Even after 16 years of living in New York City and seeing it all, we can admit it: 2026 has been a tough one for Canadian-American relations. When looking for a movie that we could riff on, and explore our alienated expat condition, Atom Egoyan’s 1994 breakthrough film Exotica seemed the perfect pick. Set in a tattered and otherworldly Toronto strip club, Egoyan took a narrative leap from his early experimental films to tell the story of a dancer, an emcee, a customer, and the horrific crime that connects them. With an incredible all-Canadian cast of Mia Kirshner, Elias Koteas, Bruce Greenwood, Victor Garber, and a teenage Sarah Polley, Exotica propelled Egoyan to his next film, the Oscar-nominated The Sweet Hereafter. As we dug in, we realized that researching the human condition at a strip club was a very Canadian pursuit. After all, Emily and I came of age in Canada’s sin city, surrounded by the sex industry, and the knowledge of where those loonies and twoonies really get to, eh.

Brian J Davis: Welcome to Canada, the world’s biggest small town with secrets!

Emily Schultz: So we’re going to have to think about what’s popular in Canada in 1994.

BJD: Well, let’s see: murder, Quebec separatism, and Mia Kirshner! At the time, this would have been my last year of high school. My best lesbian friend brought me to see Exotica.

ES: That tracks with you.

BJD: Because she was obsessed with Mia Kirshner! Because of Love and Human Remains.

ES: What’s funny is I saw that movie on a date. But I never saw Exotica until this year.

BJD: And of special note: Exotica was such a hit in Canada that it played in IMAX.

ES: In IMAX?

BJD: Yes! The first time I saw this, I felt the stories were too disconnected. But on subsequent viewings, it’s amazing, because what starts off as inscrutable for the viewer is actually quite rewarding. A lot of other people forget to put their puzzles together. You can see this in the literature as well.

ES: Linked short stories, except actually they’re not linked.

BJD: As an adult, this movie is so fucking good. But we should pause and explain why we’re going to sound like strip club experts. My family is from Windsor, Ontario, and Emily and I both ended up going to school there. It’s a very unique, rust-belt border town tethered to Detroit. Windsor had at the time, per capita, the most strip clubs in the world.

ES: Enough that years later it still got an “all nude” shoutout on the Kroll Show.

BJD: All nude is legal there, and the drinking age is 12.

ES: It’s 19!

BJD: But it was a San Diego/Tijuana set-up with an American student invasion every weekend. All this meant everyone there knew someone who danced. You lived with someone who danced, or someone’s mom was a dancer. You’d go to someone’s home and there’d be G-strings drying everywhere. What Americans call the sex industry... In Windsor, or Montreal, it’s just industry!

ES: Even my first gynecologist in New York said, “I went to University of Michigan. I remember Windsor.”

BJD: Arghh!

ES: What’s funny is the first time I went to a strip club in Canada I was told to get American singles because...

BJD: Because loonies and twoonies shouldn’t be thrown at humans! Okay, one girl I dated in college had a roommate who danced at the gay clubs, but had to quit because he couldn’t stand customers trying to tuck loonies between his butt cheeks!

ES: That’s terrible. How could you even dance?

BJD: Carefully. I hope Americans never look at their change from Tim Horton’s in the same way again. Much like Atom Egoyan wants you to look at strip clubs in a different way!

ES: And rituals. We’re watching performances within performances, right?

BJD: These people are all traumatized and performing through their trauma. You have Elias Koteas as the emcee, he’s the most revolting character in the movie. Then there’s the owner, Arsinée Khanjian, and Mia Kirshner, in a schoolgirl outfit dancing to Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows.”

ES: It’s not really what you think of when you think of strip club music.

BJD: My cousin dated a dancer whose signature song was “The Hanging Garden” by The Cure. A mournful drone song about animals dying after mating.

ES: And she got away with it?

BJD: Canada!

ES: Exotica is a tough watch, all this male gazing. But then there’s the owner of the club. A woman in control of things, and also watching.

BJD: And the emcee is the unreliable narrator of it all. Here’s customer Bruce Greenwood dropping off a young Sarah Polley.

ES: She lives above a roti restaurant. For a moment I was: I miss Toronto roti. But then I thought: wait, what’s going on? Because it’s 14-year-old Sarah Polley in a car being paid by Bruce Greenwood.

BJD: We’ll what’s going on is different from our expectations. But how do you like sleight of hand as a viewer? Because I know you love it as a writer.

ES: I do love it as a writer because I’m the one getting to play with your expectation. Maybe I have to acknowledge that my squeamishness here is intended, right?

BJD: Definitely. Now, you are an Elias Koteas fan?

ES: I am. Wig or no wig! What’s really great about this scene with him and the owner is in movies you usually have women that are the wrong amount of pregnant for what the story requires. And in this, because she was pregnant, it’s so accurate.

BJD: Egoyan has talked about how his one regret was he didn’t realize the effect it would have on his wife, Arsinée Khanjian, to be in a strip club full of naked women for two months while pregnant.

ES: That’s a lot. But here’s how matriarchal those clubs can be. I had an assistant editor at a magazine I ran. They came out as queer after visiting their mom’s strip club for the first time at age 19, when they were swarmed by naked French-Canadian dancers kissing them and cooing “Bebe.” They were like, yep, this is it.

BJD: Now Bruce Greenwood, the club customer, is investigating Don McKellar, the pet shop owner and animal smuggler, and the story starts to twist together. I don’t want to get into a dicey territory, but Canada Revenue is not the IRS. Canada Revenue is closer to the FBI. They are that intense. In Canada, not only do you know a dancer or someone who’s worked in a strip club, you also know someone who’s been audited. Emily?

ES: I don’t want to talk about it.

BJD: But this plays into a solid piece of writing advice. Every character should have a job that fits their obsession or neuroses. Don McKellar is all about secrecy. He’s a closeted wildlife smuggler. And Bruce Greenwood’s an auditor who can’t accept his daughter has been murdered. So he goes through these motions of having a babysitter. Or going to visit his daughter’s former babysitter at a strip club.

