri. Such navigational errors typically happen while the ‘smart’ character is asleep.  As Seen In: Dumb and Dumber, Due Date

2. Money is Lost The fat stack of bills Pearl begins their trip with quickly evaporates after Tammy wrecks a Jet Ski. Characters often attempt to rectify these financial setbacks by committing some type of crime or stripping in a honky-tonk bar.   As Seen In: Planes, Trains and Automobiles; National Lampoon’s Vacation; Thelma and Louise; Due Date; Crossroads; Forces of Nature; It Happened One Night; Lost in America; Rain Man; Road Trip; Transamerica

3. There’s a Stop at a Honky-Tonk Bar Tammy and Pearl dance to some bluegrass — while keeping their clothes on — in a honky-tonk in Kentucky. As Seen In: Thelma & Louise, The Blues Brothers, Boys on the Side, Fanboys, The Guilt Trip, Nebraska, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Wild Hogs

4. There’s a Stop at a Kooky Relative’s House When Tammy and Pearl are on the lam (after Tammy holds up a fast-food joint,), they call her Aunt Lenore (Kathy Bates), who knows how to destroy the evidence (meaning: blow up the car).  As Seen In: Vacation, Road Trip, Away We Go, Nebraska

5. Wild Animals Attack First, it’s a deer that “jumps in front of” Tammy’s car, wrecking it. Then it’s a raccoon that “nips her” while she’s sleeping outside of a motel room.  As Seen In: Tommy Boy (deer), RV (raccoons), We’re the Millers (tarantula), Are We There Yet? (deer), Identity Thief (snakes), Johnson Family Vacation (lizard)

6. Vehicles Are Destroyed… A hard and fast rule for any respectable road-trip movie. There are two cars wrecked in Tammy .

As Seen In: The Blues Brothers; Sideways; Due Date; Fanboys; The Guilt Trip; Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle; Identity Thief; Johnson Family Vacation; Little Miss Sunshine; RV; Tommy Boy; Vacation; We’re the Millers; Are We There Yet?; College Road Trip; Crossroads

7. …Some Even Explode A few films take the destruction even further, and have the cars consumed in a burst of flames.

As Seen In: Planes, Trains and Automobiles; Road Trip; Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back

8. People Get Left Behind Once Tammy’s had enough of her drunk grandmother, she jettisons her (only to return shortly later, of course).

As Seen In: Due Date, Kingpin, Lost in America, Little Miss Sunshine, RV, The Sure Thing, We’re the Millers

9. People Get Arrested Just like Tammy doubles the car wrecks, it triples the arrests. Both Tammy and Pearl end up behind bars; later, Tammy gets pinched a second time.

As Seen In: The Blues Brothers, Easy Rider, Boys on the Side, College Road Trip, Fanboys, Forces of Nature, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, Identity Thief, Johnson Family Vacation, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

10. There’s a Stop at a Tourist Attraction The Grand Canyon is the most popular destination, Tammy mixes it up with a trip to Niagara Falls.

As Seen In: Due Date , The Guilt Trip , Thelma and Louise , Vacation

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‘Green Book’ Review: A Road Trip Through a Land of Racial Clichés

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‘Green Book’ | Anatomy of a Scene

Peter farrelly narrates a sequence from his film featuring viggo mortensen and mahershala ali..

“Hi. I’m Pete Farrelly, co-writer and director of “Green Book.” “Green Book” is the story of Don Shirley, a concert pianist played by Mahershala Ali, who, in 1962, had to go on a tour of the south. He hired a bouncer, Tony Lip, played by Viggo Mortensen here, to drive him. This is a scene early on in the movie when they stopped to get a pack of cigarettes. And Tony Lip gets out, finds a jade stone on the ground, but it’s next to where they’re selling gemstones. Obviously somebody dropped it there. He puts it in his pocket. Thinks, well, it’s on the ground. I can have it. And is accused of stealing it by the other band members. The point of this scene is — it’s a true story, by the way — that it’s something that Tony Lip told us — we had audiotapes of Tony Lip telling stories about Dr. Shirley trying to teach him. He said, you know, I love that man — Dr. Shirley — and the reason I do is because he was always trying to make me smart.” “Before we pull out, Tony, we need to have a talk.” “Eh?” “Oleg told me what you did.” “What’d I do?” “You stole a jade stone from the store.” “No, I didn’t.” “He watched you do it.” “I didn’t steal no stone.” “You picked it up and put it in your pocket.” “I picked up a rock off o’ the ground. I didn’t steal from a box.” “Now, why would you pick up a rock off the ground?” “I don’t know. Because it ain’t stealing. It’s just a regular rock.” “And why would you want a regular rock?” “To have. For luck, maybe.” “A lucky rock?” “Yeah.” “Let me see it.” “The thing that really comes through here is a parent-child relationship is forming. Dr. Shirley is educated. Tony Lip’s — sixth grade education, but really didn’t pay attention after third grade.” “Take it back and pay for it.” “And he’s being schooled by Dr. Shirley. Dr. Shirley — if he’s gonna be spending a couple of months with him, he’s trying to help him in the way he talks, the way he speaks, the way he treats people, the way he acts.” “Do not drive, Mr. Vallelonga.” “It helps that Dr. Shirley’s in control when he doesn’t get out. He doesn’t do anything. He sits there. And Tony has to turn to him, and Tony has to stretch around him, and he’s just such a child in this scene, the way he reacts to everything. It’s like if you caught a five-year-old stealing gum at the grocery store. That’s how he reacts. I liked Viggo having to turn toward him, and it just felt like he was at a disadvantage in that scene. And it helped empower Dr. Shirley that he could just sit back and control it.” “If you’d like, Tony, I’d happily buy you the stone.” “Don’t bother. You took all the fun out of it.”

By A.O. Scott

• Nov. 15, 2018

“Green Book” is a road movie set in 1962, long before Apple or Google Maps or Waze, but as it makes its way from New York to Alabama and back, you might nonetheless imagine a little GPS voice in your ear telling you what’s up ahead.

There is virtually no milestone in this tale of interracial male friendship that you won’t see coming from a long way off, including scenes that seem too corny or misguided for any movie in its right mind to contemplate. “Siri, please tell me they’re not going there.” Oh, but they are.

“There” includes an entire subplot devoted to fried chicken, which the African-American member of the buddy duo has never eaten. He eventually (spoiler alert) acquires a taste, thanks in part to the urgings of his white counterpart.

The crispy poultry motif figures heavily in the “Green Book” trailers, conceivably as a warning. Every suspicion you might entertain — that this will be a sentimental tale of prejudices overcome and common humanity affirmed; that its politics will be as gently middle-of-the-road as its humor; that it will invite a measure of self-congratulation about how far we, as a nation, have come — will be confirmed.

Because the white guy, an erstwhile nightclub bouncer named Frank Anthony Vallelonga and known as Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen), is behind the wheel of a car while the black guy, the pianist and composer Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali), rides in back, “Green Book” seems to invite comparison to “Driving Miss Daisy.” But its pedigree is slightly different, reaching back through the Gene Wilder-Richard Pryor comedies of the 1970s to “The Defiant Ones” in 1958, which starred Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis as runaway convicts in the Jim Crow South.

If you want to get scholarly about it, you could stretch the tradition even further, following literary critics like Leslie Fiedler and D.H. Lawrence and seeing Tony and Don as manifestations of a primal American archetype. Huck and Jim. Ishmael and Queequeg. Natty and Chingachgook — bonded cross-cultural pairs that symbolically redeem America of its original racial sin.

[Read more about the real Don Shirley .]

“Green Book,” written and directed by Peter Farrelly (of the once notoriously naughty Farrelly Brothers), is based on a true story. Tony Lip and Don Shirley were real people, and the movie grounds their journey to the South in piquant historical details. The book referenced in the title was a guide used by black motorists to help them avoid the dangers and indignities of road travel, especially below the Mason-Dixon line. Don’s record company, having booked him on a tour through several southern states, hires Tony to serve as a de facto bodyguard as well as a chauffeur.

He also becomes, inevitably, a kind of white savior, intervening to shield his employer, when he can, from white people who have no such obligation. The hypocrisies of segregation are laid out — Don is celebrated as an artist and denied service at hotels and restaurants — as are the brutal and insidious manifestations of white supremacy.

The real drama, and also the comedy, is between the two men. The contrast of their temperaments is not subtle. Don, highly accomplished and educated — he’s “Dr. Shirley” to most, “Doc” to Tony — is formal and fastidious, an aesthete and an intellectual with no patience for vulgarity or sloppiness. He’s also gay, though this fact is handled with a discretion that borders on squeamishness. Tony is a caricature of Italian-American family-man exuberance. He’s voluble and emotional and constantly smoking, eating, or both at the same time. At one point, reclining in a hotel-room bed, he folds a pizza in half and shoves it in his mouth. Not a slice of pizza. The whole pie.

His warm, earthy authenticity has a salutary effect on Don, whose hauteur masks a deep loneliness. In return, Don refines Tony’s taste and dissolves his prejudices. As I said, there’s not much here you haven’t seen before, and very little that can’t be described as crude, obvious and borderline offensive, even as it tries to be uplifting and affirmative.

And yet! There is also something about this movie that prevented me from collapsing into a permanent cringe as I watched it. Or rather, two things: the lead performances. (Linda Cardellini, as Tony’s wife, Dolores, is wonderful too, but she’s only around at the beginning and the end.) Mortensen, plump as a mortadella, doesn’t so much transcend the ethnic clichés of the role as chew through them, emerging into a zone of vaudevillian poetry. Ali, more or less the straight man in the double act, approaches every moment with a razor-fine wit, a lively awareness of the absurdity of the situation that may not belong to the character alone.

These men are good company, even if the trip itself might cause some queasiness.

Green Book Rated PG-13. Some mean white people, but they’re not all like that. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes.

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Viggo Mortensen as Tony "Lip" Vallelonga and Mahereshala Ali as Dr. Don Shirley in The Green Book (2018) (Photo credit: Patti Perret - © 2018 Universal Studios / source: IMDB )

‘Green Book’ Delivers Its Message About Racism with a Spoon Full of Sugar

Peter Farrelly's first foray into drama, Green Book , is simplistic in its message for examining racism, but maybe that simplicity serves as the sugar coating the pill that many current Americans need to swallow.

There can be apprehension when approaching ‘feel-good’ films about painful subjects. Perhaps it isn’t fair to call veteran comedy director Peter Farrelly’s dramatic biographical debut, Green Book , a feel-good film – there are moments of genuine tension and emotional power – but despite its biographical subject, set amongst racial tensions in ’60s-era American South, the film bears all the sugary hallmarks of light entertainment. Thankfully, the chemistry between Viggo Mortensen’s rough, blue-collar Italian-American bouncer and Mahereshala Ali’s graceful, educated African-American classically trained pianist is enough to overcome your apprehensions. Although the plot may be sanitized and clunky, the story of Dr. Don Shirley (Ali) is a fascinating one, and certainly worth learning, even if filtered through Farrelly’s sweetened lens.

Tony “Lip” Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen) is a good guy. Sure, he busts heads for a living at the Copacabana nightclub and cavorts with some of New York’s most infamous wise guys, but he loves his family and is a reliable provider. Oh, and he’s also a racist. He refers to African Americans as ‘eggplants’ and would probably drop several other choice epithets were Green Book not sanitized for viewers’ protection (rated PG-13). When his wife (Linda Cardellini as “Dolores”) offers some water to two black maintenance workers, Tony quickly retrieves the glasses and throws them away.

But Tony knows how to effectively ‘persuade’ people, which brings him to the attention of Dr. Donald Walbridge Shirley. Dr. Shirley is a virtuoso pianist about to embark upon a tour of the Deep South with his musical trio and he needs a man to handle his itinerary. Oh, and he also happens to be African American and the year is 1962. It’s safe to assume a man adept at the art of persuasion might come in handy under such circumstances.

It’s shameful that there was a time in America’s recent past when a book was required to guide African American travelers through the South. (What form, if any, does such a current guide take?) Jim Crow laws were still years away from being neutralized by The Civil Rights Act, which meant that black travelers needed

The Negro Motorist Green Book to advise them on the segregationist statutes enforced in Southern states. Knowing where you could drive after dark or which hotels permitted black lodgers was literally a matter of life and death.

This grim historical backdrop is the setting for what is basically a simple, albeit factual story about racial tolerance and cooperation between two very different men. It’s predictable that Tony, insulated from cultural diversity in his working-class Italian-American neighborhood, will gain new perspective into the unfair suffering of African Americans. There will be scenes where he objects to the treatment of Dr. Shirley and uses his streetwise savvy to save him from peril. He will grow as a man, incorporating the best parts of Dr. Shirley’s dignity and wisdom into his own life. Unfortunately, we’ve seen this kind of movie before and it’s usually condescending.

So what saves (just barely) Green Book from a similar fate? It all comes back to Dr. Shirley. His remarkable life almost sounds like the stuff of fiction. After starting on the piano at the age of two, the Jamaican-born musical savant was accepted into the Leningrad Conservatory and began his classical training at the age of nine. By the time he was 18, Dr. Shirley was performing with the Boston Pops. The title of ‘Dr.’could apply to any of the multiple doctorate degrees he received during intensive University study. He produced two dozen albums and was world-renowned for his virtuosity on the piano. As Tony reckons, he’s “like Liberace, only better.”

What makes Dr. Shirley even more fascinating, however, is his irreconcilable emotional paradox; he has spent the majority of his life living with and entertaining the people that refuse to acknowledge his humanity. It’s the only world that he knows. Meticulous in appearance and incredibly well-educated, Dr. Shirley is a man who can’t relate to the hardship and poverty prevalent within the black community. He isolates himself in a luxurious apartment above Carnegie Hall, drinking too much scotch and wallowing in self-hatred. When he and Tony walk into an African American bar, it’s debatable which of the two feels more out of place.

We don’t see complicated characters like this in movies; highly educated black men who are struggling with their identity, wondering where, if anywhere, they fit in. There’s an opportunity here to deconstruct the anger, confusion, and resentment that keeps Dr. Shirley from re-connecting with his cultural heritage. Unfortunately, that isn’t the movie Farrelly wanted to make. He wants to use Dr. Shirley as a vehicle of change for Tony . It’s always admirable to promote racial empathy, particularly when ‘driving while black’ is still a risky proposition in America, but it feels like a simplistic objective for such a complicated subject. The choice becomes, then, lamenting the film that could have been, or trying to embrace the director’s artistic vision.

It’s the chemistry between Mortensen and Ali that makes Farrelly’s vision palatable. Yes, Green Book employs plenty of road trip clichés — Tony and Dr. Shirley reluctantly teach one another valuable life lessons in the broadest way possible — but the comical digressions of this decidedly odd couple are enough to keep you chuckling. Tony, who eats more like a mindless machine than a sentient human being, delights in the prospect of eating Kentucky Fried Chicken in the state of Kentucky. “When’s that ever going to happen!” he exclaims. You can’t help but laugh at Dr. Shirley’s exasperation over Tony’s lack of couth, including a scene in which he hilariously shames Tony into returning a stolen item from a roadside tourist trap. There’s nothing groundbreaking here, but watching the evolving camaraderie between these headstrong men is a pleasure.

Ultimately, celebrating an interesting character like Dr. Stanley outweighs the mishandling of his story. Even if Green Book functions on the level of American Race Relations 101, perhaps it will strike a non-threatening chord with the people who most need to see it. General audiences who would never watch a Spike Lee film or indulge an edgy social commentary like Sorry to Bother You might flock to the cozy confines of Green Book . Its pleas for empathy and elevated social awareness are admirable, even if the jagged edges and racial tensions have been smoothed over.

• Green Book (film) - Wikipedia
• Green Book | Movie Site | Now Playing in Select Theaters ...
• Green Book (2018) - IMDb
• Green Book - Official Trailer [HD] - YouTube

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‘Come As You Are’ freshens up the road-trip cliches

Shot in illinois, the charmer about men with disabilities earns its laughs and tears..

Hayden Szeto (from left), Grant Rosenmeyer and Ravi Patel play men with disabilities who team up for a road trip to a bordello in “Come As You Are.”

Samuel Goldwyn Pictures

It’s all about the remakes this week, as no fewer than four new movies and/or streaming series are based on previous releases.

In addition to the supernatural reboot of “Fantasy Island” and the Hulu streaming series cover of “High Fidelity,” we have Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Will Ferrell starring in “Downhill” (a remake of the 2014 Swedish film “Force Majeure” ) — and “Come As You Are,” based on the 2011 Belgian film “Hasta la Vista.”

If only all remakes and reboots and retakes and restarts were as funny as charming and lovely and moving as this one.

The premise of this movie is fraught with peril, as they used to say and, apparently, I’m still saying it. It’s built on two potentially hackneyed and all too familiar set-ups: the road trip movie and the wacky comedy about colorful characters with disabilities who teach us all a lesson.

Thanks to the smart and knowing screenplay by Erik Linthorst, sharp and well-paced and fuss-free direction from Richard Wong and a quartet of fine actors at the top of their games, “Come As You Are” is alternately laugh-out-loud funny and reach-for-the-tissues emotional without resorting to maudlin manipulations or shameless grabs for laughs.

Oh sure, many of the clichés of the genre are visited here. Every road trip movie has to include a good number of bumps in the road; if not, you don’t really have a road movie. But “Come As You Are” has a wonderful way of making even the most obvious situations seem fresh and funny and original.

Grant Rosenmeyer (“The Royal Tennenbaums,” the FOX sitcom “Oliver Beene”) is Scotty, a 24-year-old paraplegic who uses acidic wit as a defense shield. Scotty lives in a ranch home in Colorado with his chatterbox, no-nonsense mom Liz (Janeane Garofalo), who brushes aside Scotty’s sarcastic remarks as she tends to her son.

“I’m 24 years old, you’re washing my b----,” Scotty says with a sneer as his mother gives him a bath. “[This] is perfectly normal.”

