If you’ve read this newsletter for a while you might know that we have a son named Henry, and Henry is autistic. Nothing has changed our creative lives like Henry has, but we generally don’t foreground that in our conversations or professional talks. We made the decision long ago to always try to put Henry’s voice first and make sure his struggles and hard work, going from nonverbal to speaking, mattered more than anything we experienced as parents. But as Henry has grown older, his agency has also grown. One of those ways has been through filmmaking, where he’s learned the tools of communication, storytelling, cooperation, and flexibility. (And the occasional star fit—also an important skill.)

Three years ago Brian came back from a two-week location shoot and Henry, then eleven, asked “Can I make a movie too?” We gave him a budget of $100 and a choice of neighborhood locations in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He sat beside us and, with a few prompts, wrote script directions and suggested dialogue. Henry’s biggest inspiration was The Bad Guys book series, resulting in his own self-contained mythos, which is now at thirteen installments of freeform genre mashups. Like his inspiration, the Australian writer Aaron Blabey, Henry is aiming for twenty volumes. Perhaps not coincidentally, Henry and the Last Dinosaur 13: The Land Down Under is set in Australia. Though we filmed it in an old quarry in the Hudson Valley.

Early on, Henry began to build his life around film. (Wonder where he picked that up from?) Time had been a hard concept to grasp due to his autism and he used to hate it when we looked back at old photos. If we talked about the past, he would proclaim, “Back to the future now.” But writing down film release dates on the calendar for movies he wanted to see became his own understanding of how time works. Making films, and putting up with everything from our scheduling to waiting for batteries to charge, has taught him what time is: patience and effort.

While making his first films, dialogue was still difficult for Henry to perform and we had to help with voice over. Three years and many episodes later the budgets are still—mostly—$100, and filming days last about one hour of acting for him. But Henry is performing all his lines now and there is one more important milestone to this episode. This is the first script that Henry wrote completely—so we held back on adding notes like, “Are you sure you need another dinosaur battle?”

With the exception of a few improvised Australian beer jokes here, this is all Henry. We asked him for a message to the viewer, and he said: “Thank you! It’s awesome you’re watching my newest and latest release. I hope to see you again next time.”

He just came back to add, “Please subscribe to my channel” because he is our child.

Many thanks to Hannah Meyer, Olivia Jampol, Roberta Colindrez, Jennifer Makholm, and JD Davis for their help over the series.

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When A24 announced last month they were rebooting The Texas Chainsaw Massacre into several properties to be developed by Glen Powell, it came out in conversation that Emily Schultz had never seen Tobe Hooper’s 1974 film.

I think “film” is reductive here in describing Chainsaw. It’s more like Hooper weaponized experimental cinema and soundscapes to trap us in the worst day of anyone’s life, all to chronicle the downfall of the American dream. It’s an experiment in creating antimatter that has never been replicated. When Emily suggested Chainsaw as a Cinema Dirtbag commentary, I demurred. I thought maybe Emily was a better person for having never seen it. Then I watched Chain Reactions, a fascinating documentary that interviews superfans Patton Oswalt, Karyn Kusama, Takashi Miike, Stephen King, and critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas— the film writer who has most altered my way of thinking about genre over the years.

Heller-Nicholas recalled the gatekeeping she experienced as a young girl, how boys thought she could never handle Chainsaw and when she did watch it she realized, “This is for me too.” Having now called myself out on the fact I was replicating that gatekeeping with Emily, I cued up a destroyed 35mm grind house scan of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. (One of the cooler special features of Dark Sky’s blu-ray of Chain Reactions.)

In the words of the film’s tagline, who will survive and what will be left of them? Read on to find out.

EMILY SCHULTZ: I should say that I did see the ending of Texas Chainsaw Massacre—I walked in on my brother watching it and he was like: This isn’t for you! And I was banished out of the room.

BRIAN J DAVIS: And that is exactly what Heller-Nicholas was talking about! It’s almost “This isn’t for you Dewy” from Walk Hard. Now, the interesting thing is your novel Little Threats—can we do spoilers five years on?

ES: Sure.

BJD: It ends with a chainsaw accident! A sudden, shocking comeuppance by chainsaw if you will. And if I recall, this was never mentioned in any review!

ES: The only person who mentioned it was one of my ex-girlfriends! She liked it. She is also Australian. But I will say, I do think the imagery from that one brief glimpse at age ten stayed with me—enough to creep into my work.

BJD: I lucked out in that I didn’t see Texas Chainsaw Massacre until I was like, a solid fifteen. And I could actually appreciate the weird artistry of it and why Tobe Hooper was doing what he was doing. By fifteen, I’d seen Stan Brakhage movies from the library and taken out Edgard Varèse albums.

ES: I don’t think I saw Stan Brakhage movies until my late twenties.

BJD: These are just the facts of a Brian conversation—I’m going to drop shit like that. But Tobe Hooper was an underground hippie filmmaker in Austin. His film before this was called Eggshells and it is a beautiful, tedious, mix of James Broughton and Brakhage, set at a commune. And it was actually filmed in the same house as the nightmare family house in Chainsaw. I recommend watching it to see an almost mirror reverse film. But they wanted to make money, a PG horror movie that could play drive-ins.

ES: So it’s kind of like when we try to sell out. It goes bizarrely wrong?

BJD: Exactly. And they’re vegetarians also. And they think, “Wouldn’t it be funny if people were treated like cattle?”

ES: I imagine that humor doesn’t come through?

BJD: It does not. There’s not a lot of onscreen violence in it because they really were aiming for PG. The violence ended up in the filmmaking itself.

ES: And my impression, having not seen it, I always assumed that this was going to be the goriest movie there is.

BJD: So I wonder for you if this is going to be like how I didn’t see Citizen Kane until I was thirty-five?

ES: You didn’t. That’s right. I came from a black-and-white household.

BJD: And I realized there’s nothing in Citizen Kane that has not been picked to the bones.

ES: Oh, speaking of which, it’s a dug-up corpse. Well, this would have frightened me at the time.

BJD: Essentially what they did is they combined the story of Ed Gein with the Manson family, and ambient 1960s anger still lingering.

ES: Okay, this is an art movie.

BJD: Shots of solar storms, that atonal soundtrack. They’re getting at some Herzog-ian take on nature. That everything is chaos and terror or…maybe it’s just really sunny in Texas.

ES: This is going to be a talkie movie, is it?

BJD: All human communication and rationality will leave this film soon so ask your questions now.

ES: Okay, I’m getting ready for it. Oh, no.

[The Hitchhiker starts cutting his wrist and performs rituals in the van.]

BJD: Oh, you lived through the ’90s. In ’94, the Hitchhiker would have been an opening act in Lollapalooza. He would have had a spoken word album on Sub Pop.

ES: He’s gonna keep the picture in his mojo bag.

BJD: Being photographed is tantamount to being cursed, so therefore everyone in this movie is now cursed.

ES: Why did the Hitchhiker take such a disliking to Franklin in particular?

BJD: I think you just had a player-know-player moment. Why are insane people really attracted to you the most?

ES: Well, Franklin was the nice one making conversation with him. I feel like this could be a Flannery O’Connor short story.

BJD: Good catch. Like in a Flannery O’Connor story, there is a morality to this movie. Just not an easily recognizable one.

ES: Could you have a more obvious butt shot?

BJD: That’s not even the most famous butt shot in the movie.

ES: I just don’t understand why Franklin didn’t get out to wash off the cut.

BJD: Come on. We’ve toured a lot. Have you ever been to a gas station that makes you feel dirtier after using it?

ES: I forgot about Lodi, New Jersey.

BJD: As you can see, this is really a landscape movie. Like a Herzog or Terrence Malick film.

ES: It feels like it’s unfolding in real time. That’s adding to the immersion.

BJD: Time is how Tobe Hooper messes with us the most. Going from the pastoral pacing to well…we’ll get there. But as an adult, I see how bold a decision it was to have a disabled character in this movie. He’s experiencing a different movie than the rest are, and we’re feeling it.

ES: A built-in empathy?

BJD: I don’t want to ascribe empathy to this movie. I don’t think that’s one of the qualities! But I love Franklin. He’s the actor here who should have been a star.

ES: He’s starting to get paranoid about the symbols surrounding him.

BJD: He’s the only one reading the scene.

ES: You know, I have stopped at a farmer’s shed to get gas.

BJD: Like this hippie about to die?

ES: Yes. The guy that I was with, he was driving his mother’s vehicle, and the gas gauge wasn’t working properly, so we ran out of gas. And we had to go to a strange farmhouse.

BJD: And how’d that transaction go?

ES: Well, I just stayed in the car.

BJD: Smart!

ES: The tooth falling? Oh, that’s great. That’s creepy. They’re not going to get gas and then go see Macbeth like I did.

I’d much rather be traumatized by art than people. In fact, traumatizing myself with art over decades has taught me how to avoid being traumatized by people.

ES: I guess I’m not talking anymore.

BJD: I just was enjoying you being speechless during the scene. The first installation art murder set in film.

ES: Oh my God. Well, this is fucking terrifying.

BJD: They thought “As long as we don’t show much blood, we’ll get a PG rating.”

ES: They didn’t get a PG rating did they?

BJD: No, they did not.

ES: Not the guy who looks like Fred from Scooby-Doo! Before he goes into the house, he has to find something that will make him pause.

BJD: So I see the movie is now officially playing you like a piano…made of bones.

ES: I know! Even though I know exactly what will happen next I’m still “I really hope he doesn’t go into the house.”

BJD: I like to consider this movie from Leatherface’s perspective. As a few people have pointed out, it is a home invasion movie from his perspective and he’s just trying to survive. I think that’s part of the Flannery O’Connor vibe you’re picking up on.

ES: But he had that little feature wall with antlers drawing people in too.

BJD: Gunnar Hansen was the actor who played Leatherface. He was a local poet and really took the role seriously and he actually volunteered at a home for autistic adults to study their mannerisms. And the performance hits me a little different as an adult.

ES: As a parent now with some knowledge and understanding of autism, you can see that he’s playing it as if he’s dysregulated.

BJD: Exactly. And I accept that as part of the all-around discomfort of this film. Like you have to process the discomfort of watching this as a woman. But in most other films where it’s done lazily, it’s something I can’t stand anymore—the horror trope of the disabled child becoming a monster or killer.

ES: Was the idea of disability a discussion during the filmmaking?

BJD: I don’t think so. I think when you’re operating from a place of originality, things are going to happen, because you let them. We like to think there’s a grand plan to original, maverick art but it’s just that the people who made them were open to doing things differently.

ES: I have to ask you, since we’re watching a horror movie and she just ran away while her brother was getting cut up, what would you do? Would you run?

BJD: I think any Texan can see a chainsaw sticking out of someone and declare “Ain’t no intervention here.” Wait. Are you calling Sally “yeller” for running?

ES: I’m just saying, do you run towards the chainsaw or away from the chainsaw?

BJD: That’s the choice in life. Either you run towards the chainsaw or you run away from the chainsaw.

ES: So wait, she’s running to the house, not knowing what’s inside. So this is like the original slasher?

BJD: That’s debatable. I would say that Mario Bava’s Bay of Blood is the first. But this is definitely the first Final Girl.

ES: She’s got lots of pans in there though. I’m like, Get yourself a pan, girl.

BJD: See, you have the wisdom of fifty years of Final Girls to draw on. You read that frame in a primal second and said “Cast iron will kill. Check. Chili will scald an attacker. Check.”

ES: What is the radio saying…?

BJD: The radio throughout is nothing but murder news. Hooper is using every avant-garde technique, all of the senses, to alter our consciousness while watching. And of course a part of this was that there was terror in the production: 18-hour days, 90 degrees at night plus these hot tungsten film lights, in a house full of scavenged roadkill.

ES: Hear me out. Wouldn’t it be nice if he just tied her up, put her in a burlap sack to subdue her so that he can drive her out of here so that Leatherface doesn’t know that he’s got somebody in the truck with him?

BJD: Are you fantasizing about a happier ending? That’s the bargaining stage.

ES: Oh, is that the guy that they picked up? Wait, he’s not going to turn around and be a hero, is he?

BJD: No hope. Sorry.

ES: You had said earlier, quoting the critic, that boys would tell girls they couldn’t watch this movie. And that happened with my own brother. I kind of get that now during this dinner scene. The usual slasher films fall within my understanding of teenage horror movies. In this, you’re in a real nightmare. Which maybe you don’t want to know that feeling?

BJD: I kind of do. I’d much rather be traumatized by art than people. In fact, traumatizing myself with art over decades has taught me how to avoid being traumatized by people. Look, they’re bringing Grandpa down.

ES: Oh, that’s creepy. Everything in this movie is so creepy. Is she tied over top of another person?

BJD: She’s in an armchair made of arms. I’ve always likened this movie to that time I did PCP by mistake, thinking it was mescaline, but then I just kind of committed to it. Not an easy experience, but holy shit was it a trip.

ES: Oh, okay. Second window jump!

BJD: Admit it, if they did a third window crash it would have been hilarious. She’d be like, “Damn. I am good at jumping through glass windows.” But now, the artifice of filmmaking is coming back after that dinner scene.

ES: When I first walked in on the ending, I came in on that scene where Leatherface’s leg gets cut. And is that how this ends? She’s escaping in the back of truck, but now insane and he’s dancing with the chainsaw?

BJD: It’s a nice touch isn’t it?

ES: Holy shit. Just holy shit.

[After some processing time.]

ES: I would say it’s a very unique horror movie in that it does capture the psychotic violence that takes place in America that you’re always hoping you’ll never encounter. And I think that’s why I felt it so much at the end from her perspective, because this is your fucking nightmare. That you’re going to be captured, tortured and nearly killed, screaming in the back of a truck, being driven away after a night of terror. But let me ask, how was it to watch the movie with someone who hadn’t seen it before?

BJD: Exactly what I thought would happen happened. The film is kind of weird at first, and kind of stoner-ish and real-time, which let us make jokes with a false sense of security. And that would slowly fade away as the utter terror of the movie took over. So, hypothesis proven. Conclusion?

ES: Well, at least I can say I’ve now seen the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

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During the industry strike that inspired this Substack, we discovered Kristoffer Borgli’s Sick of Me, at a video store no less. We instantly bonded with the twisted Norwegian sensibility and, from our couch, even declared Borgli the new Buñuel. Of course, there are personal reasons for that, as you’ll see from our 2023 commentary that we’re re-posting here. In the film Signe works in a café in Oslo. Thomas, her oblivious boyfriend, is a conceptual artist getting famous for his installations of stolen furniture. Suffering as his nameless plus one at dinner parties and gallery openings, Signe hatches a Munchausian plan to attain her own media-friendly notoriety, one that includes taking a medication that will eventually alter her life.

It will be interesting to see how Borgli settles into studio filmmaking with The Drama, and its megawatt stars Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, when it releases this April 3rd.

Brian J Davis: Emily Schultz, what’s it like to have a boyfriend who is a famous conceptual artist?

Emily Schultz: I don’t know. It’s been so long since then.

BJD: I know! And I decided I want to talk about being shitty-famous and my shitty-famous breakdown ten years ago. I have never done this because the only thing worse than being shitty-famous, is talking about being shitty-famous.

ES: You should define shitty-famous versus—

BJD: It’s a couple of things. One, I’ve made some pretty good art in my time. But I got famous for my dumbest art. That doesn’t feel so good. Also, at the peak of everything, I was doing nothing but press for months, and it really wasn’t the same as having a good career. I was merely painfully available.

ES: Honestly, if anything, you made way more of a living as an artist when you were an unknown.

BJD: And that was feeding into my breakdown moment. I was being profiled by People Magazine, just like Chris Burden would be. At the same time your father was dying. So, I realized none of this matters. I just wanted to get through it, and maybe it would end. And then a couple of weeks after that I had a 12-hour day of interviews. Nine a.m. with the UK. Ended the day at 9 p.m. talking to someone in Australia. And then I lay down on the bed and screamed into the pillow because I never wanted to hear myself talking ever again. Then the next day I stopped. I kept my commitments and whatever exhibition schedule was set, but I decided I didn’t want this. I’m going back to writing. Being a DP. Anything. It took me a while to figure out I wasn’t upset with myself, or my work. It was the bullshit coming out of my mouth in order to partake in this thing.

ES: That’s the intensity of viral fame.

BJD: Fame is all viral now. Viral fame may be a redundant term.

ES: But there are famous people who are still permanently famous. We’re not them.

BJD: That’s celebrity. I constitutionally couldn’t be. I remember after my epiphany there’d be emails from Buzzfeed and The Guardian, or The Daily Mirror, and I would delete them, unread.

ES: What the fuck?

BJD: I would! And it was total freedom. And now that I realize that those emails aren’t coming back… I kind of regret that part a bit.

ES: It was also the worst year in my life and I know that only made things more stressful.

BJD: This is what this film really set off inside me. That I wanted to think about that time and how it changed us, almost physically.  And how culpable I was in it. I was entirely culpable! Being shitty-famous is an unforced error, like Signe in this film. But there is a difference between me and them.

ES: What’s the difference?

BJD: The difference is one day I lay down on the bed and screamed into the void I had manufactured.

ES: You’re right. There is an immense parallel between this movie and what was happening in our lives ten years ago. He’s getting famous. She is falling apart. Literally, pieces falling off of her.

BJD: I feel horrible about the gender dynamics that, despite your entire remarkable career, my quick burn internet fame was somehow important enough that your publisher at the time included me in your bio. 

ES: [Grumpily] Multiple publishers have included you in my bio.

BJD: I’d dump me at that point!

ES: It only made me work harder in order to defeat you.

BJD: There will be people who read this and say “Nice problems to have,” and that’s part of the problem too. That just reinforces that fame is the greatest value to achieve in life. Like, “How dare you consider it an illness or addiction?” You know what? You do a 2 a.m. Skype with German morning television. See how fulfilled it makes you.

ES: I don’t want us to portray this film as entirely about fame. It is about self and representation but also—

BJD: We haven’t even pressed play yet we’ve been thinking about it so much.

ES: Play it!

BJD: And welcome to Norway’s idea of a romantic comedy!

ES: This opening scene is playing so differently for me now that I know what’s going to happen.

BJD: They’re performing a dinner out as part of his art. It sets the tone for the entire film. And, interesting, she asks for credit as part of his art early on.

ES: This opening montage where he’s demeaning her in all these little ways.

BJD: And big ways.

ES: The resentment between them. It’s so well acted.

BJD: I wonder if that’s because of the no fuss no muss story. This is more or less a short story amount of plot and leaving that much space for the actors and not burying us with too much backstory keeps them in the moment all the time.

ES: Oh my god. The dog attack scene.

BJD: And she tells stories after about being the hero. This is why we’re so attached to her. As writers, we’re constantly polishing whatever story we need to tell during a day.

ES: Not just writers. Everyone is rewriting their experience now to suit their needs in whatever moment. The first time I saw this I thought she was so traumatized by the attack she couldn’t remember correctly.

BJD: She’s so alone that she needs to believe she was the hero. And that’s why we give her these 97 minutes. She’s covered in someone’s blood, and doesn’t clean up just so she can go home and maybe get her boyfriend’s attention. And even then—

ES: He takes so long! Agonizing minutes before he realizes she’s covered in blood. Really, now that I watch this a second time, I see that Signe is acting these moments.

BJD: I still feel sympathy for her, but nothing she is doing is accidental. She is contrived, but we’re all in a grandly contrived culture now.  Oh my God. Their food is so clean. I bet it was foraged.

ES: She’s saying the quiet parts out loud now at dinner parties.

BJD: Attention is giving her power! “At least it’s a small gallery, so the reception won’t look empty.”

ES: He did change the show title though, based on her criticism.

BJD: Everyone gets grace notes in this film. These are not cardboard characters acting out a thesis.

ES: The fake allergy scene. I love this scene. Actually, I’m in love with this entire movie.

BJD: You know, it was just ten or twelve years ago that only TV shows needed good ratings. People didn’t need ratings.

ES: Oh my god,  you’re right.

BJD: I looked at the reviews. Critics either loved the movie or they loathed it. And I think those ones did misinterpret it. In no way is it saying there aren’t people with lethal allergies, for example. It’s just charting Signe’s lowest common denominator approach for recognition.

ES: And he is still not acknowledging that she helped him with his art!

BJD: “I try not to let it control my life.” She’s starting to speak in prepared statements. There is a medical term for this happening in public. [Checks Google] Depersonalization! Seeing or hearing yourself in the third person. Have you ever felt that onstage or TV?

ES: I never felt that until I had to promote a novel during the pandemic. During Zooms I would feel lost in the moment, not sure if I was saying something I had said in a podcast that morning, or five minutes before.

BJD: I love everything about this movie. I would risk friendships to recommend this film.

ES: It puts us so completely in Signe’s world that we can’t help but empathize with her. We’re right there along with—

BJD: Her terrible decision making! Like deciding to take banned Russian antidepressants that cause a disfiguring skin disease, for attention.

ES: In the news article on the disease there was a flash frame of her with the condition. Everything in this movie so thought out.

BJD: It’s as streamlined as Ikea furniture.

ES: Everyone is this film is so disconnected or lonely. Even the dark web drug dealer wants Signe to hang out with him and his concerned mom.

BJD: And she does. Again, this film hands out the grace notes and it’s the secret to these kinds of characters.

ES: Lidexol. So White Noise.

BJD: One of the great reasons to buy the Blu-ray is the director interview and learning things like: Lidexol is based on the Norwegian word for “suffering.”

ES: That’s what really clicked in this film for me. What starts off as a game, or a crazy scheme, becomes an addiction.

BJD: Shout-out to Kristine Kujath Thorp. She’s performing a version of Signe “discovering” the onset of her skin disease, so it’s a performance within a performance and that is so fucking hard to do and she does it.

ES: One thing I want to say about that performance aspect of Signe is you can set out to do something so hurtful to yourself and still wind up genuinely helpless.

BJD: Let’s not forget to say: this movie is also completely hilarious.