ES: This is someone who investigates, but who can’t accept tragedy. And now we see how Koteas and Kirshner met: at a search party.

BJD: So I guess I’m going to talk a little bit about the Bernardo and Homolka case here. Delicately, because I don’t want to ascribe any intention to Egoyan that wasn’t there. This is completely me just comparing dates. But for the two years before this movie, murdered schoolgirls had haunted Ontario. Then, while Egoyan was writing this screenplay, Bernardo was arrested. So there is something powerfully evil in the air at the time.

ES: That also maybe plays into my apprehension when watching this film. It’s still a haunting case for me because I was the same age as the girls.

BJD: Grade 13?

ES: I was not in grade 13. I fast-tracked.

BJD: Canadian brag! I still want to unpack that discomfort because I feel Canada, and specifically Ontario, has since memory holed anything to do with Bernardo and Homolka because of the collective guilt over how the police and prosecution messed up the case. To quote author Kirk Makin, “There is probably only one convicted serial killer living free in the world and that’s Karla Homolka.” I believe that’s why Canada decided: We’re never going to talk about it again. Canadians take the failings of the state personally.

ES: Right, with the protests later against American Psycho being filmed in Toronto.

BJD: I was marginally on that crew as a less-than-PA! I was on location cleanup. But my favorite Bernardo and Homolka fact is that they were such avid fans of Saturday Night Live they would race home at 11:30, no matter what they were up to. So if anyone wants to go the “blame media consumption” route....you have to include early ’90s SNL.

ES: As if to say Chris Farley made them kill?

BJD: Yes. So seeing some kind of early processing of that crime in Exotica—it feels like coming across samizdat. That said, there is humor in the movie and we’re not talking about it. The fact that Don McKellar and the guy investigating him for exotic animal smuggling actually become buddies, and it’s kind of hilarious, right?

ES: It’s interesting in a movie about people who don’t connect, that they seem to connect the most. They found their similarities—they’re both compromised. Wait, Mia Kirshner is back on.

BJD: Are you gazing Mia Kirshner dancing in Doc Martens?

ES: This movie makes everyone a hypocrite.

BJD: Have we discussed how in the movie lap dances are five dollars! The price of a pack of Player’s Light at the time!

ES: The one time I went to a club was in the aughts and it was 20 bucks. Why do people stare at mirrors so much in this film?

BJD: Before phones, we only had two way mirrors to analyze our souls, Emily! Actually one of things I love most about this movie is seeing intimacy between people, and it’s not sex.

ES: Right, Don McKellar and Mia Kirshner are having a real conversation during a lap dance. That’s transgressing the rituals this film has established. My dancer only told me to not get married!

BJD: And back with Sarah Polley. She’s the only character in the film who doesn’t want to play along with fantasies. For her, it doesn’t make sense what she’s doing for Bruce Greenwood.

ES: The wonderful thing about kids is how direct in their questions they are, and in stating the obvious.

BJD: Here’s the thing I want you to talk about, because never have I been a babysitter and then gotten a ride home from a dad.

ES: I have. And it’s like: I’m alone with an adult man. And sometimes they get flirtatious.

BJD: Flirtatious or they need to talk to someone anyone?

ES: As a 16-year-old girl you’re not always sure which it is. And you’re also sometimes a little bit like, wait, how many drinks did you have? And you’re actually driving me somewhere? And then he hands you money!

BJD: Cash, at that.

ES: There has to be some trust there. And you also have to know when to get out of the car.

BJD: How good is Mia Kirshner in her second movie? This isn’t a “that person is going to be good one day” performance. It’s just phenomenal. And here’s Elias Koteas putting on a perfect Québécois accent to fool Bruce Greenwood in the restroom.

ES: They said washroom, Brian!

BJD: I won’t go back! Ever! It’s bathroom, goddammit! But here is where the movie pivots and until now Koteas’s emcee character is so loathsome. But this is a movie about people getting tired of their fantasies. He’s about to smash this guy’s world, take away the safe place of this club for him, and...

ES: I’m listening.

BJD: And is it actually kind of a gift in a way?

ES: Because Bruce Greenwood is stuck in this fantasy world?

BJD: And as it turns out Koteas and Kirshner were the ones who found his daughter’s body.

ES: Do you think this is Atom Egoyan’s best movie?

BJD: Yes. But I have a soft spot for Chloe because Chloe is all his skill set from this movie, but brought to bear on a Brian De Palma-esque Euro thriller.

ES: My Chloe story is funny. I was pregnant. I was staying with your mom. And she was watching a Twilight movie on basic cable. But I kept flipping it back to Chloe when she left the room. But then I didn’t want her to catch me watching it, so then I’d flip it back to the Twilight movie!

BJD: My mom would have loved Chloe! My funniest watching-a-movie-with-my-mom story was when she came home from the video store with Cut and Run. She picked it because she thought former child star Willie Aames was cute and it looked like an action movie, but little punk ass horror kid me knew it was directed by Ruggero Deodato, who also did Cannibal Holocaust. “Sure let’s watch the Willie Aames movie” I said. She wasn’t a fan.

ES: So Bruce Greenwood is banned from the club and now he wants to get evidence against Elias Koteas?

BJD: He’s blackmailed Don McKellar into recording Mia Kirshner and then Greenwood has to hear his life story as told to a stranger. And Greenwood’s acting: so good. Again, this movie is so good I’m angry. How long did it take for you to write something good?

ES: Years. Okay, so there’s a family dynamic going on here. That they’ve been brought together by tragedy but they have these roles they also kick against.

BJD: And these are both inherited business. Arsinée Khanjian inherited the club from her mother. Don McKellar inherited the pet store, and gun, from his father.

ES: That itself is very novelistic. The idea of what you inherit. Oh, she’s doing her signature song, Brian.