Scotty (Grant Rosemeyer) gets an assist from his mother, Liz (Janeane Garofalo), in “Come As You Are.”

Mom ignores him and continues, because she’s a damn saint although she’d tell you to knock it off with that nonsense.

Ravi Patel is Mo, a 35-year-old blind employee at the physical therapy clinic Scotty frequents nearly every day. Hayden Szeto is Matt, a handsome former athlete who lost the use of his legs due to an unspecified degenerative condition — but still is able to use his arms, which leads the resentful Scotty to dub him “Biceps.”

(In a heartbreaking scene early on, Matt visits his girlfriend at the library, where she’s with a study buddy who might have become more than a buddy. The girlfriend doesn’t have to blurt anything as direct as, “We’re breaking up.” She simply says, “I have to start thinking about my future,” and we know exactly what she means.)

Scotty is a virgin and he wants to do something about it. He learns about a bordello in Montreal called Le Chateau Paradis that caters to clients with disabilities.

In a promotional video, we see the proprietor of the bordello (played by Asta Philpot, whose real-life journey is the inspiration for the movie.)

“Bonjour!” he says. “Come as you are!”

All righty then!

Scott talks Mo and Matt into joining him on the trek from Colorado to Quebec in a rental van driven by a nurse named Sam (Gabourey Sidibe), who has at first has little patience for these horny goofballs, as when she tells Scotty, “You call me sweetheart one more time, I’m gonna bust you in the face.”

Nurse Sam (Gabourey Sidibe) drives the van rented by Mo (Ravi Patel) and his traveling companions.

Samuel Goldwyn Films

Eventually, and unsurprisingly, Sam becomes quite attached to this trio (in particular Mo) over the course of a rollicking journey that includes quite a bit of drinking, a bar fight and an encounter with a state trooper, to mention just a few classic road trip moments.

Oh, and the guys neglected to tell their families about this little excursion. When the parents et al. find out, they set off in hot pursuit, determined to put an end to this crazy and dangerous field trip.

Even though “Come As You Are” covers hundreds of miles, it was shot entirely within Illinois borders, at locations ranging from Gurnee to Waukegan to the Long Grove Community Church to the Iron Horse Restaurant to the Hilltop Family Restaurant to downtown Chicago. It’s a great-looking film, with excellent use of locations, and first-rate editing.

Rosenmeyer, Szeto and Patel have terrific buddy-movie chemistry. Gabourey Sidibe is a force of nature as the fierce and funny and lovely Sam. In relatively little screen time, Janeane Garofalo creates a fully realized character worthy of her own movie.

“Come As You Are” is a little film that deserves a big audience.

27 Road Trip Movies Every Traveler Needs To Watch

The road is one of the most enduring images in film history because it can be used for so many different purposes. It can mean the freedom of adventure, or adventure's inevitable dead-end. Road trips can result in meeting interesting new characters, or they can be the worst kind of isolation or even the worst kind of forced bonding. Filmmakers from all over the world are continually drawn to the road movie and specifically the road trip movie, where a simple car or bus ride can become something much more meaningful. It offers plenty of opportunity for unexpected change, and it often does so in front of beautiful, overwhelming landscapes. They'll never stop making movies about road trips because people will never stop taking them, always wanting to see the sights and maybe become a little wiser in the process.

The 27 films in this list all take their own approaches to portraying the road trip cinematically, emphasizing its best and worst tendencies and playing them for both comedy and drama. But even the worst trips taken here offer something to appreciate, sometimes deep thought about the meaning of the road and sometimes a laugh at the expense of the poor fools stuck in the car.

1. Easy Rider

One of the most iconic road trips in cinematic history was taken by Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in Hopper's 1969 classic "Easy Rider." The legendary image of Fonda and Hopper riding their motorcycles while Steppenwolf's "Born To Be Wild" plays remains people's main association with "Easy Rider." But the movie itself is more complicated than just the thrill of riding down wide-open roads. The tagline tells of a man who went looking for America and "couldn't find it anywhere," and that's a good summation of the cynical eye this takes toward the country it explores.

Fonda and Hopper encounter some friendly people in their travels, most famously Jack Nicholson in his breakout role as a drunken lawyer. They encounter just as much resistance as they do support, from people with no tolerance for their countercultural attitudes and long hair. In one scene, Nicholson tells Hopper that people are scared of him because "what you represent to them is freedom," and the film's bleak ending offers little hope that freedom can be maintained in the face of such strong opposition. But the power of the film's images of freedom and joy is still enough to keep this as one of the beloved road movies.

2. Lost in America

Despite its cynicism, "Easy Rider" inspired many Americans to go out on the road themselves, even ones who couldn't be further away from Fonda and Hopper's biker lifestyle. This is the subject of writer, director, and actor Albert Brooks's 1985 film "Lost in America," in which a middle-class yuppie couple (Brooks and Julie Hagerty) hits the road and quickly realizes they can't handle it. By the end of the trip, they've destroyed their lives and their savings, and they've rid themselves of any romantic notions about traveling America without a plan.

Brooks' directorial work is defined by bitterness and discomfort as much as by laughs, and "Lost in America" can be particularly caustic. Brooks and Hagerty sink to some miserable depths during the course of their trip, reduced to begging for the money they just lost gambling or treating each other with naked hostility. A trip to the Hoover Dam doesn't offer scenery, instead serving as a backdrop to the couple's most vicious fight. "Lost in America" is a satire of the waste and excess of the American '80s, but it's also a reminder to make sure you've carefully thought through your road trip before you embark on one. Some people aren't ready for the road, and Brooks and Hagerty learn that too late.

3. The Color Wheel

Getting stuck with someone annoying on a long road trip can be a miserable experience, so spending the entirety of the 2011 comedy "The Color Wheel" with two annoying people on a road trip can make it a tough sell. But the film's writer-director, Alex Ross Perry, has an uncommon talent for writing people who only seem to be awful and irritating so that they're both funnier and more tragic than they would be in real life. That skill serves him especially well for the two leads of "The Color Wheel," an obnoxious brother and sister (played by Perry and Carlen Altman) whose road trip through New England leads them to meet strangers and old friends who are all even more awful than they are. The scenery offers little comfort when every scene becomes a passive-aggressive argument.

"The Color Wheel" is above all else a comedy, happy to laugh at its main characters for their abysmal social skills and undisguised contempt for each other and everyone around them. But as the trip goes on and they keep meeting hostile exes and classmates, their situation starts to seem a little sad, like they've been molded into hateful jerks by the whole world around them. Their final attempt to escape the cycle of anger and venom is shocking, but it's also unexpectedly tender, because Perry respects his characters even as they embarrass themselves.

Even the awful road trip of "The Color Wheel" can't compare to the nightmare trip taken by the title character of "Zola," and hers really happened. "Zola" was adapted from the famous Twitter thread detailing a disastrous trip to Florida taken by a part-time stripper (Taylour Paige) and a woman she just met (Riley Keough). There's not much time to enjoy Florida on this trip, the scenery consists of strip malls and different men's hotel rooms, and the business Zola has been dragged into quickly spirals into exploitation and violence.

"Zola" is about very bad events in a woman's life, but like the Twitter thread, it believes those events to be hilarious above anything else. The band of fools Zola winds up with can seem dangerous, particularly Colman Domingo's ambiguously accented pimp, but mostly they're all bluster and no brains. When they encounter people who are actually dangerous, they escape by the skin of their teeth. There's tension but never fear in "Zola," and that helps to make it a wonderful comedy even once the blood starts getting shed.

5. American Honey

"Zola" isn't the only movie where Riley Keough is a uniquely awful road trip presence. There's also the 2016 drama "American Honey", where Keough enlists a young girl played by Sasha Lane into a crew of door-to-door magazine salespeople. They travel blissfully across the Midwest, and Lane falls in love with a member of the crew, played by Shia LaBeouf. But their peaceful, off-the-grid existence is threatened by Keough and the precarity of their jobs.

A common thread across many of the great American road movies is that they're not directed by Americans, with international directors often looking at American landscapes in a different way than their American counterparts who've grown up with them. English director Andrea Arnold joins that group of directors with how she films America here, pushing the colors of the landscapes to such extremes that the emotions associated with them are also heightened, whether they be romance or danger. Her beautiful imagery is accentuated by her pulsing soundtrack, which switches between big-name pop hits and obscurities that perfectly match the mood of youthful excitement and negligence that defines "American Honey."

6. Stranger Than Paradise

While road trips can be fun and exciting, they can also be tedious, especially when there's not much scenery to look at. Writer-director Jim Jarmusch expertly captured the boredom of a bad road trip in his 1984 breakthrough "Stranger Than Paradise," in which the three leads take off in search of new experiences and don't find them anywhere they look.

Two of the leads are Hungarian émigrés hoping to find more from America than they did from their home. But the America portrayed in "Stranger Than Paradise" is just the most unremarkable areas of New York, Ohio, and Florida, presented so that the camera is just as unimpressed by them as the characters are. And only the most monotonous aspects of the road trip are shown, like driving through the endless expanse of Pennsylvania or arguing about who has to sleep on the cot when they get to a motel. Despite its tedium, "Stranger Than Paradise" is a very funny study of how the myths of the road can collapse in the face of the realities of going out on the road.

7. Badlands

Not all road trips start from good intentions. The one undertaken by Kit (Martin Sheen) and Holly (Sissy Spacek) in 1973's Bonnie and Clyde story "Badlands" starts after Kit murders Holly's father and burns down their house. That's where the journey begins, and eventually Kit is responsible for much more than one murder. But there's still an innocence to young Kit and Holly's trip, where they create their own society out in the wilderness and encounter all kinds of gorgeous nature. "Badlands," writes Sheila O'Malley for Criterion , is based on the 1958 murder spree of Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, but its power doesn't come from its killings so much as its troubling naivete, where the blinkered teenage attitudes of its protagonists and the pastoral beauty of their surroundings say nothing about the horrible violence occurring right in front of them.

"Badlands" was the debut of writer-director Terrence Malick, who would go on to develop a reputation for his eye for natural landscapes. That's present even this early, shooting trees and sunsets so that they appear magical more than natural. But that magic here comes with a terrible price, and Malick seems as disturbed by nature's non-reaction to the evil committed all around it as he is entranced by its power.

8. My Blueberry Nights

Wong Kar-wai has directed some of the most beloved films of all time in his native Hong Kong, but to date, he's only made one movie in the United States. That was 2007's "My Blueberry Nights," which explores the unique geography of America through a road trip starting in New York and ending in Las Vegas. Wong is renowned for his intensely stylized movies, and "My Blueberry Nights" is no exception. Wong's America is beautiful in a way it isn't in real life — only Wong's oversaturated colors and beautiful golden light could make it look this gorgeous. In this way, Wong captures the feeling of a great road trip, of falling in love with every location you pass. And Wong ties all these stunning locales to his usual themes of heartbreak and melancholy, showing beautiful places inhabited by sad, lonely people.

"My Blueberry Nights" is held back from the levels of Wong's best movies by a weak script and inconsistent performances. Otherwise talented actors like Natalie Portman and Rachel Weisz go over the top, while even strong performances from Jude Law and David Strathairn have to go against the bland lead performance from singer and first-time actor Norah Jones. But such flaws don't matter too much in light of how enchanting Wong's vision of the world is. This is the kind of movie that makes people want to keep taking road trips.

9. Alice in the Cities

Few directors are as synonymous with the road and road movies as Wim Wenders, the German director who's made several of the best-loved movies about the road ever made. His most overt takes on the road genre are the three movies that make up his "Road Trilogy," starting with "Alice in the Cities" in 1974. "Alice in the Cities" concerns German writer Philip (Rüdiger Vogler), who follows a disappointing assignment by meeting a woman (Lisa Kreuzer) and her young daughter Alice (Yella Rottländer), then agreeing to go on a trip through Amsterdam. Their trip is marked by complications, boredom, and a lot of music, including a Chuck Berry concert and a jukebox playing Canned Heat. And all the while, Philip and Alice begin to develop a friendship.

"Alice in the Cities" is one of the most lasting Wenders movies, inspiring the work of filmmakers like Allison Anders and Mike Mills, particularly Mills' own adult-and-child road movie "C'mon C'mon." "Alice in the Cities" holds special power for its tale of unexpected companionship, where the road has the magic to bring together people who never would have even met under different circumstances. Even when the sights aren't exciting, getting to experience those sights with someone new can be a rewarding experience.

10. Magic Mike XXL

The success of the male-stripper comedy "Magic Mike" left star Channing Tatum and writer Reid Carolin with the duty of following up a movie that seemed to neatly wrap up at the end. Rather than repeat the first one's formula, Tatum and Carolin decided to go in another direction, turning 2015's "Magic Mike XXL" into an exuberant road trip movie about friends and the joy of performing. "Magic Mike" was an often melancholy movie about the recession, and while there are still economic worries all over "Magic Mike XXL," they mostly take a back seat to just enjoying the chance to escape from them for a few days.

The first film's director, Steven Soderbergh, didn't return to direct "Magic Mike XXL," but he did serve as its cinematographer, and he deserves special credit for how beautiful he makes the film's Southern locations look. Even an ordinary gas station comes to life with Soderbergh's golden light, to say nothing of the beaches and palatial estates Mike and his friends visit on their journey. The beauty of these locations also represents the simple beauty of hanging out with people you love, and this is where "Magic Mike XXL" separates itself from its predecessor. Mike's fellow strippers barely had personalities in the first one, but here they're best friends who love each other's company even as they razz each other. It's a unique pleasure to go on the road with such a tight-knit group.

11. Y tu mamá también

After making 2001's "Y tu mamá también," Alfonso Cuarón stuck to making large-scale spectacles and big-budget blockbusters. But in "Y tu mamá también," Cuarón applies his usual technical excellence to a simple story of a woman and two teenage boys going on a road trip. The Mexican landscapes they drive past are beautifully shot by future Oscar-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, and their conversations are profane and hilarious, especially as delivered by Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal in their breakthrough roles. But a serious side creeps into "Y tu mamá también" as it goes on, eventually taking it over entirely.

As the three take their trip, they pass by political strife and Mexican culture soon to die out entirely. The characters may only be passing through these areas, but there are people living in the areas whose lives will be very difficult long after the leads are gone. Despite its main characters' immaturity, this is a surprisingly thoughtful road trip movie, understanding that even the most pristine locales are burdened by troubling history. That also turns out to be true about the main characters' dynamics, where the teenage leads eventually realize the depths of sadness and desperation they and their traveling partner carry with them. But before they get to that point, they have a great time, and so does the viewer watching them.

12. My Own Private Idaho

Gus Van Sant's "My Own Private Idaho" opens with River Phoenix's character, Mikey Waters, saying that he's traveled so much down so many roads that he can recognize the roads just by sight. His life on the road is a beautiful but lonely one until he finds someone he can briefly share it with, a senator's son, Scott Favor ( Keanu Reeves ). Their journeys across deserted roads and rocky landscapes are sometimes silly but mostly poetic and sad, showing two young men as lost in the scenery as they are in their own lives.

Van Sant makes a lot of odd digressions in "My Own Private Idaho," including a sequence with talking erotic magazines and an entire plot loosely adapted from Shakespeare's "Henry IV" saga, writes Amy Taubin for Criterion . But the heart of the film is the relationship between Mikey and Scott, one where Mikey may be the only one of the two to realize how special and intimate it is. A heartbreaking scene at a campfire sees Mikey get tantalizingly close to professing his love to Scott and not quite doing so. While Mikey may have lived his life by the isolation of the road, he needs Scott to share that life with him, and the film offers little hope that this will happen.

13. The Straight Story

The films and TV of David Lynch are usually filled with the darkness and violence that lurk beneath the beautiful landscapes of America. But Lynch still loves those landscapes and the people who inhabit them, and never is that clearer than his only movie to get a G rating, 1999's "The Straight Story." He tells the story of a real-life road trip, where an elderly, almost blind farmer named Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth) drove a lawn mower from Iowa to Wisconsin to see his ailing brother (Harry Dean Stanton).

There's not much dialogue in "The Straight Story," especially for the long stretches where Alvin is on his own out on the road, but it's not necessary when Lynch is working with the wide-open expanses of the midwest. He finds magic in the crop dusters and near-empty roads Alvin encounters, setting the sights to a moving Angelo Badalamenti score and making them even more powerful. And when Alvin does meet other people, their encounters are simple and touching, showing the hard lessons Alvin has learned about family over the course of a long, difficult life.

Channing Tatum and Reid Carolin made their directorial debuts in February 2022 with "Dog," which followed the "Magic Mike XXL" model of a road trip encountering lesser-known sections of American life. "Dog" is a sadder movie than "Magic Mike XXL" because the trip's ultimate destination is a military funeral, and along the way, Tatum and his dog co-star must contend with the trauma they've suffered as soldiers. This makes the bond of friendship between Tatum and the dog even more important than it is in "Magic Mike XXL," as it provides both of them life-saving help when they need it the most.

The most impressive aspect of Tatum and Carolin's first directing job is how well they film the landscapes encountered over the course of the trip. They make them symbols of the beauty of everyday life without making them overly stylized. The duo learned well from Steven Soderbergh's visual excellence without merely copying it. While "Dog" has its faults, including some awkward comedy at the beginning and a too-brief attempt to deal with the racism instilled into Iraq War soldiers, the strength of Tatum and Carolin's filmmaking and storytelling suggests that they could have a good future as directors.

15. Kings of the Road

The third film in Wim Wenders' Road Trilogy, "Kings of the Road" is a three-hour opus combining two of Wenders' favorite subjects: the road and cinema. The two titular "kings" are a movie theater projector repairman (played by "Alice in the Cities" lead Rüdiger Vogler) and a depressed psychologist (Hanns Zischler), who band together on a road trip after the psychologist has experienced a life-shattering breakup. They drive across what was then the East German border, touring worn-down movie theaters so that Vogler can make repairs.