[Thomas poses like a doofus during a photoshoot with stolen furniture he’s going to stack in a gallery.]

BJD: And that is shitty-famous, folks.

ES: It’s about vanity too. Look at him. He’s doing this while she’s destroying her beauty.

BJD: I don’t know if she’s destroying her beauty. During this first stage of her disease, her scarring is ornate and even floral.

ES: Well, she’s making herself more unique, I suppose?

BJD: Okay, here is my favorite thing this film does. As she’s making herself sick, she has all these fantasies of becoming famous for it: TV appearances, an alternative modeling career, a sold-out funeral. And when I first heard the plot of this film my expectations of what it would be like were more in tune to her fantasy scenes, and it’s not. Her fantasies fail. The film undercuts those. Her modeling career isn’t like the fantasy, it’s in fact a disaster. Her fantasy version of “success from illness” is what a lazier satirist would have stayed with.

ES: This is the best scene. This is every moment I’ve ever had with a doctor compressed into one.

BJD: A beautiful cameo from Anders Danielsen Lie, the costar of The Worst Person in the World. And now her sexy hospital selfie! My brain and heart have melted into a pool of confused awe.

ES: But her boyfriend hasn’t even told her friends she’s in the hospital.

BJD: And he brings her his cover story to make her feel better!

ES: “I mentioned you too. Not by name. But indirectly.”

BJD: One of my favorite scenes—he starts performing as the supportive boyfriend in front of a swooning woman on the bus.

ES: The sex scene. It’s such a tragedy. She fantasizes about him asking “How are you doing?” and it’s enough to make her orgasm. “Tell me about my funeral. Are people turned away?”

BJD: The critics who called this a cruel film aren’t that wrong. But it’s cruel with purpose, in the way Buñuel was.

ES: I feel like I’ve known so many of these characters. Intimately.

BJD: It has the simplicity of a myth to it. She gets what she wants. She’s famous. Then she destroys it because she can’t stop making herself sicker.

ES: That’s really my take. It’s about addiction, not to drugs, but to behavior.

BJD: My favorite boyfriend moment. He asks her not use that corner of their apartment for her interview and photoshoot because that’s where he did his interview and photoshoot!

ES: The face-melting nightmare. Got me again.

BJD: The key to Signe is that she doesn’t have inauthentic emotions. Even if she’s causing her own illness, she’s feeling things authentically. Thomas tells her—casually, offhandedly—that he thinks she’s brave for publicly talking about her skin disease and she breaks down. It’s the greatest moment of her life.

ES: This is my favorite image in the film. Walking across the square in slow motion, famous, tossing her hair. She’s disfigured herself for this moment, but she’s ecstatic. And now, like a novelist at Barnes & Noble, she’s arranging her magazine cover to be on top.

BJD: You know, maybe this is the remake of A Star is Born that we actually needed. A really dark, Norwegian comedy version of a A Star is Born.

ES: Now he’s walking into a furniture store despite the fact he is famous in Norway for stealing furniture.

BJD: He can’t stop. Neither of them can stop.

ES: I’m not questioning it. I’m marveling at it!

BJD: Now her interview scene at the diverse modeling agency. It is as good, if not better than any Buñuel/Carriere scene for impeccable farce. Every beat is perfect and I can’t even breathe while watching it. Here’s an example of cruelty with purpose. It’s the modeling agent who is so cruel but she thinks she’s the best person in the world.  She’s going to injure her arm patting herself on the back.

ES: Signe is asking her friends to toast to her bravery and modeling contract. This isn’t a fantasy?

BJD: It isn’t. She’s really like this now. “Thanks. We know what H&M is.” Scandinavian shade is the coldest.

ES: When I saw this before, I thought she and Thomas were on the same side—but they’re not. He’s only angry at the friends for what they say about him.

BJD: During the photoshoot she almost wins. I love that they let her get so close to a win, with everyone sharing these “I can’t believe she’s actually good” expressions, before it all falls apart again.

ES: Is bleeding from the scalp normcore?

BJD: And that’s how you feel after a 12-hour interview day! I think this fashion shoot crew are cowards. Benetton would be photographing the hell out of her collapsed on the ground in a puddle of blood. That would be a Benetton centerfold in 1993.

ES: I never did it, but I remember girls literally collected Benetton ads for their lockers.

BJD: They’re such a forgotten part of radicalization in the 1990s. All things aside, “Regardless” is an amazing name for an overpriced bullshit fashion line.

ES: I said before her fantasies are about connecting. I take that back. Not in this fantasy when she confesses everything and gets a book deal.

BJD: She’s hoping to do the American-style hustle of playing both sides of sin and redemption. But it’s not going to work in Europe! These people invented Krampus.

ES: I’m surprised that the boyfriend sticks around through everything.

BJD: Again, this movie actually has so much heart. They have each other.

ES: I think it might not be the best relationship.

BJD: Show me a good relationship!

ES: I’m trying!

BJD: We all are.

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For all the thousands of vampire films out there it’s surprising not one of them has won a non-technical Oscar yet—especially given how deep the mythos sits in our collective psyche, drawing on the cinematic appeal of sex, death, and otherness. The genre is so worn in and pliable that it has long given filmmakers a framework to say whatever they want, from the profound to the insipid, at budgets of 10 bucks to tens of millions. The only rule for inclusion here is that one of us had to have seen the movie, even if we occasionally needed a YouTube clip reminder. If we’ve missed your favorite, take wing to the comments section.

JUMP TO THE TOP 20

45. Zoltan - Hound of Dracula (1977)

BRIAN J DAVIS: I bet you didn’t know that Dracula had a dog?

EMILY SCHULTZ: And he had trouble rehoming him?

BJD: The hilarious thing is a studio would now make a movie this stupid, but spend $60 million and take the fun out of it.

44. Underworld (2003)

BJD: Social commentary! But the filmmaking is everything I hate about the aughts: Matrix teal, big beats, mall bondage wear, British actors saying ridiculous things.

ES: Action as a genre is really forgettable. I have a gun. I jump through the air.

BJD: Harsh.

ES: This is much more action than horror. And how dare they do this to Bill Nighy and Michael Sheen.

43. Andy Warhol’s Blood for Dracula (1974)

BJD: After Udo Kier died, I revisited this one. He is hilarious in this.

ES: Dracula as a needy stunt queen. It works!

42. Blade II (2002)

BJD: Okay, Blade I or II? Which is better? This is going to be a battle of “blood rave” versus “Massive Attack and Mos Def” entrance music! I still work out to that track.

ES: This film seems so generic now!

BJD: Come on. We only went to see Blade II because you’re such a del Toro fan girl.

41. Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter (2001)

BJD: Low-budget and high charm from Canada’s capital city Ottawa! We saw it at the Bloor Cinema in Toronto, mostly because you lived across the street at the time.

ES: My favorite thing was being able to read what was playing on the marquee from my living room window. So this is…like Suicide Girls meets Monty Python?

BJD: I’m including this mostly because I’m happy someone had fun in Ottawa somehow.

40. Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat (1989)

BJD: I saw this back on VHS and don’t know why it’s not a more well-known cult hit. There are a few vampire Westerns, though one would think vampires would avoid deserts.

39. Vampire’s Kiss (1988)

ES: I was really into Nicolas Cage when I was in eighth grade, because of Raising Arizona, and sort of remember this, but also, don’t.

BJD: I rewatched it a couple of years ago. It is not as good as I remembered. Insane Cage performance: Yes! But the satirical bite, if you will, is kind of weak. It’s a comedy but not funny.

38. Ferat Vampire (1982)

ES: Wow. This is very ’80s. Cars were so loved they’re alive, and in this film, undead.

BJD: In Soviet Union, car drains you!

37. Interview with the Vampire (1994)

ES: In the words of Norm MacDonald, “Not gay enough!”

BJD: I saw this in Detroit with a row full of Detroit goths in front of me. Real ones with fang implants, and like crows in their hair. And they were shouting “Bullshit!” and “This sucks!” throughout. They screamed like they had been staked when Guns N’ Roses came on during the credits.

36. Vamp (1986)

ES: Cliff from My Bodyguard!

BJD: Rudy from Meatballs!

ES: I definitely saw this at a sleepover. It’s After Hours, “but make it vampires.”

BJD: You could say it’s an analogy about a group of young men who travel to a club downtown and become part of a community that likes dancing, Grace Jones, and Keith Haring art.

35. John Carpenter’s Vampires (1998)

BJD: The closest we’ll get to “Cormac McCarthy’s Vampires.” But still, kind of on the waning end of Carpenter’s powers.

ES: That’s the problem of having made some of the greatest films of the ’80s—the bar is high and yes, I’d rather watch The Thing.

34. From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)

ES: Only…and I mean only in the 1990s could this movie have existed.

BJD: I can’t believe you haven’t seen this, because: Salma Hayek dance. [Cues up on YouTube]

ES: Okay, my jaw went slack for a minute. No! Not the toes! I need a Magic Mike chaser.

33. Love at First Bite (1979)

BJD: I checked with my mom and apparently when I was six and we watched this on the ABC Movie of the Week together, and I loved it way too much…. Richard Benjamin, the communism jokes. That was the first time she thought, “This one is the weird kid.”

32. Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010)

BJD: Okay, back in the aughts it’s safe to say we’re total snobs, far above anything to do with Twilight.

ES: Correct. But then we end up jumping in on the third movie, totally lost. Why do My Chemical Romance control all the vampires? Why is Anna Kendrick in this for one scene? Why are Abercrombie & Fitch models fighting?

BJD: What happened was my niece was staying with us and how do you entertain a then 14-year-old? We take her to Twilight: Eclipse. And I have to say, seeing the movie through her eyes? She believed in all-powerful love for two hours. And that’s when I accepted the power of Twilight.

31. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)

BJD: You’re not a fan of this movie?

ES: There was so much hype leading up to it, and then for me it was such a letdown. I’m not dissing on actors I love, but in a vampire movie, you want chemistry.

BJD: Oh, I think wolf-mode Gary Oldman had lots of chemistry!

30. Requiem for a Vampire (1972)

ES: Oh I remember this one. They end up in a saucy castle. It’s episodic right?

BJD: “Dreamlike” would be charitable. The only Jean Rollin film that is almost a proper film. There’s no beating the surreal opening of two clowns having a gunfight.

29. Abigail (2024)

BJD: I’m still angry about this. A great fun movie kneecapped at the box office by a horrible ad campaign.

ES: It will be a cult film one day.

28. The Blood Splattered Bride (1972)

BJD: You know, girl meets vampire girl, they kill men, make out in a grave. That idea.

ES: Every woman has that moment in her life, that’s why these plots are popular!

27. Blade (1998)

ES: Oh my god, Stephen Dorff, the blood rave…. The sequel has a young and clean-looking Norman Reedus. But this really is the best Blade.

26. Def by Temptation (1990)

ES: It’s Dwayne Wayne!

BJD: Def by Temptation is awesome. It’s nearly a Spike Lee film—Ernest Dickerson as DP, Samuel L. Jackson. And it looks like an ultra-violent Luther Vandross video.

ES: I didn’t see this. But why didn’t I see this!

25. Nadja (1994)

BJD: As close to a Hal Hartley vampire film as you can get. Elina Löwensohn, Martin Donovan.

ES: It’s gorgeous. I need to watch this now that I have a TV larger than nine inches.

BJD: I’m on my second Pixelvision camera that I bought that doesn’t work! I’m jealous they got theirs to work.

24. Blacula (1972)

BJD: Blacula is exploitation as much as Ganja & Hess is authentic, but still there’s so much awesome. The slow-motion vampire running down the hall? Childhood nightmares courtesy of WKBD Detroit.

23. Cronos (1992)

ES: Ron Perlman! You just don’t have a del Toro movie without him!

BJD: Really, this is every girl’s relationship with their grandfather. “What’s that weird machine connected to you? Are you dead?”

22. Lifeforce (1985)

BJD: People can read our full talk about this one here, but I’ll leave it with your memorable blurb…

ES: It’s like a horny Ghostbusters.

21. The Lost Boys (1987)

BJD: Okay, Lost Boys. I don’t get your love for it.

ES: It’s like a giant grilled cheese sandwich. There’s nothing original, but all the elements are satisfying.

BJD: This is your Highlander. I accept it.

ES: Exactly.

20. Shadow of the Vampire (2000)

ES: I think this is fused in my mind with Herzog’s version of Nosferatu.

BJD: But this one has Cary Elwes as the cinematographer saying the immortal line, “The camera is loaded…and so am I.” And of course, Willem Dafoe would go on to…

19. Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu (2024)

ES: I admit it. I fell asleep.

BJD: An honest response to the first half. That part really put me off in how traditional it was then…Robert Eggers goes the full Georges Bataille’s Eroticism, and it is lunatic, and worth waiting for.

ES: I will rewatch.

18. Alucarda (1977)

BJD: Mexico knows how do a vampire movie: Nuns on fire, goat men, exorcisms, blood-drenched vampires. Frolicking in a glen.

ES: I’d roll down a hill with Alucarda too!

17. Vampyros Lesbos (1971)

ES: It’s really the soundtrack, isn’t it?

BJD: Life-changing music! Maybe I like vampire movie soundtracks better than vampire movies. But Jess Franco actually made good movies, better than this. She Killed in Ecstasy is amazing.

ES: Lesbian vampires do not move quickly.

BJD: As in mortal life!

ES: You know what, if this was all you had before the internet…it really delivers on the title.

16. Rod Hardy’s Thirst (1979)

BJD: I really like this Australian gem. It’s a TV movie budget, but it’s about an elite group of blood drinkers searching for a new leader—a descendent of Elizabeth Báthory who has no idea she is. It’s more emotionally intense than you think. And the human farm scenes with all these Australian hippies!

ES: We’re maybe only two years away from the discovery there really are blood drinking elites.

BJD: Salmon sperm is a slippery slope. Next is “Hey guys, working-class blood on the skin gives it such a sheen.”

15. Park Chan-wook’s Thirst (2009)

ES: Holy shit, I remember that was an intense film.

BJD: All Park Chan-wook’s films are beloved, except for this one and I don’t know why. It really pushes the vampire conventions.

14. Ganja & Hess (1973)

ES: Okay, I can’t say if I saw this or not, but there are images in this that are very burned in my mind. I must have.

BJD: This is another gem I saw because we grew up outside of Detroit and WKBD played this once a month. I believe my first joint at fourteen was while watching this at one in the afternoon. And it’s still astounding.

ES: This is what you get when you ask an artist for a horror movie.

13. Habit (1998)

ES: We saw this at a film festival held in a mental health hospital.

BJD: But we weren’t patients there! They just had a cool festival.

ES: I remember really liking it.

BJD: It’s one of the better vampire-as-addiction films. And a great 1990s NYC indie time capsule—“Kelly Reichardt as Party Girl.”

12. Kiss of the Damned (2012)

BJD: This is a great film from Xan Cassavetes. I think it’s the only contemporary movie to capture 1970s Euro-cult: the music and mood is stunning.

ES: This movie is about how hot you’ll get for someone and overlook every red flag. Good date movie.

11. Lair of the White Worm (1988)

BJD: My first Ken Russell movie! According to Hugh Grant, Russell was hammered by noon every day and would tell the cast, “The script is shit, so make it up.”

ES: I hated this the first time you made me watch it. Ten times in, I’m coming around to it.

BJD: There are pagan priestesses with strap-ons and it is still not the weirdest Hugh Grant movie.

ES: Which one is?

BJD: Have you seen Love, Actually?

10. Salem’s Lot (1979)

ES: I didn’t see this as a kid. I saw it as an adult. But if I had seen it as a kid…it probably would have been as formative for me as The Exorcist was for you.

BJD: I was a creepy floaty vampire kid, so this representation really speaks to me still!

9. Sinners (2025)

ES: It’s not a perfect movie. But it’s a really entertaining one.

BJD: Again, the music history montage—sublime.

ES: The ending is a little rough around the edges.

BJD: Novelists! You’re never happy with endings.

8. The Hunger (1983)

BJD: How can I account for discovering Bauhaus, Catherine Deneuve, and male-gaze lesbianism all in one film?

ES: This movie tells the truth. When two women kiss for the first time, opera music plays out of nowhere.

BJD: My favorite Hunger story is that mega producer Don Simpson was up on coke at 4 a.m. when The Hunger came on cable and he thought it was the best movie ever made, then hired Tony Scott that morning to direct Top Gun.

7. Byzantium (2012)

BJD: If you like what risks Sinners took with the vampire mythos, you’ll love Byzantium.

ES: Vampires go to gender studies!

BJD: Vampire Women versus the Vampire Manosphere.

ES: Caleb Landry Jones and Saoirse together, that is some twee hotness!

6. Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)

ES: I like this more with every rewatch—it’s a subtle vampire movie. And again, about addiction.

BJD: Addiction to art! Which is a message I love, and I love how much it loves Detroit for what it is. It doesn’t project.

5. Daughters of Darkness (1971)

BJD: The Citizen Kane of Belgian lesbian vampire movies.

ES: I still can’t believe Delphine Seyrig leaves her vampire girlfriend for the boring blonde!

4. Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)

BJD: I’ll say it. Werner Herzog’s best narrative film. He dives fully into German consciousness and gives us an apocalyptic movie about fascism as an infection.

ES: Damn. The images in this film. The caskets on the ship and the rats. Haunting.

3. Let the Right One In (2008)

ES: I really love this film.

BJD: It is so profoundly haunting. Only Scandinavians could make the most heartbreaking kinder-vampire movie.

ES: It’s a testament to the power of loneliness.

BJD: Okay, let’s watch the cat lady scene, because there is humor in it!

2. Near Dark (1987)

ES: The most perfect vampire movie. It is everything you want in a vampire movie.

BJD: The Wild Bunch as vampires. Flat out, the fucking best. Bill Paxton, The Cramps, Tangerine Dream, Kathryn Bigelow.

1. What We Do in the Shadows (2014)

BJD: How can you make another vampire movie after this?

ES: I don’t know how to talk about things I genuinely love.

BJD: The secret to this movie is that it’s not just funny. There is melancholic gravity throughout.

[Emily bursts out laughing]

ES: No there’s not.

BJD: There are stakes to the storytelling!

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We watch a lot of movies to entertain our readers. We also watch a lot of movies as writers and producers. That leaves precious little time to keep up on new films watched together, just for fun. It may have taken several nights to watch most of these, but we did out best. Here’s our 2025 in fun watches.

THE MONKEY

Directed by Osgood Perkins

BRIAN J DAVIS: I think I maybe had a bit more of a profound experience with The Monkey than you. I’m just so into the idea of a two-act movie lately. The three-act is just feeling so bloated and slow to me creatively. I’ve noticed a few movies lately have been using this two-act structure, and that’s one of the things I liked about The Monkey. That and the pacing of the storytelling.

EMILY SCHULTZ: You’re seeming to imply that I didn’t get into this movie and that’s absolutely false. I thought it was fantastic and weird and I loved how graphic it was and how it had… they weren’t even jump scares.

BJD: Splat scares?

ES: That’s good. Act II did kind of bother me. But I still love the movie.

BJD: We’re professional problem solvers for storytelling. Can we ever really enjoy a movie?

ES: No. Even movies I enjoy, I’m lying in bed later and I’m trying to rewrite certain scenes.

BJD: Readers should pity us! One more thing about The Monkey is that it gets at something close to profound: the aleatory nature of life and death. I think specifically in the first half of the film, focusing on childhood, this is done so well. And I’ll just put this back to your criticism of the second half, it’s dropped a little bit when we get into the plotty details of what’s happening.

ES: It’s still exhilarating to see big ideas in a horror movie.

BONE LAKE

Directed by Mercedes Bryce Morgan

BJD: I just thought this was a classic nasty-ass, nihilistic horror film. And a total blast. You don’t get that from the trailer, which presents it as a little on the generic erotic thriller side.

ES: I liked it because it’s so sure of itself. She took a very simple setup that you see in a lot of horror movies: limited cast at a house on a lake and she did something different.

BJD: You know what you’re seeing is a small-resources movie, but she ended up with a big movie feel. And that comes from talent and the wherewithal to make it happen.

ES: An absolute shameless joyride of a horror movie.

BJD: Look at you go, Gene Shalit! I think the great thing is we don’t really know what’s happening for a solid half hour.

ES: It’s a slow build. And the other thing that I really loved about it is that they were willing to actually use the relationships for horror. A couple’s sexual problems or their miscommunications become the horror. With someone preying on whatever their insecurities are.

BJD: Readers, if you’re going to do Bone Lake as a couple’s watch, you should be rock solid. No cracks. Because this movie will chip away.

ES: The other thing that I want to say about the movie is that when it got to the climax, it just went for it.

BJD: And I don’t think a single movie has ever used The Exploited on the soundtrack before. [Correction to self: Alan Clarke’s Made in Britain, and you own it on DVD.]

ES: What song is that?

BJD: “Sex and Violence.” And this will let me tell you the story of why I have never gotten a tattoo.

ES: Right, Mr. Punk. You have none. And somehow I have four!

BJD: So, the reason is this. At age 14 I’m at a party at this punk house. And a guy named Dennis just got out of jail where he had learned how to make a homemade tattoo gun out of a toy motor and a pen casing. And he was giving out tattoos at this party. Now, I’m in line for this and if it actually happened—a tattoo at 14 is pretty baller, in theory. But the tattoo I’m going to get is the Exploited logo. A Mohawked skull. And the only reason this didn’t happen is that Dennis passed out before he got to me. And for years afterwards I thought, Holy shit, I almost got an Exploited tattoo—the cheesiest punk band ever. I can’t be trusted with tattoo ideas for the rest of my life.

ES: And that’s the reason you don’t have a tattoo?

BJD: Or hepatitis.