BJD: I want to point out that you, in your one and only drag performance, also did a Leonard Cohen song!

ES: I did! I did “I’m Your Man.”

BJD: And now this Canadian ending where there’s about to be a gun murder, but then two men express their feelings instead. And have a hug.

ES: I love this scene so much it’s why I don’t care for the final flashback of Greenwood dropping Kirshner off at home.

BJD: I love the flashback. But they go a little too far in styling her as 16 in this scene. The acne.

ES: The retainer!

BJD: Importantly, this scene implies that maybe Greenwood helped her out of an abusive home. And that’s why she later takes care of him, in her own way, through his own tragedy.

ES: I do love that they used 1980s Canadian money in this flashback. And the backpack she has is the same one she uses on stage later!

BJD: So she walks into her house and it’s uncomfortable how long they hold on the house and how slow she walks in. She doesn’t want to go in.

ES: It makes the audience trauma bond with her and we are truly are all connected.

BJD: Except not by the Queen Car. I’m so sorry!

ES: No, you won. That’s the ending now.

Exotica is available on disc and streaming at Criterion

As Pauline Kael once wrote, “If you’re afraid of movies that excite your senses, you’re afraid of movies.” This proves most true with audiences when it comes to horror and thriller films. That’s why last year we created a list of films that will let you take a calculated risk while getting away from the same safe picks on the seasonal lists. We’ve also added new films this year to help you plan your watch parties, no matter who you’re watching with.

WATCH WITH A FRIEND GOING THROUGH DIVORCE: THE BROOD

Often considered within David Cronenberg’s filmography to be the white-haired rage child hidden in a chalet, The Brood is due for rediscovery in this era of maybe you’re all doing therapy a little too hard. Coming out of his own acrimonious divorce, Cronenberg was never this vulnerable again as a filmmaker and the script and performances remain astonishing. Oliver Reed is the most frightening therapist ever but it’s Samantha Eggar, as a woman who gives birth to literal rage babies, who should have won an Oscar for that placenta scene alone.

WATCH WITH YOUR FRIEND WHO IS MOST FREAKED OUT BY AI: HARDWARE

Seeing Richard Stanley’s debut movie is the moment Brian can personally pinpoint going from a Fangoria subscriber to a Flipside subscriber. A music video wunderkind, Stanley scored cameos from oldsters like Iggy Pop and Lemmy along with the insurgent music of the coming 1990s, including Ministry, Gwar, and Psychic TV. They’re all perfect for this near-future story of a genocidal war drone inadvertently brought to sentient life in a London squat of artists and immigrants. Movies should be cool, and Hardware­—relentlessly trippy, violent, and roughhewed—is still cool thirty-five years later.

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 cast 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 WANNABE INFLUENCER FRIEND: NOPE

Nope was technically a hit but we’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 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 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 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 just started filming.

WATCH WITH YOUR SIBLINGS: RAISING CAIN

What could drive Brian De Palma, in mid-career, to make his craziest, most belief-beggaring thriller? Maybe even his masterpiece? Becoming a new father! An act that’s apparently traumatizing for many artists. From there, just add an ensemble cast of John Lithgow, John Lithgow, John Lithgow, John Lithgow, and John Lithgow.

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 own 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.

FOR DADS TO WATCH WITH THEIR DAUGHTERS: 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 IF YOU THINK YOUR FRIEND IS A SOCIOPATH: DON’T DELIVER US FROM EVIL

Notorious as “The French film banned in France!” Don’t Deliver Us From Evil walks a fine line between exploitation and arthouse as it follows two schoolgirls who read Les Chants de Maldoror and decide to become evil. Drawing loosely on the real-life Parker-Hulme murder, director Joël Séria imbues the film with a spirit of genuine anarchy, from the scene of the giggling girls biking away in joy from their first murder to their performance art finale that anticipates Big Black’s Kerosene by 15 years.

WATCH WITH YOUR WELSH SEPARATIST FRIENDS: THE FEAST

We’ll just say it: the “folk horror” revival of the 2010s was the “college rock” of horror films—a term that codified legit practitioners but mostly served to excuse a lot of boring films with no sense of purpose other than “someone wanders a forest, fearing something something.” Released in 2021, The Feast may look like that, but it’s not. It’s like the unholy child of Lars von Trier and Takashi Miike, performed entirely in Welsh. Myn diawl!

As the film opens, Cadi is the temp help for a wealthy and dysfunctional mining family’s very important dinner party. She’s impassive, mostly silent, and also trails black dirt behind her. After a Kubrick-uncanny opening act, with jaw-dropping cinematography, The Feast becomes a blood-drenched fairy-tale, proving that mining power is no match for witch power.

WATCH AFTER A THREE-HOUR CALL WITH YOUR HEALTH INSURANCE PROVIDER: THE TOXIC AVENGER (2023)

Like its 1984 source film, Macon Blair’s The Toxic Avenger is full of ultra-violent provocations and stupid-on-purpose humor. Where it bests the low-budget original is the performances, with Peter Dinklage alongside a perfectly cast David Yow and an obviously having-the-time-of-his-life Kevin Bacon. There’s also the gooey beating heart that the film wears on its sleeve. Even Emily, who had never seen the original, was won over by this film’s love letter to outsiders and its (severed) middle finger to power brokers.

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 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 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 Salò 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 only 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 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 POD DURING THE NEXT PANDEMIC: 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—a conceptual studio cash grab that 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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It’s The Devils, plural, for a reason. Not only was there director Ken Russell, working through the end of his faith by adapting Aldous Huxley’s novel about a medieval convent taken over by sexual hysteria. There was also Derek Jarman, plucked by chance from experimental theater anonymity to design the 1971 film’s sets. And what sets. Unlike in most films the sets became part of The Devils’ spell. In Jarman’s hands the town of Loudun is the psychogeographical model of its denizens’ madness: the white fortress walls, the tiled torture chambers, its crucifixion fields. With the 4k restoration of the uncensored version now touring, Medium Cool is excerpting Jarman’s diaries from the making of Russell’s film.