"Kings of the Road" offers even less of a plot than "Alice in the Cities" does, also offering one of the purest, simplest depictions of a road trip on film. There's no inevitable endpoint for the characters to reach, just a sprawling journey where they come to slightly better understand each other and themselves. It encompasses all the joy and melancholy of road trips in one package, people searching for more from life hoping that they'll find it behind the wheel.

16. Having a Wild Weekend

1965's "Having a Wild Weekend," also known as "Catch Us If You Can," is technically a vehicle for The Dave Clark Five, the British group that came into popularity at the same time as The Beatles . "Having a Wild Weekend" would seem to put the band in a comedy just like "A Hard Day's Night," but director John Boorman instead made a lovely, melancholy road movie, showing two people trying in vain to escape their confining lives back home.

Dave Clark plays a stuntman who takes off on a road trip with a model (Barbara Ferris) dissatisfied with her position as the face of ad campaigns for meat. On their journey, they encounter the youth who will soon become the counterculture and the old men still obsessed with the imagery of old Hollywood. Everywhere they go, Clark and Ferris are reminded of the culture they're trying to fight against, but they're powerless to stop it. The two have impressive chemistry together, but their relationship is a sad one, one that can only last the length of the road trip even though they're the only people who could possibly understand each other. Even once the remaining four Dave Clark Five members show up to do some slapstick, the tone is more elegiac than silly.

17. Wild at Heart

For a more representative David Lynch road trip movie, there's "Wild at Heart," which manages to be funny and romantic as well as frightening. Sailor and Lula, the giddy young couple played by Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern, hit the road only after Lula's mother has unsuccessfully tried to kill Sailor, and on their journey they'll deal with more killers and more victims. But their love may be strong enough to keep them safe every step of the way.

The giddy energy of "Wild at Heart" is unusual for Lynch movies, which usually have a more deadpan tone. Cage and Dern are balls of energy in this, engaging in grand romantic gestures and, in Cage's case, frequently falling into Elvis impersonations. The world around them has gone mad with rage and violence, the road bringing as many terrors as beauties, and they seem to have adapted to that madness by matching it. The title doesn't lie — these are two wild kids who will let nothing, not even a horrifying figure like Willem Dafoe's psychopathic Bobby Peru, stand in the way of their love. And for all the darkness of the rest of the movie, Lynch is still kind-hearted enough to give them a happy ending.

18. Two For the Road

All the good and bad feelings associated with going on the road are present in 1967's "Two for the Road," and they also represent the ups and downs of a marriage. The good and the bad are shuffled together in a nonlinear style, where pieces of the beginning, middle, and end of Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney's characters' relationship are presented as a series of out-of-order road trips. There is some beautiful European scenery over the course of the trips, but the fractured editing means that the destinations of the trips are less important than the trips themselves, and how they function as both bonding exercises and sources of arguments.

The film's most hilarious section is when Hepburn and Finney commit the error of going on a road trip with another couple, an obnoxious American family that makes the two sure of the mistakes they don't want to make in their own relationship. But of course they end up making those mistakes, and by the end "Two for the Road" is a bittersweet movie about how difficult and tricky it is to stay close to someone, whether that means marrying them or staying with them on a long car ride.

19. Don't Come Knocking

Wim Wenders and playwright-actor Sam Shepard first collaborated on the 1984 road movie "Paris, Texas," one of the most acclaimed films in the genre. Their decades-later second collaboration was 2005's "Don't Come Knocking," another road movie that couldn't match the critical success of its predecessor. But "Don't Come Knocking" is a very good movie in its own right, finding a lot of power both in western vistas and the tragic figure passing in front of them.

Shepard wrote and stars in "Don't Come Knocking," playing a washed-up Western star who ditches the set of his new movie in favor of driving to Nevada and then Montana, where both cheap thrills and old family await him. As with Wenders' other films, he makes the western settings of "Don't Come Knocking" look incredibly beautiful, shooting casinos, small-town squares, and vast deserts with the same level of vibrant color and light. And it also shares with Wenders' other work a tremendous sadness, where Shepard has abandoned the people who need him most and has only realized this too late to do much of anything about it. This trip may not be able to redeem Shepard, but it can get him one step closer, and that's better than he's done yet.

20. Highway 61

Canadian director Bruce McDonald followed in Wim Wenders' footsteps and made his own trilogy of road movies through the 1980s and '90s. The middle film in the trilogy was 1991's "Highway 61," a joyous comedy about American rock 'n' roll. Highway 61 is the highway named in Bob Dylan's legendary "Highway 61 Revisited" album, and one of the two leads (Valerie Buhagiar) is a rock-obsessed drug dealer trying to smuggle a dead body from Canada to New Orleans. Her partner (Don McKellar) is a nervous, shy barber who prefers jazz. Their odd-couple dynamic is very charming, and it only gets more charming as the trip brings them closer together.

"Highway 61" is led not just by romance and scenic views of all of North America, but by a great soundtrack at every step of the journey, often from obscure local bands McDonald is kind enough to introduce to his audience. And there's also plenty of oddball humor, particularly with a character who may or may not be the devil (Earl Pastko) chasing the two leads. "Highway 61" doesn't have much of a reputation outside of its native Canada, but it's a blissful film that deserves more attention.

21. Get On the Bus

One of the least commonly filmed ways of going on a road trip is taking the bus, perhaps because getting stuck with many unfamiliar people is not the most romantic way to see the country. But Spike Lee found a lot of drama, comedy, and political relevance in a story of a bunch of guys trapped on the bus. That story is 1996's "Get On the Bus," following a group of Black men en route to the famed Million Man March. Lee believes that every one of those million men has their own story, and he fits as many of those stories as he can into one bus.

As usual with Lee, "Get On the Bus" has an impressive cast, including Ossie Davis, Charles S. Dutton, Andre Braugher, and Bernie Mac. The characters touch on social issues, including homophobia and the anti-Semitism of Million Man March leader Louis Farrakhan, but mostly they have frank and funny conversations that naturally reveal their prejudices and moral stances rather than shout them out. Lee didn't write "Get On the Bus" (that was Reggie Rock Bythewood), but it shares the perceptive dialogue and unexpected comedy of Lee's best screenplays, including his beloved "Do the Right Thing." "Get On the Bus" is a smaller movie than "Do the Right Thing," but its confined setting doesn't mean it's any less riveting.

22. Thelma & Louise

The road trip that runs through 1991's "Thelma & Louise" is most famous for where it ends, with Thelma and Louise's car in the middle of a jump off a cliff. But their journey shouldn't just be defined by its endpoint, as the entirety of "Thelma & Louise" is a rollicking ode to female friendship and the healing power of the road trip, showing it as a rare opportunity for two women to take their lives into their own hands.

A few things remain consistent throughout Thelma (Geena Davis) and Louise's (Susan Sarandon)'s road trip, namely the beauty of the southwest locations as shot by director Ridley Scott and the appalling behavior of the men both women meet along the way. "Thelma & Louise" is today best-known as the breakthrough film for breakout film for Brad Pitt , but he's only one of the film's parade of awful, often violent men, including the rapist who begins the journey in the first place. With such overpowering adversity, it's no wonder Thelma and Louise are so tight-knit — they must make their bond as strong as the forces united against them. And their bond can sustain even the steepest fall from a cliff.

23. Little Miss Sunshine

"Little Miss Sunshine" was the sensation of the 2006 Sundance Film Festival (per IndieWire ), its story of a dysfunctional family trapped in a Volkswagen van on the way to a child beauty pageant in California proving irresistible to both critics and audiences. The famous images of the film, like the family chasing after the bright yellow Volkswagen, suggest the kind of quirky, Wes Anderson-inspired comedy that was all the rage in the 2000s. But like actual Wes Anderson movies , "Little Miss Sunshine" deals with real pain and hurt, trapping several very fragile people in a small space where they might all combust.

It's helped by having such a sturdy cast playing those fragile people, including Steve Carell in one of his first dramatic performances, a silent Paul Dano, an Oscar-winning Alan Arkin, and most of all an Oscar-nominated Abigail Breslin as the girl all this trouble is in service of. The movie might have collapsed into road-movie cliches without a strong presence anchoring it, and Breslin, then 10 years old, proves more than capable of being that presence.

24. Two-Lane Blacktop

The most existential of all road movies might be 1971's "Two-Lane Blacktop," where driving is the only way of life for its main characters. But they aren't driving with any destination in mind; they're driving because it's the one thing they know how to do. Car culture was a big part of the '60s and '70s, and "Two-Lane Blacktop" has a supporting part for Dennis Wilson, whose work with the Beach Boys helped to cement cars as the ultimate symbol of cool and independence. But it's not all fun for the characters of "Two-Lane Blacktop," with the emptiness of the road ahead of them also representing the emptiness of their own obsessions and personalities.

Shot on the famed Route 66, with minimal dialogue to distract from the scenery, "Two-Lane Blacktop" is not short on great shots of cars in motion. But "Two-Lane Blacktop" also decries the hollowness of making cars the centerpiece of one's life, showing that a lifestyle based solely on speed and appearance cannot be sustained. The film's most famous line is "Those satisfactions are permanent," but the pleasures prove to be a very impermanent, fleeting bliss that doesn't disguise much deeper troubles.

25. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert

In addition to being one of the great road trip movies, "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" was also a breakout LGBTQ film when it was released in 1994, offering such a sunny view of its group of drag queens that it would be pointless to resist. The next year, America was already attempting its own "Priscilla" with the fellow drag-queen road movie "To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar," but it couldn't compete with the original, particularly regarding the gorgeous vistas passed by the central trio. The stunning deserts of the Australian Outback prove to be an ideal setting for a story with outrageous outfits and colors, offering a plain brown backdrop on top of which every outfit and character pops out.

Not that the characters need any help standing out, especially when they're brought to life with such exuberance and talent. Only Terence Stamp, playing the transgender matriarch of the group, was an internationally known actor at the time of the release of "Priscilla." But the film also catapulted its other two leads, Hugo Weaving and Guy Pearce, to their stardom. Even as all three actors are now almost three decades out from "Priscilla," it remains one of their crowning achievements, as well as one of the most infectiously cheerful road movies yet made.

26. Pee-Wee's Big Adventure

One of the goofiest, most enjoyable road trips ever taken on film was the one taken by Pee-Wee Herman (Paul Reubens) as he searched for his lost bike in Tim Burton's feature directorial debut "Pee-Wee's Big Adventure." Pee-Wee would later become famous for his television show, where he created his own wacky universe, but in "Pee-Wee's Big Adventure," he travels through the real America and finds that it's just as silly as he is. Whether visiting dive bars, Hollywood backlots, or even The Alamo, he bends every place he visits to his own indescribable wavelength.

Burton has made flashier, more expensive movies since "Pee-Wee's Big Adventure," but he's rarely made anything better. His work becomes so defined by production design and special effects after this that it's a shock to see him working mostly with real locations, making the natural world ridiculous rather than creating ridiculous worlds from scratch. And the road movie proves an ideal match for his love of middle-American eccentricity, where every new character Pee-Wee meets on his travels is an oddball in their own way. This remains Burton's funniest and sweetest movie, free of the bitter edge that distinguishes many Burton movies and instead celebrating the goofiness of life.

27. Something Wild

Jonathan Demme's "Something Wild" takes a sharp turn around its midpoint, turning from a joyous road comedy to something scarier and more intense. But all of "Something Wild" is united by Demme's love of the road and of the people you can meet along the way. Sometimes those people can change your life, like how Melanie Griffith's free-spirited Lulu gets Jeff Daniels' yuppie businessman Charlie to admit that he has a wilder side than he presents to the world. And other times they can threaten that life, like Ray Liotta as Lulu's malevolent ex-husband, Ray, who resolves to force Charlie out of Lulu's life and win her back.

Even as "Something Wild" gets dark, Demme still finds something magical in every location visited, and often in places that seem perfectly ordinary. A friendly convenience-store employee, a dog on the back of a motorcycle, and a waitress singing outside of a New York greasy spoon — these details all come to vibrant life in front of Demme's camera. Few people have taken a road trip involving this many wacky, endearing characters, but the world as Demme portrays is a better, brighter place than it is in real life. It's a joy to experience a road trip in this world, even if only for two hours.

The Green Book

Media Assignment

A Road Trip Through a Land of Racial Clichés

New York Times Article

The New York Times review begins with a video of a scene from The Green Book with the movie’s director, Peter Farrelly, voicing over the scene. “The point of this scene is — it’s a true story, by the way — that it’s something that Tony Lip told us — we had audiotapes of Tony Lip telling stories about Dr. Shirley trying to teach him. He said, you know, I love that man — Dr. Shirley — and the reason I do is because he was always trying to make me smart.” After watching the film, I could feel that Tony Lip appreciated when Don Shirley was showing or teaching him something such as how to write eloquent letters to his wife back home. I think that including an interview with the movie’s director indicates the article is shedding more positive light on the film. The writer of the review, A.O. Scott, argues that the film is quite predictable and full of clichés, particularly regarding the bond between Tony Lip and Don Shirley. He discusses each character thoroughly, particularly drawing attention to the classic Italian American stereotypes associated with Lip. I like that he brought up the aspects of food in the film such as fried chicken and pizza, as the filmmakers used food and eating as a way to define and distinguish characters. The writer of the review, A.O. Scott, argues that the film is quite predictable and full of clichés, particularly regarding the bond between Tony Lip and Don Shirley. He discusses each character thoroughly, particularly drawing attention to the classic Italian American stereotypes associated with Lip. I like that he brought up the aspects of food in the film such as fried chicken and pizza, as the filmmakers used food and eating as a way to define and distinguish characters.

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Road Trip Plot

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"Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car." — E. B. White , One Man's Meat

A Road-Trip Plot is a work about characters taking a trip to go from point A to point Z, usually in a car. Along the way, they stop by points B, C, D, et al, in diners, motels and Small Towns , while things happen to them at each point. It may be a silly comedy or a drama where characters learn things they didn't know about themselves . Unsurprisingly, this type of plot opens itself wide to Cliche Storms and Narm , but creators conscious of what kind of story they are telling can defy these and create very original and poignant tales, because the characters are removed from their everyday environment.

An important distinction needs to be made between a Road Trip Plot and a Walking the Earth story. If the heroes encounter an adventure at every stop and end up staying at each location for a while to solve some major problem or deal with a big event, it's Walking The Earth, especially if each location can be considered an Adventure Town . If, on the other hand, each location is merely a brief stop along the way, and the story is more about the journey than the specific locations, then it's a Road Trip Plot. The former tend to be episodic, with most of the actual travel happening offscreen between destinations, while the latter is more commonly a structure for a self-contained story.

Not all Road Trip Plots involve use of a vehicle, but it's often what one associates with the genre: a family or group of friends traveling in a car—or a van, or on horseback, maybe even on a boat—from one place to another, with stuff happening at each location. A variant is the outlaws on the run Road Trip, in which the hero (or a couple) are pursued by law enforcement . Road movies can overlap with horror if the heroes are fleeing zombies, serial killer families, and the like.

Films with a Road Trip Plot are called "road movies" and are a distinct cinematic genre. Because of the vastness of the continental United States, its extensive highway network, deep-seated car culture, its love of the "rugged individual" character, and a still-lingering affection for The Western (a genre which road movies draw on a lot), most Road Trip Plots take place there. Characters may discover both wholesome, friendly small towns and towns with a seamy underbelly. Historically, the characters are often two male buddies or a couple, but female buddies are also used. The characters are often trying to get away from it all to figure out a personal issue or discover themselves . For this reason, the interaction between the characters is more important than the destination or places they stop.

During Hollywood's Golden Age, Film Noir directors loved road film plots. One of the attractions of the road film was that it was a way around Hays Code censorship rules. A 1940s road movie about an unmarried couple on a road trip would technically follow the rules if the two people stay in separate motel rooms on the trip, but for viewers, knowing that the lovers are alone in the car on the open road and staying in cheap motels got their imagination working.

Live action television programs (As well as other episodic works) often have Road Trip Episodes in which the characters take a trip. Due to the episodic nature of TV— Status Quo Is God —these episodes are typically one-off affairs made to give the characters something new to do and create opportunities for friction.

• In subtype 1A, the characters complete the trip and come back, with the Boring Return Journey possibly omitted.
• In subtype 1B, the trip is never completed for some reason.
• Type 2 is Public Transportation, in which the characters themselves aren't in control of the vehicle, and may include a bus, a plane, or even a spaceship. This type can easily be derailed by a "Stuck at the Airport" Plot .
• Type 3, the Alternate Transport, is rarer, and involves characters who are always traveling taking some different mode of transport. Imagine the characters from a show in the Star Trek universe leaving their starship and taking a bus or a shuttle.

Hard Truckin' is a Sister Trope , as it's a road trip, combined with delivering a 18-wheeler's load to its destination. Compare Blake Snyder's description of this plot , under the title Golden Fleece . Also compare The Quest , along with Booker's version of the archetypes behind it.

Very likely to run into at least one Wacky Wayside Tribe along the way.

Contrast with Going to See the Elephant , where the destination starts the plot. See also Buses Are for Freaks , a trope that may overlap with this if the characters are taking the bus somewhere. See also Wanderlust Song , the Music equivalent of this trope. See also Travelogue Show , the non-fiction equivalent of this. For instances where a road trip is dangerous, see Deadly Road Trip . For road trips that are incredibly short, see Road Trip Across the Street .