FRANKENSTEIN

Directed by Guillermo del Toro

BJD: When I made the Frankenstein image for the Composites project, I got an email from a novelist and she told me, “THIS is the Frankenstein Monster who can quote Milton. And he can get it.” I didn’t know until that moment people thirsted after the Monster! And I don’t know if Guillermo del Toro saw my Hot Frankenstein. I was only going by Mary Shelley’s description, and I’m sure he did as well, along with a lot of Bernie Wrightson. But I do think del Toro cast it perfectly. And Jacob Elordi is great in this. If I walked away with anything it’s the skill of Jacob Elordi’s physical performance.

ES: So, you think he should get some award noms?

BJD: I think it’s entirely possible. Actors do like to reward transformation and physical work in acting.

ES: I have to say, I adore Guillermo del Toro. Love all his films. This was not my favorite among them.

BJD: Is it because he combined Frankenstein with Wuthering Heights?

ES: No…more that it got into, like, “Frankenstein on the therapist’s couch,” a little bit too much.

BJD: I was thinking about that after. That every era gets the Frankenstein movie it deserves. James Whale’s version was the class anxiety Frankenstein. This is the emo Frankenstein. And anti-war Frankenstein, a theme that goes back to del Toro’s Spanish-language films.

ES: I think I liked his relationship with Mia Goth. I don’t think I liked his relationship with his creator.

BJD: Well, are you interested in any man’s relationship with his father? Or is that just, like, a no-go area?

ES: That might be a no-go area for most women.

BJD: “Just don’t even talk about his father. He made him from corpse parts and then abandoned him before going to his new family. Father’s Day is rough for him, okay?”

SINNERS

Directed by Ryan Coogler

BJD: Given that this was the year that the entire industry was kept alive with horror films, would it behoove the Academy to acknowledge Sinners?

ES: I would like to see it acknowledged because, one, the acting was fantastic. Two, the costumes were fantastic. The music was fantastic. And it was just a hell of a lot of fun. I also thought the twin dynamic was well done, and I loved that the film is not going to spare the characters you like just because you like them.

BJD: The scene where they go through Black music history through the centuries. To me, that’s not just the best scene of the year. That’s one of the best scenes in movies ever.

BLACK BAG

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

BJD: I want to talk about this young director, Steven Soderbergh. I’ve really liked following this kid’s stuff ever since he complimented my cinematography I did for a friend of his. Or so I’ve been told.

ES: You’re going to go there?

BJD: How else is that going to get out there in the world other than me spreading it?

ES: So Black Bag was really interesting because it had that sort of vintage feel of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

BJD: But this is Michael Fassbender. So, it’s George Smiley after an Armani glow-up.

ES: It’s a very attractive cast all around. We were talking about acts, and the only thing about this was that I kind of wished it had…not so much another act, but another turn.

BJD: A part of me was thinking along those lines. What if this had those Soderbergh time jumps he now avoids?

ES: Maybe he finished with time jumps by doing Mosaic? Maybe it’s the one thing you just never want to touch again after something as complex as that series.

BJD: The plot of Black Bag is aggressively ABCD, but isn’t that kind of the appealing part of a fun watch? That tidiness is down to David Koepp. Koepp writes blockbusters so he doesn’t get the artistic accolades for his scripts that he should. But if you look at any of his great scripts—Panic Room, Death Becomes Her, his work with De Palma. They’re master classes in what makes a script work. Each scene just falls into perfect place.

ES: I will say that one of the best scenes is the couple breaking up. The breakup scene between Regé-Jean Page and Naomie Harris was phenomenal.

BJD: And the opening dinner party scene, which I almost wished was the entire movie: spy couples at a dinner party!

ES: But the rest is great as well. Especially how the relationships are drawn between the couples.

BJD: We’re framing this as movies we watched for fun this year. So why do you keep watching a movie when you put it on? For me, it’s a hook like the dinner party in Black Bag.

ES: I think that not everyone feels that way, Brian. Once they start a movie, they finish it no matter what.

BJD: I guess I watch movies by myself like a manic DJ! Music on headphones. Movie muted on screen. And I’m also writing.

ES: Like a complete immersive experience?

BJD: Exactly. And one more thing about Black Bag. You’re drawn to any movie in the 90-minute range.

ES: I love a movie that knows what it should be.

BJD: But again, this comes back to the time that we have. I remember when I realized our movie watching lives had changed after parenthood. When it took us three nights to watch Tootsie together!

ES: How long is that?

BJD: 116 minutes, including credits.

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The signs have been accumulating for more than a year.

The in-crowd millennials of The Drift wrote a squib on their Instagram about discovering Trust. Gawker founding editor Elizabeth Spiers deployed “Theory of Achievement” in the New York Times to shame Gen X bros who had careened to the right. I even heard the filmmaker is blurbing a friend’s novel. Is the Hal Hartley revival finally afoot?

Yes and probably—ultimately—no. (It’s been tried before). But in case I’m wrong I want to get down what Hal Hartley was before it arrives and everyone has their own ideas. Such an exercise would be possible for other ’90s auteurs, of course. What did it mean to see Reservoir Dogs (1992) the week it opened or to see Rushmore (1998) before Wes Anderson became an adjective? But Hartley has managed to remain that most important thing to Gen Xers: a shibboleth. A secret handshake exchanged by those in on the bit. To persist as shibboleth is not easy. (Maybe Jim Jarmusch has succeeded?) One must avoid dated irrelevancy on the one hand (has anyone heard from Neil LaBute?) and commercial self-parody on the other. (Pick an Anderson.)

Hal Hartley does have a new movie out. His first feature since Ned Rifle (2014), the conclusion of the Henry Fool trilogy. Did you know that? I suspect that either you did not know that or have known it for so long that you now suspect I am a poser. (That’s what shibboleth-speakers call people who have gained, but not earned, access to the shibboleth. Tedious, but it comes with the territory.) It’s called Where to Land, he paid for it via Kickstarter—as he has for his projects since Ned Rifle—and I doubt a large audience will see it. Hartley produces and sells his own box-sets and offers his movies via streaming on his website, but the new one isn’t there yet. It had a handful of screenings at the Roxy Cinema in New York, which is where I saw it.

I loved it, and you if you like Hal Hartley, you will too. Hartley is an acquired taste, and seeing the new movie made me recall the experience of first seeing Trust (1990) and Simple Men (1992), the final two movies in his so-called Long Island Trilogy. Actors don’t exactly act in Hal Hartley movies. They say their lines and are. Robert Bresson, who preferred the term “models” to “actors” is often brought up in connection with Hartley, and while that is a good starting point, Hartley has a much lighter touch. He calls his preferred delivery “without interpretation” in a nod to (known Bresson stan) Susan Sontag. The spine of Benjamin Moser’s Sontag biography also seems to appear on every bookshelf in Where to Land.

Starting in the late ’80s, Hartley developed a troupe of performers who mastered the technique. Martin Donovan became his Jean-Pierre Léaud and Adrienne Shelly his Anna Karina. While his inspirations are many, I mostly see ’60s Godard, Band of Outsiders¹or Masculin Féminin, but with less protective coolness. “I find I’m having a kind of dialogue with Godard by trying to describe what’s beautiful in his work,” Hartley has said. “Of course, even if I try to imitate it, I get it wrong, because I fall into my own groove.” Hartley’s relationship to Godard is something like Jonathan Richman’s relationship to Lou Reed. Deep influence fueled by an entirely different source.

The immediate effect of deadpan delivery is estrangement, which is often leavened—as in Godard or Tarantino—with a wink of knowingness that makes it more palatable to everyone. Hartley more frequently risks skipping this second layer, and it is a tangible risk. The first time I saw Trust, I remember thinking, “Is this awful or the most exhilarating movie I have ever seen?”

Where Hartley is concerned, everything rests on how you answer this question.

To do so, comparison with Kevin Smith’s roughly contemporaneous Clerks (1994) is useful. While its charm has grown on me over the years, Clerks is not a good movie. The acting is not good. It is an example of naive art made by a team working at the edge of their capacities, sort of like The Ramones. The proof of this is that the acting in Smith’s later movies, none of which I can bring to mind, got better with investment and experience. (Again, like The Ramones.)

In a Hal Hartley movie, on the other hand, the actors deliver their lines in a stilted, expressionless way because that’s the way he wants them to do it. It is not an accident or a deficiency. It is the vision. The proof of this is that the vision has hardly wavered in almost forty years.

From the opening scene of Where to Land we know we are in the Hal Hartley cinematic universe.2 Rom-com director Joe Fulton (Bill Sage) talks to cemetery groundskeeper Leonard (Robert John Burke) about a job he doesn’t need and will do for free. Before the scene ends, Leonard has uttered the verbatim definition of “husbandry” from the dictionary and Joe has written it down.

We are in the hyper verbal, definitional space of Trust, just many years later.

From Trust:

MARIA: Did you mean it? Would you marry me?

MATTHEW: Yes.

MARIA: Why?

MATTHEW: Because I want to.

MARIA: Not because you love me or anything like that, huh?

MATTHEW: I respect and admire you.

MARIA: Isn’t that love?

MATTHEW: No. That’s respect and admiration. I think that’s better than love.

The effect now is the same as it was then, but what is it exactly? Where to Land includes a scene that lampoons—or perhaps attempts to exert prior restraint upon—such questions. Fulton meets with an academic who wants to write a book about his films and wants his participation. He doesn’t think she needs him. She tries to impress him with her view of how his distancing is some sort of Brechtian defamiliarization, and keeps talking until she concludes that Fulton has no method that he would be able to elucidate. In the end, they agree. He is not needed.

The plot, based on a misunderstanding that Fulton is dying when he is merely writing a will, takes all the screwball turns, and provides plenty of easter eggs. A poster for Flirt appears in his lawyer’s office. Two young filmmakers see Fulton and seem vaguely aware of the plot points of Trust. In the end, Fulton embarks on a project that is Hartley’s unrealized series turned novel Our Lady of the Highway.

Of course, there is a Hartley method and an effect, whether he wishes to authorize its discussion or not. You can feel it. Call it depth from flatness. There have always been rules of thumb that point in its direction.

“Show don’t tell.”

“If you cry, the audience won’t.”

Ernest Hemingway is the controlling authority here, at least in prose, who transmitted it to the present via postmodernists and minimalists like Donald Barthelme and Raymond Carver. Combined with philosophical dialogue, the effect is distinct, and can be found as a tool used by the Coen brothers, Aaron Sorkin (cf. Sports Night), Chuck Palahniuk, David Rabe, Lydia Davis, and others.

But Hartley’s work is an exhibition—perhaps the exhibition in film—of this principle pushed to its limit. Why does it work? I’m struggling, as Hartley did with Godard, “to describe what’s beautiful in his work.”

I have heard it said that if you have a hard heart, you will have thin skin, but if you have an open heart you will have thick skin. Paradoxically, then, though the surfaces of Hartley’s films are cool, the overall effect is of an expansive vulnerability.

Where to Land is a midlife crisis movie, with all the themes of death and regret, and Hartley faces them head on, neither undermining nor overdetermining them. The effect is the sublime breeziness that pervades all of his movies. And, I would suggest, one only gets to it if one lets go of knowingness completely.3

Godard’s Masculin Féminin is among the coolest media productions of all time, prefiguring the modernist chic of post-punk and beyond, the Europe of the mind—which mostly lived on in the British pop of that later New Wave.4

But there is no vulnerability—at least not for the men, who interrogate the women relentlessly—only knowingness. To retain Godard’s distancing but head toward vulnerability risks getting stuck in the uncanny valley of mawkishness. I understand why so few attempt it, and why watching such attempts might be intolerable for some. “Thoughtful people laugh because it’s a shock to be reminded how the obvious is avoided in everyday life,” Hartley’s fictional academic suggests. “Unthoughtful people are maybe a little unsettled, not sure if they understand.”

The incentives to abort, for both director and audience, are tremendous. But Hartley understands that, once started, the only risk is stopping, of not going all the way, of abandoning the bit.

To stay with it, to go all the way, you have to have an incredible amount of trust.

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In his book Jackpot, author Michael Mechanic argues that the extraordinary sudden wealth of Silicon Valley and Wall Street is having profound effects on the not just the very rich but everyone else. (And for the middle class this era’s lust for premium, posh, and top-drawer everything is starting to clash against the dying myth of social mobility.) But how do the billionaires feel in this new gold rush moment? Other than Mechanic’s book there is scant research on how oligarchs think of their wealth, and how its sudden arrival changes them.

We do, however, have movies and billionaires can seem more real there than they do in life.

All movies inspired by William Hearst or Howard Hughes are essentially nepo-baby stories. There Will Be Blood is a portrait of a man who does not change, no matter his material wealth—it’s everyone else around him that changes. Bob Hoskins in The Long Good Friday is a Cockney gangster looking to level up to founder mode in Thatcher’s Britain, but a single bad day and a few IRA bombs end his dream. Then there’s Nicolas Roeg’s Eureka—a bipolar mess of an epic that maybe somehow gets it right.

“I used to have it all, now I only have everything”

Played by Gene Hackman in the best performance you’ve never seen, Jack McCann is a gold prospector who emotionally dies the moment he becomes the richest man in America. As his daughter, played by Theresa Russell, says, “He’d been looking for 15 years. And then one day he found it. How could he ever recapture that moment of triumph?” Eureka starts with McCann in the final days of the gold rush, surviving in a psychedelically violent Yukon before jump-cutting to the Bahamas in 1945. There, McCann is rich, life-weary, and unhinged, with good reason to believe everyone wants to kill him. He also has parrot shit on his shoulder according to his dipsomaniac wife. For screenwriter Paul Mayersberg, “The challenge of writing the script was to show convincingly one man’s life in two such short, intense bursts... It’s as if his story began before there were any humans, and ends after all the humans have gone from the world.”1

In that way, Eureka is less Citizen Kane and more 2001: A Socialist Odyssey. McCann’s orgasmic rebirth in a gold torrent set to Wagner acts as the film’s bad trip prologue. The film then becomes a true crime story with McCann’s spectacularly violent murder at the hands of… his son-in-law Rutger Hauer? Joe Pesci as Meyer Lansky? A fortune teller’s curse? Roeg presents us all three potential universes in his fragmented way.

“A sick movie made by sick people for sick people”

Roeg still reigns as the director who crafted his films most like novels. He wove his stories in and out of time no matter the script. He knew just how powerfully suggestive a glimpse or recalled image could be and his backgrounds are laced with witchy purpose—tarot cards, kabbalistic charts, Nabokovian doubles—all to throw us off.

Like most Roeg fans I started easy: a cable showing of 1968’s Performance. I then moved through Don’t Look Now and The Man Who fell to Earth. The studio that funded his 1980 film Bad Timing (starring Art Garfunkel) called the final product “a sick movie made by sick people for sick people.” It remains a powerful watch, though Simon and Garfunkel may be ruined for you as there’s really no such thing as “light” necrophilia. For Roeg, the rest of the 1980s was a grab bag culminating in his adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches. As Eureka was from 1983, I long assumed it would be lesser-Roeg. I was wrong. It’s his masterpiece, even if it was legitimately broken enough that MGM put it on the shelf for two years.

“A little leftover life to kill”

There are no normal emotions in Eureka and that’s fitting for a story of people lifted up by wealth from the realm of mere humans. Everything from the voodoo ceremony to the courtroom finale is not so much acted as exorcised. McCann and his relationship with his estranged daughter especially runs on Elektra currents. “All you can do in this life is stake your claim,” he says to her, both as a warning and to inform her of her status of belonging to him. Jack has learned nothing from his wealth other than the worth of gold—the substance he’s still obsessed with. She answers by imitating her father, and searching for her own version of the impossible: a marriage built on love, not money, with golden-haired horndog Rutger Hauer.

“What happens now? A mystery”

When McCann is beaten, tarred and feathered, set on fire with a blowtorch, then beheaded you can’t accuse Roeg of being excessive in his violence. Eureka is based on the still unsolved murder of Sir Harry Oakes, who was beaten, tarred and feathered, set on fire with a blowtorch, then beheaded despite being one of the richest men in America at the time of his death in 1943.

After claiming the largest gold mine in the world in Kirkland, Ontario2, Oakes decamped to the Bahamas for tax reasons, took on British citizenship and bought a knighthood. At the time of his murder, he was being pressured by Meyer Lansky to allow the development of casinos on the islands. Oakes also despised his son-in-law Alfred de Marigny, for eloping with his daughter. It was de Marigny who was arrested for the murder though it was discovered police fabricated evidence against him and he was acquitted at trial. Sir Harry Oakes was friends with then Bahamian governor, the exiled-Duke of Windsor, and it’s widely considered the Duke coordinated the failed frame-up. He was also a character in the Eureka script until legal pressure won out. According to Roeg, this freed him and Mayersberg to make a more interesting film.3

The major flaw of Eureka is that Hackman’s McCann—the volcanic, self-loathing void at the center of the film—is absent from the final act, except as a crime scene blowup placed beside the witness stand. I have a low expectation of most court room scenes.(They’re essentially theater within theater and that’s why they can never really take off.) But Roeg—who started as David Lean’s cinematographer—loved Hollywood surfaces no matter how much of a radical he turned into. Here, Roeg and Mayersberg lard the ending of Eureka with gavel strike–worthy lines like “My lord, I now call to the stand…my wife!” or “The only thing my husband is guilty of is…being innocent!”

In no way does this wrap anything up and maybe that’s the point. After all, for most of the twentieth century sudden excessive wealth was a state of mind known only to a few. That’s different now. Being eternally present, having a podcast if not a biopic, is part of the founder’s playbook. Rich and crazy is no longer a secret. The world has seen what the Greek god emotions look like of someone in the Hamptons denied a parking spot. And if being a billionaire has always been a kind of mental illness, then the billionaires of today are a lot like the rest of us: they’re owning it. Parrot shit and all.

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With Halloween coming up, you may plan to have friends over and be in the mood to throw on something a little dark. But you aren’t quite sure and maybe you’re worried about picking the wrong vibe. We at Medium Cool understand that, and have reached into our vast memory of horror and thriller movies to help you, no matter who you’re watching with.

WATCH WITH YOUR MOM: THE FINAL GIRLS

The Final Girls came out well before Happy Death Day but while that much more lucrative time loop film stayed in the slasher lane, Todd Strauss-Schulson’s film gleefully goes everywhere from meta-levels to cheap jokes. The cast is full of alt comedy pinch hitters like Adam DeVine and Alia Shawkat, but the realistic relationship between Taissa Farmiga and her scream queen mother Malin Åkerman is what makes this genre riff so special. Come for the machete battle, stay for the hugs.

WATCH WITH DRAG QUEENS: SLEEPAWAY CAMP

Tasteless, offensive, indefensible, and absolutely fun, Sleepaway Camp is the Johnny Guitar of slasher films. It pulls a gender inversion on the genre, with all the male camp counselors dressed for Fire Island circa 1983 and all the women acting like it’s a regional production of Suddenly, Last Summer. There are pervy flashbacks and a twist ending that gay-married your brain forever if you watched this back on VHS. Emily distinctly remembers being shown this one as a teen and a friend saying, “I really want to know what you think of Sleepaway Camp.” That’s called profiling.

WATCH WITH YOUR ANTIFA SOCCER LEAGUE: BACURAU

Equal parts acid western and The Wicker Man, this movie is pure tension as the audience teases out the mystery of what’s happening in Bacurau, a fictional town in the back country of Brazil. What makes it a great film is the patience directors Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles take in showing us the town. By the time the ugliest Americans since Cannibal Holocaust show up, we are living in Bacurau and know all the gossip. When the locals are forced to defend their town there’s no question whose side we’re on.

WATCH WITH YOUR INFLUENCER FRIEND: NOPE

Nope was technically a hit but I’ve long had a feeling that it went over the audience’s heads with a Kubrickian leap. It may take years for us to catch up to how unnerving and subversive Nope is, especially in what it says about being seen/not being seen as a core part of human nature. That Jordon Peele does this all at a rollicking Spielberg pace only adds to the sense of mystery and genre mash-up. There’s also an alien that looks like a Björk dress.

WATCH WITH YOUR DAD: ZODIAC

Emily Schultz has no love for Gen X or Z girl standards like Mean Girls, or Beaches. Instead Emily loves Dad Movies, and specifically within that genre: stories of taciturn men researching late into the night and sublimating their emotions into an obsession for justice: All the President’s Men, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and of course Zodiac. David Fincher’s best film is his most literary and haunting—about men trying, but mostly giving up, on winning against evil.

WATCH WITH YOUR CANADIAN DAD: MY BLOODY VALENTINE

“My Bloody Valentine has a whimsical level to it. Like if Bill Forsyth made a slasher film.” Read our epic talk about Canada’s contribution to the slasher canon here. But be aware that if you watch this with your Canadian Dad he’s going to interrupt with wandering digressions about Moosehead Beer, or say things like, “That ain’t no way to wear a safety helmet.”

WATCH IF YOU’RE 1980s OBSESSED: DEMONS 2

Demons, the first one, is a classic of a different kind of Italo-horror film. Demons 2, however, tones down the gore and cranks up the new wave and post-punk soundtrack for total hairspray chaos. Plot? Sure, let’s try. Residents of a high-tech condo tower in Hamburg are watching a documentary about, um…the first Demons movie? From there, fiction crosses over to reality through the power of a sad birthday girl listening to the Smiths, and soon all the tenants—including all the armed patrons of a muscle gym—are under siege by demons. Really, the less sense it makes the more fun you’re having.

WATCH IF YOU’RE ON OZEMPIC: THE STUFF

Larry Cohen’s The Stuff opens at a mining site with a white liquid bubbling up that turns out to be delicious, and addictive. From there, it’s a quick rise to the number one selling food in America and a lot of questions, including: Is the Stuff not just alive, but sentient? No one combined grind-house commerce with satirical anarchy like Cohen did and the charm of The Stuff is it’s both polished—they hired a Madison Ave. firm to create the branding for the fictional food—and rough around the edges. As if Cohen was too excited to fill out his one-page pitch to script length and started filming.