Reading these entries now I’m struck by the studio-ness of The Devils: epic sets, the department squabbles, the suit visits. It was a major co-production, making Russell’s surprise at how much the studio loathed the completed film seem genuine. “They read the bloody script didn’t they!” he was reported to have yelled. With the director later begging Jarman to design his adaptation of The Who’s Tommy, Jarman would have been poised for his Hollywood debut as a designer. He decided otherwise, and embarked on a career of his own as a resolutely independent director, video artist, discoverer of Tilda Swinton, and LGBTQ activist before his death in 1994. But here, back before The Devils was the most notorious studio film ever made, read about champagne-soused takes, wasps invading the production, and the director accidentally blowing up the set.

The Devils restoration screens at Lincoln Center as part of the 2026 New York Film Festival and opens in wide release on October 16th. The following are entries from Dancing Ledge, by Derek Jarman.

January 1970, Upper Ground: I was dreading coming back to London as by Christmas I had very little money and no way of heating the warehouse at Upper Ground, with the exception of the small office I’ve made of my bedroom. I can just afford to keep the ‘pither’ stove going, but it does nothing except keep the water from freezing in the lavatory. The old coke water-heater swallows up fuel, and you have to lay in at least half a ton at a time. The holiday in Excelmans [Paris] solved the problem for a couple of weeks as the fridge was well stocked and the building centrally heated. On the train waiting to return home, I noticed a girl carrying two heavy suitcases. Something about the way she was dressed and her long hair told me she was English, so I shouted out of the window that there was a spare seat in our carriage, and she clambered in. Throughout the eight-hour journey we chatted about the theatre and painting. Janet Deuter was teaching at Hornsey in the experimental light and sound department. She was a friend of Ken and Shirley Russell so she told me of their new film project, The Devils. When we parted company she told me that she’d tell Ken about me, as she was convinced we would get along.

I soon forgot about this. But a day later the phone rang and Ken asked me if he could come over — ‘Tomorrow’. OK I said. ‘I’ll be there at eight in the morning,’ and at eight he arrived in the freezing empty warehouse at Upper Ground. He was bowled over by the building and while we huddled over mugs of tea I pulled out the odd drawing from Jazz Calendar and the Don, plus various other projects I had worked on. After looking at them briefly he asked me to design The Devils. I was quite taken aback by the suddenness of this offer, as I’d promised myself that after Don Giovanni I would never design again. I asked him if I could think it over, and he gave me twenty-four hours. ‘In the meantime can Shirley come to tea to meet you?’ In the evening I rushed out to see Women In Love. On the strength of that, and conversations with a few friends, I decided to plunge in...

February 1970 Ladbroke Grove: I sit up stairs on the livingroom floor among the bric-a-brac which invades every corner of Ken’s home. His latest addition is a portrait of Hedy Lamarr. Shirley makes coffee while Ken and I thrash out ideas. My architectural history, the years with Pevsner, stand me in good stead.

The town of Loudun is an enormous task. There’s the exterior as well as the interiors to consider, and also a large number of sets for Louis XIII’s court in Paris. I’ve brought a bottle of sepia ink ink and the finest rapidograph, which I use to make meticulous drawings of the sets, stone by stone, after initial (very rough) sketches. An art director, George Lack, is drawing these up into proper plans and elevations, and students at the Central are building a scale model of the exterior.

The whole lot is to be built at Pinewood. My source books are Ledoux, Boulee and Piranci’s prison series. All detail is sacrificed to scale as I want the sets as large as possible, and as forceful as the sets from an old silent.

May 1970, Pinewood: The journey out to Pinewood Studios is a nightmare. I’m usually up by 5.30 to get there by 8.30. So much of the time is spent waiting for trains and in the evening it’s worse unless I manage to hitch a lift. Yesterday I came out with Ken in the white Rolls for a meeting with the American investors — a gang of Hollywood mafia, who took the model of Loudun up to the lot where it was dismembered with a breadknife while they argued about its size. They posted studio assistants to mark its limits on the ground. They spent half an hour dissecting three months’ work, and at one point attempted to jettison the cathedral. The set is apparently going to be the largest since the ill-fated Cleopatra. Later, Ken called to say he’d been battling with them all day. Although he’s saved Loudun, we’ve lost the sets for Louis XIII’s palace, except for the theatre and perhaps the library; so the original design will never be realized — a historical film shot entirely in sets.

17 August 1970, Pinewood: We started filming after months of preparation. The great white city is nearly complete on the lot and has become a tourist attraction. You could almost pay for it with visitors’ fees. It cost £97,000. The finish of the white machine bricks (rather than the stone of the drawings) was decided upon in the plaster-rooms where they have brick and stone moulds of every description. I had various sections painted with more usual brick colors — yellows and reds — but looked dowdy on the glittery surfaces. Today we take up the catafalque with its shrouded figures: the whole of the studios are devoted to us as we’re making most of the props and furniture as well. A few special pieces, amongst them the life size crucifixes of the nuns’ chapel, are being sculpted by Christopher Hobbs; the crucifix is from the Isenheim altar (in polystyrene with a gesso finish). We found an authentic sixteenth century brank, a skull mask made in limewood. It’s in fragments but we’re going to restore it for the burning sequence, for which Christopher is also making a half burnt Oliver Reed out of latex.

The bald nuns have caused quite a stir. At first they refused to have their hair cut off, but the producer bribed them with an offer of 150 pounds and two wigs each.

September 1970, Northwood: I just picked up the tail-end of a conversation between my parents, who are washing up in the kitchen having insisted on me leaving it to them. Whatever Dad had said, Ma replied, ‘I’m so glad our children haven’t grown up normal, they’re so much more interesting than their friends.’