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• The earlier chapters of Dragon Ball evoke this as Goku and Bulma travel the world in search of the titular plot objects .
• Parts 3, 5, & 7 of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure are essentially what you get when you combine one of these with a Shōnen Fighting Series , with Part 5 incorporating The Mafia and Part 7 incorporating The Big Race & The Western .
• Rolling Girls follows a group of girls as the travel from city to city mediating land disputes.
• Robihachi follows Robby Yarge and Hatchi Kita, two strangers throw together by circumstances, on a trip to Isekandar, the planet where dreams come true. They stop at an assortment of tourist traps and odd planets along the way.
• Asterix and the Banquet is about Asterix and Obelix on a "Tour de Gaule", collecting speciality food from various cities throughout France in a bid for freedom from the Romans, who are enclosing their village from the rest of the world with a stockade.
• The "Hard-Travelling Heroes" arc in Green Lantern / Green Arrow , where Hal and Ollie travel across the US so Hal can reconnect with ordinary humans and the problems they face.
• Knights of the Dinner Table has featured multiple arcs where the main characters (and many supporting characters) make the annual pilgrimage to GaryCon . Adventures on the road (before they even get to the con) have included being locked in a basement before they leave; losing all of their luggage; getting stranded in a biker bar; and driving hundreds of miles in the wrong direction.
• Likewise with the "Superman: Grounded" arc of Superman .
• An unpublished DC Comics story of The Powerpuff Girls , "Road Trip," has the Professor on his way to a festival out of town with the girls in tow. The girls' misbehavior causes the car to get dismantled piece by piece until, when the car is nothing but strewn parts, the Professor angrily intones that if they don't start behaving, "I'm turning this car around right now!"
• Garfield and Jon (and sometimes Odie) go on Type 1a road trips occasionally. They've also gone on Type 2 ones.
• Calvin & Hobbes: The Series has a Type 1a in "The Insane Road Trip".
• The WWE fanfic Grapefruits series of stories are crack-fics that combine 1a and 2. They deal with teams of superstars traveling to far-off locations in order to procure alcohol and porn magazines for Vince McMahon , and the wild and crazy adventures they have along the way.
• Dermabrasion : The fic's epilogue has the Todoroki siblings including Dabi on a road trip through Japan. Even though it's meant to be a vacation, a good chunk of it is them discussing the future.
• In the third book in the Last Mage of Krypton series, the two villains Voldemort and Gellert Grindlewald spend a large portion of the story travelling around America to collect Obscurials.
• The protagonists of Cececat's The Rocky Horror Picture Show fanfic Life (Not) at the Frankenstein Place spend a large portion of the plot driving across America in a van.
• Luz and Hunter's Roadtrip Extravaganza has two teenagers stranded in Texas, and having to go back to Connecticut in spite of having no money, no supplies and cheerfully loathing each other. Hilarity Ensues .
• Disney's Bolt has the title character trying to travel back from New York City to Los Angeles, with a notable stop in Vegas.
• Finding Nemo is a story about a fish swimming in the ocean, so there aren't any roads. But otherwise it fits this trope exactly, as Marlin travels across the ocean to find Nemo, meeting many colorful sea creatures along the way.
• A Goofy Movie is about Goofy (yes, the Disney character) taking his son Max on a father-son trip, while Max attempts to take a trip to a concert he wishes to attend. After Goofy discovers what he's been up to, they end up doing both.
• The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie revolves around SpongeBob and Patrick going on a road trip with the Patty Wagon to Shell City to retrieve King Neptune's crown, visiting various new locations and encountering strange characters along the way.
• The Plucky & Hampton subplot from Tiny Toon Adventures: How I Spent My Vacation is about a road trip to an amusement park.
• The Mitchells vs. the Machines features a family going on a cross-country road trip to the main character's college when a robot apocalypse hits. The family spends the remainder of the movie fighting against said apocalypse.
• Lampshaded and Enforced in The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle , where the titular heroes need to get from Los Angeles to New York within 40 hours to stop Fearless Leader from using hyponotically bad TV shows to make people vote for him for President of the United States . As they start out, Rocky questions why they don't just take an airplane and Bullwinkle simply responds "Because then it wouldn't be a road movie."
• Alvin and the Chipmunks : The Road Chip . The premise of the film being the the Chipmunks three are rushing to Miami to stop Dave from proposing to his new girlfriend and dumping them, based on a misunderstanding.
• American Honey follows a traveling magazine sales crew as they traverse multiple states in the Midwest—Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota among them.
• Ana : The two protagonists embark on a road trip for Ana to get back home, and Rafa out of debt.
• Around the Bend : The patriarch of the Lair family leaves instructions in his will that his son, grandson, and great-grandson go on a road trip to scatter his ashes at various sites across the southwestern US... a series of KFC restaurants. His motivation was for his son and grandson to heal their broken relationship. The ploy works just in time... his son is dying of renal failure himself.
• Badlands is a super-dark take on this trope, as young lovers Kit and Holly go on a cross-country murder spree after he kills her father.
• Ballad of a Soldier is about a Russian soldier making a difficult journey home on leave during the darkest days of World War II , and all the people he meets and experiences he has on the way.
• Barefoot has the protagonists driving from New Orleans to Los Angeles .
• Between Two Ferns: The Movie : The crew drives from North Carolina to Los Angeles, interviewing several celebrities along the way.
• Boys on the Side : The first act, before they settle down in Tucson due to Robin's hospitalization.
• Broker is about brokers who drive around South Korea in search of adoptive parents willing to buy an abandoned baby for a price.
• Carol takes place on the road for the latter half of the film.
• Parts of Carry On Camping are based around this, depending on what character story the movie chooses to follow. One subplot follows Charlie Muggins , who spends most of the runtime looking for a place to stay after his tent is blown away in a landmine accident, whilst Peter Potter travels around the countryside with his absent-minded wife Harriet as he has a horrible holiday , as well as two sexually-frustrated thirty-somethings, Sid Boggle and Bernie Lugg, driving around England looking for a nudist camp with their prudish girlfriends Joan Fussey and Anthea Meeks.
• Cry Macho : an old washed up rodeo star and horse breeder ( Clint Eastwood ) is sent to Mexico to bring a young man back to his father in Texas. They are forced to take the backroads.
• Damnation Alley : The survivors of World War III have to travel from the western desert to Albany, New York, which, for some reason, survived all the destruction.
• Dog : A US Army ranger with PTSD must bring the dog of a fallen comrade to said comrade's funeral, from the State of Washington to Arizona.
• Dogma is about a trip/chase from Illinois to New Jersey. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back is about their shenanigans on the way from New Jersey to Los Angeles.
• Drive-Away Dolls is the story of two best friends who get mixed up in a crime during a road trip to Florida.
• Due Date is about two strangers being forced to travel together to the hospital where one's wife is giving birth. Turns out this was invoked by the other, who stole his wallet so he'd have to travel with him .
• Dumb and Dumber , Harry and Lloyd travel from Rhode Island to Colorado on a dog shaped van.
• Easy Rider centers around the main characters' road trip to New Orleans. It isn't a comedy .
• Finch (2021) : The title character, his dog, and two robot companions go on a road trip west across post-apocalyptic America to San Francisco.
• Much of Fleisch has trucker Bill and German tourist Monika travelling across the highways of the American southwest in order to rescue the latter's husband, who has been kidnapped by organ traffickers .
• The Go-Getter When his mother dies , a teenager takes a road-trip in a stolen car to find his long-lost brother.
• The basic plot of Go Trabi Go revolves around a man and his family seeking to take advantage of their newfound freedom to travel following the reunification of Germany by recreating Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 's Italian Journey using their family car, a Trabant 601 nicknamed "Schorsch".
• Honey Baby revolves around a washed-up musician meeting a runaway ballerina on his contractually obligated tour of Europe, and they travel the continent together. It then deconstructs the genre by showing that, while they do become closer, it doesn't make them any happier or closer to understanding themselves and that going home may lead to self-actualization .
• Interstate 60 features a surreal road trip on a mythical interstate, where the main character tries to find "the answer to his life."
• The Trope Maker, as far as the "road movie" Sub-Genre is concerned, is It Happened One Night . Claudette Colbert is a spoiled heiress who wants to escape her father's detectives and make her way from Florida to New York to get married. Clark Gable is the newspaper reporter who aids her in exchange for the scoop on her story. Naturally, romance ensues.
• Knockin' on Heaven's Door : Two terminally ill guys with just a couple of days left to live get to know each other and refuse to just sit in a hospital and await their fate. They steal a car and go on a last road trip to see the ocean for the first and last time in their lives. The thing is, the car was used by gangsters to deliver a substantial amount of money to a kingpin.
• Larger than Life has the protagonist crossing the country with an elephant using various modes of transportation, including trucks, a train, and at one point riding on the elephant's back.
• Little Miss Sunshine is about a family who travels across state lines and has various misadventures along the way, while trying to get to a beauty pageant in time for their daughter to participate.
• In Mad Love (1995) , a teenager busts his mentally ill girlfriend out of a psychiatric hospital, and they run away together by car.
• Mad Max: Fury Road naturally, since it has 'road' in the title. The titular Max stumbles across a woman freeing the wives of the Bad Future 's tyrant - and the majority of the story is them journeying across the desert in search of an Arcadia called 'The Green Place', while being pursued by aforementioned tyrant's army . As it's also an action movie, there's quite a lot of Car Fu .
• Midnight Special drops you right into the middle of a father on the run with his empowered son - as they travel across Texas trying to escape both the FBI and a religious cult trying to worship the boy as The Messiah .
• Monsters is primarily a road movie, where a journalist helps his boss's daughter get back home from Mexico. The Mexico in this location just so happens to be after an alien invasion.
• The Muppet Movie , in which Kermit sets off from the swamplands of the American South on his way to Hollywood to become rich and famous, picking up all of his Muppet friends along the way.
• My Favorite Blonde features a sexy British spy and the bumbling American comedian she gets entangled with (Madeleine Carroll and Bob Hope ) traveling from New York to Los Angeles by train, bus, stolen plane, and stolen car, chased by Nazis the whole way.
• My Name Is Emily is a rare Irish example. The eponymous Emily is a depressed teenager who, after her Disappeared Dad fails to send her an annual birthday card, convinces a school friend to drive across the country to break him out of his mental hospital. Overlaps with the Road Trip Romance of course.
• Nathan's Kingdom is about an autistic man and his younger sister searching for a magical kingdom free from hunger, fear, and pain, mostly in the sister's truck.
• The sequel/reboot, Vacation , is revisiting the premise of the original from the perspective of Rusty and his family.
• The Odd Way Home is about an autistic man and an abuse survivor traveling by truck to visit first his father, then hers.
• Paul is about two bumbling nerds who are on their way to a Sci-fi convention to pitch a comic one of them's written, only to wind up picking up a Grey named Paul who escaped Area 51 and was trying to get to an area where he could contact his people to leave. Hijinks and an accidental kidnapping ensue.
• Paper Moon : Moses and Addie Travel from Gorham, Kansas to Joplin, Missouri, conning people along the way.
• Patay na si Hesus (in English, Jesus is Dead ), follows a Filipino family in the Visayas region, in the central Philippines, on a roadtrip from Cebu to Dumaguete city, for the funeral of their father/husband, named Hesus.
• Plan B : Most of the plot is Sunny and Lupe going to Planned Parenthood in another city for the Plan B pill, since the pharmacy near them won't issue it.
• Planes, Trains and Automobiles , which is all about a businessman's frantic efforts to make it from New York to Chicago for Thanksgiving, while all kinds of bad luck and complications get in his way.
• Poetic Justice : is about a hairdresser and a postal worker going on a trip from Los Angeles to Oakland alongside their two respective acquaintances. The trip ends up both destroying and creating relationships.
• All of the Hope/Crosby Road to ... pictures, which always featured Bob and Bing as comic partners getting in various misadventures as they traveled from A to B.
• Rain Man : After the Black Sheep brother finds out that he's been disinherited, with his late father having left all his money to an unknown older brother in an institution, he kidnaps the brother and goes off on a cross-country trip.
• Rubin and Ed comically relates a trip made through Utah to give a man's deceased cat a proper burial.
• Scarecrow has two oddballs hitchhiking and riding the rails from California to Pittsburgh, where they hope to start a car wash business.
• Sesame Street Presents: Follow That Bird has Big Bird travelling to the fictional Ocean View, Illinois, to live with Dodo family, only to find he doesn't really fit in with the family, and flees to return to Sesame Street; at the same time, his friends embark on a journey to try and meet him half way.
• The 1989 sci-fi movie Slipstream is a Road Movie with airplanes. A Loveable Rogue steals the prisoner from two Bounty Hunters and flies off with them in pursuit across a world changed by environmental disaster. Earthquakes have torn up all the roads so everyone uses a permanent world-encircling wind called the slipstream for long distance travel. Unfortunately it was marketed as a sci-fi action movie instead , causing it to flop.
• Smoke Signals : Victor and Thomas go on a road trip to Phoenix to retrieve Victor's father's ashes and grow as people along the way.
• A good chunk of Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) is this, with Sonic and Tom hitting the road to San Francisco to recover Sonic’s rings while trying to stay one step ahead of Robotnik and the government.
• The Sure Thing is a great example from The '80s , combining this with Quest for Sex , as a college student travels from the east coast to California in search of nookie with the eponymous "sure thing".
• Thelma & Louise : The two women shoot a rapist and decide to flee the scene of the crime, and travel towards Mexico.
• Tommy Boy follows Tommy and Richard's travels as they attempt to sell brake pads. Complete with singing along with the car radio, hitting a deer, and other events typical of the genre.
• Trafic : Features the misdaventures of Jacques Tati 's M. Hulot and his bumbling goof a truck driver, as the two of them try to haul a model car from Paris to Amsterdam, having all sorts of wacky adventures on the way.
• Two-Lane Blacktop is about a cross-country race between two stoic street racers and a mysterious man with a Multiple-Choice Past . Along the way, a girl drifts between the two cars.
• In Vampires vs. Zombies , a father and his allies are transporting his vampire-infected daughter to the vampire queen's hometown so they can stake her in her lair and hopefully destroy the curse. Unfortunately, the countryside is infested with zombies.
• The Way Back (2010) is a Based on a True Story account of several prisoners who escaped from a Siberian gulag, and hiked all the way to India.
• Weekend (1967) by Jean-Luc Godard is a satirical roadtrip in a World Gone Mad in which everything is Serious Business .
• Who's Singing Over There? describes an eventful bus trip to Belgrade on the eve of the German attack on Yugoslavia during the 2nd World War .
• Wild is a road movie on foot, as Cheryl Strayed goes on an 1100-mile hike of the Pacific Crest Trail, on a voyage of self-discovery.
• David Lynch 's Wild at Heart is about a young heiress ( Laura Dern ) and her ex-con boyfriend ( Nicolas Cage ) driving across America, trying to get away from her overprotective mom ( Diane Ladd , Laura Dern's real-life mother ) and her various henchmen.
• Wild Boys of the Road : Three teenagers stuck in The Great Depression go on a harrowing journey from middle America to Chicago and thence to Cleveland and New York, scrounging for food and trying to avoid arrest and/or assault.
• Wild Strawberries is a relatively rare European example. 78-year-old professor Isak must travel from Stockholm to Lund to receive a special award in recognition of fifty years as a medical doctor. He meets many people and sees places along the way that make him think about his life and what to do with the time he has left.
• The Wizard has elements of this, as Corey (Fred Savage) takes his (supposedly) autistic brother Jimmy from the home he was put in, and they both run away to "California", where Jimmy competes in a video game tournament at Universal Studios Hollywood.
• The Yellow Handkerchief has three lonely strangers hitch-hiking together through post Hurricane Katrina Louisiana, and slowly becoming friends over the course of the trip.
• Zabriskie Point by Michelangelo Antonioni has two plots. One guy joyrides a plane out of Los Angeles and flies over the desert, near Death Valley, and the other plot is a girl riding to Phoenix to be with her boss. Their paths intersect midway, but the story is mostly the girl's trip from Los Angeles to a corporate retreat in Phoenix.
• Zombieland is pretty much a Road Movie set after the Zombie Apocalypse . Initially, Columbus is looking to get to Columbus, Ohio to find his estranged parents (mostly for want of anything else to do) and the girls are going to Pacific Playland. Tallahasee is mostly just in it for the zombie killin' (and the Twinkies ). Halfway through, Columbus finds out his parents are very probably dead already, and once the climax at Pacific Playland is over, the end of the movie seems to signal the four of them starting their Walking the Earth .
• Mark Twain 's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn may qualify, in that while Huck and Jim didn't go "across" the country, they did journey down the Mississippi River from the North to the South on a crude raft, with plenty of perils (particularly for Jim in the Antebellum South).
• Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon is a nonfiction chronicle of the author travelling around the US in his camper-outfitted van on back roads (highways that were often colored as narrow blue lines on old gas-station maps), visiting many obscure or idiosyncratic small towns, in the 1970s.
• Borgel is about a kid and his uncle driving through various locations along The Interstate through Time-space-and-the-other. They only develop their goal of seeing the Great Popsicle about halfway through, and Uncle Borgel isn't very committed to it.
• The Cal Leandros book Roadkill features the brothers and Robin on a road trip to try to stop a figurative walking plague bomb.
• The Canterbury Tales has as its framing device a group of pilgrims sharing stories to pass the time on a long journey from London to Canterbury.
• Carry On 's sequel, Wayward Son , sees the main characters dealing with their Happy Ending Override . The main character, Simon, is depressed and his relationship with his boyfriend, Baz, is on its last leg because of it. Penelope believes a change of scenery might do them good and pushes them to travel to America and then make a road trip from Chicago to San Diego, something Simon always dreamed of.
• Carson Crosses Canada : The plot of the book is that Carson the dog and Annie, his owner, are taking a cross-country road trip across Canada to visit Annie's sister, Elsie.
• A portion of the plot in Cigarette Girl consists of Soeraja's sons, Tegar, Karim, and Lebas, travelling across Java in search of the titular "cigarette girl".
• Dancing Aztecs : Jerry spends most of his scenes in the second half of the novel following (and falling in love with) Bobbi after she leaves her husband and is driving out of the country.
• '' Dashing Through The Snow " is a romance novel about a man and a woman who share the last rental car available to get her home for Christmas/him to a job interview (although he's also an FBI agent tailing her) as they run into increasingly improbable plot twists. This was also made into a Hallmark movie.
• The Long Haul is about the family's (disastrous) summer road trip.
• The first third or so of The Deep End is about a road trip the Heffleys go on before sticking with the RV park for the remainder of the plot.
• The Dreamside Road becomes a road trip story after the first arc. Once the story leaves Nimauk, the focus shifts to finding the Island Hidden at the International Dateline and all of the many stops on the way there.
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , both the book and the film.
• The Gaunt's Ghosts novel Honour Guard features the main characters as part of a convoy to retrieve a sacred relic from a distant location.
• Generation Kill is effectively described as a combination of this genre with a war movie, as it deals with the members of Marine Recon driving through Iraq during the 2003 invasion.
• The second book of The Girl from the Miracles District is basically a road trip novel about Nikita's and Robin's journey from Wars to Iben's household and what happens on the way.
• The Grapes of Wrath follows the Joads, a family of tenant farmers displaced from Oklahoma journeying to California where work is said to be plentiful.
• In An Abundance of Katherines , Colin and Hassan take a road trip south from their home in Chicago after graduating high school and (in Colin's case) getting broken up with. They end up in a small town in Tennessee where most of the story takes place.
• Towards the end of Paper Towns , Quentin, Ben, Radar, and Lacey take a road trip from their home in Orlando to upstate New York to try to find Margo.
• In Keith Robertson's Henry Reed 's Journey Henry, his best friend Midge and her parents travel across the continental US.
• The Horse and His Boy , the third book in The Chronicles of Narnia note  Third chronologically; it's an Interquel taking place during the Pevensies' reign in Narnia. It was one of the last books published. spends the bulk of its plot on the road. A talking Narnian horse persuades a Calormen slave to help him ride north to free Narnia. Along the way they meet another Narnian horse and her mistress trying to do the same.
• Your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere and you're 'rescued' by a stranger who promptly butchers and eats you.
• You accidentally run someone over, decide to hide the body, and spend the rest of the movie slowly being picked off like scabs.
• You safely arrive at your destination ... only your destination is a log cabin the middle of nowhere .
• I Am David has a young boy being helped escape from a concentration camp and essentially being directed in a hike all the way from Germany to Denmark on his own. He eventually realises he's being directed to the home of his birth mother .
• In the Midst of Winter : Richard, his colleague and tenant Lucía and Evelyn brave a blizzard so they can go to a remote location to Dispose Of A Body that Evelyn found in the trunk of her employer's car.
• Judy's Journey is a sort of juvenile Grapes of Wrath , being a story of a ten-year-old girl and her family who are forced to become migrant farm workers after they are evicted from Papa's work as a sharecropper. They travel from Alabama to Florida and back up into New Jersey, living in a tent, enduring the hardships of life as migrant laborers and meeting many people and having experiences along the way.
• Nevada , the plot revolves around the main character's, Maria Griffiths, Road Trip to Nevada.
• The Odyssey , in a way. It's basically about a king and his men on their journey home from war. By sea, of course.
• On the Road . Jack Kerouac 's adventures constitute a long succession of road trips.
• The Road , a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and film starring Viggo Mortensen about a boy and his father following an abandoned highway After the End .
• The Someday Birds has an autistic boy, his three siblings, and their babysitter Ludmila travelling in a camper from California to Virginia to visit the kids' brain-damaged father.
• The Stand turns into an After the End version of this, as the characters make harrowing journeys to either the rallying place for the protagonists (Boulder, CO) or the rallying place for Satan and his antagonists (Las Vegas, of course).
• Stranger Than Fanfiction : Four friends decide to spend their last summer together before leaving for separate colleges on one. They plan to hit up the world's biggest rubber band ball, the St. Louis Gateway Arch, the Lewis And Clarke museum, the Mark Twain National Forest, the Bundy and Claire jailhouse, the UFO Observation Tower, Dinoworld, the Petrified Forest, the Arizona Meteor Crater, the Grand Canyon, and ending at the Santa Monica Pier, followed by touring the Wiz Kids set on the Sunshine Studios lot in Hollywood, California.
• The Traveling Triple-C Incorporeal Circus follows the three main characters traveling from New York City to San Francisco. On foot. The journey takes months, and is quite physically difficult on the one living member of the trio. (The other two are ghosts.)
• Why We Took the Car is about two 14-year old boys' journey in a 'borrowed' car from Berlin to Walachia.
• Robert Persig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance details a motorcycle journey by him and his son across the western US, along with a journey of philosophical and spiritual discovery.
• Mr. Men : The 2018 book Mr. Men Road Trip has the Mr. Men and Little Miss characters hopping in a bus to take a tour of the United States.
• Roys Bedoys : The plot of “Let’s Go on a Road Trip, Roys Bedoys!” is Roys and his family going on a road trip to a dinosaur theme park.
• Stalin's Nose by Rory Maclean has the author and his aunt (and her pet pig) taking a road trip in a Trabant through Eastern Europe shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It's also a journey into the past and the moral compromises needed to survive under fascism and communism.