WATCH WITH YOUR THERAPIST: RAISING CAIN

It’s so comforting to know that in the Brian De Palma oeuvre we can all point to his most lunatic film and say, yes, that’s the most lunatic one. That film is Raising Cain and it’s vitally important to track down the reconstructed version that reorders the film according to De Palma’s original script.

WATCH WITH A SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE WHO YOU MET ON GRINDR: STRANGER BY THE LAKE

Stranger by the Lake is Rear Window, but set at a cruising lake with an eerie ending that will make you question everything you think you know about love. It’s very French like that.

WATCH WITH A CLASSICS MAJOR: THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS

With the most apocalyptic ending since Planet of the Apes, this story of a girl being transported across a world destroyed by a zombie-generating fungal infection—no, it’s not The Last of Us. Instead, Girl With All the Gifts is based on a British novel that came before the video game and proudly wears its references on its sleeve, from The Day of the Triffids to I Am Legend, and the Pandora myth. By the time you finish, you’ll have earned your A levels.

WATCH WITH YOUR DAUGHTER: CRAWL

It’s called kin work, and it inordinately falls to women, especially when they must save their estranged fathers from being trapped in a basement full of alligators during a hurricane.

WATCH WITH THE KIDS: NIGHT OF THE ZOOPOCALYPSE

On the face of it, Night of the Zoopocalypse is a remake of John Carpenter’s The Thing for the Pixar age bracket, which is cool enough. And it is a fun, gorgeously animated film. But within the story are more radical themes of society, wildness, and identity, played out in a zoo setting. Look at the writing credits and you’ll see Clive Barker, who probably gave the story its Nightbreed “Fuck the law” energy.

WATCH WITH YOUR BEST FRIEND: GRETA

We’ve already discussed why Greta is the greatest psychological thriller you’ve never seen so now it’s up to you to make this a true cult classic. Bring on the 4k boxsets, the drinking games, the Isabelle Huppert costumes!

WATCH WITH A CANCELLED FRIEND: DREAM SCENARIO

This story of Nicolas Cage as mild-if-annoying professor Paul Matthews haunting the dreams of strangers arrived maybe a year too early. (Taylor Swift however has better timing.) Still, it’s an amazing follow-up to Sick of Myself, Kristoffer Borgli’s breakout film. Working now on a studio scale Borgli builds Dream Scenario into a Scandinavian version of Nightmare on Elm Street and the film isn’t afraid of the cringe—the date fart!—or truly unnerving dream sequences.

WATCH WITH A FRIEND WHO WON’T SAY WHAT THEY DO FOR A LIVING: FRANKENHOOKER

There’s no gloss on a Frank Henenlotter film, especially one with the tagline “A terrifying tale of sluts and bolts.” But all his films have an honest humanism that carries far past the exploitation and dumb humor. Frankenhooker is no different and it might have one of the most accidentally feminist endings of any horror movie.

WATCH WITH A ROOM FULL OF GOTHS: BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA

Why bother with anything else vampire related? Coppola’s film is still the crushed velvet-wearing, wolf-humping, overwrought classic you remember it being.

WATCH WITH A VENTRILOQUIST DUMMY NEXT TO YOU: TOURIST TRAP

The Elder Gods among our readers may have memories of this PG (!) rated film from childhood. If you don’t, trust us, this combination of evil doll film and Texas Chainsaw Massacre is still terrifying, as if it was completely made of cursed images.

WATCH WITH A STRESSED GRAD STUDENT: THE ADDICTION

What if Lili Taylor was the most humorless academic you knew? What if she became a vampire in 1990s New York? Abel Ferrara asked those questions for his vampire-as-addict analogy, The Addiction and the result is gritty and booming with 1990s hip hop. Also features the entire future cast of The Sopranos.

WATCH BEFORE YOU BUY A $1 HOME IN ITALY: THE HOUSE WITH LAUGHING WINDOWS

Like film noir, Italy’s giallo genre has a steep quality drop off after you hit all the classics. But there are still buried nuggets like Pupi Avati’s 1975 film about an art restorer summoned to a village—with secrets!—to work on a disturbing mural of Saint Sebastian. Less a mystery and much more a demented gothic thriller, House with Laughing Windows explores deeper themes of sadism and corruption. Avati had co-written Salo with Pasolini a few years before, and you could almost call Laughing Windows an answer film about artistic morality. Still, it’s as Italian as talking with your hands and surprisingly creepy—all the way to the twist ending that passes go and is sent straight to gender studies.

WATCH WHILE EATING CHEESY GARLIC BREAD: NIGHTMARE CITY

In a world of crazy Italian zombie movies it pays to be the craziest. And Umberto Lenzi’s Nightmare City most definitely is. After a radioactive plane full of generals and politicians lands, a toxic strain of zombie-ism spreads through Rome. Noted for being the very first fast zombie movie, the undead also look ridiculous here, with what can be described as burnt mozzarella on their faces. Come for the aerobics studio massacre. Stay for the earnest message about nuclear war.

WATCH WITH A NEW YORKER: C.H.U.D.

Believe me, C.H.U.D. is way better written and better acted than any film called Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers needs to be. I also firmly believe it’s in the same cinematic universe with Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, given that it shares the same 1983 Soho/East Village locations, and John Heard.

WATCH WITH AN INDIE FILMMAKER: BAGHEAD (2008)

As far as we know, Baghead is the only mumblecore horror film and it somehow works. This early Duplass Brothers joint with Greta Gerwig manages to capture cabin-in-the-woods creepiness at the same time as taking the piss out of the pretensions and petty rivalries of no-budget filmmaking.

WATCH WITH YOUR FRENCH BOYFRIEND: DOUBLE LOVER

In François Ozon’s horny tribute to De Palma’s Sisters, Chloe is a docent in Paris with phantom stomach pains no one can diagnose. As a last-ditch effort to understand the cause she’s sent to Paul, a psychiatrist played by Jérémie Renier. His brand of therapy is saying very little and being very handsome. Paul also has a secret twin brother, Louis, but that’s the least of the twists in Double Lover, so be prepared. There’s even a twist ending after the twist ending.

WATCH WITH A THEATER MAJOR: PEARL

Ti West’s prequel to his hick horror tribute X turned out to be a truly moving, unnerving story about psychopathy and how outsiders are made. Mia Goth’s country girl Pearl dreams of dancing in Hollywood against the wishes of her icy German mother. The audience wants Pearl to succeed, except she is in no way sane and she knows it as much as we do. (We won’t spoil the scarecrow scene.) As a movie, Pearl is patient and loving with all its characters, even when it dispatches most of them in a climax that has the moral symmetry of a Flannery O’Connor story.

WATCH WITH A GIRLFRIEND YOU NEED TO BREAK UP WITH: KNIFE+HEART

Yann Gonzalez’s retro answer film to Cruising is set in Paris’s gay scene, circa 1979, but the story belongs to a woman, Anne, played by Vanessa Paradis. She’s the top “blue movie” filmmaker in the country and desperate to rekindle a toxic relationship with her ex-girlfriend and editor Lois. All the signs—including an escalating body count in their circle—point to bigger problems to tackle but Anne, being a director, is far too self-involved to notice and turns her attention to incorporating the murders into her masterpiece.

WATCH IF YOU HATE DINNER PARTIES: THE INVITATION (2015)

If there’s a horror movie list on the internet it will invariably contain Jennifer’s Body. And you know what? Karyn Kusama has made other movies, goddammit. Great ones, like The Invitation. As a concept it looks even more prescient ten years later with its Hollywood Hills death cult. Kusama and her writing partners Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi work the limited location with ruthless efficiency until the ending, which uses a simple symbol to suggest a global catastrophe. Never has surviving one night of terror felt so much like losing as in The Invitation’s final seconds.

WATCH WITH A NOVELIST: IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS

We love this late-period John Carpenter banger, even if the idea is silly that a novelist—a novelist—is so influential he could drag humanity into Lovecraftian-madness and call forth the end of the world. Most novelists emotionally shut down if asked for a blurb, let alone when asked if they could take in some shoggoth rescues.

WATCH WITH THE ROOMMATE WHO STOLE YOUR HAIRSTYLE: SINGLE WHITE FEMALE

Barbet Schroeder’s Single White Female is always unfairly lumped in with the erotic thrillers of the early 1990s gang. While there are butts to be seen, Single White Female aims to be a real movie and succeeds. Schroeder definitely saw Persona, the acting battle between Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh is intense; it’s lensed by Argento collaborator Luciano Tovoli; and the script by Don Roos knows when to be logical and when to take the audience into horror and slasher territory. One lingering question: where to find an apartment that big in New York?

WATCH WITH YOUR NEXT POD: REC

The found footage horror movie might be on its last recording seconds, but if you go back to its early days you’ll find that REC is in its own nonstop terror class. A news crew is trapped inside a building being sealed off from the world during what looks like an outbreak and all the fun tropes are there including “Keep filming!” But the demented twist in the last act could only happen in a Spanish film.

WATCH WITH A LETTERBOXD SNOB: PSYCHO (1998)

Artists have been as drawn to Hitchcock as much as filmmakers have. (I’ve seen Douglas Gordon’s numbingly meditative 24 Hour Psycho video installation.) Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of Psycho exists somewhere between the disciplines as a conceptual cash grab and was critically savaged for it at the time. It’s easy to focus on the intended differences: the camp colors, the subliminal inserts. But what alters the DNA of the original the most turns out to be the performance choices. A young Vince Vaughn goes full demon twink as Norman Bates, while Julianne Moore plays crusading sister Lila Crane as…neurodiverse? Repeat these talking points and claim it’s better than the original and you’ll be a true Cinema Dirtbag!

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At Cinema Dirtbag we believe there is no such thing as a bad movie. There are cheap ones. There are shallow and expensive ones. There are movies that make no sense, or are too personal in meaning for the creator to allow an audience in. But being born of the most grinding art process devised on Earth, every completed and released film is a miracle, proof that human cooperation is possible and that there is cinematic light in all of us.

This faith was shaken by 1977’s The Exorcist II: The Heretic.

We weren’t surprised by that. That the Exorcist sequel was both the most expensive film ever made at the time and a total disaster is part of film lore. So much so a documentary, Boorman and the Devil, is doing the festival rounds this season to ask audiences to reconsider one of the most disliked films in history. It screens next at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival on October 22nd.

Since neither of us had ever seen the sequel we decided to start our Halloween watches with it.

Heretic is less a horror story and more That ’70s Movie about universal consciousness. Or something. Director John Boorman, the genius behind Point Blank and Deliverance, has long admitted he made a mistake in trying to craft an incredibly sincere riposte to William Friedkin’s original film. (Boorman loathed the novel when he was offered it first.) Adding to the unheimlich nature of the Heretic is that nearly every shot—including the highlands of Ethiopia—was created on airless soundstages, guaranteeing that “1977-ness” was baked into every frame.

While we didn’t become converts, we did reverse engineer how this film went off the rails, and were reminded that misfired talent is still talent any of us would be lucky to have.

Brian J Davis: Unmute it! The polite “I liked the lighting” discussion for this movie is the soundtrack. An insane Ennio Morricone score. Maybe one of his best.

Emily Schultz: So I’ve never seen this. And I can’t believe you haven’t.

BJD: I know! And I grew up in an Exorcist household even. But it was so firm in cultural memory that this was a bad movie we never saw it. I distinctly remember being at the video store with my mom when I saw the box for Exorcist II: The Heretic and I’m like, “I didn’t know there was a sequel! Why haven’t we rented it!” And she just gave me this wordless look then said, “How about Footloose?”

ES: Brian, it was edited by someone whose last name is Priestley. How wrong can it be?

BJD: The number one thing they did that sank this movie is they were rewriting the film on set. Which is pretty much a guarantee that—for a plot-driven movie—you’re going to get something incomprehensible. Richard Burton is about to have a very bad day at work as an exorcist. [A possessed woman sets herself on fire.] After this it’s a bit of a slow burn.

ES: Is it any wonder that growing up I thought religion was weird?

BJD: I guess we have to remind our readers out there that Emily is terrified of religion and annoyed by all Exorcist films.

ES: For some reason we’re jump cutting to the saddest high school musical.

BJD: Linda Blair is only possessed by jazz now.

ES: This is her mom?

BJD: No! It’s her therapist. Louise Fletcher. Most of the original cast didn’t want to do the sequel. So some interesting character choices were made. Max von Sydow actually hated The Exorcist. He said all it proved was that the world hates children. Boorman somehow talked him into coming back.

ES: This is more ’70s looking than you could ever imagine. Wait, did her therapist also play Nurse Ratched?!

BJD: She did. The conceit here is that Regan has no memory of the exorcism and they’re using, more or less, a Dreamachine to access her memories. This movie is so sincere—that’s what struck me on my first watch this week. And maybe that’s why it has fans and what makes people revisit it.

ES: I’ve just never seen anyone smile so much during therapy.

BJD: And now this bizarre therapy clinic is all glass panels.

ES: It’s very stagey. Does it matter at all?

BJD: I think every filmmaker is guilty of thinking their methodology is so very important. Reading the making-of book, the things that John Boorman says out loud are hilarious. When debating with an actress and HMU about what hair the character would have, the actress says she’d have a cut that meant she didn’t have to style it, because she wouldn’t care. Boorman flipped out and yelled, “You’re being literal. Her hair must define the shape she makes on-screen, which is of spiritual torment.”

ES: [Emily snort laughs.] Oh, my torment is represented in my hair every day.

BJD: Directors can think they sound so important saying shit like that but it’s just like bad method acting, it’s not going to be on the screen. Okay, so the church wants Richard Burton to investigate the death of Father Merrin and prove that he had heretical ideas and to absolve them of responsibility.

ES: You got that from the Vatican meeting scene?

BJD: I’ve had to watch this three times to get the plot! I want to go back to when you asked if this hospital set matters at all?

ES: It’s odd that it is so determined. And you can see all these background scenes with children with disabilities. Are they going to fully become characters?

BJD: Not. At. All.

ES: So they’re trying to turn The Exorcist into a story of human goodness?

BJD: And that’s the flaw of this movie. The idea is that Regan is clairvoyant and has healing powers. That’s why Satan was attracted to her and it’s why these priests are drawn to her as well. But what struck me about that BS is it’s actually the kind of studio development they would have done to the first movie if they could have. What’s the reason? Just evil? That doesn’t play. Maybe she has super powers?

[Two characters connect to “the synchronizer,” a device very similar to Brion Gysin’s “Dreamachine.”]

BJD: The mistake is they should be playing some Aphex Twin right now to help. Okay, do you remember the point in the late ’90s where it seemed like everyone had a Dreamachine? That was just something that was normal. You’d go over to someone’s apartment and they would be like, “Want to try the Dreamachine? Just made one.”

ES: Yeah, definitely. Where did you hear about them?

BJD: As you work through all stages of alt culture, you will hit the Burroughs and Brion Gysin section and hear about the machine that would get you high without being on drugs. Which, given the expense of drugs in the ’90s, was a very seductive proposition.

ES: Who’s hypnotizing who?

BJD: I don’t know, but Linda Blair is just a little too casual with letting priests hang around her.

ES: I was thinking that. Hey, brooding Welsh priest I just met. Oh, you can stay during my therapy.

BJD: The bulk of this movie is a one-act play on an experimental set, in which characters are trying to communicate to each other through light and sound. It’s almost Canadian.

[Emily laughs when the demonic Regan shows up in flashback using cheesy ghost glass.]

ES: There’s a lot of interdimensional groping going on in this scene.

BJD: “You won’t remember any of this.” He’s not the first priest to say that. Okay, was that scene the first clue that you’re not watching a normal movie?

ES: It’s pretty bad.

BJD: Okay, Burton says this while looking directly at the camera: “Utterly horrible. Fascinating.” He’s warning us.

ES: “I can’t have that discussion right now!” Because they haven’t written the rest of the scene.

BJD: You don’t need a finished script to make a movie. You absolutely need a finished script to make the most expensive movie made though.

ES: So far it lacks character conflict. There’s really no struggle in the characters, at all. Where are we at right now?

BJD: We’re in Ethiopia on a soundstage. There’s a throwaway line in the first Exorcist that Merrin performed his first—

ES: Wait, this giant moth is kind of awesome.

BJD: It’s a locust. There are no moths in the Bible, Emily.

ES: Sorry. Okay. What is going on?

BJD: It’s a flashback. Kokumo, the young boy there, has healing powers, just like Regan. And in no way is that conveyed clearly by this movie. I know that because of three watches and reading the making-of book. Oh, and the locusts represent the dual nature of humanity. That is literally said later on in the movie!

ES: Is this the same day or does Regan just always wear see-through white dresses?

BJD: White to represent good? Groundbreaking. Okay, let’s examine some basic dramatic failure in this scene where Pazuzu summons her to the ledge of the building. It’s a well done shot, dizzying, but no other character is there to witness it.

ES: Which means there’s just no tension from it. It was just a shot. And every time this film establishes tension, it doesn’t hold it long enough. Wait, why does she suddenly live with her therapist?

BJD: That’s actually Kitty Winn. Her mom’s assistant from the first movie. They were so desperate for actors from the first movie to join.

ES: And they were like, hey personal assistant character from the first movie, please come back and play a major character?

BJD: Exactly. Everything wrong with sequels starts with this movie. And I think that’s why it should be studied. That said… Kitty Winn actually has the performance of the film as the assistant because she’s going so Actors Studio hard later in the movie. Her death scene at the end: “I chose evil!”

ES: I think people not talking to each other and looking off into the space isn’t a mood conducive to a horror film.

BJD: So the director wanted to film in Ethiopia because they have these mountain churches where you have to climb up crevasses to get to them. And they couldn’t film in Ethiopia at the time because of the civil war. These are huge sets they’re traveling up to perform the flashback exorcism.

ES: But there was nothing to set that location up, was there?

BJD: Nothing! I had to Wiki “Ethiopian Rock Hewn Churches.”

ES: But now we have obvious ADR over top of it to explain to us what’s happening. Did he want to tell the Ethiopia story or did he want to tell Regan’s story? Because I think actually that this story might be more interesting of the two.

BJD: This is the crux. This movie is both a bad Exorcist reboot and a bad Exorcist prequel folded into a single unappetizing pea soup. There’s the morally superior “we can make a better film than the original” attitude meeting the “fans really want to know about this character and how they came to be.”

ES: [Reading Wiki] Wait. I didn’t realize John Boorman’s still alive.

BJD: No feelings are being hurt here. John Boorman knows exactly what he did. He said in various ways over the years, “The sin I committed was not giving the audience what it wanted in terms of horror.”

ES: Well, look, she’s not wearing white now.

BJD: Because Regan’s about to show off her powers. Let’s give this movie some due: This scene with the autistic girl talking for the first time? I bawled my eyes out the other night.

ES: You did?

BJD: I did! This shitty movie stole my tears because of this one scene that I’ve lived through. And I could break your heart even more. That’s Dana Plato from Diff’rent Strokes playing the autistic girl.

ES: I thought she looked familiar and now that you’ve told me that it’s like a little mini-Kimberly. Okay, this film should have been about Regan working with kids. So simple. They should have had this feel-good stuff where she finds out that she can work really well with kids. That she has a gift. But then she winds up tormented by her demons from the past, right?

BJD: That was right out of The Player. I think you just pitched an amazingly straight forward, emotionally grounded exorcism film!

ES: And don’t bring in the priest until you need him, frankly.

BJD: I want Richard Burton to walk into all that glass, slapstick style, once in this movie.

ES: I was actually going to say, anyone who knows non-typical children knows they would not be down with a mirror maze of a therapy center. Well, we’re back at jazz high school.

BJD: Thank God one single set-up actually paid off.

ES: It’d be a shame if they had built those cardboard sets for nothing. Whose Ethiopia memory is this now?

BJD: It’s not a flashback. Richard Burton is searching for adult Kokumo.

ES: That’s why he’s saying “Kokumo” a lot.

BJD: [In Richard Burton voice] Take it fast. Take it slow. That…is where I want to go. Kokumo. Sorry! I promised I wasn’t going to Mystery Science Theater this talk.

ES: That’s all we can do because there is nothing here. Nothing! There is no active plot!

BJD: But Emily, they’re talking about locust husbandry now.

ES: “The Good Locust,” there you go. This film could have just been a poem.

BJD: That’s a sick burn. Okay, here’s where they tie it all together. Kokumo, the boy with the healing powers, the locusts, Father Merrin, demonic possession. And the woman who died in the opening scene, who was also a healer.

ES: Have they, though?

BJD: No, they haven’t! I think the real conflict of this movie is the commute between New York and D.C.

ES: It’s incredibly poor development if you’re going to have someone direct a sequel to a movie and their pitch is, I hated the first movie.

BJD: One of the flaws of the studio system is it really loves novelty. Not originality. Novelty. Boorman said that and they replied, “Okay, Englishman, you got me listening.”

ES: It’s the climax and they have tension and they always jump to a different scene instead of staying with the tension every single time.

BJD: I’m not going to get too in the weeds, technically, but what I see is the editor desperate to find pacing, because the pacing wasn’t filmed because it wasn’t written in the first place.

ES: So as much as this director tried to escape the first film, now he’s back in that film for this climax?

BJD: Fate is like that. Also, there’s not that much parking in Georgetown.

ES: So now the rest of the movie is basically this stuff, right?

BJD: The shaking bed, the wind, the locusts?

ES: Isn’t that what people come to The Exorcist for?

BJD: They come to think about why there is evil.

ES: What did you come to The Exorcist II for?

BJD: To understand why there are evil sequels.

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You don’t often get much say in your first encounter with a media format, but mine have tended to be solid bangers. First movie watched on broadcast? The Wizard of Oz. First cassette tape purchased? The Repo Man soundtrack. First VHS watch? Psycho. First streaming video? Exploding Whale. First DVD watched? The Cell.

Record scratch: that one has always felt like a bit of let down. But why?