Lunch with Max Adrian, which brightens up the day no end. I found him in bed with the lady who is covered with the most revolting plague sores, eating a sandwich lunch on set. He said why didn’t I join them, as she couldn’t go to the restaurant looking like that: it would put everyone quite off their food. Max sat at lunch today eating cherry pie surrounded by empty plates. When I asked him what the plates were for he said, ‘For the bones.’ He recalled that at his twenty-first birthday party his mother looked him up and down and said, ‘Max, you are really quite ugly but at least you’re clean.’

Work is a minefield: the courtiers came down to the set this morning with horrible plastic roses in their hair. I told them to take them out, which most of them did quite willingly— but alas I didn’t know that the designer’s powers do not stretch to hair and a dispute began which came within an hour’s breadth of stopping the film. The whole thing was conducted with the utmost pettiness. The extras can be as stubborn as mules. They insist on wearing watches, never take off their rings and carry newspapers around with them, which come out the moment Ken shouts ‘Cut!’

Rushes are like bingo. Each of us votes for his favourite — one, three, four or whatever. Ken sits at the back with the lighting cameraman, David Watkins, who usually gets his way. Watkins, who always wears plimsolls, reminds me of a bad-tempered sportsmaster. One expects him to take out a whistle and blow it. He doesn’t like me very much, probably because everyone calls me ‘the artist’ and the sets, rather than his lighting, are the continual topic of conversation.

Today, Charlton Heston was sitting in the projection-room — he has a hide like tanned leather.

Revolting afternoon at the plague pit: it is composed of dummies and extras made up as corpses. Ian laid in gallons of real blood from the abattoir — splashed all over the place, it attracted clouds of wasps which made it almost impossible to act dead. Ken, as usual, stormed around, the bodies shifting as a wasp flew too close even when the cameras were turning. Nothing was right; the blood was a disaster. In the end he made me bring bottles of ketchup from the kitchens, which made everything worse as the wasps preferred it to the real thing. There was a huge row this morning about the houses on the lot. I’d taken down some shutters without consulting Ken. He’d seen them at an early stage of the design, and was expecting them on the buildings. ‘I can’t trust you, I can’t trust you. In future you’ re going to bring me everything to be signed.’ He looked like the mad empress from some B movie — waving his cane, his long hair flowing, wearing a smock and enormous rings on every finger. He left the set shouting to the air, everyone looking at each other rather embarrassed. I quietly carried on and tried to ignore the whole affair.

October 1970, Pinewood: The wilder scenes in the film are fueled with champagne, which sometimes arrives with breakfast. In the cathedral Ken has a drum-kit
brought in and drums away loudly to whip up fervour. The set is closed, and there are wild rumours all over the studio about ‘orgies’.

I’m back at Bankside every night, exhausted, often as late as ten. I’m up at 5.30 to reach the set by 7.30. Ian Whittaker picks me up in his car, on Southwark Bridge, bleary-eyed at about six. I work most Saturdays and often Sunday. Life as I knew it has ceased to exist.

May-September 1970, Ladbroke Grove: Ken asked me what would most upset an English audience. Louis XIII dining al fresco, carelessly shooting peacocks on the lawn between courses. ‘Impossible,’ said Ken. ‘How would you do that?’ ‘Make some dummies, stand them on the lawn and detonate them. ‘No, you’d have to shoot real peacocks. It wouldn’t work otherwise.’

Later, this scene crept into the film in the garden at Pinewood. Ken dressed his Huguenot extras as blackbirds, which the king shot while nonchalantly talking to Richelieu. At one moment our Louis said campily, ‘Bye, bye blackbird.’ ‘Marvellous,’ said Ken. ‘What do you think of that, Derek?’

‘Oh I suppose it’s OK,’ I said half-heartedly. I didn’t want to be the kill-joy. The idea had transformed from the steely, vicious concentration of a scene from The White Devil to a farce. ‘Do it again,’ said Ken, and into the film it went. My sensibilities about what was appropriate were violated. A flip joke in a nasty little garden at Pinewood, instead of a great abstract topiary set with strutting peacocks. In a very dark mood I returned to Bankside.

December 1970, Pinewood: Ken and his camera crew were tempers frayed come the end of filming in December. When the day for the great detonation of the walls of Loudun arrived, when all the charges were laid and we were ready to go; Ken, who had been very moody, said, ‘I’m not having this fucked up’ and climbed on to the camera to film it himself. The signals that had been organized to let the explosives experts know we were rolling were primitive; and Ken, waving his arms in the argument around the camera, set the whole lot off. The camera stood idle, and as the dust and debris descended from the massive explosion everyone stood around dumbfounded. The next ten days were spent restoring the walls to get the shot.

Almost every waking moment of 1970 was spent working on The Devils. When I began in January I had no idea that a film of this size completely usurps your life. And by the time I emerged from Pinewood in December, the easy life of the sixties — designing and painting — had gone for ever. It was now impossible to pick up all the threads. Painting was the major victim: I continued it over the next ten years very sporadically. After the intense pressure under which a film is made, it seemed undemanding — and the isolation in which it was pursued, enervating. However, in the autumn the first of my own films took off with the help of Malcolm Leigh; to be followed by a whole series of Super 8s which gradually, without my realizing it, relocated my work. Although much of my time at Pinewood was spent in the constructions of sets, every now and then my presence on the set was necessary. In fact, Ken attempted to keep me there full-time; and I discovered (imperceptibly) how a feature film ran. There was no better director to learn from, as he would always take the adventurous path even at the expense of coherence.

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The 1990s may have been the golden era of the commentariat gravely asking in editorials and special reports, “How far is too far?” But so many of the films from that time seem deflated after losing the contexts they sprung from. Then there’s Crash. Unlike other transgressive movies of the era, David Cronenberg’s adaptation of the J.G. Ballard novel about the collision of sex drive with four-wheel drive has only grown in both esteem and prescience. In its own cold, metallic way, Crash continues to tell us about ourselves and where we’re going. Despite being a teenage Ballard obsessive, I hadn’t revisited Crash until last year and was stunned at the precision of the film, and the still intense sexual content. Emily Schultz had never seen it before, making this a perfect pick for Cinema Dirtbag.