• Antiques Road Trip is a much more subdued version of this trope. The series has two Real Life British antiques experts and auctioneers driving a classic car around the UK over five legs (one per episode, though the Celebrity Edition reduces this to a single leg) to look for items to buy from different antiques stores in order to sell them at various auctions. While the experts do some silly lighthearted antics during their trip, it is a factual Reality TV series where the experts nevertheless maintain their professionalism on camera, and the profits they make are always donated to charity at the end. If anything, the mood is more like a nice Sunday drive.
• Due to a blockade, Marcus and Dr. Franklin leave Babylon 5 and embark on a Type 2 on board a slow freighter to Mars in order to meet with La Résistance .
• The original Battlestar Galactica sent crew members on Type 3 trips in a great many episodes. The reimagined series was a little more restrained about it.
• Billy the Exterminator : Season 4 has Billy and Ricky visiting various new locales, such as Phoenix, Chicago and Florida, to deal with different threats, such as javalinas.
• An episode of The Drew Carey Show has the main cast piling into the Buzz Beer van and travelling to New York in an attempt to sell the beer outside a baseball game.
• Frontier Circus : In "Journey From Hannibal", Casey has to pick up an elephant from Hannibal, Missouri and deliver it to the circus in Bismarck, Dakota Territory.
• Throughout the series, The Golden Girls take quite a few road trips of the type 2 variety. Many become problematic due to the shortcomings of the person who planned the trip themselves without taking into consideration the needs of the other members of the group. Others are interrupted by natural circumstances, such as inclement weather.
• Gold Rush! : Each season opens with a type 1a trip that delivers the miners to their gold mine in the slowly thawing far north. A few low-grade secondary type 1a trips are undertaken during the course of the mining seasons in order to obtain more mining resources. (Loans, materials, machines and equipment)
• I Love Lucy had a several-episode arc where Ricky got cast in a Hollywood movie, so Lucy, Ricky, Ethel, and Fred drive a Type 1a cross-country to get there, stopping in (in subsequent episodes) Ohio, Tennessee, Albuquerque (Ethel's hometown), before finally getting to Hollywood, where they meet (through several more episodes) tons of Celebrity Cameos .
• played with this one. Because Harmon Rabb is a trained fighter pilot, he flies to Cuba in one episode. He almost blows the actual mission.
• Another episode has Harm and Mac, on their first mission together, driving into the desert to find the people who stole the US Constitution . Both are a bit cagey, as Harm can't help but notice that Mac looks just like a former lover of his who was murdered , and because Mac knows that the man who stole the Constitution is a family friend of hers.
• Yet another episode has Harm, Mac, and Budd driving a rental car to the site of their next case, due to there not being enough money in the budget to buy them plane tickets. On the way, they end up at a Quantum Leap convention, complete with Bellisario addressing a group of fans.
• The Love Boat : In an interesting twist on the trope, the job of the regular cast was to facilitate type 2 trips for the guest stars.
• NCIS : Members of the NCIS crew are on a Type 2 international flight when an air marshal is found murdered.
• One episode of the British comedy One Foot in the Grave had Victor and Margaret stuck inside their car in a traffic jam for the entire episode for a Type 1b.
• Red Dwarf : Several Type 3s using the Starbug.
• Roseanne follows Jackie and Roseanne on a trip to meet their father’s mistress when her existence is revealed upon his death.
• Stargate-verse : When they aren't spending mere seconds using the Portal Network to gate between planets light-years apart, they eventually use a variety of starships . When there's only a few seconds of travel time, there's no time for plot. When travel takes days or weeks, plot has loads of time to develop.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation : Several different crew members took shuttles to get someplace the Enterprise wasn't going.
• Post-Season 8 of Supernatural moves from a Walk the Earth format to the brothers and their companions settling into the Men of Letters Bunker and going on frequent monster-hunting road trips. One notable episode, "Baby", is shot entirely from their car's point of view and fills in the gaps not seen in standard episodes.
• That '70s Show : The gang traveled out of town so the boys could check out a college.
• Wings introduced the infamous Carlton Blanchard in one of these. Blanchard wins a contest where the prize is a trip anywhere. Because of how the description was written note  The trip was supposed to go "anywhere Sandpiper flies", but Brian thought the last two words were unnecessary. , he uses the prize to visit his brother in the American Southwest and fight him for their father's pocket watch.
• Mr. Bean takes a trip in one episode to a destination we never see him arrive at. He first has to pack for his trip, desecrating most of his belongings in the process so he can get them to fit in his small trunk, taking the first part of his trip by train and then going by plane. The train trip is a disaster when he gets distracted by another passenger's laughter and then throws his ticket out the window. The plane is more so a disaster when he has to deal with a boy and his motion sickness. Of note, both feature films are road trips. Both of the films are also road trips. The first film Bean is about him making a trip to the United States. In the second film, Mr. Bean's Holiday he wins a trip to Paris to attend the Cannes Film Festival.
• The first season of The Detour chronicles the Parker family's road trip from Syracuse, New York, to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. It turns out to be a last-ditch effort by patriarch Nate to get his job back.
• The show Promised Land (a Spin-Off of Touched by an Angel ) made this the entire concept of the series, with the Greene family traveling around the country to help people. Though they did settle into a community by the final season.
• The ER episodes "Fathers and Sons" (Doug and Mark travel to California for the former to settle his dead father's affairs and the latter to visit his parents) and "Sailing Away" (Carter and Abby travel to Oklahoma to rescue her ailing mother).
• The Victorious episode "Car, Rain & Fire" has Cat, Tori, and Jade travel to a dead actress's home so that Cat can pay her last respects to her. Turns out she wasn't dead, Cat just misread a headline to a news story about joining a new show.
• Frasier had two episodes in its run where Frasier and company head out on a trip in Martin's RV. The first season had "Travels with Martin" where the whole gang travels up to Canada, only to discover Daphne doesn't have her green card yet and have to try and get back so she doesn't get in trouble. Season seven had "RDWRER" where Frasier, Martin, Niles, and Eddie travel cross country to a big party that's celebrating the turn of the millennium, but Hilarity Ensues when they arrive at a rest stop and Niles accidentally gets on the wrong RV.
• Good Luck Charlie : The Christmas movie, Good Luck Charlie, It's Christmas! has this plot for Teddy and Amy, as during a planned flight to Palm Springs to visit Amy's parents for Christmas, the plane turns out to be overbooked, so Teddy volunteers to take a later flight in return for a free ticket, and Amy follows her refusing to let her daughter travel alone. However, when it turns out the next flight won't have them arrive until after Christmas, the two are forced to hitchhike by road to reunite with the rest of the family in time.
• Young Sheldon : In "A Lobster, an Armadillo, and a Way Bigger Number", Sheldon, Dr. Sturgis, and Dr. Linkletter go on a road trip to the Super Telescope.
• The first episode of Lovecraft Country follows Atticus, George, and Leti on a road trip through 1950's rural America. Due to the prevalent racism still being in full force, just surviving the trip becomes a harrowing experience.
• Misty goes on with citizen detective Walter, seeking out to find Lottie's cult.
• Natalie goes on a trip with Lisa, the girl from the cult that she stabbed in the second season premiere, and meets her controlling mother.
• Shauna takes her daughter Callie out into the middle of nowhere to try to get some answers from her about where she's been going when claiming to be with her friends. In return, she ends up telling the truth to Callie about having killed Adam and Jeff having blackmailed the Yellowjackets.
• Taissa goes on a trip, runs out of gas and ends up hitchhiking, eventually making her way to a store run by adult Vanessa .
• Havalina Rail Co. 's album America is a concept album about a road trip across the US, with each song corresponding to a different area traveled through. The back cover of the album has a map depicting the route traveled.
• Ninja Sex Party 's song, aptly titled Road Trip, features Danny Sexbang and Ninja Brian going on a Type 1b road trip so that Danny can avoid a meaningful relationship with a girl he is dating. The trip (and song) revolves around Danny having sex across the nation (with various sex-related puns based on state and city names) until they reach California, at which point Ninja Brian kills a man for his yacht, and the duo travels around the world (continuing with the sex puns, this time using country names). The pair board a rocket so that Danny can bang "hot alien sluts", and the song ends when Danny leaves the rocket and is killed by rapid depressurization (he forgoes his spacesuit, as he is "way too horny").
• "Its My Mother and my Father and My Sister and the Dog" by Barry Louis Polisar is about a family going on a long car trip to visit relatives, and the chaos that happens throughout the journey, especially in the car. The protagonist gets into a fight with his two little brothers, his sister cries and joins in the fight, and the dog keeps on making a mess. At one point, the father gets so fed up with the chaos that he threatens to send the kids out the car to walk to their destination. The song doesn't end so much as it fades out while the chorus is being sung. We're going on a trip And we're riding in the car, We've been driving all day it seems.
• "Weird Al" Yankovic 's The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota tells the story of a family on a three day trip to see the titular tourist trap. Notably, the journey is actually extremely pleasant. Even when the father's camera is stolen by a homeless man and thrown out of the attraction for getting too emotional, he looks on the bright side and the family is excited to come back the next year.
• Red & Ted's Road Show has its titular protagonists traveling across America, wreaking havoc along the way.
• World Cup Soccer had the player progressing through the cup in different locales in the U.S. (matching those of the 1994 World Cup, which the game was made to promote).
• The much-maligned Vacation America was all about this.
• Adventures in Odyssey has two mini-arcs involving road trips. One is Connie and Joanne going to Washington D.C., and another is Eugene and Bernard.
• Our Miss Brooks has the episode "Game at Clay City."
• The Thornton Wilder play Theatre/The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden is about a family taking a car trip to visit their oldest daughter, who has just had a baby.
• Similarly to in the book, much of Percy Jackson and the Olympians plays out as the main trio treks across the country to Los Angeles. There's even an obligatory upbeat travel montage.
• In the musical Violet , the title character travels by Greyhound bus from Spruce Pine, North Carolina , to Tulsa, Oklahoma, with several stops along the way.
• The comedy Leaving Iowa contains a road trip within a road trip. As columnist Don Browning drives across the Midwest trying to find a suitable place for his father's ashes, he remembers the summer driving vacations that Dad would take them on with all their stresses, frustrations, and near-death experiences of trying to dodge semis while passing traffic. Dad's long-ago destination (Hannibal, Missouri) is never actually seen in the play; the trip itself and how it changes Don is the point.
• 80s edutainment game Are We There Yet? is about the Mallard family's quest to visit two usually-obscure tourist attractions in each of the fifty states.
• Darkest Dungeon 2 takes place on the road, with four heroes seeking to keep hope alive in a world going straight to hell.
• Death Road to Canada is a road trip game that takes place during the Zombie Apocalypse . Alongside fighting zombies, dealing with bandits or rescuing survivors, your party members will have to deal with mundane things like figuring out who farted in the car.
• The Rockwell Pursuit mod for Fallout: New Vegas revolves around a trip from Nevada to a research facility in Vermont.
• Final Fantasy XV uses this, with protagonist Noctis setting out on a road trip with his True Companions to recover the stolen Power Crystal that keeps their kingdom alive.
• Get In The Car, Loser! is a Road Trip Plot fused with the plot of your standard RPG - a party goes on a journey to defeat a recently revived ancient evil, they just happen to have a nice car.
• Jalopy sees the game's protagonist drive through Eastern Europe shortly post-Glasnost with his uncle on a trip said uncle took in his youth. The game's title comes from the vehicle acquired for the trip: an Expy of the Trabant, which will cause its fair share of complications .
• The Oregon Trail is an edutainment game about a family in the mid-nineteenth century crossing America to get to Oregon.
• Persona 5 Strikers features the Phantom Thieves on a Busman's Holiday around Japan, taking an RV to different cities where they enter the Metaverse to combat Shadows and take back the stolen Desires of the people in those cities.
• Road 96 has you travelling across for over a thousand and a half miles across the game setting of Petria via a number of means while meeting interesting characters and falling into various situations as you ultimately try to get to the border and maybe help overthrow the oppresive regime of the country.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters : The SNES version has stages all over... what is probably supposed to be the United States.
• WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$ : In their chapter, Dribble and Spitz are asked by the player's avatar to be taken to the harbor during a rainy night. Winning the microgames symbolizes Dribble overcoming the difficulty of driving across the road during night while the downpour is ongoing. At the end, the taxi drivers manage to get their customer to the destination... and then that person is shown to be a merperson. Watching them depart to the vast sea is heartwarming for the drivers... until they realize that the merperson didn't pay them!
• In Daughter for Dessert , the protagonist and Amanda take a car trip to Whiskeyville. Apart from their main object (to fix their jukebox), the trip proves very eventful, with the sexual tension between the two of them reaching a tipping point, and with the two of them meeting Lily for the first time.
• Drop-Out is about main characters Sugar and Lola taking a cross-country road trip to the Grand Canyon... where they will proceed to jump to their deaths.
• El Goonish Shive s "Hammerchlorians" arc dedicates several pages to a Type 1a road trip.
• An early Freefall arc had the crew of the Savage Chicken embarking on a Type 1a to an abandoned colony ship. It was technically a salvage mission, but Sam and Helix both called it a road trip.
• The Less Than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal : Amal is a guy in trouble with his family due to just coming out to them and TJ is an eccentric guy he met on a bar. Together, they cross the US to get to Amal's sister's graduation, as well as taking TJ away from California so he can start a new life.
• Zeus' Godly Goodtime uses this as backdrop for Zeus and Kratos to spend some father-son time together. Too bad the surprise-destination Zeus planned ends up being Nintendo Land ...
• Chakona Space : Plenty of interstellar type 2 and 3 trips.
• A minor plot in Volume 3 of Simple Complications is Ted and Lyle going on a roadtrip. It's mostly just used for one off jokes in between the more serious storyline that took over that volume.
• NeoScum turns into this by Episode 12, when the crew decides to run away from their problems in Chicago and Minneapolis and drive to California, making pit stops and enemies all along the way.
• Find The Alleged Car . Go on road trip with it. Break down multiple times and hack together fixes using absolutely sketchy methods and whatever the hell is lying around for parts. Use said Alleged Car for something it never was meant to, most likely failing at it in a photogenic and hilarious manner. Congratulations, you just made an episode of Roadkill !
• TableTop : Invoked in the Dragon Age episode, where the party members joke that they're basically the cast of an '80s road trip movie: Thinly needs to get laid, Keegan is "trying to make up for the football thing ", Fonzor is there to make out with chicks, and Gorek just wants to go home.
• The Adventure Time episode "Thanks for the Crabapples, Guiseppe", where Ice King and some of his fellow wizards hop on a van and take a trip to Big Butt Rock. They never reach their destination because they accidentally drive the van into the lake.
• American Dad! : "Independent Movie" is a Homage and Affectionate Parody of this kind of movie, and uses this kind of plot, since it's a rather popular subject for independent American cinema, with Steve and his friends driving through the country so Snot can be in his estranged father's funeral.
• Amphibia : The first several episodes of Season 2 are about Anne and the Plantars on the road heading towards the Amphibian capital city Newtopia and their misadventures along the way. After spending several episodes in the city, their return trip then consists of a single episode before they get back.
• In an episode of Arthur Arthur and his family are taking a vacation to the beach. Arthur just wants to go to camp all by himself (and with his friends) but his family has to keep reminding him of how fun things can be. Even though things turn out bad at first, it winds up being a perfect vacation.
• Being Ian : A two parter season finale has Ian and his family crossing the country so Ian can take part in an amateur film competition that is being judged by his idol. It becomes an in-universe example when he loses the movie he was going to submit and edits the footage he got of his family during their trip there to make a road trip independent movie as his entry .
• In one episode of Chowder , a simple delivery turned into one of these, much to Chowder's joy. Unfortunately, they were delivering explosive fruit.
• The third Danny Phantom Made-for-TV Movie , Reality Trip , doubled as this when the titular hero and his friends had to travel cross-country to obtain three magic gems.
• Daria : "The Road Worrier" sees Daria and Jane take a road trip with Trent and Jesse to go to Alternapulooza. It ends up being a Type 1b, but Daria and Trent do get some "quality time".
• Family Guy seems to have gone on more than one with their "Road To..." episodes.
• The Flintstones : have gone on a variety of different Road Trips.
• One Futurama episode, " Bendin' in the Wind " where they follow Beck in a VW bus is a Type 1a.
• Gravity Falls has "Roadside Attraction" in which Dipper, Mabel, Stan, Candy, Grenda and Soos go on a statewide road trip, which includes sabotaging Stan’s rival tourist traps, Dipper learning to talk to girls and giant spiders.
• The Phineas and Ferb episode aptly titled "Road Trip" is kind of a subversion of Type 1a: The entire episode takes place while the family is coming home from a road trip.
• The House of Mouse short "Daisy's Road Trip" has Daisy inviting herself on a road trip with Mickey and Minnie. She spends much of the trip driving them insane. "AARDVARK CROSSING!"
• " Over a Barrel " may count as a Type 2, with the Mane Six and Spike taking a trip by train to Appleloosa.
• " Pinkie Apple Pie " definitely counts as Type 1a, with Pinkie Pie tagging along on a trip with the Apple family to see a distant relative who might hold the key as to whether or not Pinkie really is a distant cousin of Applejack.
• " Road to Friendship " is another clear-cut Type 1a, focusing on Trixie and Starlight going on a road tour to take Trixie's magic show to Saddle Arabia , while facing issues such as difficult terrain, the cramped confines of Trixie's wagon, inns with no vacancies and mounting irritation with each other.
• 101 Dalmatians: The Series has the three-part series finale "Dalmatian Vacation".
• Rocko's Modern Life : In "Road Rash", Heffer talks Rocko into going on a trip to see a tourist attraction called Phlegm Rock before it's closed down. Hijinks ensue, ranging from the struggle to find a decent motel, to having to ask for directions from easily-distracted locals, to Rocko trashing their motorcycle trying to stop the tape player and having to complete their trip in a hot-dog-shaped car Heffer wins in a contest, to an encounter with some surprisingly-friendly bikers.
• The Sonic Boom episode "Planes, Trains and Dude-Mobiles" has Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles going on a road trip to participate in a concert. Despite the number of bathroom breaks, tourist trap stops, and a run-in with the police, they make it to their destination. Only to find that their concert isn't for another month.
• In "A SquarePants Family Vacation" SpongeBob is bringing Patrick along on his family vacation to a water park but the two get lost along the way.
• In "Walking the Plankton" Plankton and his wife go on a cruise but it is actually party of a plan to steal the Krabby Patty formula.
• In "Mooncation", SpongeBob tags along with Sandy on her vacation to the Moon.
• Lastly, in "Mr. Krabs Takes a Vacation" SpongeBob tags along with Mr. Krabs & Pearl on a vacation to the Bikini Bottom Mint, much to Pearl's disappointment.
• In " Bart on the Road ", Bart and some of his friends take Type 1 in order to visit a world fair that turns out to have closed years ago, making this Type 1b .
• In " We're on the Road to D'ohwhere ", Homer takes Bart on a road trip to a motivational camp across the country due to incident in school and was on a "no fly list" in the airlines.
• In " The Road to Cincinnati ," Principal Skinner and Superintendent Chalmers head on an 800-mile road trip to Cincinnati so Chalmers can deliver the keynote speech at an educators' convention.
• A series of Tiny Toon Adventures : How I Spent My Summer Vacation has Hamton's family take a Type 1a to Happy World Land , with Plucky tagging along. They take the monorail around one time, then go home.
• One of the final episodes of Nickelodeon's Doug has a Type 1 with Doug's family off to see the Painted Gorge, which gets sidetracked by several stops to visit which turn out to be tourist traps, followed by the car getting stuck in the mud and requiring everyone to get out and push it free.
• " The Sweet Spot " has Lincoln (and then his sisters) vying to sit in the "sweet spot", the only good seat in Vanzilla, for a road trip the following day. The trip turns into type 1b before it even begins, as it gets cancelled when the kids' violent brawl for the seat completely destroys Vanzilla.
• A later episode, " Tripped! " features an actual road trip. The Loud family have worked hard to save money for their family vacation to the Weeping Willow Resort & Lodge on Lake Michigan, but as they drive to their destination, everything that can go wrong does go wrong. Vanzilla breaks down and later accidentally ends up on a car carrier, the Loud family attend an open mic night to raise money for new transportation, they encounter a prisoner when they accidentally get on a prison bus, and Leni made egg salad sandwiches weeks ahead of the road trip , which make the family sick.
• The hour-long special Tiger Family Trip from Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood premiered in May 2017. The double-length story "Tiger Family Trip" is only the first part of it and the part the contains the actual road trip. The rest of the special is spending time at Grandpere's and vacationing, followed by the Boring Return Journey that is only depicted on-screen in about a minute or so. Given the Edutainment Show aspect of the program, "Tiger Family Trip" focuses on strategies for making a long road trip bearable for both youngsters and their parents, one of which is to take breaks every so often at someplace like a play park so the kids aren't just spending the entire trip cooped up in a vehicle.
• Parodied in The Crumpets episode "Road Stories" where Granny and Caprice embark on a world road trip for a reality TV show, and Granny decides to drive the van to the forest near their house and secretly fake their visits to world destinations using a backdrop.
• Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! has the episode "Wubbzy's Wacky Journey", in which he and his friends embark on a trip to Wuzzleburg after he previously wins the Wubb Girlz' Talent Contest in Wuzzleburg. However, Walden refuses to let anyone stop at fun places along the drive to Wuzzlewood. Hilarity Ensues as expected when Wubbzy sneaks off the Wubb-Mobile to spend time at Wacky World, bumping into the Wubb Girlz. As his friends arrive there and find out, they suggest using the Wubb Jet to arrive in Wuzzlewood on time for the rehearsal which, after some time enjoying rides, they then do.
• In 1888, Bertha Benz was convinced that her husband's newly invented motorcar was much more than a technological curiosity and had huge potential to revolutionize transportation. So she took the car that previously had only been used for short engine tests on the factory grounds and went on a road trip to visit her mother with her two sons. Even though they had to deal with various complications like running out of fuel (a pharmacy was able to help) and engine failure, they still made the 100 km trip in a single day. A journey with a horse carriage would have been a trip of at least three days. She also came up with the idea for a multi-speed gearbox, which would allow the car to be driven slowly uphill or quickly across flatter terrain.
• In 1903 Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson bet he could drive from San Francisco to his home in Vermont. After purchasing a 20hp Winton automobile and hiring a mechanic to ride with him, they set off. The journey would take three months. It's regarded as America's First Roadtrip.
• If you have a car or a reasonable amount of disposable income - The road goes ever on...
• This has been a major sticking point in getting people to embrace electric cars . Before lithium-ion batteries, their range was severely limited, and before high-voltage DC charging (such as Tesla's Superchargers), recharging took several hours (if one could even find a place to plug in while on the road). Even people who rarely if ever drive long distances tend to be hesitant to deny themselves that option. Things have gotten better, but many people still associate "electric" with "useless for road trips".