The Cell is the story of a child psychiatrist played by Jennifer Lopez—then at peak J. Lo fame—who enters the mind of a serial killer using something-something technology. The Cell was critically reviled on release in 2000 for both its empathetic approach to serial killers, and former music video director Singh’s wholesale plundering of art history for his ravishing visual pallet. On viewing it again nearly 24 years later it’s easy to see those are in fact the strengths of The Cell. As well, it led Emily to talk about her mixed feelings about her upcoming novel, her first to ever deal with the subject of serial killing. —Brian J Davis

EMILY SCHULTZ: What I remember about watching this on DVD was thinking, This technology won’t stick around.

BRIAN J DAVIS: The more that we’ve talked about The Cell, the more I realize though I may have seen this once, just starting my art carer, this sent me on my digital journey. I want to know what they’re doing in this movie visually and how they’re doing it. The digital intermediate, the bleach bypass.

ES: It’s interesting that this was both our first DVD.

BJD: It wasn’t our choice! It was over Christmas at my brother’s place and he was showing off his DVD player. I think the choice was this or Blade. We hadn’t seen this in theater. I remember the reviews were atrocious. How dare you try to make me empathize with a serial killer?

ES: That doesn’t bode well for me.

BJD: Because you just finished your new novel, which is a first-person narrative. But here’s the important part, it is a female serial killer.

ES: And we’re yet to discover how the public will take that.

BJD: I think with a female serial killer, even though our culture does judge female criminals harsher, some might just say, maybe she had her reasons. Okay, you have pointed out this might be the most goddamn ’90s movie of all time, despite being from 2000.

ES: I’m sure the pitch was like: “It’s the Matrix meets Seven!”

BJD: The interesting thing is The Matrix was able to invent a decade: the entirety of the aughts was Matrix-y. And The Cell is instead looking back—it’s the culmination of all things 1990s with the transgressive art references of Damien Hirst, Joel-Peter Witkin, or the body art of Stelarc.

ES: Why is Kurt Cobain the serial killer?

BJD: Vincent D’Onofrio has come on-screen with his wig. It’s true, he looks like he should be asking, “You want to see my band? We’re playing at Zoot’s on Tuesday.”

ES: I’m wondering why we have not seen this movie in 24 years?

BJD: It’s a lot to take in visually. No matter how attuned you are to art references or movie references there’s too many inputs. Like this opening: A Magritte painting mixed with the movie Coma and the Eiko Ishioka costumes. It makes the brain start to work too much.

ES: And D’Onofrio is not a light-duty serial killer! My serial killer does not really engage in torture.

BJD: It’s the little things! Charm goes a long way in a serial killer. I want to take this back to you and your journey in the last year of this new novel. Do you have a moral responsibility when you’re writing about crimes like this?

ES: I mean, the serial killer book that I’m writing is not based on any actual killings. But there certainly are killings that are happening which are similar types of crimes. I think I felt more responsibility when I was writing Little Threats. Whereas I think with the new novel... The new novel is not as serious. It is much more of a burlesque through the subject. Will readers like it? It remains to be seen.

BJD: You’re going on the assumption that we like to get inside the head of evil, which is the plot of this movie! And readers might even enjoy the trip a little bit?

ES: That’s what I’m worried about with the new novel—that it is an enjoyable serial killer book. It’s also a social critique of consumerism and image.

BJD: Gotta have your greens in there.

ES: It’s a new work. I really don’t know how to talk about it yet.

BJD: I’ll tell you the one thing it isn’t. It’s not camp. And I do think that The Cell does have camp moments. The childhood flashback scenes have a certain flare of community theater to them.

ES: Here’s the thing about getting inside the head of a killer: it’s not easy to do. I was writing this, and I was still making her too emotional. And you would have a note: she doesn’t feel fear at all. That’s not one of her emotions. And it was so hard for me to separate myself from the emotions that I would feel.

BJD: This movie could be Posh Nightmare on Elm Street or Super Dark Inside Out. Now, J. Lo is smoking a joint and watching Fantastic Planet—she’s just like us!

ES: I think she’s great in this movie.

BJD: I think J. Lo was robbed of an Oscar nomination for Hustlers. Now, you pointed out that one of the big ’90s things here is the inner child stuff, right?

ES: To me it felt like this movie was really coming out of the early ’90s. When I was in therapy as a teen in the early ’90s they were talking about the inner child, and I was like, “Uh, my inner child is not that far away.”

BJD: It keeps hitting me that this was a major movie and it is almost like if Peter Greenaway directed Silence of the Lambs. An artist reminding you that you’re watching an image. And at the ending gilt even starts growing around the edge of the frame. I think Tarsem Singh is saying you can see the history of evil through art.

ES: Oh, that’s a good point.

BJD: The contemporary art world was pissed at the time, because he was swiping from living artists, especially Hirst, Witkin, and Odd Nerdrum. There’s an argument to that and there’s also an argument that in film you should just steal.

ES: And now Hank from Breaking Bad! And Vince Vaughn.

BJD: You said you actually had some Vaughn dissonance watching this time?

ES: To see him in this dramatic role. I forgot!

BJD: You forgot that Vince Vaughn started out as a very serious actor. And he’s quite good, right? He’s from the Thomas Harris tradition of the profiler who might be just as off as the killer. It’s kind of interesting that they do away with an entire procedural in the first act. And now they’re inside the visual articulation of the killer’s mind!

ES: I wish it wasn’t a Marilyn Manson video.

BJD: You’re taking one of the worst examples of 1990s transgressive. Think of the best examples. Joel-Peter Witkin’s photographs are extraordinary. Impossible to look at and impossible to look away from. They’re painful arguments about beauty.

ES: I just think there’s sexy bondage and there’s creepy bondage!

BJD: There’s a lot of gratuitous cruelty in this movie. And it’s matched by a lot of gratuitously saccharine moments.

ES: Do you think they were trying to strike a balance?

BJD: When you have such extremes you can’t quite recover from either the cruel or the saccharine moments. It is an attempt to say something. Not many movies try like The Cell tried.

ES: Really wonderful, well done scene here between J. Lo and Vince. And they’re having the argument the audience is having. Can you sympathize with who a killer was before they were a killer?

BJD: Readers! I recommend putting that into your scripts: whatever you think the audience’s question or arguments would be. It’ll always add another week to your box office! Okay, now some jokes. I think there was a missed opportunity when they could have put the serial killer’s dog into the mind-jumping machine.

ES: Maybe the dog knows where the final victim is! Look at that good boy. He’d be so honest about it!

BJD: Okay, now to talk about some of the filmmaking techniques that I nerded out on at the time. Watching The Cell now it’s like an elegy for what CGI could have been. It could have been art, but we went literal, with flying superheroes and destroyed cities.

ES: The gorgeousness of this movie, it really does contrast with the harder scenes.

BJD: Like the nipple piercings being ripped out by J. Lo during the fight? I felt that!

ES: Don’t tell that story! [Emily makes grossed out sounds.]

BJD: I have to. What no one tells you is that there is a high rejection rate for pierced nipples. Like a year in, my body decided, Nope! and starting pushing the ring out, like a Rob Bottin effect.

ES: I think my take away from The Cell is we need to be able to empathize enough to be able to watch it, but we don’t want to really empathize with the killer.

BJD: Empathy is such an important emotion as a human being, as a viewer, as an artist. But empathy is not the same as forgiveness.

ES: You think that the movie was asking us to actually forgive him?

BJD: I feel like this movie truly had—and I say this not as a compliment—a Christian ending. This movie’s like the moral opposite of Seven. Seven is like: no one can be saved. This movie is: everyone can be saved, even the serial killer. That’s not a place I could ever be at.

ES: Not in this scenario, no! And maybe that’s the limits of empathy. Empathy is important. Forgiveness, optional. I don’t ask the reader to forgive my serial killer. In fact, I tell the reader she’s going to stay more or less the same. Sorry. Spoiler.

BJD: So let’s hope people appreciate consistency.

ES: I will hope so!

The Cell is now available in a new 4K edition from Arrow Video

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“Is there anything to say about Jaws that you haven't already said?”

That’s the opening question of the documentary Jaws @ 50, Laurent Bouzereau’s worthwhile look back at Steven Spielberg’s defining film. (Which was also the sorest point of our controversial Gen X and Millennial quiz.)

One of the things most often said about Jaws—and not usually as a compliment—is that it was the birth of the summer blockbuster. The anxiety expressed through that factoid is that Jaws’ success was the moment B material could marry an A film budget. What The Exorcist had started, Jaws completed, leading to Alien and then the wholesale postmodern raiding of pulp culture through the 1980s and ’90s .

Of course, none of the below filmmakers had anything as remotely complex on their minds when they made their respective Jaws rip-offs. But the list shows how a successful story can be remade the world over, with unique local alterations, allowing the movies to achieve their own kind of stolen grace, like photocopies of photocopies.

Grizzly (1976)

Grizzly’s story of a park ranger versus a rogue bear set the template for all Jaws rip-offs to follow. A concerned fill in the blank teams up with an eccentric fill in the blank, plus a fill in the blank with a dark connection to the animal. They all take on the indifferent civic leaders choosing tourism over safety. There’s a fair amount of ridiculous exploitation to Grizzly—a female ranger stops to take a nude waterfall bath in the middle of a search party—but the scene of Richard Jaeckel waking up from his bear-dug shallow grave only to be eaten again is still nightmare fuel. Director William Girdler’s film from the following year, Day of the Animals, is an even more deranged take, asking the question: what if every animal, and Leslie Nielsen, started attacking you?

Tentacles (1977)

As I sadly learned first watching this on Detroit’s WKBD 50, Tentacles is a bit soggy. This despite the promise of a giant octopus terrorizing a cast of check-cashing day players including Henry Fonda, John Huston, and Shelley Winters. That said, Bo Hopkins’ scarily committed performance as a grieving widower using his trained orcas to hunt down the monster octopus who killed his wife is worth waiting for. If that sentence just sounded a little strange, remember that director Ovidio G. Assonitis would later go on to make the Citizen Kane of WTF films, The Visitor.

Orca (1977)

With a cast of Richard Harris and Charlotte Rampling, music by Ennio Morricone, and script by Robert Towne, Orca was the first truly big budget Jaws rip-off but also— ironically—an example of the 1970s bummer film Jaws was meant to have vanquished. What traumatized child could ever forget the scene of the stillborn calf of the titular orca being hosed off the deck by Harris? Bo Derek having her leg bitten off as revenge? Or the late era Pierre Trudeau malaise this filmed-in-Canada movie seems to have soaked up? Orca is Beachcombers meets Blackfish over a bong of sadness.

Piranha (1978)

Now known mostly as both Joe Dante’s first full directing credit and John Sayles’ first filmed script, Piranha isn’t quite as fun as you remember it being. And it’s a lot more low-budget. (Producer Roger Corman cut $200,000 out of the budget a week before shooting.) Still, the attack scene on the campers remains jarring, and Spielberg was enough of a fan that he hired Dante to direct Gremlins. When later working on The Howling together, Dante visited Sayles in his East Village apartment and was surprised to see he had a typewriter set up for every one of the multiple scripts he was working on, including The Howling, Return of the Secaucus 7, and ...

Alligator (1980)

Jaws meets Saul Alinsky! As far as John Sayles’ monster era goes Alligator is leagues better than Piranha. (But not quite as good as The Howling.) After all, it stars Medium Cool’s patron saint Robert Forster as a Chicago cop tracking down a mutant sewer alligator amid local corruption. The fat cat wedding attack is still a peak of socialist screen fantasy violence and Alligator remains the most character-driven film about a giant animal on a rampage you’ll ever see.

Razorback (1984)

Pitched as “Jaws on trotters” the Australian contribution to the genre is far better than it needs to be thanks to director Russell Mulcahy. The Australian native had returned to make Razorback after spending the first part of the 1980s creating iconic music videos for Duran Duran. He brought with him tricks, filters, style to spare, and the right attitude: if you’re hired to make a movie about a monster wild boar terrorizing the Outback then you should make the best goddamn monster wild boar film ever. There are psychedelic walkabouts, Mad Max bogans, and the best hunter line in any Jaws rip-off. “He’s just bacon!”

Amsterdamned (1988)

Next to Razorback this is my favorite Jaws rip-off because there is no animal in it. After nearly 15 years of rip-offs by that point, why bother with one? Rather, this is an Amsterdam-set slasher film with a killer who stalks the city’s canals in a scuba suit. Yes, it recreates some iconic scenes from Jaws, but the film is also its own very Dutch and weird thing, directed and scored by the exquisitely named Dick Maas. In Amsterdamned, Huub Stapel investigates the water-based murders, strutting like a Dutch Sylvester Stallone. He has bizarrely inappropriate conversations with his daughter, starts pastry shop fights, and in the middle of the film leads a James Bond-worthy speedboat chase through the canals. It’s easy to love everything about Amsterdamned and I suspect that Spielberg himself was a fan, as Maas was later a director on The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.

And I didn’t even get to the dozens of other Italian Jaws rip-offs. If I missed your favorite, let us know in the comments.

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Unlike the New York Times, we didn’t have to collaborate with a racist hacker to put a spotlight on New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s identity. We just watched his mother’s 1991 indie film Mississippi Masala on HBO Max. Billed as a Romeo and Juliet story with the luminous leads of Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury, director Mira Nair deftly shows how colonial systems force people into identities that get labeled “complicated” for the sake of not discussing how horrible history can be.

We may already have voted for Mamdani in the primary, but this watch was also an excuse to pitch our ideas for New York City film initiatives and—since this is Cinema Dirtbag—discuss the pretty damn hot sex scene between Washington and Choudhury.

Brian J Davis: When he was still against Cuomo in the primary, there’s just no way you could throw “Nepo Baby” at Zohran. In comparison to Cuomo, whose dad was the king of New York state, it was silly. But you take that away: yes, Zohran’s mother is an acclaimed indie filmmaker. But it’s not like he went to intern at A24. He became a Queens assemblyman! And now he wants the worst job in America: Mayor of New York City!

Emily Schultz: I hope he gets it!

BJD: His mother’s success does nothing for him in that regard. I hadn’t seen Mississippi Masala since probably the late ’90s. I watched it in film school. And I had this vague memory that it was this scrappy DIY film with a lot of heart and a really nuanced look at the complexities of post-colonial identities. That was borne out again on rewatch and I think those are also the qualities I want for my next mayor of New York!

ES: I remember seeing it obviously in video stores, but never watched it until now. I did watch Monsoon Wedding though.

BJD: Now to talk about Nair, and how the creation of Mississippi Masala relates to Zohran’s own story. In the 1980s, Nair was a documentary filmmaker who switched to narrative film. She moved to Uganda to research the story of the expulsion of Ugandan Indians. And that is where she met his father, academic and activist Mahmood Mamdani. And the father played by Roshan Seth is pretty much inspired by his story. Mahmood Mamdani criticized the Idi Amin regime in the 1970s, and was jailed and stripped of his citizenship by Amin. Which is literally what Trump threatened to do to Zohran. So it’s proven that his family can stand up to dictators.

ES: You’re saying he’s well-qualified.

BJD: Exactly. And I think we’re a week away from Trump starting to wear a general’s uniform.

ES: Going back to Zohran, I did learn from Wikipedia just now that he was once a rapper.

BJD: So if you knew that before voting for him…

ES: I think it’s a fun fact that he went from being Young Cardamom to Mr. Cardamom to the Zohran that we know and love today.

BJD: To know yourself is to be successful. And for him to say, maybe I’m not cut out for entertainment, to go from that, to Queens assemblyman, that says to me he chose a path of seriousness, right?

ES: It also does equip you: it says you can get up and perform in front of people and connect.

BJD: Okay, so my memories of this movie did live up to it. And what’s amazing, about halfway through watching it, you were like: I love this movie!

ES: I was, “I’m watching a chick flick with you! While I’m PMS!” And also it’s beautifully filmed, let me say, and very well acted.

BJD: Shot by Ed Lachman.

ES: Lachman came out of documentary as well. And there is kind of a documentary feel to this film.

BJD: There are a lot of characters. Like there’s a TV season’s worth of characters in this movie.

ES: I think the thing that’s interesting about the film is how it is many things. I mean, it’s a drama, it’s a rom-com, it’s historical. Which is very 1990s!

BJD: This struck me as a lot like a Jonathan Demme movie. Something Wild or Married to the Mob. What the hell is the genre? Who cares?

ES: And I will say that this movie did get me to cry. I do love that with the generational differences, we get to see it from both sides. The daughter’s saying, why do you care about these things, these old things? And the mother’s saying, well, aren’t you glad that you have someone to care about you? If we don’t care, who will?

BJD: That got to you?

ES: Oh, it got to me.

BJD: I like that the message of the movie is that there is life after a dictatorship. There’s life after these historical calamities that destroy people and scatter them. This movie really is about that: what colonialism does to histories. Let’s just quote the scene where Sarita is meeting Denzel’s family at a backyard BBQ. She chokes up at trying to explain herself as an Indian woman born in Africa and now in the American south working at a motel. And the brother character helps clarify. “You’re an Indian who’s never been to India. We’ve never been to Africa.” Again, the New York Times was blaming Zohran for having multiple identities—as if 600 years of colonialism was his fault! I know HBO Max is getting expensive but they could’ve just watched this movie.

ES: The kiss is coming up!

BJD: Sarita Choudhury just has the same gaze while looking at Denzel Washington for the entire movie.

ES: Oh, yeah. They have chemistry. He’s doesn’t seem too shy himself.

BJD: Oh, look what they’re doing with their hands! I know that technique.

ES: It’s a good kiss.

BJD: And technically, they’re filming it with Steadicam or handheld. It feels intimate and a little shaky. But it’s all going to fall apart now as they realize that they have transgressed their respective communities in small town Mississippi.

ES: We’re at the phone sex scene.

BJD: I wouldn’t say it’s phone sex. It’s phone sexy.

ES: They’re just working their way up. They’re still getting to know each other.

BJD: This is a proper 1990s relationship. Alright, I have to talk about the genius of Ed Lachman in this phone scene. It’s so easy to go over-the-top with gels. He’s the king of subtle gel work. Look at the soft pink/coral on her coming from the globe lamp. And the warm yellow on him. Okay, should we talk about what we want in terms of some film initiatives for New York City?

ES: I think let’s do 1980s-style sex scenes first. The characters sneak off for a coastal vacation in Biloxi. She lies to her family about who she’s going with.

BJD: And this is 1991. There’s a lot of the 1990s in this film, but still some 1980s.

ES: I was thinking about this. It’s no wonder that sex was very disappointing the first time given the expectations I may have had from 1980s sex scenes.

BJD: So what are some of the markers of 1980s sex scenes: hand stroking and the body as landscape. And it’s slower than sex could ever be! Like, ever.

ES: One day in my lifetime I should try to have ’80s sex. I think I would just start laughing though. And not critiquing the actors. They’re going for it.

BJD: Okay, 1980s sex scene jokes aside. Nair uses the end of the sex scene for a devastating flashback. And I think that is true to sex.

ES: List the film initiatives and I’ll respond if they’re ridiculous or not.

BJD: I know that the mayor has no power over the Hudson Valley, but how baller would it be if he worked with the governor to rename the Mario M. Cuomo Bridge to the John Cassavetes Bridge?

ES: Cassavetes. Born in New York. I love A Woman Under the Influence. Yes to that one!

BJD: City-owned studio spaces. The city is in control of so many of industrial spaces and seized buildings. Meanwhile, film studio space is disappearing into condos. Just three or four buildings would guarantee film production here for generations. And the leases would earn money.

ES: I mean, he’s talking about city-owned grocery stores. Why not!

BJD: He should force the Criterion Mobile Closet to stop in Greenpoint!

ES: I think that one’s unreasonable and biased completely to us.

BJD: Okay, it’s safe to say that overnight this has turned into one of your favorite movies?

ES: Yes, just like overnight Zohran has turned into one of my favorite politicians.

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And the winner of game three of the 1990s film playoffs is Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, by an astounding 86 percent. No love for Romance? Just know that Catherine Breillat is out there somewhere exhaling Gitanes smoke and sighing, “Non, je ne regrette rien.”

Next week it’s Gregg Araki’s Doom Generation versus David Lynch’s Lost Highway. But since we’re putting films through athletic paces, we decided to share some of our favorites that are actually about sports.

Sports have been part of cinema since the days of Muybridge’s motion studies. They’ve also been politicized entertainment since the start of the modern Olympics, up to the rightward shift of the Rocky series. After all, the idea of what is “inspiring” is both easy and changeable. The best sports films resist those manipulative narratives by focusing instead on individual athletes and their struggles against the limits of their bodies, minds, and their industry.

Personal Best (1982)

Look, if the writer of Chinatown is going to write and direct a lesbian track-and-field romance film, you’re going to get the Chinatown of lesbian track-and-field romance films.

Is Robert Towne’s movie also a studio artifact from just before the era of new queer cinema? Yes, but the writing is so painfully real as Mariel Hemingway and runner-turned-actor Patrice Donnelly train for the doomed 1980 Olympics, fall in love along the way, best each other, break up, and fall into mutual respect after collectively missing their Olympic moment. Bonus: the film’s sweat-core fashion inspired a queer punk classic. (Streaming on Prime)

North Dallas Forty (1979)

All you need to know is the NFL fired or blacklisted any player or employee who was involved in the making of this movie full of sociopathic coaches, sponsor party orgies, and drug addicts pushed beyond broken. Nick Nolte is a dharma bum on the gridiron near the end of his career as a wide receiver, still bristling against the conformity that the NFL demands. There’s an opening act that probably inspired the opening act of Anchorman but its humor and passion for the game still lands. What makes North Dallas Forty truly different is how director Ted Kotcheff centers pain as the organizing principle of these players’ lives. Pain is ecstasy, fear, and ultimately fate, and all this is achieved by bravely holding the camera on faces and scarred bodies. There are monologues about dildos and codeine, to be sure, but Kotcheff never stops framing the players with the reverence of Joan of Arc. Emily worked with the late Kotcheff on his memoir and you can read her post about that time. (Available from Imprint)

A Story of Sorrow and Sadness (1977)

No one could mess up a movie with as much artistry and weirdness as Seijun Suzuki could. In 1967 he was assigned by his studio to direct a standard Yakuza hitman movie, Branded to Kill. Bored with the script, he turned the film into a crazed, pop art masterpiece that bent the cliches of genre with surreal logic. He was fired from that studio, but after 10 years of exile he went back to work at the same studio to make a sports melodrama about a manufactured golf superstar. He promptly turned it into a crazed, pop art masterpiece that bent the cliches of genre with surreal logic.