As it turns out we both have very personal stories to share about Crash, including that time we almost got in a car accident with Cronenberg.

Brian J Davis: I am at an advantage here. You’ve never seen this film, and J.G. Ballard was for me probably what Tolkien was for you growing up. So ask me anything.

Emily Schultz: Let’s start with the basics. When you saw the film what was your reaction? Being a Ballard fan.

BJD: I didn’t like this film the first time! While watching it I couldn’t suppress the visuals of the novel in my mind. Ballard is not a very emotive writer, to say the least, but he was incredibly lucid and visual. Ballard himself thought this film was better than his novel and having seen this a couple of times in the last few years, I now agree. It’s stunning and the thesis of this movie is only getting more correct.

ES: I can see how you managed to have an in-theater “experience” with this movie — I mean it’s the first 10 minutes and we’ve seen three sex scenes and all these people talk about are their orgasms.

BJD: If you think your friends’ polycules are too much, be thankful they’re not crashing cars…yet.

ES: I’m quite shocked by this movie already. And by all that light traffic in Toronto.

BJD: Here’s Ballard’s point. In the early ’70s, he saw how technology and media was starting to alienate us from our bodies, and culturally he saw this in advertising: how cars and sex were being combined. Think of Helmut Newton’s infamous Citroën ad. The car crash as sexual climax was Ballard’s way to open everything up. The violence would break through the alienation.

ES: I remember the first time I understood that the word “sexy” actually referred to sex, the act. It was when I was 10 and saw an ad featuring a woman wearing leather on a motorcycle. It just clicked for me.

BJD: Maybe a couple of things clicked for you with that.

ES: Very true!

BJD: You shared, so I’ll share my story of getting it on in a theater during Crash. And I will do my best to protect the identity of the other person— they’re kind of famous now. First, this is the important part of the story: I was at my peak transgressive, more alternative-than-thou stage, but I brought the most normal person I knew to see Crash, and I do remember wondering, how is this going to go? We’re watching it and I’m like, I’m not connecting with the film but slowly I realize that Crash is, completely unexpectedly, driving my date into such a state that by the final reel way too much is happening in the theater, and it was definitely finished in the car afterwards and…wait for it…that was in the parking lot of a mall.

ES: You were still young though, like 19 or 20?

BJD: Don’t try to defend me.

ES: Where would you rank this with Cronenberg films?

BJD: Again, as I’ve revisited this movie it’s now up there with The Fly or Dead Ringers, and maybe his best. But what’s interesting is you would think this had been some long gestating passion project for Cronenberg, but he was relatively unaware of Ballard. It was really producer Jeremy Thomas’s project. And there is a great, idiosyncratic documentary out now that I recommend, The Storms of Jeremy Thomas. But both of them are absolute gear heads.

ES: Now let me tell our Cronenberg story. Okay, it was our last day of living in Toronto before moving to New York.

BJD: We were living in a warehouse across the street from Deluxe, the film lab.

ES: We were walking past the parking lot and I have to say, this was completely our fault because we probably were arguing about some travel detail, and not looking. Then this outrageous silver sports car—

BJD: I described it at the time as an Italian Batmobile.

ES: It stops just in time before hitting us. Like an inch from our shins. Thank God there’s a great driver. But we all look at each other, very Canadian and apologetically, and then I realize, that’s David Cronenberg in that car. The day I’m leaving Toronto and it’s David Cronenberg!

BJD: And I look at David Cronenberg and I swear he and I had the exact same thought at the exact same time, which was: Damn that would have been ironic because he/I directed the movie Crash.

ES: There’s a lot of realizations in the moment you’re about to be hit by a car. I know!

BJD: I do think that this is some of the best usage of 1990s Toronto in a film. The east side is still the east side, and all this concrete brutalist scenery is shot in North York. It’s all soulless expressways and towers. That Toronto turned out to be the perfect Ballard city.

ES: What I find interesting about James Spader and Holly Hunter, having been in the same accident and now meeting at the junkyard and being turned on, is this idea that your most traumatic experiences could emerge as a part of your sexuality. That is brave storytelling.

BJD: You’re absolutely right—that very contemporary idea is why this film has had a reputational rebound, because it continues to speak to us. It had its defenders at the time and won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes but the press, especially in the UK, loathed it and its US release was delayed by a year of just ratings battles.

ES: Where is Holly Hunter in her career at this point?

BJD: I believe she went right from Home for the Holidays with Robert Downey Jr., to Crash. And that, kids, is called range. Roger Ebert had the best compliment of Crash. He said it was as if an AI looked at our culture and determined we like cars and sex, and outputted this film for us. And that is down to Cronenberg’s obsessive detailing in this film and the way scenes are built so coldly and logically. This is not a verbal film; it could almost work as a silent film.

ES: So they’re joining this sort of underground club that recreates famous celebrity car accidents?

BJD: Just think of it as Crash Club.

ES: Got it.

BJD: I do wish there was more of this celebrity obsession material from the novel. Spoiler alert that Elias Koteas’s character dies in a crash…at the end of a movie called Crash. Grow up, people. But in the novel his character Vaughan dies while trying to crash into Elizabeth Taylor’s car and that was probably too high a legal bar for the film to suggest. Fair enough, but the ending does lose some conceptual power.

ES: Can we talk about Elias Koteas?

BJD: The Canadian De Niro.

ES: He’s great in Zodiac. But I think the first time I was aware of Elias Koteas was in Some Kind of Wonderful.

BJD: And he was in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at the same time as being in early Atom Egoyan films. My favorite Koteas performance is as the DJ in Exotica. We should continue this “Toronto Ennui” series, and do that film next.