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Sundance Review: How the Road Trip Dramedy ‘Land Ho,’ From Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens, Transcends Clichés

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Indie road trip comedies are perhaps the worst cliché of low budget American filmmaking, but “Land Ho!,” the story of two aging men on a meandering vacation in Iceland, provides a notable exception. This unassuming, elegantly shot collaboration by directors Aaron Katz (“Cold Weather,” “Quiet City”) and Martha Stephens (“Pilgrim Song,” “Passenger Pigeons”) actively avoids any melodramatic confrontations or cheesy subplots. A gentle meditation on growing old and bored, “Land Ho!” never rises to the level of narrative engagement found in the filmmakers’ previous efforts, but it doesn’t take much to make it sufficiently insightful, carried along by a pair of actors so inherently likable from the outset that “Land Ho!” hardly requires a lot of story to set their adventure in motion.

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Essentially a two-hander from start to finish, “Land Ho!” opens with the soft spoken Colin (Paul Eenhoorn, star of last year’s sleeper hit “This Is Martin Bonner”) paying a visit to his foul-mouthed pal Mitch (Earl Lynn Nelson), who promptly announces that he has bought the two of them tickets to Iceland. Ex-brother-in-laws previously married to a pair of sisters, the men have nothing better to do with their time — their age is never revealed, but both appear to be well into their seventies and have retired, affording them the luxury of throwing caution to the wind. From their initial scene together, their off-beat chemistry is made amusingly obvious, as Mitch compares the food he’s cooked to “angels pissing on your tongue” and Colin mostly looks back with a good-natured smirk. That natural rhythm, with Mitch running his mouth and Colin mostly trying to reign it in, continues over the course of their journey through Iceland’s expansive natural scenery.

Yet rather than casting the duo as an odd couple on the verge of getting into trouble, Katz and Stephens merely observe the pair as they veer through the country’s popular spots, hiding their fears in one carefree activity after another. “We’re getting our groove back,” Mitch says with a smile, but neither of them express any comprehension of what that means. In Reykjavik, they spend time with two of Mitch’s younger women relatives, grad students passing through town, whom Mitch offers anachronistic advice about female style over an increasingly awkward dinner in which one of the visitors compares the genial Colin to her dad. “I’m not uncomfortable with my age,” he says, but the next scene, in which the two men huddle in the corner of a blaring nightclub, suggests otherwise.

“Land Ho!” maintains this tendency toward allowing its two leads to internalize their insecurities, while gradually exploring them through terse exchanges. The wizened Mitch’s constant attempts to liven things up — mainly by brandishing a joint — strike a noticeable contrast to the more recently divorced Colin: While Mitch grasps to be forever, Mitch shows a constant fear of growing old. The landscape takes on a therapeutic dimension once they leave the city and drive through the country’s vacant regions, exploring transcendently beautiful cliffsides and black sand beaches, while Keegan Dewitt’s peaceful score underscores the cathartic nature of their journey. While Katz and Stephenson indulge in the hackneyed montage all-too-familiar from countless other road trip movies, in this case the trope has a psychological complexity that elaborates on their emotional state. Cinematographer Andrew Reed’s images do justice to Iceland’s otherworldly scenery, but rarely stray from focusing on capturing the two men within it, which allows their surroundings to become an apt reflection of their collective mindset.

Eenhorn, not far off from the alienated struggler he played in “Martin Bonner,” makes for an adorably good-intentioned protagonist, while Nelson persistent goofiness is an incredible feat considering his age. As funny as any young comedic actor today, he’s also far more assertive, giving Mitch a confidence that drives his over-the-top exclamations and makes them entirely credible. During one scene at an isolated inn, he meets a young married couple and unleashes a string of ridiculous one-liners (“How often have you been hitting the mattress?”) with an upfront affability that allows him to get away it. Similarly, the movie gets away with trading plot for texture. The narrative progresses as a series of snapshots — one scene, involving a potential romantic attraction, could function as a standalone short film. The movie’s construction is an apt reflection of its characters’ fragmentary existence.

Still, “Land Ho!” drifts from one scene to the next with such a light touch that it runs the risk of turning the men’s trip into a trivial affair. But even without a major climactic moment, the filmmakers arrive at a thoughtfully triumphant conclusion. Treasuring small victories and mood above all else, “Land Ho!” makes it possible to engage with its subjects’ pathos and experience their sense of renewal along with them, and concludes with the lingering sense that their adventure has only just begun.

Criticwire Grade : B+

HOW WILL IT PLAY? A low key crowdpleaser in Sundance’s NEXT section, the film is unlikely to attract a large deal given the small nature of its story and lack of name cast members. But decent reviews and word of mouth could attract a smaller distributor to take a gamble on the film’s warm appeal, and in the right hands it could find an audience on VOD.

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10 Best Buddy Road Trip Movies, According to Rotten Tomatoes

In Hollywood, certain staples will never die , no matter how many years go by. Some clichés like the less attractive sidekick, superhero films, the nerdy underdog, or the Oscar-bating based on a true story movie are built into the fabric of Hollywood. These clichés make audiences feel comfortable because they already know what to expect. One trope that's constantly repeated is the buddy road trip film.

Whether it's Rainman or Train, Planes and Automobiles , movies where two characters don't get along but are stuck in a car together and end up being good friends by the end always seem to garner an audience. However, being a cliché doesn't make a film great; it needs the right balance of heart and familiar tropes to become classic and not commonplace.

10 Plains, Trains and Automobiles (1987)

Rotten Tomatoes: 87%

In 1987, John Hughes took a break from teen dramas to make one of the most iconic Holiday and buddy road trip films of all time, laying the foundation for modern iterations of these types of movies.

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This classic film is instantly hilarious because fans can relate to all the hi-jinks that come with having a flight delayed during the holidays. Legendary comics Steve Martin and John Candy masterfully play off of each other like the Harlem Globetrotters of comedy. Martin's conservative straight-man character meshes perfectly with Candy's annoyingly offbeat salesman, setting up the prototype for all the following buddy road trip films.

9 Dumb and Dumber (1994)

Rotten Tomatoes: 84%

The Farley Brothers breakout hit about two loveably dimwitted friends who take a road trip to Aspen is a milestone in comedy and took the buddy road trip film to new levels of ridiculousness and funny.

This classic comedy about friendship is choked full of immature yet deceptively smart jokes . Whether complaining about not being able to find good jobs under 40 hours a week or thinking Aspen is a tropical resort, this film's characters are so silly that fans are left with no choice but to laugh, even if it's despite themselves. This vital film represents a turning point from the cheesy hi-jinks of the 80s to the more irreverent comedy of the 90s.

8 Thelma and Louise (1991)

Rotten Tomatoes: 82%

This female-led road trip dramedy about two women on the run from the law was a cultural phenomenon and spoke up for a segment of the population not used to being heard.

Whether it's the epic last scene where they drive off a cliff or introducing the world to Brad Pitt , there's a lot that makes this film a classic. More importantly, this film highlighted women's exhaustion at being objectified and showed two female characters unwilling to take it, which was a novelty at the time. Scenes like Thelma and Louise blowing up an eighteen-wheeler belonging to a truck driver who berated them resonated with women who might have been in similar situations but couldn't do anything as drastic, making this one of the most influential movies of the decade.

7 Midnight Run (1988)

This Golden Globe-nominated action about a bail bondsman who has to retrieve a criminal who skipped town keeps the audience laughing and guessing what will happen next.

Midnight Run proves Robert Deniro isn't just an outstanding dramatic actor but also has impressive comedic timing. Deniro and Charles Grodin play their characters straight and not wacky, making them even funnier because it feels natural. More impressively, the audience never knows what will happen next in this cat-and-mouse chase between the two leads, the mob, and the police, leaving viewers on the edge of their seats after every plot twist and turn .

6 Easy Rider (1969)

This groundbreaking film about two free-spirited bikers struck a chord in counterculture for daring to question the legitimacy of freedom in America.