At first we think the story of golf pro Reiko being manipulated by cynical marketing executives is going to be a breezy Albert Brooks–like satire. But after her star rises, a neighbor becomes obsessed with her and systematically inserts herself into Reiko’s life, ultimately destroying it. The demented energy is ratcheted up in every scene and if Darren Aronofsky didn’t see this before making Mother! I’d be surprised. (Available from Radiance Films)

The Firm (1989)

Alan Clarke’s final film, The Firm, is a sustained 90-minute heart attack of class resentment and knife violence. Gary Oldman plays Bex, a football hooligan and real estate agent navigating his double life in yuppie-ascendent Britain. In Clarke’s Elephant—his most known film—he used the poetry of the Steadicam to implicate the viewer in a relentless murder tour of Belfast during the Troubles. In The Firm he uses it to sync our pulse rates with Bex as he sprints from failed rumbles with other aging football gangs, to a final breakdown with his wife, played by Oldman’s then real-life partner Lesley Manville. Not much of it is about the game itself, and that’s the point.

We covered The Firm during the last World Cup and paired it with The Damned United. While the underrated film The Damned United is worth a watch for Michael Sheen’s brilliant performance, it’s The Firm that will take you into the heart of toxic fandom like nothing else. (Only available on DVD!)

Challengers (2024)

Confession. Emily and I never thought we’d swoon over a Luca Guadagnino movie. Not after his 2009 film I Am Love left us rolling on the floor in hysterics. (About now is the time to look back and admit y’all took molecular gastronomy way too seriously.)

But Challengers’ pro-level time jumping to capture a three-way relationship between a tennis contender, a could’ve been, and someone who’s still trying results in some of the best filmmaking of the decade. Challengers doesn’t reinvent the sports film—plot-wise it borrows equally from Personal Best and North Dallas Forty. However, Justin Kuritzkes’ script does reinvent the idea of the sport muse. You could spend most of the movie thinking the competition between Art and Patrick is over Zendaya’s Tashi. But by the end you realize it is for her approval. (Available on Prime)

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Richard Linklater may have kickstarted 1990s indie cinema with Slacker, but the heart of that movie really belongs to the last days of the subcultural 1980s. Before Sunrise, his first hit and one that sits in the dead middle of the decade, seemed a better fit for us and the playoffs. In Before Sunrise Ethan Hawke is an American on a train in Europe. He flirts with Julie Delpy on her way back to Paris and invites her to spend the night with him wandering Vienna before his flight home. They fall in love over long conversation and stolen time.

It’s what Americans think happens in Europe, whereas the films of French director Catherine Breillat are closer to what really happens in Europe. As a filmmaker she’s a bridge between the end of the New Wave in the 1970s and the New French Extremity of the 2000s. A novelist turned director, her films unflinchingly investigate power and sex through a memoirist style that’s been called an “intimate revolt.” Starting with 1999’s Romance she did so with scenes of unsimulated sex, causing decades of controversy, and giving rise to a mini-movement in film.

So which version of pre-millennial Europe will win? Vote below now, or read our discussion and come back here!

BRIAN J DAVIS: This is the movie where Ethan Hawke won’t have sex with his girlfriend anymore and she blows him up?

EMILY SCHULTZ: No, that’s the other movie.

BJD: Well, here’s the great thing about this. Of all these movies, I have never seen Before Sunset until now!

ES: And I saw it in the theater on a date.

BJD: For you, Ethan Hawke was your main 1990s crush?

ES: I admit that I do really like Ethan Hawke.

BJD: And also with a clean record, too! A lot of your ’90s icons are gone.

ES: And we can no longer talk about them.

BJD: Ethan Hawke is like the perfect MFA boyfriend here — look at that merlot mock turtleneck sweater, scraggly little goatee, hair slicked back because he hasn’t had a cut in six months.

ES: I’m looking at Julie Delpy now actually. Looking good in that baby T and sundress!

BJD: Now we’ve entered a new bracket in our competition: Love in the Ruins. And it’s hard to explain to someone who wasn’t a teenager in the 1990s that the overall messaging we received was: If you have sex, you will die. And that may have affected us a bit.

ES: No one younger than us understands that.

BJD: On theme! She’s French and reading Georges Bataille, who once said that the only two rational responses to sex are laughter or tears. It’s interesting Ethan Hawke is pitching the sequel right here: he’s asking her to think in the future 10 years, and maybe her marriage isn’t the best, will she have regrets about this moment?

ES: It’s actually really difficult to talk over a movie that is nothing but talking.

[Here we decided to mute the movie and watch with subtitles.]

BJD: Dreams, Situationist theory, time and relativity. Linklater has made this movie at least three times but this is probably the version that broke into the mainstream the most.

ES: Okay, the listening booth scene is so cute. It’s so clear they want to kiss and are trying not to. Okay. I have to admit I really thought that I was going to hate this movie on rewatch because I thought it was going to be so saccharine. Instead—

BJD: Someone has moved an X-ray screen in front of your heart and it’s Grinch’d out three sizes too large? Their kiss on the Ferris wheel is so good. They both have that beautiful dumb look after a first kiss.

ES: That was a good first kiss. But the question is, is it going to get saccharine?

BJD: I think going back to my idea that love in the 1990s was shaded with death. Even in this movie, they are on a clock here. They have 12 hours to be in love.

ES: They are talking a lot about death.

BJD: As you do when you’re that young, and then if you’re lucky you forget about it for 20 years, and then it really starts happening.

ES: The other thing that they’re doing that was common when I was that age, which was defining yourself in opposition to your parents. But now I actually don’t think it's that common.

BJD: Well, I can’t speak for an entire generation. But maybe I should! We’re quite the oppositional generation.

ES: Oh no. He’s now acting like a bit of dick to her. I remember not liking that.

BJD: They do want to contrast them, right? He’s American and a little gormless. She’s French and perfect. But also, I don’t think I could stop myself from being a dick in my twenties no matter what country I was in.

ES: Give me an example.

BJD: Anytime I opened my mouth? Sometimes I would realize I just spoke to someone for four hours but did I believe a single word of what I said? You don’t even really care about it until you wake up one morning and say I wish I could stop being a dick. Now, I do want to ask, do you think Ethan Hawke’s character would like this movie?

ES: I think he’d probably make fun of it in some way. And when we were going to put it on, I was like, we’re going to make fun of this in some way. But—

BJD: You’ve been grinning ear to ear in joy! This is what I will say about youth and dating. When first dates lasted 12 hours, you would start at like 2 p.m. coffee and it would go till 2 a.m. Those dates did bend time. So this setup is natural for Linklater’s main preoccupation with time.

ES: I think that bending time is overrated because eventually you have to live in the real world.

BJD: I’m going to disagree with you, there’s no difference between what you’re calling the real world and those moments where you feel outside of it — I hope that part is always accessible. But then again, even Philip K. Dick wrote, Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

ES: Dick move! Also, so much of their conversation in this film is coming off as trite now.

BJD: That’s true. I’m also going to say that the trite conversations we have when we’re 19 to even our mid-twenties, we are learning how to think. Especially as writers. You have to learn empathy. You have to learn how to see multiple viewpoints. And the path to that place — ironically — is total navel-gazing obsession with yourself and your condition.

ES: So you’re saying this is something we have to go through?

BJD: Yes, and if you’re lucky, you don’t do that in public… like we did! I can’t believe newspapers and magazines paid 25-year-old us for our thoughts.

ES: Okay, this is cute. The fake phone call to their friends, telling them about the date.

BJD: Oh, look, he doesn’t have a real camera. He has to take her picture with his mind.

ES: No phones anywhere, just people living their life. Taking mind photos!

BJD: So about their conversation, it seems like they have a terror of knowing someone too much. There really is a terror of routine. And maybe this is a Gen X thing, right? We were the divorce generation.

ES: I don't think I felt the terror of knowing somebody, though. I think I desperately wanted to know people. Probably too many people!

BJD: Just so you know, I'm crying at this goodbye scene!

ES: “Au revoir… later.” We need to do that as a T-shirt!

BJD: Okay, what if after seeing her off at the train, Ethan Hawke immediately then tried to pick up another woman with the exact same story?

ES: That would have been a great ending. And we’re ending almost on the same shot that we started with.

BJD: No, it’s their entire date, but in static daytime shots. Which is pretty brilliant of you, Linklater.

ES: Showing that they were the magic of the night.

BJD: That old lady walking through the park knows someone fucked at that spot with the empty wine bottle. Look at her face. She can tell!

ES: I don’t think we can top that.

BJD: I do have to point out that this DVD of Romance was purchased at a church rummage sale in Montauk where we were on vacation. And it’s the uncut version!

ES: You also got a Mac monitor for 10 bucks!

BJD: Now to talk a bit about how you and I ended up seeing almost every Catherine Breillat film. I make a lot of Toronto jokes here, with much affection, but I will give it this. It’s the kind of place where — while we lived there — every single Catherine Breillat movie opened for some reason. The sick and horny soul of Toronto was in love with Breillat.

ES: I actually saw her do a Q&A at TIFF for Sex Is Comedy and it was sold out. I just remember seeing this film and thinking I’d never seen a movie like this before.

BJD: Why do you think Romance has such an impact on you?

ES: Because it has a female character who wants sex. It really is that basic. Even though she is in an annoying couple.

BJD: Their world is aggressively beige.

ES: This is 1999.

BJD: And if you look at this woman’s world as she starts to get into the S&M relationships and pickups, it gets very red and black. Now, here’s the thing about Breillat. She is a singular artist with literally a single subject. Do you think she ran out of things to say over the years?

ES: That’s a possibility. I think the other thing about her films is that once you know she’s shocking, then it becomes less shocking.

BJD: I think my peak Breillat experience was Anatomy of Hell. Probably the combination of the character’s identities spoke to me the most. I still can’t believe I watched that movie in public.

ES: I feel like Romance is mine. And Fat Girl.

BJD: Oh, God, the driving scene in Fat Girl and then the shock ending. It’s so stress inducing.

ES: The French title translated—To My Sister—is so much less cringe. But I don’t think I could ever recommend that movie to anyone!

BJD: Welcome to Cinema Dirtbag! Where we risk subscribers over film recommendations!

ES: She and her boyfriend are so boring they could be in the background of Before Sunrise on a completely numb vacation in Vienna.

BJD: While Ethan Hawke would be making fun of them! We'll get to it, but my favorite part of Romance is the ending.

ES: The ending’s great.

BJD: It’s what I like most about Breillat. Her filmmaking. The mix of the neorealist, long takes, and then some total Eurotrash flashes right out of Jean Rollin or Jess Franco.

ES: This movie did really inspire me because I was just starting to publish when I saw it. I remember early in my career being told by a literary scenester that I should be careful about writing one kind of story because after a while that was all people would expect from me. And what he meant by that was a sexual story.

BJD: God, I hate people like that. The random asshole who wants to impart his wisdom, essentially stopping people from being themselves.

ES: What a sad penis. I mean, on screen right now. I will say that when I saw this movie, I couldn’t understand why she was so focused on her shitty boyfriend. That her worth is involved in whether he sexually responds to her or not.

BJD: That’s the moment she makes her decision to go on her erotic journey of self-discovery, right? How many times can I say erotic journey of self-discovery?

ES: She’s picking someone up now. This is Before Sunrise, but if she had nine Ethan Hawkes in one season.

BJD: Maybe we need to talk a little bit about the unsimulated sex era, which were mostly French films in the aughts — but Romance in 1999 was the start of using doubles, and adult performers in narrative filmmaking.

ES: We should also talk about the fact that there have been some things said about Breillat in the media, in terms of what she allowed on set.

BJD: I understand the French urge to take down the boundaries. This was 1999. Pornography went from limited access, to everywhere all at once. But I think there are good reasons to keep them separate. Both filmmaking and porn are workplaces. But with very different expectations. Casually mixing up the boundaries of the two potentially opens things up to performers getting hurt. In this case it did — though the lead actress has more complicated feelings than we can relay here. But, you have to ask yourself, What are you getting out of it artistically? Like, in Romance there are unsimulated shots next to merkins.

ES: Yeah, that’s weird. I think the acted bondage scenes are so much more emotionally intense, and they’re completely clothed — that’s the power of pretending.

BJD: I do think the unsimulated approach works to much greater effect in a couple of other movies, because the intensity of sex is integral to the characters’ actions — Virginie Despentes’ Baise Moi, and Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake.

ES: Let me emphasize, to GREAT effect in Stranger by the Lake. Oh wow. I hate her model boyfriend so much. “A man has to remake the world with his pals in a bar.”

BJD: The thing is, any guy who says that has no friends. And now we find out she’s a schoolteacher!

ES: I forgot about her principal.

BJD: Her principal with a dark secret.

ES: Well, Brian, have you known many schoolteachers? They all have dark secrets!

BJD: He’s actually quite tender with her during their bondage scenes.

ES: I’ll say this about Before Sunrise and this — if you look at the two female characters, they’re an interesting contrast. In Before Sunrise, Julie Delpy’s character Céline can mock Ethan Hawke’s character, and call him out, but she can also speak very honestly about her uncertainty. In Romance the lead doesn’t seem to know what her value is, but she knows what she wants.

BJD: She wants to get pregnant and she somehow does after five second sex with her boyfriend.

ES: And now a doctor exam. Since we grew up in a country with socialized health care, I’m thinking this is something Americans don’t know about. Where something so uncomfortable is about to happen and suddenly there are five or six student doctors in the room with you. With gloves!

BJD: It’s so Breillat that she turns that into a fantasy scene with the sleaziest looking medical students ever. Like that guy in the back is totally a grip they put a white coat on.

ES: Okay, last minutes of life for the boyfriend. It’s like this guy is the repository of every dumb thing that a man has ever said out loud.

BJD: This is the most miserable relationship on film since Diary of a Mad Housewife. And unlike that movie, this ends with the death of the terrible partner. And that’s the satisfaction I think you were looking for at the end of Mad Housewife.

ES: Oh look, she saved the cat before turning on the gas, and going to the hospital to give birth.

BJD: And then the jump cut to the funeral procession and the best needle drop in French film history: Funkadelic’s “Free Your Mind … and Your Ass Will Follow.” How are you going to vote, Emily?

ES: It’s like, okay, do we let the weird goth kid be valedictorian? You usually want to say yes but this is a complicated film.

BJD: Um, did you know I was voted valedictorian but the admin nullified the vote on the basis I would say something weird? There are flaws in this movie, and there are flaws in how it was made, but maybe I should vote for it, just to prove that school administration right!

ES: And in an odd twist, I’m switching back to Before Sunrise. Breillat is similar to a director like Lars von Trier, in that if you’ve seen one film you know what the tricks will be. I’m going to with Linklater for an actual romance.

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Last week our readers resoundingly chose The Limey over Jackie Brown. That film will go against the winner of this week’s 1990s film playoff for a semi-final in our Narrative Rebellion bracket.

Robert Altman was on a career comeback at the time with 1992’s The Player and 1993’s Short Cuts. Both are rambling narratives that make us remember how he invented the form in the 1970s with Nashville and The Long Goodbye. Short Cuts is maybe peak Altman, with a cast of 22 and a script that links nine different Raymond Carver short stories.

In 1994 Wong Kar-Wai was exhausted after making a Hong Kong swordsman movie in the Gobi Desert. He said of that time, “I had forgotten how to see.” In the middle of postproduction on that film Wong and cinematographer Christopher Doyle set up in the small apartments and food stalls of Chungking Mansions to make a hyper-kinetic, handheld movie built around two storylines of lovelorn almost-couples.

Which film will advance? If you’ve made up your mind already, vote below! If not, read our commentary and then come back up here.

Brian J Davis: Can we sit down and watch this goddamn movie about love?! Oh, is the recorder on? I’m just kidding, I was doing a bit because Emily came to the studio in a bad mood.

Emily Schultz: I will be in a good mood as soon as the movie starts.

BJD: I know you’re a massive fan of Wong Kar-Wai, but I want to explain for the readers where this film came from. During the Hong Kong film explosion of the ’80s, you could make a crime movie, you could make a horror movie, or you could make an historical movie. And so many awesome genre movies came out of that, but Wong Kar-Wai was instead far more interested in being Godard.

ES: Did he even have a script?

BJD: The thing about Wong Kar-Wai and Robert Altman is that they both write with the camera. Altman’s famous quote is, “The script is only a suggestion.” Which means everything they make is on the precipice of disaster. Both directors have masterpieces, and unwatchable films.

ES: I do feel like there needs to be a side note about my parents. I lent them my DVD of In the Mood for Love. Criterion! Not cheap! My absolute favorite film! And when I asked for it back several months later, they were like, oh, we watched it. And I was like, yeah, so can I get it back? And they were like, oh, well, we thought you'd seen it.

BJD: So what did they do with it?

ES: They donated it! Because my parents had this weird idea that you only watch a film once.

BJD: Basically Medium Cool is a constant rebellion for you to rewatch movies!

ES: Now, in Chungking Express he’s still working within the setting of a Hong Kong police film, in a way?

BJD: And even more so in Fallen Angels right after this, which was meant to be one of the short stories in Chungking Express. And this is where Chungking Express and Short Cuts are so similar. They’re all these stories of people waiting, and missing these interactions around them. Which I think is so part of the spirit of the short story. And this is where we turn over to you, author. You have a short story collection and co-founded a certain short fiction journal called Joyland.

ES: I love the short story. But I’m going to break away from the short story topic. Because I think actually the whole idea of waiting is about love and romance. And the idea that there’s space in your life for somebody to walk into it.

BJD: Well, very much the short story is about one moment or a very short period of time. And usually the mechanics is then they make a decision about something.

ES: It’s always one particular puzzle or conundrum.

BJD: Now we have these movies that threaded short stories together. They are puzzles made of smaller puzzle pieces! In no way could you get away with this kind of narrative now.

ES: But, I mean, at the same time, this is a movie that definitely that made me want to write.

BJD: And after watching Fallen Angels again last week, I realized these movies made me want to die with a camera in my hand. I just want to capture life like it looks in Chungking Express and Fallen Angels. Existing light, wide angle, constant motion.

ES: So for both of us, this movie was completely transformative.

BJD: And that’s going to make it tough. Chungking Express is the kind of art you make after a failure. I think both of us know what it feels like to make a big, huge belly flop towards commercial. Sell our souls and feel totally empty inside and then realize we have to go and make art again.

ES: Couple of times now!

BJD: Here’s the thing about all the directors in this bracket. They’re all novelists! Wong Kar-Wai films have chapters and very writerly voiceover. And here it is! “Password is ‘Love you for 10,000 years’”

ES: I mean, the other thing I really like about Wong Kar-Wai movies is the way that he uses music. And lets characters interact with and live through music. Usually only one very meaningful song.

BJD: That’s actually how we use music in life. There’s one song that defines a certain month for you or period of your life and if you hear it you’re back there.

ES: There’s a nostalgia in both Short Cuts and this about chance encounters. You don’t have a lot of chance encounters in the app world now. Unless you run into someone you saw on an app in real life.

BJD: This is just it. I worked in restaurants and bars and watched a lot of waiting. A lot of longing. That’s not romantic, that’s just what you literally had to fucking do! You had to sit alone in a café hoping that the one would show up again or walk by the window.

ES: This movie’s just making me hungry now.

BJD: Unless Short Cuts totally changes my mind I kind of know what I’m going to pick over these two movies.

ES: So Faye Wong has the keys to his apartment because of the letter his ex left for him. Again, a great short story hook. That’s exactly what you want with a short story.

BJD: Also, a large part of you enjoys watching Tony Leung smoking.

ES: Tony Leung can do anything he wants in his undershirt.

BJD: What Wong Kar-Wai and Doyle were going after—and Doyle is really an equal collaborator on this film—was the liminal spaces and moments in cities. I hate to say it, Chungking Express is a lot like early Instagram.

ES: It was wonderful once! That’s why I was there. It was for the silence. I am going to sound nostalgic saying this, I think what this movie is about is that sometimes you just liked someone to like them. And I think that that’s sort of part of the era. I think that relationships have gotten very complicated. And we’re all supposed to interact in the healthiest way as possible.

BJD: We have to confront it. This movie’s message is: Love equals stalking plus time.

ES: There was a lot of stalking in ’90s movies.

BJD: But don’t get me wrong. It doesn’t suggest common stalking. This suggests big gestures: breaking into a cop’s apartment and turning his floor into an aquarium!

ES: A one year later epilogue. Also very short fiction!

BJD: And it ends so obliquely. It could have ended with “You’re under arrest…for stealing my heart.” But instead they decide to wait another year before meeting again!

ES: As far as bad girlfriends go, she is pretty bad.

BJD: That’s how you know it’s love! Before we switch over to Short Cuts—on fast-forward—here’s why these two films matter. If you think about the well-noted, well-worked-over feature script that adheres to the hero’s journey—the cat in the fucking tree—all that stuff is so oddly old now. I just love these movies that spit in the face of everything about screenwriting convention.

ES: But there’s a problem with the linked short story, the networked narrative, the multi-POV. It’s that you start to pick and choose.

BJD: Especially during a three-hour film like Short Cuts. Even personally, we pitched a networked narrative script last year and I could not disagree with the feedback from a producer: If I follow a character and like them, I want to keep watching them. Also, technically, you’re multiplying your chances of fucking up.

ES: For all the amazing things in Short Cuts, there’s a lot we don’t like.

BJD: Oh god, not Jazz Mom already! The worst storyline in Short Cuts and it’s Altman’s story. Not even a Carver. But before we start to pick it apart, I do love this movie. This was my first Altman movie other than M*A*S*H, censored on broadcast TV. I remember being a teenager and the youngest person in the audience for this!