ES: I probably wouldn’t have been able to watch Crash in 1997. I was happier with, like, Go Fish. This part is really sinister: Spader is watching his wife’s car being crashed into by Koteas. It’s like a cuckolding with cars. And now they’re racing through Cherry Beach.

BJD: With wantonly displayed Ontario license plates. This film is openly Toronto…except for this scene. I know this only bothers me but the translight outside their condo set is totally New York City.

ES: I’m too busy watching this extremely explicit sex. Actually, I’m almost starting to get bored with how much sex there’s been.

BJD: That’s part of it. The film wants to have the numbing effect of too much sensory input. But I also suspect that the next time I see you in a car you’re going to be revving the engine for an extra minute more than you need to.

ES: Should I tell my story about being hit by a car?

BJD: Yes and—I’m asking this merely because Crash is currently playing in front of us—was it sexy?

ES: It actually was bonding. I had been out with an ex-boyfriend, and we had discussed a lot of the things that had happened in our relationship. We were quite drunk and had completely come to peace about everything. We were crossing the street and a car was making a left-hand turn. We didn’t see him. The next thing I knew I was on the pavement looking at my friend and one of us asked, Did we just get hit by a car? We both blacked out on impact. The car hit me, and he blacked out on impact from the force with which I hit him.

BJD: Oh wow. And the driver of that car was Denis Villeneuve?

ES: No! It was a car of college kids. But the amazing thing is nothing happened to us! We were fine. We did go to the hospital and get x-rays. My knee hurt for a month but that was it.

BJD: I find it so interesting that your car accident had this emotional dimension to it. That’s not that far away from this film.

ES: It changed my life because I really took a serious career turn after. I remember right before the car hit us, we were talking about, of all things, Who was that Christian metal band that dressed in yellow and black?

BJD: Stryper!

ES: Right? And what if my final thought on Earth was something so stupid? So I started writing my first novel that month.

BJD: I think one of the magnificent things about the movie is the tone—it’s sustained from beginning to end. It’s almost if you’re watching the movie with a concussion, in terms of how slow and methodical it is. It’s a consistent wobbliness.

ES: Oh what just happened?

BJD: Vaughan crashed, off screen. Which was probably both a stylistic choice, and to save money. And again, one of the only flaws in an otherwise fantastic adaptation is that his ending in the film lacks the power it has in the novel.

ES: Now James Spader and his wife are chasing each other. Notice they never wear their seatbelts?

BJD: That’s kind of like going raw for them.

ES: Now he sent her car down a hill.

BJD: Consensually.

ES: One flaw with this final crash scene is this. Where are the dozens of Canadians trying to out-helpful each other?

BJD: James Spader hasn’t blinked for a whole minute while he’s seeing if his wife is dead or not. And it’s not concern, it’s excitement. That is some acting. And it’s very much Cronenberg’s ending—something that would be very difficult to convey in a novel.

ES: I do get this ending. When I got hit by that car, I suddenly had an awareness of death that I had not had before I was 27 years old.

BJD: So a traumatic experience can become part of you in a way not entirely negative?

ES: True, but I don’t think I needed to have sex after getting hit by a car.

BJD: Don’t knock it till you try it! Which is what I think the tagline of Crash should have been.

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I cut Ducks using the most recent Blu-ray edition of the series, and Adobe Premiere Pro. All footage comes from season one of HBO’s The Sopranos. Some foley and transitional music cues were added to patch the scenes together.

Black and white was both an aesthetic choice and a necessary one as the pilot episode has completely different cinematography than the rest of the season.

Of course, a go ham-fair use experiment like this would have the lifespan of an FBI informant on Youtube. But you can always share or download Ducks from Vimeo here.

We’ll be back in September with weekly content including film commentaries, author interviews, and more!

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During FIFA Women’s World Cup of 2023 Emily Schultz and I watched two of the most intense films about soccer: Alan Clarke’s The Firm from 1989 and The Damned United from 2009. Here’s a replay of that post, though in retrospect we also want to recommend, as a chaser to these profiles in psychopathy, the nicest film about soccer: Bill Forsyth’s Gregory’s Girl.

Alan Clarke’s final film, The Firm (1989) 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 and Stanley knife slashes 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.

The Damned United (2009) is a graceful and gritty adaptation of the novel by David Peace that details the 44 days of Brian Clough as failed manager of Leeds United, the most feared British team of 1974. Michael Sheen has a blast with the dogged and aggravatingly confident Clough while screenwriter Peter Morgan reaches the peak of his historical theatre-stylings that began with The Queen.

Both films are about love—point of fact, The Firm opens with “That’s Amore!” over images of vandalism and window smashing. But it’s obsessive, corrosive love that hides just under fandom’s tear-streaked face.

We’re in the New York, so we’re calling it soccer for most of our discussion, excepting for quotes and specific references. Please don’t jump us in the car park after.

BRIAN J DAVIS: Emily, you’re coming into this commentary recording right from having played your best game of the year?

EMILY SCHULTZ: It should have been 2–0. But we won at 2–1. I really don’t enjoy The Firm, by the way. Technically, it’s masterful, but the violence is so…first personal.

BJD: It’s true. When we first watched this, you were watching through your hands and asking things like, “Is the baby okay?”

ES: It really is the filmmaking. It’s so intense.

BJD: I now understand sports through you. I never in my life got it before. And I enjoy watching soccer with you. I enjoy it until they pan to the fans and I see flags painted on faces and I cringe so much.

ES: You like sports but not fandom?

BJD: I love the drama of sports but something strange happens in the stands. And here’s our first look at young Jay Simpson, who you may know as Foz from Peep Show, or Rod Senseless in Black Mirror.

ES: Is that it for actual soccer in the film?

BJD: That’s it. It’s all knife crime from here on in! And that’s the point. That these gangs ruined the game in the ’70s and ’80s.

ES: I relate to the game. I do not relate to these….

BJD: Yobs? Bootboys? Shitmunchers?

ES: I’ll bring the soccer. You bring the British.