RELATED: Groundbreaking Films Made In The 1960s

Easy Rider is considered the first American arthouse film and started a wave of independent filmmakers who, similar to the film's main characters, wanted freedom from the establishment. As the characters ride through America, they encounter everything wrong, including bigotry, consumerism, and violence. However, there's no putting a halo on counterculture as the drug-selling cyclists are also contributing to consumerism in this time capsule of the late 60s .

5 Rain Man (1988)

Rotten Tomatoes: 90%

This road trip film is about a down-on-his-luck collectibles dealer who kidnaps his autistic brother never fails to leave fans misty-eyed.

Dustin Hoffman delivers the performance of a lifetime as he disappears into a character with autism. At the same time, Tom Cruise manages to make the audience empathetic to a flawed character like Tommy, who uses people for a living. While cliché of the genre, seeing Tommy go from treating his brother as a nuisance at the beginning of the trip to genuinely caring for him by the end leaves the audience emotionally satisfied, showing some tropes never get old.

4 Blues Brothers (1980)

Rotten Tomatoes: 92%

This musical, based on an SNL Sketch about two brothers traveling to find their old bandmates to raise money to save a Catholic Orphanage, is as wild as it sounds in all the best ways.

Blue Brothers is full of insane comedy moments fans expect from SNL, including floating angry nuns, Carry Fisher shooting a rocket launcher at the brothers, and a two-hundred cop car pile-up. When things can't get crazier, characters break out into song, including amazing performances from Aretha Franklin , James Brown , and Ray Charles that are worth the watch alone.

3 Smokey and the Bandit (1977)

Rotten Tomatoes: 85%

Bert Reynolds and Sally Field star in this box office smash with a charismatic lead character who single-handedly raised the sales of Pontiac Trans Ams in the late 70s.

This unique film almost entirely takes place in cars, making it the ultimate road trip film. Decades later, its practical car stunts are even more fun compared to today's CGI-laden chases. However, the film is sold on the cult of personality, Smokey. Smokey's confidence and bravado endear him to viewers even though he's a criminal. Sally Field also bewitches audiences as the lovable runaway bride who's swept up in the madness like the viewer. Refreshingly, Fields is more than a ditzy sidekick but is running from the responsibility of marriage by doing something completely irresponsible. Whether running from cops or a groom, this film is ultimately about defying authority.

2 Toy Story (1995)

This groundbreaking Pixar film about toys that come to life when no one is looking was the first completely CGI animated movie and taught a generation of kids what true friendship means.

Toy Story features timeless voice acting performances by Tim Allen and Tom Hanks , making fans forget they're watching a child's action figures . When rival toys get lost and have to join forces to find their way home, fans are brought to tears with its message about people getting over their differences to work together and the necessity of friendship.

1 Logan (2017)

This film is like an ultra-violent family road trip with Professor X as the senile grandpa, X-23 as the annoying daughter, and Logan as the dad trying to keep everything together.

Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart's twenty-year friendship shows on screen. Fans can feel the bond between Logan and Professor X, including arguing every five seconds, showing how comfortable they are with each other. Both characters are also the most vulnerable audiences have ever seen them, with Logan slowly dying and the once genius professor's mind deteriorating. Similar to the film's message, the grand illusion of our heroes is wholly destroyed. However, like a real father, Professor X still has one more lesson to teach Logan after he's tasked with protecting X-23 he learns being a hero isn't about how strong he is but about choosing to help others.

NEXT: 10 Best Buddy Comedies Of The 2000s, Ranked By IMDb

The 10 Best Road Trip Thriller Movies

There is a natural tension to the open road, with its isolation broken only by a complete stranger piloting their own ton or two of steel, glass and rubber where only suckers heed the speed limits. Most of the world might be carved up by roads, but that doesn’t mean that civilization grew up alongside them. It’s still a frontier, with plenty unknown on either side of the asphalt. Here are ten terrific pictures about why that cancelled road trip might be a blessing in disguise.

1. The Hitcher (1986)

When The Hitcher was first released, it proved a modest commercial success, largely ignored or reviled by critics. It grew in stature as HBO played it incessantly, and now it routinely shows up on the lists like this one. The premise couldn’t be more basic, as a young man (C. Thomas Howell) drives cross country to deliver a car from Chicago to San Diego and on one dark and stormy night, picks up a hitchhiker (Rutger Hauer). The script operates like those great seventy-minute B-movies of the thirties and forties, wasting no time with back stories or set-ups. Howell picks up Hauer in the opening moments and minutes later, Hauer calmly explains he’s going to kill this good Samaritan.

The script manages to keep its foot on the gas for the rest of the movie, finding clever ways to leap to where other movies like this might end, and pressing on to more unexpected, and depraved terrain. Jennifer Jason Leigh does her best to elevate her roadside waitress into someone more interesting and nearly pulls this off. But this is Hauer’s movie, and rarely has an actor seemed to delight as much in playing an apex predator. The movie wisely subscribes to the Michael Myers school of character development for its antagonist, understanding that childhood trauma and rationales only make monsters in such movies less intimidating.

Howell makes for a fine everyman here, though stumbles when the movie needs him to process his trauma is more disturbing ways. Richard Harmon directs this with competence and care, benefiting from an era where he got to blow up real cars, so the chases and crashes have a weight missing from contemporary movies that aren’t Fury Road. It’s a satisfying little thriller, but its screenwriter Eric Red would go on to produce far more intriguing genre experiments, writing both Near Dark and Blue Steel for Kathryn Bigelow. And unfortunately, Hauer would never get the chance to bare his teeth like this again.

2. Joyride (2002)

Before JJ Abrams became the anointed remixer of juggernaut franchises, he co-wrote this nifty B movie with Clay Tarver about a trio of young folks who play a nasty prank on a truck driver using an old CB radio. It earned some respectable reviews and its money back, but like a few others on this list, its reputation only grew over time.

Here Paul Walker offers to drive his college crush (Leelee Sobieski) home, with his clownish pal (Steve Zahn) along for the ride. By this movie, Zahn perfected his persona as a destructive, if well-meaning, moron. Zahn’s prank fuels the story and builds organically, never lurching into outright cruelty, but hurtful enough that the wrong person would take it very, very personally, which a truck driver with the CB handle of Rusty Nail (sumptuously voiced by Ted Levine) most certainly does. The twists are small but satisfying, refusing to take the big plot swings that made JJ’s company Bad Robot so famous for intriguing premises, jaw-dropping second acts, and deeply flawed endings.

The movie’s secret weapon is oddly enough the director, who quietly built his name on a string of accomplished neo-noirs in the nineties like Red Rock West and The Last Seduction. John Dahl balances the tone well, keeping this a high-grade thriller with nasty streak, as opposed to a more overt horror play, that might strip the plot down to a grocery list of kills. Rusty Nail and this trio are well-matched the whole way through, with an ending that can still produce shivers after repeat viewings. It’s exactly the type of thriller that people shrug off as simple, when in fact it’s a high-wire walk few pull off.

3. Breakdown (1997)

The generic title didn’t do this movie any favors, but it still became a small bore hit on its release, reminding everyone why its lead, Kurt Russell, has been a star for decades. The movie opens with Russell in a near collision with a truck driver, followed by a brief argument at a gas station, only to find his car breaking down in the middle of nowhere. He lets his wife hitch a ride with another trucker to get help, and naturally, she disappears into thin air. What follows is hardly groundbreaking, but the tension swells with rock solid story logic that too few of these movies ever bother to employ.

This was the directorial debut for Jonathan Mostow, who has the reliable chops that would have made him the second coming of Don Siegel or Robert Aldrich given enough time cranking out movies like this. Hardly a revelatory stylist, Mostow knows what he has in Russell and his script, and isn’t afraid to let those things shine here. But he shows a gift for sharing narrative information visually and letting the audience add two and two for themselves, as at one point, he unveils the time and scope of the conspiracy at work in a single image.

Still, this movie relies on Russell to deliver the goods, and he does, as he’s a delight to watch get frustrated, lose his cool, regain it, all with his average Joe aplomb. Few actors can play exasperated without ever falling into self-pity as Russel does so naturally. He’s just doing the best he can and looking for a break that is long overdue. This is stellar middlebrow entertainment, of the kind that shouldn’t make that an insult.

4. Detour (1946)

Long heralded as one of great no-budget noirs of the 1940s, Detour is a miracle for more than its financial constraints. Its director Edward G. Ulmer managed to stitch together his movies with used sets, hungry actors and a few, very few, well-placed lights. In this one, a down on his luck piano player (Tom Neal) hitches a ride with a bookie (Edmund MacDonald) to California to meet up with his girlfriend in Hollywood. Along the way the bookie ends up dying in an accident no one would believe happened. Too nervous to trust the police, Neal assumes the bookie’s identity and if his luck wasn’t already circling the drain, it’s flushed away upon picking up the one hitchhiker (Ann Savage) that knows that bookie.

Savage swiftly blackmails Neal, assuming exactly the kind of foul play the cops would. She’s not a garish femme fatale though, looking to gobble him up whole. She’s a fragile, broken soul that believes the only way to get what she needs is to harass, cajole and snatch it from the world around her. And Neal, desperate to put the detour behind him tries to escape her any way he can.

Now an established classic, Detour has the strange luxury of looking better now than it did in 1945. A recent 4K restoration has turned its glaring whites into a hypnotic glow, and its blacks into velvet shadows. Its longevity can’t be credited only to its place as an early noir, but rather, what kind of noir it is. Yes, the genre is built around bad, mostly criminal decisions, but the best have an aura of inevitability. It’s not simply a matter of falling for the wrong girl or aiming for the quick fix, but of trying to do the best with bad circumstances only to sink even deeper into trouble. Neal didn’t want anything but to reunite with the love of his life and yet, the open road had other plans.

5. The Vanishing (1988)

Stanley Kubrick once called this French-Dutch thriller the scariest movie he’d ever seen, and reached out to its director George Sluizer, to discuss how he edited it. This makes sense given that the suspense is built on the need to know, which had to resonate with Kubrick, a man who clearly had a ravenous curiosity.

It begins with a haunting rehearsal of the crime to come, as a pair of lovers, played by Gene Bervoets and Johanna ter Steege are separated when their car breaks down, only to be swiftly reunited. But then at a crowded rest stop, she goes to the bathroom and never returns. Bervoets waits and waits, but there is simply no sign of her, though some workers saw her with another man, implying that she might have simply left her boyfriend behind. This is a movie, so that’s clearly not the case, and soon The Vanishing splits its POV, following the killer (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu) as he plots the kidnapping, and Bervoets as he devotes his life to finding out what happened.

As it turns out, Donnadieu is a sweet family man and chemistry professor whose sociopathic tendencies are bundled up as tight as those in a 19th century Russian novel, intellectualized until it’s a bloodless act within an indifferent universe, until it’s not. As Bervoets unravels from his grief, Donnadieu only grows in calm and power, sending him post cards inviting him to meet, only to stand him up over and over again. Truly great horror filmmakers require an expansive understanding of the human condition to avoid relying on crude sadism and genre clichés alone. And here, the shocking finale arrives when the lead can’t resist the urge to know, and credibly becomes a willing ally in the killer’s larger design.

8 Replies to “The 10 Best Road Trip Thriller Movies”

Thanks for a good solid list (road films are a weakness of mine), I appreciate your knowledge and insights.

…….Vanishing Point….YES! Looking for Kalifornia but alas, no.

It should be noted that Charlotte Rampling’s appearance in Vanishing Point is in the U.K. version of the film.

Damn, some excellent stuff here.

Solid collection, and I only clicked the link to make sure Hitcher was #1 – one of the most underrated thrillers

And never mentioned that shoddy remake.

Where is Stranger than paradise?

What about indy Thomas Jane’s Dark Country (2009)?

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The best road trip movies of all time

Posted: February 12, 2024 | Last updated: February 12, 2024

Few things are better than a classic road trip. Sun shining, music blaring, wind in your hair, and some good friends. But since road trips aren’t exactly a thing you can schedule every day, sometimes you have to make do with watching other people go on their own epic journeys. For that, we have 20 of the best road trip movies of all time.

Nomadland (2020)

Any movie that wins three Oscars , including Best Picture and Best Director, is sure to make its way to the top of any best-of list, and that’s exactly the case here. Frances McDormand shows that even two decades after also starring in Almost Famous , she can still make one hell of a road trip movie in this story about packing up your essentials and roaming the country in search of purpose.

Road Trip (2000)

With a title that says all we need to know, Road Trip is a who’s who of stars from the teen sex comedy genre that dominated the early 2000s. The film is raunchy and hilarious, capturing that youthful energy of adventuring with your friends and having everything spiral out of control. Released in 2000, the movie feels like a send-off to the ‘90s, full of countless references and cast members that were part of iconic ‘90s productions ranging from American Pie to Rent .

The Blues Brothers (1980)

Considered by many to be the greatest Saturday Night Live spinoff film of all time, The Blues Brothers stars John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd road-tripping around the state looking to get their old band back together. The movie was a box-office and cult hit, eventually spawning a sequel that unfortunately failed to live up to the high bar set by the brothers.

Y Tu Mamá También (2001)

Travelling to a secluded beach on the Mexican coast may not sound like the most exciting destination, but it’s times like that where it’s important to remember the journey is always more important. A story of two teenage boys travelling with a woman in her late twenties, the film depicts jealousy and self-discovery against the backdrop of Mexico’s political turmoil. The movie was so popular, it set the record for the highest box-office opening in Mexican cinema history .

Thelma & Louise (1991)

Seen as one of the greatest feminist films of all time , Thelma & Louise is also just one of the greatest films of all time, road trip or otherwise. It portrays two best friends adventuring on the road together and quickly spiralling into crime and running from the police. The controversial film became instantly beloved by audiences everywhere, earning six Oscar nominations and winning Best Original Screenplay . In 2016, it was added to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry for its cultural significance.

Easy Rider (1969)

If you’ve ever seen a movie or show where Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild” blasts as people drive off , you have Easy Rider to thank for that seminal moment. The movie was iconic for its portrayal of rising counterculture movements such as hippie culture, anti-war protests, and recreational drug use. It’s a fun movie about venturing off to New Orleans and leaving social tension behind.

Dumb and Dumber (1994)

Widely considered to be one of the greatest comedies of all time , Dumb and Dumber showcases a journey from Rhode Island to Colorado that is full of as many shenanigans as one could possibly pack into 107 minutes. The movie’s popularity has led to two sequels and even an animated television show, as people couldn’t get enough of watching these two goofballs have fun on the road together.

Death Proof (2007)

A road trip movie-turned-brutal slasher flick is about as Quentin Tarantino as anything can get, which is what makes it the perfect twist on the genre. Released in North America as Grindhouse , a double feature alongside Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror , the movie was a box-office failure that taught Tarantino a few lessons . Nevertheless, the movie has since become a cult hit, for viewers who discovered it without having to sit through a second movie.

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

Travelling from New York City to Chicago and back may not sound like the most thrilling road trip, but the Coen Brothers are capable of turning nothing into something enthralling. In classic Coen fashion , this is a movie that twists the road trip trend, instead offering a look at a down-on-his-luck folk singer trying to make ends meet rather than the hijinks and hilarity the genre usually offers.

Into the Wild (2007)

Who hasn’t found themselves disenchanted with society and debated giving away all their possessions to hitchhike across the country and live in the wilderness? Fortunately, that’s exactly the journey that Into the Wild portrays, telling the biographical story of Christopher McCandless , who met all sorts of people on his journey out to live in the Alaskan wild.

It Happened One Night (1934)

One of the first road trip movies of all time, this 1934 classic starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert is famous for its iconic ankle flaunting scene that has been parodied an endless amount of times. It’s widely considered to be one of the greatest films ever, as the rom-com is filled with endless comedic moments as the pair venture out to New York. It was also one of the last movies released before the Motion Picture Association began stricter enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code , which severely limited what films could show for nearly three decades.

Midnight Run (1988)

Robert De Niro in a New York to Los Angeles buddy comedy , need anyone say more? The film was both a critical and commercial success, spawning three made-for-TV sequels expanding on the story of various characters throughout the film. With De Niro playing a bounty hunter, the movie perfectly blends hysterical comedy with thrilling excitement and a few heavier, dark moments to keep audiences guessing.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987)

When Steve Martin, John Candy, and John Hughes collaborate on a movie together, the result is sure to be… well, as good as Planes, Trains and Automobiles is. The movie is about a three-day journey to Chicago between two unlikely travel companions—like if The Odd Couple happened in transit. It’s a must-watch performance for both Martin and Candy, with Roger Ebert calling the film “perfectly cast and soundly constructed.”

Little Miss Sunshine (2006)

A tiny budget and an all-star cast led this movie, about travelling to a California child beauty pageant, to become one of the greatest surprise hits of all time. Little Miss Sunshine , won two Oscars , including Best Original Screenplay, and made over US$100 million on just an US$8-million budget . It’s the perfect example of how a beat-up van and a cast of weirdos can be just as engaging as a team of superheroes.

The Cannonball Run (1981)

What’s more exciting than a road trip from Connecticut to California? What about if that road trip was all part of an illegal race across the country? That’s exactly the plot of The Cannonball Run , in which an all-star cast that includes Burt Reynolds, Roger Moore, Dom DeLuise, Farrah Fawcett, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and Jackie Chan all race from coast to coast. The Cannonball Run continues to live on in road trip lore with the record having been broken countless times over the years.

National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983)

The National Lampoon’s series has produced some wonderful movies, but Vacation is widely considered to be the best of them all . With John Hughes, Harold Ramis, and Chevy Chase all collaborating on this movie, it’s no surprise that it’s an endless stream of laughs with just the right amount of heartfelt moments sprinkled in.

Rain Man (1988)

Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise each give perhaps the best performance of their careers in this iconic movie. The film was a success in every sense of the word, becoming the highest-grossing film of 1988 , making over US$350 million on just a US$25-million budget , alongside winning four Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Hoffman winning Best Actor. It’s a cross-country road trip about self-discovery and never underestimating people—an absolute must-watch.