ES: It was probably the first Altman movie that I saw also. Andie MacDowell? Frances McDormand? Lili Taylor?

BJD: Julianne Moore? This wins the 1990s points on cast alone. Like, the only person from the ’90s not in this movie is Steve Albini.

ES: And there are brilliant storylines in this. Tim Robbins as Officer Gene. Actually, I kind of love watching this on fast-forward.

BJD: Now here’s the magic of Altman, the world’s biggest actor lover. He’s only looking for those real grace moments and gives the cast time to find them. Frances McDormand picking her wedgie. Tom Waits throwing that plastic mini bottle of whiskey and it bounces back and hits him.

ES: But it seems like they had to follow the script for this, given the complexity.

BJD: I think they did much of the edit in the script, i.e. how long are we going to spend with each storyline. And they had a quite heavily graphed-out plot wall.

ES: Which you would have to.

BJD: Altman may be script agnostic but he cares about filmmaking. There’s a lot dexterity in the edits and jumps. But let’s get to comparisons. Because Chungking Express is shorter you don’t see the built-in limitations of short stories as source material. Here, over the course of three hours, you do. Think of the great short story writers who couldn’t write a novel to save their life.

ES: Raymond Carver, for one. Lydia Davis? But why does this not work for Shortcuts?

BJD: I think the ending. The characters are kind of running out of things to do, rather than coming to a moment of change or interesting failure. I mean, an earthquake? That’s very much a film deus ex machina. That’s Altman taking over the material to make it kind of work. No short story writer would end a story with an earthquake. They’d be laughed out of their little MFA room.

ES: People accusing them of “bathos.” Oh the shame.

BJD: So did you actually read Carver because of Short Cuts?

ES: No, I eventually read Carver because I was teaching short stories. But I was more likely to assign someone like Donald Barthelme. And my students hated me for doing things like that.

BJD: I think your students hated you flat out for being weird.

ES: They didn’t even like it when I taught Margaret Atwood! That was online. In person, my students tended to like me.

BJD: Now let’s talk Julianne Moore because I think the one thing you can say about Short Cuts unequivocally is that this is Julianne Moore’s “Holy shit who’s that?” moment.

ES: Right. This is her first role?

BJD: No. She was in Benny & Joon.

ES: No she wasn’t.

BJD: She was the waitress, Ruthie! But let’s shit on Benny & Joon for a minute. Here’s the thing that makes me cringe about the 1990s. The sheer amount of studio attempts at fake cult movies, where people were just doing the umpteenth iteration of Harold and Maude.

ES: [Imitating Dan Hedaya] “My hands are tied! My hands are tied!”

BJD: I think the Julianne Moore story is the best story in Short Cuts because these are the people that Altman was most comfortable with. A doctor and his artist wife in the Hollywood Hills. And he allows Matthew Modine and Julianne Moore to just go off, right before the dinner party. That said, my vote is still for Chungking Express.

ES: I almost want to switch my vote from Chungking Express. I mean, the baker sending death threats to the family with the child in the hospital. And Andie MacDowell confronting him. “You bastard! You monster!”

BJD: You get Short Cuts more as you get older. As you understand that…dads have affairs with sister-in-laws. A lot. Or you go to the dinner party of someone you barely even know, and they nearly got divorced seconds before you arrived.

ES: I was so young when I saw this I didn’t get the dinner invitation. They don't have any reason to try to impress these people or even entertain them.

BJD: And when you become an adult and realize: People just invite people for dinner? And then you go to their homes?

ES: And then you have to be nice to the extra people who are there who you’ll never see again.

BJD: It’s the worst thing in the world! I’ve grown with this movie and that does matter. But I still have to give it to Chungking Express. Because I feel this is Robert Altman being Robert Altman. He did the sprawling movie many times.

ES: No, I’m not going to change my vote. I’m going to go with Chungking Express because I think it has a unique style.

BJD: Okay, so we’re declaring Chungking Express the winner of our votes?

ES: I have some reluctance because I do think there is a lot of stalking in it.

BJD: The 1990s was a bad decade for love, really.

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It might have been the renewed interest in French New Wave films. It might have been the fomenting digital revolution. It might have been the ungodly amounts of ecstasy we took as teenagers. No matter the reason, fracturing time became an important part of how narrative changed in the 1990s.

Quentin Tarantino knows we all think 1997’s Jackie Brown is his best film and that we sound so smart for saying it. Now’s the time to test that status against Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey from 1998. It would have been obvious to match Jackie Brown, an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s novel, against Soderbergh’s own Out of Sight, but this pairing is the better matchup. Both are self-aware crime films starring actors from the 1970s playing characters who are facing down time itself.

There’s a chance we’ll be talking about one of these films a few more times so we tried to be concise in our first discussion as referees. Of course there are many more questions these films raise and you can bring them up in the comments and notes. You can also vote for the winner of the matchup below to decide which film moves on, and your vote matters as much as ours!

BRIAN J DAVIS: So before we hit record you said that the broken timeline is done better in The Limey?

EMILY SCHULTZ: I think the broken timeline is done better in The Limey because it’s almost as if life itself is a memory.

BJD: Jackie Brown has a different take on that, which is that aging is the unknown country. You don’t know what’s going to happen as you age.

ES: You think Jackie Brown touches on the theme of aging better?

BJD: No, no, no, not better, but differently. Like, Max Cherry at the end of Jackie Brown—he’s literally receding into a blur. Then Jackie Brown herself is driving and singing along to the camera. To think that life is still unknown at 50 for these characters—that hit me harder now about Jackie Brown.

ES: When we saw these films, we were really young and the filmmakers were…

BJD: Young! And they were really the two hippest filmmakers of the ’90s and in pretty much the same calendar year both have neo-noirs about aging starring cult actors of the 1970s.

ES: If you asked me which is my favorite filmmaker, I would hands down say Soderbergh. But at the same time, when I watched these back-to-back, I responded much more to Jackie Brown.

BJD: I want to bring up some of our rules for our readers right now, it’s not about favorites. This is a game. This movie against that movie.

ES: Because we’re basically refereeing a match. We have to be impartial.

BJD: The matchup between these two movies is extraordinary, thematically. Both very strong directors who are working with strong source material. Soderbergh working with a Lem Dobbs script.

ES: And Tarantino adapting Elmore Leonard. And it’s a very good adaptation.

BJD: Again, this first 1990s conference we’re doing is Narrative Rebellion. These are the most novelistic movies in this group.

ES: I would actually say that The Limey borders on poetry.

BJD: Both movies escape the linear progression that most film is trapped in, and they really try to use techniques from novels in the way that characters think. A novel is generally going to be told in the past tense, like a memory. It is going to be someone thinking through the story rather than experiencing it, per se. The thing about Jackie Brown that it has over The Limey is it does have more of a through line that you feel. And you feel that ending. You feel that progression.

ES: And The Limey doesn’t have that because of the broken timeline.

BJD: The one thing that I don’t like about The Limey is that it goes pretty conventional for the last reel. And it’s not the best shootout.

ES: One of the reasons it’s not as propulsive is because it really has one character, and that’s the Limey himself played by Terence Stamp.

BJD: But Luis Guzmán!

ES: This is still kind of a one-character film. Whereas in Jackie Brown, you have multiple characters that you care about, that you’re invested in.

BJD: This is a big one for anyone out there writing in genre. Jackie Brown has an amazing villain in Samuel L. Jackson. He starts off Mephistophelian but he ends up losing in this really interesting way. Jackie Brown, a flight attendant, completely undoes all his power, thread by thread, just tugging it out. Also on rewatch I was wowed by the multiple POVs of the money handoff. It is an exquisite set piece. And people to this day try to do it and they do it so badly.

ES: Now a criticism. Jackie Brown is a long movie!

BJD: That is by Tarantino’s design. He said, “I want you to hang out with these characters and be friends with them.” That after you stop caring about the plot, that’s what you’ll come back for.

ES: I do think its energy runs out.

BJD: Agreed. You’re looking at your watch after the peak of that heist scene. What hit me most about The Limey on rewatch—and I’ve been thinking about it for days— is when he realizes he’s the one who doomed his daughter by being a shitty father and teaching her to love these kinds of men. And Stamp plays it both devastated and at peace with the fact, as if he kind of knew the truth already. He just had to experience it.

ES: That’s why I would say The Limey is almost more literary: it’s more interior than Jackie Brown.

BJD: Should I go off on my tangent about what I actually think Tarantino’s best movie is?

ES: Oh god, that theory! I think first we should say that we almost didn’t want to include Tarantino because it seems like such an obvious pick. But when you look at Pulp Fiction, $300 million box office, he did take a risk following it with Jackie Brown, a two-hander character drama with two killings. And he fought for Pam Grier.

BJD: And Robert Forster, the patron saint of Medium Cool. Okay, here’s my little aside about what is the best Tarantino movie: Death Proof!

ES: No.

BJD: All I ask for from you, and the world, is two minutes to let me explain myself. With Death Proof he did this scrappy low-budget experiment and the parameters didn’t allow him to get wrapped up in “I have to make something genius or an epic.” And he ends up making what I think is his most personal, perverse, and narcotically paced movie. It’s a speedball made of Éric Rohmer and Jack Hill and for me it points to this alternate universe, where Tarantino makes a movie like Death Proof once a year, jumping around to different genre exercises.

ES: So you wish he was more like Soderbergh? [Laughs] He has his smaller, more experimental films. And those are often the ones that I love.

BJD: Well, let’s talk a little bit about where Soderbergh was here. This is really the start of his “one for me, one for the studio” cycle.

ES: How did this fare commercially?

BJD: Not well! The star is Terence Stamp at age 60. And it’s a fractured timeline narrative. I’m sure no one was fooling themselves, but they did it anyway.

ES: That’s the ’90s. So let’s calculate the points for both films.

BJD: Okay, I’ve never shaken something I overhead in a record store the day before I first saw Jackie Brown. I was flipping through the crates and this “old dude”—you know, in his late 20s— was talking to the store owner about Jackie Brown. He said, “It was like a three hour long episode of The Rockford Files.”

ES: So do you think it would be a better film if it were shorter?

BJD: I don’t know. You start to tighten up a movie like Jackie Brown, it’s like undoing relationships. Love is felt in the quiet moments, right? Would you cut the Bridget Fonda and Robert De Niro material? On this watch, I realized how important the Bridget Fonda character was.

ES: Oh, she’s fantastic.

BJD: And her and De Niro having “the dad fuck.” Is that the only consensual sex in the Tarantino oeuvre?

ES: I think maybe, but I haven’t seen them all.

BJD: What movie do you want to defend and put your vote on?

ES: I probably would put my vote for Jackie Brown.

BJD: Well, I’m going to surprise you. I’m changing my vote from what I thought it would be. Yes, the final reel of The Limey is a letdown. But Jackie Brown just doesn’t take that many risks. And I want to reward risk-taking. I’m going to vote for The Limey.

ES: Great timing as what’s playing right now is The Limey chase scene with Barry Newman!

BJD: From Emily’s favorite car movie, Vanishing Point!

ES: I really do like The Limey, but I’m going to vote for Jackie Brown. I think a big reason that I’m voting for Jackie Brown is Pam Grier. It is her character. It is seeing her own that role.

BJD: I think The Limey took more risks. And in some moments, it doesn’t pay off. But in a lot of ways, it does. To show the feelings and the memories that we’re not actually going to see play out. If there’s one thing that puts it right over the top, it’s that Soderbergh samples a movie—Ken Loach’s Poor Cow starring a very young Terence Stamp. What’s more 1990s than sampling?

ES: I guess I side with Jackie Brown because I also like the fact that you’re showing criminal morality, that all these criminals have their own moral code, even if we don’t immediately understand it.

BJD: Okay, so I think the two refs have spoken. It’s a draw. One vote for The Limey, one vote for Jackie Brown! We’ll put it to our readers to vote and see who moves on!

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“Film is a contact sport.” –Werner Herzog

The 1990s have popped up here a lot on Cinema Dirtbag. As far as decades go, it’s a bit overrated, but given the film industry’s existential crisis this year we thought the raging, scrappy culture of the 1990s deserved the spotlight one more time.

Emily Schultz and I have set up an eight film bracket to debate over the next two months, culminating in the championship title. The winner from these films will represent not so much the best film of the 1990s, but rather the most ’90s film of the decade.

Just like in any other sport, the films are grouped in thematic conferences and were chosen with rules that verge on irritating eccentricity:

• It was released between 1990 and 1999.

• We already own it on physical media.

• We can’t have already covered it. Sorry to 1997’s Crash.

• Be reasonably popular enough that casual readers might have seen it, but not so popular as to be obvious. Sorry to 1992’s Man Bites Dog.

For each match up we’ll vote along with you, the readers! The winners will advance to their conference semis, and then a final competition.

Narrative Rebellion Conference

Chungking Express vs. Short Cuts

The Limey vs. Jackie Brown

Love in the Ruins Conference

Before Sunrise vs. Romance

Lost Highway vs. Doom Generation

We hope you catch up on some of these films and join us next week for the opening game of The Nineties Movie Playoffs! You’re also welcome to complain about your team not making it in the comments below.

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In 2017 Kristine Barnett was only known as the author of The Spark, a questionable bestseller about raising her special needs son. Emily Schultz was a then out-of-work writer and mother to a recently diagnosed autistic child. A cold call from a producer aimed to put them together on a feature development. There was no way to know what was to come in the saga of Barnett and her adoptive daughter Natalia Grace, now covered by both an HBO documentary and a dramatized Hulu series premiering this month. But enough felt wrong about Barnett’s book—and the producer’s intentions—that Schultz could not get out of that meeting fast enough.

Most agents preach to their clients, “Take every meeting.” We’re telling this story for the first time to present a more realistic response: Maybe not every meeting?

BRIAN J DAVIS: I’m going to start with 2019, two years after the meeting. I think people should know that in this household if there’s any true crime news that’s happening, I’m kind of on it first.

EMILY SCHULTZ: Hey, every once in a while I see the articles before you do!

BJD: I remember seeing the first articles about the Natalia Grace case and being so shocked that I was kind of stammering out the complexity of it. Okay, there’s this movie, Orphan. From 2009. With Vera Farmiga? You don’t remember it? It’s not bad. Anyway. This couple claimed it really happened to them—an adult with dwarfism impersonating an adoptive child. Then they left her alone in an apartment! They were arrested for neglect!

ES: I remember thinking, they sound like horrible people.

BJD: But then I saw the names of the parents and shouted, “Holy shit. It’s The Spark woman!” And that’s when you grabbed my arm and then stared at the screen. I think the first thing we did was make sure you weren’t still following her on social media.

ES: I was clean.

BJD: So let’s go back to 2017, when none of this is known by the public, and you couldn’t have known. For us, this is right after an agonizing film development crashed, and the year-long process of getting our son into a therapeutic school. We had two lawyers on retainer and were broke. So broke.

ES: If I recall anything about the time, it’s just pure defeat.

BJD: We really needed something and you got this email from a Canadian film producer looking for a writer to adapt a mother’s bestselling memoir about her son: The Spark, by Kristine Barnett.

ES: It seemed legit, at first.

BJD: And I did the quick due diligence research. The producer had made one of our favorite horror films. Not Orphan. That would be a little much.

ES: And the contact came from a mutual friend—a very solid person—and he had met this producer at his synagogue.

BJD: And you’re going to be in Toronto in a couple of weeks so you book a meeting with the producer. Everything’s working out perfectly, but as I do a little more digging…

ES: So many Spidey senses going off.

BJD: It turns out only a year before this, The Spark was a major Relativity Media package that was going to star Rosamund Pike and be adapted by Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours. And without knocking us…

ES: Without knocking us, how does a project like this end up at our doorstep?

BJD: We’ve come far since. But I really suspect the original studio found out about some things before the public did. It looks like this got dropped or put into turnaround fast. At this point, it’s with this indie Canadian producer, and it turns out the Barnett family has moved to Canada from Indiana. But we don’t know why…

ES: Yet!

BJD: For the record, you never met with Kristine Barnett, only this producer representing her book.

ES: Correct.

BJD: Now, as you’re reading her book on the plane, you’re starting to doubt…

ES: The entire premise? I remember saying to you, “I don’t know if her son is autistic. There’s something kind of odd here.”

BJD: I say this with all awe and respect to the autism spectrum, which can be staggering in its range. But if a child is diagnosed at the level of disability Barnett claimed, no matter the interventions, the result is not commonly going to be: going to university at 15.

ES: What I noticed when we were fact checking for this talk, the word “autism” is replaced with “Asperger’s” in her later media appearances.

BJD: Hustles have a learning curve. The narrative she was really invoking in The Spark was savantism, which is rare, but overly connected to autism because of Rain Man. And stealing the plots of films seems to be this person’s main problem in life. Allegedly!

ES: Again, looking at the subtitle— “A mother’s story of nurturing, genius and autism” —it’s about her journey as a magical mother, and almost that she’s “curing” autism. When I watched clips of them I saw a child who looked very media coached to say certain things.

BJD: It’s like seeing the backstory of a parent-child relationship in a Paul Thomas Anderson movie.

ES: But… I had to take the meeting. Especially because sometimes you take a meeting like that, and you’re offered a job, and maybe you’ll make some money, and you can relax a little bit. So I flew into Toronto and had to immediately meet right after landing.

BJD: And you had some awareness that your personal experience was going to be part of this meeting?

ES: I had written about Henry a little bit. For Slate and Today’s Parent. So yes. I have put myself out there. But not many people knew that at the time our son was in the same school as the child of a Very Famous Celebrity. And during the meeting the producer was leaning on me about that. Did I know this actor? Had we interacted? And that was suspicious.

BJD: The finality of this meeting was made easy for you because of some pretty standard bullshit.

ES: What the producer wanted me to do, and it became fairly obvious, was that they wanted me to write something on spec. And I could immediately see that there’s not going to be payment for me and that made it really easy to say, “Thanks for the coffee and croissant. I’ll never talk to you again.” I didn’t say that, but that was my feeling.

BJD: Now, I always tell people, don’t be totally afraid of spec work. It’s about the only way to generate your own projects. But when you’re meeting with a producer on a project that was, until very recently, a buzzy studio package and they’re now saying “Spec?” in a little squeaky voice. Yeah, you should run.

ES: I had reservations, but I also wanted a job! I mean, that’s how you go into most meetings. You hope it’s going to be something great.

BJD: And not to go down to the rabbit hole here, but you didn’t meet with Kristine Barnett. You met with a producer. There’s no saying this producer even legitimately held the rights to this book. [Laughs in evil voice.]

ES: I have no idea what’s real anymore.

BJD: And that’s just what the industry will do to your brain after a while. Okay, I found the emails from this producer and actually THIS is where it gets crazy.

ES: I was uncomfortable, for several reasons, but I did genuinely like the producer, until the follow-up email, two months after I had totally moved on.

BJD: Where the producer directly asked you to ambush this Very Famous Celebrity at school, or get a personal contact through the school office, and pitch the project.

ES: It was very gross.

BJD: I’ll give the producer credit for this. They apologized.

ES: After I reprimanded them.

BJD: Right! In your response I see you literally advised them to contact the actor through official channels should they wish to reach out.

ES: Because I don’t help other people stalk people.

BJD: Now to talk about Barnett in general, and all the revelations about what went on in her family—and we have no more real insight than anyone reading this does. But I do see someone who really wanted to be a famous mother…and now she is!

ES: A Munchausen by proxy narrative runs through all of this story. She really wanted to find some kind of notoriety through her children. And the media really loves a good mother story. They also really love a bad mother story.

BJD: She got an adaptation. Not the one she wanted.

ES: I think this has all stayed with me because I had this concern when writing even just a couple of articles about Henry. That the struggles that we have as parents shouldn’t outweigh his.

BJD: I think this encounter did force us to figure out who we needed to be as parents. That for Henry we were going to be his advocates, and make him heard in this world. Not us.

ES: Sometimes I will identify myself as the parent of an autistic child. And I think it’s important because it helps you find others in your community. But when I do it, I also sometimes feel like, should I do that? Because there are so many things about my child and that’s only one element, right?

BJD: As a writer, I am fond of the saying: just because it happened to you doesn’t make it a story. There are parts of life that you can’t spin into narrative. Becoming a parent to Henry broke me down and put me back together as a different person. I am not the same person I was before and how do you turn that into a 90-page screenplay? I wouldn’t know how, and nor do I want to.

ES: This is all a reminder that at any given moment you can come really close to putting a spotlight on a very bad person.

BJD: Well, they sure do have a spotlight on them now!

ES: I’m glad that I didn’t help.

Is sex back in film? In international cinema it never left. America, on the other hand, has never been too comfortable with the subject, no more today than in 1990 when it was forced to create a new rating for a studio film, Henry & June.

Director and writer Philip Kaufman was one of the only radicals of New Hollywood to stay radical well into the 1980s, subverting the horror film (Invasion of the Body Snatchers), the historical epic (The Right Stuff), and the literary adaptation (The Unbearable Lightness of Being). You can probably even ascribe the cynical core of Raiders of the Lost Ark to his early draft of that script. His Henry & June draws on Anaïs Nin’s journals to tell the story of her meeting expatriate Henry Miller in 1930s Paris, and the resulting love triangle with Miller’s wife June. Henry & June is perfectly cast with Uma Thurman as June, Maria de Medeiros as Nin (both future stars of Pulp Fiction), Fred Ward as Miller, and Richard E. Grant, who steals every scene as Nin’s clueless husband.

All this is to say we watched the hell out of this on VHS in the 1990s.

But does Henry & June still deserve its scandalous rep and does it capture anything real about writing life? We ask all these questions and more while still losing it every time Grant delivers the line reading, “Pussywillow.”

BRIAN J DAVIS: I don’t think we should dwell on Henry Miller or Anaïs Nin’s places in literary history. We should just talk about this movie as a movie itself and its identity as having the first NC-17 rating.