Smokey and the Bandit

Burt Reynolds’ directorial debut was everything anyone could have hoped for, with his hilarious and exciting film about a bootlegger and runaway bride trying to smuggle 400 cases of beer from Texas to Atlanta. It was a massive hit , with only Star Wars outperforming this iconic 1977 film at the box office. The on-screen chemistry would even blossom into a real relationship between Reynolds and co-star Sally Field .

Almost Famous (2000)

In this semi-autobiographical story , a young Rolling Stone journalist follows around a touring rock band, getting in all sorts of hijinks along the way. Love, sex, partying, and meeting all sorts of new people make this movie a coming-of-age tale as much as a road trip movie. It’s an absolute must-watch for music lovers, and those who dream of hitting the road and partying every night.

True Romance (1993)

As if travelling from Detroit to Los Angeles wasn’t exciting enough, doing so while being chased by the mob is sure to add some excitement to the road trip. This film marks one of the rare instances of Quentin Tarantino writing the screenplay, but not directing as well, which many people credit for its success .

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Why Heavy Trip is the funniest metal movie since This Is Spinal Tap

Director Juuso Laatio reveals the challenges of making a film featuring grave robbers and a band called Impaled Rektum

“The scene where they’re all digging up the corpse in the middle of the night was actually shot on the longest day of the year – Midsummer’s Eve. Poor choice of scheduling that day!” 

We’re speaking with Juuso Laatio who, along with Jukka Vidgren, co-wrote and directed 2018’s Heavy Trip — the most unerringly-authentic metal comedy since This is Spinal Tap . Juuso is discussing the challenges of filming night scenes in his native Finland during the summer, when the sun simply doesn’t set. 

“For variety, it’s good to have night and day scenes, so the night stuff is all done in post,” he explains.

But grave-robbing is actually one of the film’s more minor plot points. Drawing inspiration from The Blues Brothers and other vintage American comedies, Heavy Trip tells the story of a lovable extreme metal band from a small town in Finland, whose simple quest for a gig catapults them into a sprawling and disastrous odyssey involving local bullies, wild animals, grave robbing, terrorists, Vikings, a crucifixion, a love story, an international standoff, buckets of vomit and a steady onslaught of brutal, neck-snapping metal. Their goal: make it to the Northern Damnation festival in Norway so they can play their bludgeoning new song in the parking lot.

Describing the film’s origins, Juuso explains, “Jukka and I were both raised on Hollywood cinema and Hollywood comedies. We wanted to make a feel-good film about a subject that isn’t typically seen as a feel-good subject.” 

The subject, of course, is heavy metal, which tends to get a very short shrift in most movies, with metalheads coming across as thuggish or dim-witted scenery for the main characters to avoid or to overcome (although, of course, there are some movies that get metal absolutely right ). The band in Heavy Trip — who adopt the suitably-appalling name of 'Impaled Rektum' — are the movie’s sweet but hapless protagonists. Portraying them in a realistic and positive way was one of Juuso’s primary objectives. 

“There’s something about metal guys,” he says. “Metal people know that they’re generally really nice and gentle and funny; or sometimes quiet, nerdy people and in contrast they do the most sonically violent stuff you can imagine. There’s a great contrast between the people and the music that they play. Also, usually metal people are the butt of the joke and we wanted to tell the side of the metal people.” 

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One of Heavy Trip ’s many refreshing qualities is the clever ways in which it acknowledges the many cliches that it taps into — road trip movies, bands looking for their big break, romantic comedies, small towns, etc. — while turning them on their heads. For example, the film’s principal antagonist is the town’s slimy, womanising lounge singer. 

“I don’t know how well his jokes translate into English,” Juuso says, “but the lines that I wrote for him are so dirty in Finnish that I was embarrassed for my parents to see the film. It was really great to write such an asshole character.” 

The lead singer’s crush is not a leathery metal vixen but the girl in the flower shop who likes coffee and sticky buns. It’s very easy to relate to the characters because they seem like real friends in a real band dealing with the kind of stuff that most people — metalheads or otherwise — have experienced. And the way that the band’s vocalist (played by Johannes Holopainen), ultimately deals with the town’s homophobic bullies is deeply-satisfying.

From a metal perspective, the authenticity is off the charts. The actors sport t-shirts from the likes of Death , Kreator, Slayer , and Cannibal Corpse and their rehearsal room is decked out in painstakingly-curated extreme metal regalia. Also, the band’s first hit, Flooding Secrations (sic), is an absolute firestorm of pummeling blastbeats and grinding riffs, composed by Mika Lammassaari (Mors Subita). A longtime metaller himself, Juuso knew that the metal references had to pass muster with the scene’s most committed disciples — a caricature in and of themselves — who appear in the composite form of the band’s bassist, Pasi (masterfully played by Max Ovaska). 

“I think that if you’re in the metal scene,” Juuso says, “you know somebody who’s like that. An absolutist or a purist. I don’t want to admit this, but have you seen the show Community? There’s a lot of Abed in Pasi.” 

In one of the film’s recurring jokes, Pasi describes their subgenre as, “symphonic, post-apocalyptic, reindeer-grinding, Christ-abusing, extreme, war, pagan, Fennoscandic metal.”

One finds more than a few similarities between Dave Mustaine and Impaled Rektum’s guitarist Lotvonen (played by Samuli Jaskio). 

Juuso explains, “Pretty much the whole appearance of the guitar player is the old school Mustaine look. I tried to pack as many Megadeth references as I could into the film. He works in the slaughterhouse and he has the Killing Is My Business shirt and his guitar is the Mustaine guitar from the early 90s. Also, one inside joke is where the drummer (played by Antti Heikkinen), is sneaking into the police station, the chords playing in the background are another Megadeth reference — Hangar 18 .”

The film begs for multiple viewings. With a coveted 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, Heavy Trip has found a wide and enthusiastic global audience that continues to grow exponentially now that it’s available on streaming platforms. Weirdly, although Finland is acknowledged as the metal capital of the world, Heavy Trip initially bombed there. 

“Nobody went to see it in the Finnish cinemas,” Juuso says. “It was marketed very poorly and to the wrong audience; it was marketed to 15 year-olds but it’s not a film for them. They don’t know the metal references and they don’t listen to metal anyway. After the failed opening, it was pretty much, ‘Well, there goes our career. Nobody’s going to work with us again.’” 

But the sense of failure was short-lived. At its South By Southwest premiere, the audience got it immediately, responding with thundering laughter and standing ovations. 

“We were really surprised, wondering if people would like a Finnish film with subtitles, but they loved it. Since then we’ve been to a lot of festivals and I’ve actually seen mosh pits at the theatre! We have the craziest fans in Japan. They have cosplay over there and one guy cosplayed as the speed camera! And they had special screenings where the music is turned up extra loud. There’s a crazy Heavy Trip scene over there.”

Which leads us to the inevitable question — will there be a Heavy Trip 2? 

“It's in the works," he says. "We’ve written a really good script and we were supposed to film it this summer. We’re aiming to film it next year. You never know. The last film took six years so I hope this one doesn’t take so long!”. 

There’s no need to worry — in the immortal words of Pasi: “We’re on a mission from Satan.”

Buy Heavy Trip on Amazon

Hailing from San Diego, California, Joe Daly is an award-winning music journalist with over thirty years experience. Since 2010, Joe has been a regular contributor for Metal Hammer , penning cover features, news stories, album reviews and other content. Joe also writes for Classic Rock, Bass Player, Men’s Health and Outburn magazines. He has served as Music Editor for several online outlets and he has been a contributor for SPIN, the BBC and a frequent guest on several podcasts. When he’s not serenading his neighbours with black metal, Joe enjoys playing hockey, beating on his bass and fawning over his dogs.

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I saw the new movie "Civil War" so you don’t have to. You’re welcome, and you owe me. Fifteen years ago this month, I started writing for the legendary Andrew Breitbart at Big Hollywood , where we drew attention to the increasing wokeness of Tinseltown. That’s why I saw this movie – to see if Hollywood had learned any lessons. I think it did, but it learned the wrong lessons.

Spoiler alert—it’s a bad movie, and you don’t want to see it. I’m going to tell you some of what happens, but you shouldn’t care because, if you’re smart, you’re going to listen to me and not spend money on it.

The problem with "Civil War" isn’t its point of view, to the extent it has one. Now, you can tell that, beneath the surface, it has a generic left-wing orientation. The bad guy president is vaguely Trumpy. He’s a straight white male, of course. In fact, every single villain is a straight, white male. None of the major heroes is a straight, white male. You can make movies where the villains are straight, white males, and where none of the heroes are straight, white males, but it’s now a woke Hollywood cliche to make all the villains straight, white males, and none of the heroes straight, white males. You can’t unsee it. Rural white guy? Definitely a villain. Black woman? Hero!

But the mandatory pseudo-diversity of Hollywood is not the main problem with "Civil War." Nor is how the movie employs the hackneyed device of characters doing stupid, impulsive things to drive the plot. Don’t go do that thing, don’t go do that thing, don’t go do that thing – and then the character goes and does that thing, and all the other characters have to deal with the consequences, and that’s how the plot progresses. Weirdly, it’s always a young female character who seems to go do that thing. Anyway, it’s annoying.

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But the real issue with "Civil War" is that it is not about the cinematic civil war. When I go to a movie called "Civil War," I’d like to learn a little about the civil war, like what happened and why it happened and what one side believes, and what the other side believes, and how our society degenerated into open combat nearly two centuries after the Democrats started – and lost – the last civil war. But you don’t get that. I spent two hours watching this movie and I still have absolutely no idea what caused this civil war. I know that the Trumpish president character – he’s not a complete Trump clone, but it’s pretty clear he’s Trumperrific – is supposed to be a bad guy. But that doesn’t mean that his side is necessarily bad. The good guys can be led by a bad guy. Or a good guy can lead the bad guys. The movie seems to attribute the cause of this civil war to a single personality instead of illuminating the politics that drove it. That’s not particularly compelling as drama.

I know a little about Second Civil War fiction since I’ve written a best-selling series of novels about it. And you know what I focused on? How America gets into a Second Civil War and what happens when it does. How do things change? What expectations are upended? How would things work out in that situation? That’s what’s interesting about the concept. That’s what we want to know. And frankly, that’s what teaches us what to avoid so we never get into that situation again no matter how much the Democrats try to provoke Round Two.

But this movie ignores the civil war stuff and is all about journalists on a road trip. Despite the fact that most journalists today are loathsome communists, that’s not necessarily a bad way to show us around the Second Civil War. You could get lots of perspectives, and you can see and learn what happens and why through reporter characters. But the only perspectives we get are about the reporters themselves, and they’re annoying people – which is at least a taste of realism. But they never talk about the war itself. There’s no context to all the mayhem.

Remember, it’s the world-building that’s interesting to us, not these characters. I don’t care about the characters. You have a jaded war correspondent. And another jaded war correspondent. And a third jaded war correspondent. And a fourth war correspondent who’s young and isn’t quite jaded yet but who gets jaded at the end. That’s not interesting, and that’s not what I’m trying to buy when I throw down nearly 20 bucks for a ticket to a movie called "Civil War."

Look, the actors are competent. They’re just playing boring people. And the movie is boring. That’s the crime. The lesson Andrew Breitbart always taught about political movies is to be good first. Be interesting. Make a good movie. Then you can get your message across. He didn’t object to the idea of a left-wing viewpoint. "JFK" is a left-wing movie with an idiotic message, but it was interesting. I couldn’t take my eyes off it, even though it was unbelievably stupid. I barely kept my eyes open here.

Alex Garland is not an untalented filmmaker. The Englishman has made a few vaguely interesting movies. The problem is he shoots this one like a movie-of-the-week. It is very workmanlike. What he wants to do is set up really interesting shots like helicopters flying around the Washington monument. That’s a pretty cool image. A gun battle at the White House? Yeah, that’s an interesting concept. But not the way he does it. You can see this was not a big-budget movie. All the battles have like 10 people.

Another beef – as a military guy, all the military stuff bothered me. It doesn’t look like a military operation, and it’s kind of hard to explain to civilians why. For instance, you’ll have a weird mix of vehicles with a HUMVEE and a truck and a tank and another HUMVEE and a tank rolling, and overtop are helicopters flying really low, and F-35s are flying at treetop level just because it looks kind of cool. But it’s not realistic. Military guys, be prepared to bust out laughing at the scene where a guy is sleeping on the ground around a bunch of parked trucks. Yeah, sleep on the dirt among parked trucks and see how that works out for you. Look, some of the battles do look kind of cool, but not as cool as they could. The movie isn’t particularly spectacular, though it tries to be. The imagery is kind of distracting.

But not as distracting as the relentless breakaways to boring expositions about the characters’ backgrounds. I think way too many Hollywood people have been watching Netflix shows where they stuff three hours of drama into nine hours of episodes. Here’s how I wrote the People’s Republic novels – I made it all good parts. If it didn’t make you think, or laugh, or get your pulse racing, I cut it out. Here, something interesting happens, and all of a sudden the action comes to a flying stop for a five-minute dialogue scene with the characters in a head-on two-shot sitting on benches talking about their childhoods. It’s a movie called "Civil War." I don’t care about your feelings or these characters.

Garland’s objective in not having any discussion of the politics in "Civil War" was clearly to take politics out of the movie. But here’s the problem. It’s a movie about a civil war. You can’t take politics out of it. That’s the essence of it. To make an effective drama about it, you have to have a point of view. In interviews, all the actors denied that the movie had an agenda, and maybe that was what they intended. But that’s the problem. Without a clear point of view, none of it makes sense.

My books have a point of view. I’m a conservative, and the conservatives in the books are right. Not perfect. Not faultless. And not always nice. But generally right. The conservatives are the good guys. In my books, the red states are who you should be rooting for. You know that going in, and you can evaluate what I say on that basis. Am I right? Am I wrong? What am I missing? You don’t have to agree with me, but at least we have something to debate.

What’s not interesting is a bowl of mush. This was a missed opportunity. We’re at a very dangerous time in our country. That’s the point of my Second Civil War novels . That should be the point of this movie. But the movie is afraid to make a point because it doesn’t want to alienate anyone. And that’s why it’s a missed opportunity.

But conservative billionaires, you have an opportunity to make a real difference. Instead of wasting cash donating to DC think tanks like the Forum for Families, Liberty, Eagles, and Forums, throw a few million bucks behind some conservative movies. That was Andrew Breitbart’s hope – that we make quality, thought-provoking entertainment with a conservative message. Note the order – the thought-provoking and entertaining parts come before the conservative message part. And until we make our own movies, we’re going to be stuck with stuff like "Civil War."

Look, we need your help to keep up the fight by joining Townhall VIP right now. You get access to a bunch of great stuff, not the least of which is my extra  Wednesday column , the weekly  Stream of Kurtiousness  videos every Friday, my  Unredacted podcast  every Monday, my VIP members-only direct email address, and more! Join now! Use promo code KURT for 50% off membership.

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Road Trip (2000)

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Family road trips have been and will always be a call for laughs and adventure. Spending hours, trapped in a car with your family, in itself is enough to drive anyone bonkers let alone all of the drama that happens along the way. Here are the top 5 most cliché family road trip destinations.

Grand Canyon

One of the most beautiful and breathtaking places in the world, the Grand Canyon is the ideal location for a road trip. With its stunning views and sweeping panoramas, America's best known national park is likely to leave you speechless. Of course, this is usually where you run out of gas, in the middle of nowhere. An all too familiar predicament is when the needle on the gas meter magically hits the "E" zone. And, of course, this only happens on a long, desert-like road which barely has any other cars passing by. We often see that happen in the movies , and one would think to keep that gas tank well-fueled... but for some unexplained reason, we always forget to do so.

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For any dad passionate about history, Washington D.C. is the ultimate road trip destination! With its countless historical landmarks, D.C. is the perfect place to educate your children about American history. But before getting to the National Mall, you first have to find it! The scene where dad is fighting with a big map while driving and trying to find that "right" turn, is an all too familiar sight. It almost seems like those maps were made to get us lost and confused rather than guide us safely! Nowadays, we are lucky to have the GPS, this magical talking box that has saved so many family trips.

Mount Rushmore

Can you name the four American presidents carved on Mount Rushmore? If not, a road trip in South Dakota is a must! Thankfully, the Mount Rushmore National Memorial is not the only attraction in the area. The Custer State Park and its iconic buffaloes, the Black Hills, and the Badlands all feature some amazing sights. Of course, you cannot have your average family road trip without picking up some random teen hitchhiker on the way. The backseat is already crowded, but good old dad insists on making room for the poor soul standing on the side of the road. And while daddy drives, that poor guy does not hesitate in borrowing a few valuables from your car, maybe taking off with one of the kids' iPods or smartphone. If that unfortunate possibility is holding you back from organizing this road trip, let us tell you that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln are the ones with their faces sculpted in granite.

At the bottom of the Florida peninsula, the Everglades consist of 1.5 million acres of subtropical wilderness. Home to an impressive array of flora and fauna, the biodiversity in the Everglades is unique in many ways. According to National Geographic, the "Everglades National Park is the only place in the world where alligators and crocodiles co-exist." One of the best way to scare your children is to book an airboat tour, which will get you dangerously close to those creatures. But before you get there, "are we there yet?" and "I need to go to the bathroom" are the two phrases you will likely hear during your road trip. Ironically, bladders turn overactive on open roads where there isn't a gas station or restaurant in sight. "Just find a big bush and go for it." One thing for sure is what happens on the road, stays on the road... Just make sure not to get bitten by an alligator!

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With all the adventure and inevitable catastrophes that accompany any family road trip, there will always be many amusing stories (that you will only laugh at a few years down the road!). The next time you browse through your old memories , make sure to find pictures or recordings of your family road trips!