EMILY SCHULTZ: That’s good, because I hate Henry Miller.

BJD: I loved Black Spring. But not much else.

ES: I hated Black Spring.

BJD: Okay, Emily hates Henry Miller!

ES: I don’t know if that’s fair to say because I’ve never revisited Henry Miller as an adult. I picked Black Spring for a paper, probably because men I knew liked him. Whereas Anaïs Nin—

BJD: You based your entire 20s on her!

ES: Maybe. Yes.

BJD: Certainly Nin has lasted longer into our era because her writing—the journals, the lifelong project of herself as subject—it was Livejournal before Livejournal.

BJD: To switch to the rating discussion, we both grew up on the border. And R-rated movies meant something different in Ontario versus the US. I could take the bus over to Detroit as a teenager and see any R-rated film. They didn’t care. I saw Wild at Heart three times! In Ontario, R-rated movies were actively patrolled. Like, I snuck into Robocop 2 when I was 13 and got pulled out of my seat! I got perp walked out of Robocop 2. So the American R-rating is kind of soft and the Ontario R was much more like NC-17 ended up being. Now, Canada does not have PG-13—

ES: No, it’s called 14A for adult accompaniment!

BJD: That led to some very surprising movies I was able see—Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II. I saw that in the theater when I was 12!

ES: That is a crazy-ass film for a 12-year-old to see at a theater. Wait. I’m looking up what was the rating on Hard to Hold. Wow. That was PG? My friend’s mom made us leave that one halfway through. I guess eight was too young for the raw truths of the Rick Springfield story.

BJD: The MPAA was so scandalized that a studio—Universal—was going to distribute Henry & June that they came up with NC-17. Meaning no one under 17 was admitted. That’s pretty much Ontario’s R rating but NC-17 was a flop here. Theater chains wouldn’t book NC-17 films. Video chains wouldn’t buy them. I’ll give the MPAA this: they tried.

ES: And what was it that offended them so much?

BJD: Apparently one of the biggies was this scene where Anaïs Nin is looking at a ukiyo-e Japanese print of a woman getting it on with an octopus.

ES: Correction, Brian: getting oral from an octopus.

BJD: You’re right. If it was missionary with an octopus they’d be okay with it. Now, if we still drank... We would have to take a drink every time Richard E. Grant says his pet name for Anaïs: Pussywillow.

ES: We could invent a shot called the Pussywillow.

[For those who care to play along at home, our shot “The Pussywillow” is Pernod with lime cordial, shaken and strained.]

BJD: Let’s talk about casting. Uma Thurman, Maria de Medeiros, Fred Ward. Richard E. Grant is coming off Withnail and I. This is casting gold.

ES: She’s complaining about her banker husband even “smelling like the bank now,” but he’s underwriting their lives. This was totally my model for like what I thought I wanted my life to be as a writer.

BJD: On this watch I realize this is Anaïs Nin’s movie. It’s all from her perspective. It’s her truth and fictions. But I’ll tell you why Henry Miller is important to this story.

ES: Why?

BJD: Henry Miller brings in the ridiculousness of choosing the artistic life when you’re working class. One thing I took from Tropic of Cancer—his advice that if you show up at someone’s house around dinnertime there’s likely to be food there.

ES: I remember you doing that! Having not eaten for two days because you’d spent your money on books or albums.

BJD: Okay. The stockings and slip budget of this movie was extraordinary.

ES: How long are we into the movie and how many affairs and longing looks!

BJD: The cloche hat. The bangs. That was so Young Literary Emily. Now this line. “We’re living in a dump in Brooklyn. But we’re living like kings.” How’s that line strike you now!?

ES: No comment. But I like how this moves so fast through the flashbacks they took from their fiction. It lets us stay in the actual movie.

BJD: Oh my God. Walking through Brooklyn with Emily is like Henry Miller walking through Montparnasse. You know everyone. They’re like waving baguettes and shouting, “ça va, Emily!”

ES: I haven’t learned to ask strangers for money yet. I might need to learn that skill. And here is Uma Thurman.

BJD: Filmmaking-wise, they make blackouts sexy. They’ll just blackout on a close-up or a lingering look.

ES: This film is really fifty percent smoldering looks.

BJD: It’s like they use horror movie techniques for the erotic scenes, with the blackouts and the dissonant strings.

ES: Uh oh. One partner likes to talk in bed, the other doesn’t.

BJD: If you date a writer, you gotta have some sexy talk. Get that material in shape. Rehearse. Workshop.

ES: Writers do love to talk.

BJD: Fabric is one of the sexiest things about this movie. Everything is draped just so.

ES: That’s easy on Uma Thurman! What movie are June and Anaïs watching?

BJD: Mädchen in Uniform.

ES: Classic!

BJD: Here’s a question. When Henry Miller is playing her for money, Anaïs knows it. He’s not subtle. But when June is, because she is such an inveterate hustler, it seems like Anaïs doesn’t know she’s getting played. Wait—Anaïs is wearing three different kinds of crushed velvet!

ES: It was 1990. That’s one of things about historical films. There’s always a bit too much of their own time in the design.

BJD: So this is a film by Philip Kaufman, who adapted The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

ES: This is so similar to that, with the triangle!

BJD: But it is flipped. It’s a triangle from the woman’s perspective—not the horny doctor played by Daniel Day Lewis.

ES: Oh this scene in the lesbian bar! This scene ruined my expectations of lesbian bars forever.

BJD: You mean: tuxedos and garters in a smoke filled boîte while a sultry version of Cab Calloway’s “St. James Infirmary Blues” is played?

ES: Exactly! Instead I got faucet chain necklaces and 4 Non Blondes.

BJD: Anaïs and June. Two femmes in a relationship. What do you think?

ES: Honestly, they are two bagel bottoms put together and there is going to be a lot of drama out of that! Look at the love bombing already. “I wanted to smoke opium with you.”

BJD: So what’s interesting is Anaïs wants Henry Miller’s muse. June wants Henry Miller’s money source.

ES: And Anaïs is misinterpreting everything.

BJD: And Richard E. Grant is treating her queerness like pneumonia, putting a cold cloth on her head. “You’ve had a bad spell of it, but you’re on your feet again.”

ES: “Besides, you’ll never see her again.” Wish fulfillment out loud.

BJD: Let’s talk about writers dating other writers.

ES: A good topic!

BJD: You and I essentially have two different forms. I’m incapable of writing a novel. So I write scripts, but you write novels. I think that’s why we’re relatively safe around any shared subject.

ES: So both Henry and Anaïs want to write about June. I’ve never had it happen where I’m writing on the same topic or themes as the person that I’m dating.

BJD: I don’t want to say being an artist is evil. But without saying it, I think we know the answer to what’s more important: personal relationships or material for the art? And it’s always material!

ES: You have to! But you try to not let anyone ever know that you made that choice.

BJD: And now the other part of the love triangle. With Henry Miller this time. And more sexy writer talk.

ES: And sexy musical instruments! Bongo intercutting while they have sex in the club.

BJD: And then the guitar strumming and nipple montage.

ES: That is coming up! I forgot.

BJD: And it’s where the eroticism gets into Jess Franco territory. Let’s give a shout-out to Richard E. Grant in this role. It is the thankless role that he makes his own.

ES: Is this his first role after Withnail and I?

BJD: Maybe third? He did Warlock before this! Where he’s a time traveling witch hunter and has an insane mullet.

[Brian explains the entire plot of Warlock during a lull in the film until a rather explicit chair sex scene happens between Miller and Nin.]

ES: Oh, is it the chair scene? The chair scene, I never, never forgot it.

BJD: Because for you, it’s like “I’m in my writing chair. Might as well stay here.”

ES: Probably! I mean, it’s slow motion sex in a chair. Piaf on the soundtrack. A bubbling pot of bouillabaisse.

BJD: Why are you laughing now?

ES: I’m laughing at how she really likes to talk about her other lovers when she’s with the other one.

BJD: This scene is a good tip for writers seducing other writers. Praise their work!

ES: It’s literally all you have to do.

BJD: This movie really captures how much of a writer’s day is just ranting.

ES: Like pacing back and forth, or doing dishes and…

BJD: Complaining how the first person POV isn’t respected anymore?

ES: More garters! And talking.

BJD: There are two places you’ve got room to try and fail. The stage, and the bedroom.

ES: It really depends who your audience is.

BJD: Okay, let me ask you a personal question. Have you ever stopped something because someone said the wrong dirty thing?

ES: I have! But I think that I’ve certainly said things that have freaked other people out a lot. Ooh. everything’s tacked up above the desk like that. That’s true to writers in any generation.

BJD: Yes, the writer/serial killer wall is true. As is this scene of editing each other’s work and it leading to breakup.

ES: Exactly. Writing isn’t just drunken sex. There is a lot of revision and editing work as well!

BJD: Now the art students’ ball. Compare this scene to the chaste version of this event in An American in Paris. But first, a Kevin Spacey warning. This might be a normal person’s breaking point with this film: a naked Kevin Spacey painted blue and talking about Nietzsche.

ES: And still clutching his briefcase so no one steals his ideas. It’s a good scene.

BJD: Anaïs Nin seems like the nicest girlfriend in the world. And all these men and women just project onto her.

ES: That's because the film is from her point of view!

BJD: And that’s a good way of talking about the next scene during the parade where she’s followed by her husband.

ES: I never liked it when I first saw the film. Because I think they play it up as a sexual assault at first, for the tension. That’s a bad reason.

BJD: Before turning it into her fantasy scene. She then writes afterwards “My first infidelity to Henry…was with my husband.”

ES: And now they’re a sexually awoken couple on their way to a brothel.

BJD: Thank you Universal for this movie!

ES: Okay, this movie is more explicit than I remember!

BJD: I think the difficult thing they did with this brothel scene was to start in a very unerotic mood. Then Anaïs takes control and it turns into a genuinely erotic scene.

ES: As in life!

BJD: So what’s the story with Eduardo, Anaïs’ cousin who’s just cruising various waiters and dance instructors across Paris?

ES: He needs more scenes.

BJD: He looks exactly like Ronan Farrow.

ES: And now she seduces her cousin.

BJD: Her first novel wasn’t called House of Socially Condoned Sex. It was called House of…

ES: She’s back at the brothel by herself. Getting ready to do some Delta of Venus here.

BJD: Now Henry Miller has finished his novel and is going back to Anaïs. And she’s waiting for him in—

ES: The sexiest lingerie in film history? I can’t believe I’m watching this in Christmas pajamas right now.

BJD: If you love Fred Ward, this movie is for you. And this scene: 100% all the Fred Ward you need.

ES: Do you know if they had an intimacy coordinator on this film?

BJD: They did, but he died of a heart attack.

ES: June Miller is back and upset with both presentations of herself in the writing.

BJD: So this is like your character coming to life and giving you notes. “I was expecting a little better.”

ES: Actually, I remember at the time thinking that June was kind of annoying. Why is he obsessed with her?

BJD: Anaïs just got read for filth. “You just want experience. You’re a writer!”

ES: Now June is threatening to go find better writers!

BJD: She should have threatened, I’m gonna go give James Joyce a handjob! That’s what I’m gonna do!” Alright, here’s the question: Do you think that two novelists can be a good couple?

ES: Yes, with boundaries.

BJD: Here’s the interesting thing about Kaufman’s films. There is still so much traditional storytelling in it. I love that this ends like a movie.

ES: That they just drive off? The characters part ways for the time being. With Henry Miller riding his bike behind the car without a care. It kind of ends on the theme of possession.

BJD: And Anaïs’s final voice over. “I wept because I had lost my pain and I was unaccustomed to its absence.” I think I’m going to cry!

ES: Then this final title kicker!

BJD: “June became a social worker in Queens.”

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Emily Schultz has a rule. Just because a brutal or off-kilter film has a Christmas tree in it doesn’t make it an alternative holiday classic. Both Paul Schrader’s Hardcore and Aldo Lado’s Last Stop on the Night Train open on Christmas scenes but neither dwell on seasonal themes that much. To truly be our pick for a Cinema Dirtbag Christmas, a film has to embody the spirit of the holiday in its own perverse way.

My suggestion was Richard Shepard’s The Matador, a film unfairly dumped into cinemas in January, 2005. Pierce Brosnan is outstanding as a degenerate hitman who strikes up an unlikely friendship with Greg Kinnear, a wholesome businessman taking one last shot at success. While Emily and I were lucky enough to see The Matador in theater at the time, most audiences were probably sick of anything to do with hitmen after the 1990s. That’s a shame as Shepard’s script is far more than the Tupperware Tarantino the marketing suggested it was. It is in fact a great film that takes death seriously and is all the funnier for it. With each viewing the craft and wit is more apparent and the relationship between two men facing down their mid-life career crises more nuanced.

Before we would get to The Matador we made a brief stop on Tubi so I could show Emily the ending of 1980s bizarro slasher Christmas Evil and we could each reminisce on our darker holiday memories.

BRIAN J DAVIS: I'm going to show you the ending of Christmas Evil. FYI: Everyone who sees the ending of this film believes in the magic of the holiday a little more.

EMILY SCHULTZ: You're putting on the ending of a film that I've never seen?

BJD: It doesn’t matter. First, there’s a hundred horror movies set on Christmas Eve now. It’s not special anymore, right? And it’s not even that good of a slasher movie. But I want to bring it up here as a classic because probably no one has my story, which is my grandmother put this on and had me watch it!

ES: That is unique.

BJD: My grandmother was unique. She was probably bipolar, definitely a drug addict, and from the perspective of a nine-year-old, a total blast to be around. Was she my parents’ first choice of childcare? No. But you know how the 1980s were.

ES: The ’80s were like, Will anyone will watch my kid? Anyone? I’ll give you two dollars. Try not to kill them.

BJD: She knew how to push the limits. She was obsessed with her police scanner. She would gather us around to listen. “Come on, kids. Sounds like there’s a knife fight at Sam’s Hotel.”

ES: Oh my!

BJD: But even before we showed up, she would have gone to the video store and come back with a stack of the most hardcore horror, exploitation, or weirdo movies.

ES: This is where you get it from!

BJD: This is a triple feature I’ll never forget. Rock and Roll High School, the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers and, sure, why not: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. My grandmother had Vinegar Syndrome taste. She’s why I discovered the Ramones and punk!

ES: Whereas my grandparents thought they were being really risqué that time we all watched A Fish Called Wanda!

BJD: So one December, we were dropped off there and she said, “I rented Christmas Evil. You guys are going to love this one!” Now, it’s not the best slasher movie. It’s actually quite pedestrian. Basically Psycho plus Halloween set at Christmas. A kid is told by his brother Santa isn’t real, wakes up later, then sees Santa getting it on with his mother. He then becomes obsessed with Christmas, and snaps. Now here’s the thing, and I think this is probably why my grandmother liked it. It has the single most bonkers movie ending ever.

[We watch the ending, which we won’t spoil but you can watch the film on Tubi or just the ending on Youtube]

ES: If you told me before what the ending was I would not believe it was from a real movie.

BJD: I want to point out that my grandmother literally liked these movies. She wasn’t just picking films she thought would entertain three boys.

ES: She was just bringing you along for the ride?

BJD: Bringing us along for the “slay” ride! So that was the Davis family Christmas movie. What was yours?

ES: Um… It's a Wonderful Life. Every year.

BJD: It's okay to have had a normal childhood. Celebrate who you are.

ES: Actually, Christmas Evil reminded me of something. So my brother, his birthday is the day before Christmas. That’s a very difficult birthday. Even getting people to come over. But one year he tried to have a birthday party, and my father dressed as Santa. Nobody knew it was my father. Except I went to sit on my father's lap and I shouted “I’d like a puppy, Daddy!” Because I could see the cuff of his polyester shirt hanging out from underneath the Santa suit.

BJD: You're just like the brother in Christmas Evil!

ES: I’m that kid that ruined it for everybody.

BJD: So for the record, did your brother become a Santa Claus obsessed serial killer?

ES: Not that I know of.

THE MATADOR (2005)

BJD: You are of the opinion this is not a Christmas movie.

ES: I think having a tree in the corner for, like, one scene does not a Christmas movie make.

BJD: We’ll discuss it and we’ll see where we land. We actually saw this at the theater in January and you never forget a January film on the East Coast. No one in the theater so they are not turning the heat on.

ES: Having to watch while in a parka after you’ve made some effort to get there.

BJD: But we loved this film! And I think the audiences at the time just didn’t want to sit through another hitman movie.

ES: How many were there really?

BJD: The entire 1990s? Love and a .45, Grosse Pointe Blank, Things To Do in Denver When You're Dead. This movie is set up to look like those, but here’s the difference… there’s not an ironic note in The Matador. Everything is sincere.

ES: I was thinking we were also pretty young for the theme at the time.

BJD: A hitman and a businessman meet at a bar in Mexico and realize that they are both at their mid-career slumps. This definitely hits even harder now.

ES: I remember at the time being amazed at where this film went and Pierce Brosnan— what a beautiful mess in this film.

BJD: Didn’t you have a Pierce Brosnan thing as a kid?

ES: I was a Remington Steele fan, but it was a Stephanie Zimbalist thing, thank you. There’s still this cognitive dissonance for me. Brosnan in this movie is such a complicated piece of shit. This opening scene does so much. The radio that starts talking to him, he wakes up next to a pickup, then he decides to paint his toe nails. It’s very novelistic.

BJD: And they open with suburban nice guy Greg Kinnear having sex with his wife on his dining room table.

ES: It kind of says, no we’re not the crime film you’re expecting. I remember wondering at the time what they were doing with Brosnan’s character’s bisexuality, or rather his omnisexuality.

BJD: They had to fight for it in the edit so it’s there and sometimes not. It gives a layer to the men’s relationship.

ES: One of the things that the film really wanted to achieve quickly is to not like Brosnan’s character Julian but…

BJD: To empathize with him, and that’s the start of this film’s Christmas message.

ES: Now stop talking.

BJD: Pretty soon in this film we realize that it just zeroes in on the relationship between these two men and it gives their scenes a stage play amount of time. There are four scenes that take up half a movie. But I want to circle back to not liking Julian the killer. The film really deftly shows how to have a morality even within the immorality of a killer. You don’t immediately understand his ethics, but they are there.

ES: Right. His name is Julian Noble. They are two men who realize that they won’t do anything for money.

BJD: They both have limits.

ES: Let’s not spoil it. The twist is really enjoyable. Here’s what I’ve been thinking about. What is it that attracts the hitman to this straitlaced businessman?

BJD: I think he realizes Kinnear’s character has a part of him that will entertain the dark side. As we learn at the end of this scene, he and his wife have survived a tragedy. And tragedy marks you in the middle class. It makes you an outsider.

ES: So Julian sees this without knowing?

BJD: Truffaut had this notion about Hitchcock, that his films were all about the random moments when good and evil are put in the same room. And now, The Scene. Where Brosnan walks through a luxury hotel in his underwear and boots, set to “Garbageman” by The Cramps.

ES: That's how I feel walking to the pool at every hotel I’ve ever stayed at.

BJD: Now the bullfight scene. It’s so great. It’s 10 minutes long and you do notice when they take 10 minutes with a scene in a film.

ES: Okay, I relate so much to this scene where Julian reveals what he does for a living. Having had a career as a writer now I’ve gotten tired of explaining it to normal people. I feel like I have a double life that people have to drag out of me.

BJD: Like, Come on, tell me what you really do?

ES: Exactly. I’ve lived it. Now the bad news about Kinnear’s business deal. Answering machine messages. I miss how easy they were for conveying information!

BJD: Okay, so we’ve got to Christmas this shit up, though, Schultz. The first half of the movie is almost entirely in Mexico City. Then it jumps to Christmas in Colorado six months later, and we don’t know what happened in Mexico.

ES: This is the biggest connection with 1990s film. The fractured timeline. But this one is classy. It’s exactly in the middle of the film. This sex scene on the washing machine is so bad.

BJD: But you have to love Kinnear’s new mustache, he’s cloning with Julian.

ES: The mustache is so amazing.

BJD: I realized what I love about this film. Men are generally never interesting as subjects as they are in this movie. They’re given actual interior life here.

ES: What are men’s interior lives usually though?

BJD: I don’t know—energy drinks and podcasts? Can I now talk about what I think the Christmas message is?

ES: Go for it.

BJD: So Julian shows up at Christmas at Greg Kinnear’s house because he’s in trouble and needs help with a hit. This is such a test of friendship and they both realize that their friendship completes them as people.

ES: What I like is the friendship now has to negotiate Kinnear’s wife and in a way, she joins the relationship as well. And Greg Kinnear is the hinge!

BJD: Hope Davis is fantastic in this. In a just universe it would have been a supporting actress award nomination.

ES: We think she’s one kind of person but we see how she lets herself loose.

BJD: So, do you buy that this is a Christmas movie?

ES: They’re in a room with a Christmas tree.

BJD: But what does Christmas do but bring people together? And the pecan pie!

ES: I wondered why they just happen to have that pecan pie, just sitting around. And I guess there is a bowl of oranges. And there’s dancing—though it’s not Christmas music.

BJD: Now Pierce Brosnan is talking about his mental breakdown and how he woke up in a pile of donkey shit—that’s a deep-cut Christmas reference.

ES: Okay, it’s Christmas Eve and he has no place to stay. I guess those are details I may have missed. And I really like how they draw out the “what happened between these men in Mexico City” reveal. Was it a hookup? Did Brosnan kill someone for Kinnear?

BJD: Let’s jump to the ending, without spoiling anything. Kinnear literally uses corporate training techniques to help Julian with his work problem. Brosnan stops Kinnear from making a mistake. This movie’s emotions are so sincere.

ES: At the same time as being violent and filthy.

BJD: And that’s what I want Christmas to always be: violent, filthy, and sincere. So, Schultz, is it a Christmas movie?

ES: There’s a gift, there’s a wreath, there’s generosity of spirit, and there’s underground sex clubs. It is a Christmas movie.

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