BJD: I’ll use this moment to explain the absolute shallow depth of my connection to the United Kingdom. When I was twenty, I had dropped out of art school — please sit with that for a moment.

ES: Quite the accomplishment.

BJD: Thank you, it gets even more shameful. And after a year of me doing nothing, my family was concerned, and my brother was living in Brixton then, so they borrowed money from my grandmother to send me to the UK so I could “find my roots.” And that wasn’t the best thing for me at the time, because apparently my roots included: getting tossed out of a party at the ICA, then throwing up behind one of the lions in Trafalgar Square and passing out. And I remember this giant of a man, maybe not even a “bobby,” it could have just been someone who wanted to murder me asking, “By any chance are you an American?” And I mumbled, “Canadian” to which he replied, “Jolly good. Carry on.”

ES: That didn’t happen!

BJD: Totally did! We have to talk about the filmmaking. This is what Alan Clarke did so well. Like Elephant, it’s immersive trauma.

ES: He’s very much, How about a cup of tea and some trauma, love?

BJD: It’s so focused though.

ES: It’s honing in on one character, Bex (Gary Oldman), at one particular point in his life.

BJD: As he makes horrible decisions. And this is really what was happening then with football gangs. They were taking on the vestments of yuppies, taking middle-class jobs.

ES: But like functional alcoholics going on a bender over the weekend?

BJD: Exactly.

ES: Sorry I have to stretch.

[Break for Emily to stretch her soccer injuries.]

BJD: This is my favorite Gary Oldman performance of all time, by the way.

ES: He’s great, but this character is so loathsome.

BJD: This is what I was left with the last time I watched this. Here you have working class gangs with their own shadow leagues—local and even international—and their own celebrity captains. It’s their way of clawing power back from the submissiveness of fandom. They’ve made themselves stars and negated the game.

ES: What we would now call toxic fandom?

BJD: One of the things England is actually good at is subcultures.

ES: You learned some things passed out in your own sick in Trafalgar Square! It was good for you.

BJD: Here’s the most chilling scene. Bex lives two blocks from his parents still. He’s in a very small world. And in his childhood room, full of football posters still, he has his weapon stash of knives, and axes and then he practices!

ES: I love this scene. It’s almost novelistic in how alone we are with him.

BJD: This is one of the most terrifying things I could think of: Gary Oldman practicing beating someone with a telescoping baton. Imagine seeing that face right before you die.

ES: Wait, where is this actor from?

BJD: Nick Dunning from The Tudors! Literally every co-star in this film went on to The Tudors, The Crown, or Game of Thrones.

ES: I have such a wife-connection with Lesley Manville. She is the only woman in this world of men and she just doesn’t want the football gang meeting to wake the baby up.

BJD: She carries a lot here as the only person with sense.

ES: The knife tattoo scene. I can’t watch. There are far too many blades in this film.

BJD: The rumble scene. This kitchen sink handheld approach is much more intense than any studio fight scene. You feel everything.

ES: I don’t like this part. [The youngest member of the gang has his face slashed.]

BJD: And the fact that the rival gang look like members of an over-the-hill New Romantic band makes it so much scarier. Like, they should be singing “Don’t You Want Me” in a Dorset pub instead of doing this.

ES: I’m so glad they don’t show the revenge face slash scene. And to be honest, they do cut away from the worst throughout.

BJD: It’s that immersive Steadicam filmmaking. But yes, from here on in this feels like a horror film, just in terms of dread.

ES: I understand anger. I don’t understand ritualized violence.

BJD: I think it goes back to this attempt at power. This is their revenge against the degradations of the class system. Bex’s life looks okay, but the reality is he’s in a terraced house and—oh shit, no, no, not the scene of the baby finding the Stanley knife! I’m looking away.

ES: Goddammit, I saw it!

BJD: They’re back from the hospital and now the great Lesley Manville scene. She just slaps the shit out of Gary Oldman while shouting, MY baby! MY baby! Like she’s firing him from parenthood itself.

ES: No one fights on screen better than actual couples. Now he’s at his parents and this scene got to me as well. You want his parents to tell him to cut this shit out but…

BJD: His father is helping him plan what will be his final fight! It’s multi-generational. And now he confronts his nemesis Phil Davis, who would later be a teacher in the magnificent and underrated Notes On a Scandal.

ES: The first time I saw this I did not see this ending coming.

BJD: Here’s the kicker. No pun intended. The film switches to mockumentary and during the interviews his gang declares Bex a martyr. I seriously thought that it was going end like Cannibal Holocaust, where the camera crew-within the film are torn apart.

ES: Really?

BJD: I mean, it is a pub full of drunk men chanting “England!” while wearing Union Jack shorts. Nationalism is not only evil and infectious, but also utterly ridiculous.

ES: This is such a well-made, well-acted movie…I still don’t enjoy it.

BJD: Going from that, to The Damned United, which we just started, I want to say the United Kingdom, maybe, just maybe, takes football a little too seriously. Probably to the detriment of their mental health.

ES: And it opens with a title card: The nation is in trauma after having failed to qualify for the World Cup. Hope that doesn’t happen to us this week! [Ed. note: The US Women’s team failed to advance to finals, setting off Emma Haye’s dramatic turnaround of the team.]

BJD: Since this is a biopic, technically, let’s circle back to that for a second. The way to do it is to take the “make shit up” route. Like this movie.

ES: It’s so much better to be able to write that way.

BJD: You don’t get a lot of protagonists named Brian in films.

ES: Were you named after Brian’s Song?

BJD: I was absolutely named after Brian’s Song.

ES: Why aren’t we watching that?

BJD: It’s terrible. And The Damned United is key for me understanding you and sports. Brian Clough really believes in sportsmanship and the beauty of the game and teamwork, and believes that’s what wins at the end of the day. That’s you! You are just like that.

ES: I won the sportsmanship trophy in high school.

BJD: Of course you did! This movie is also Moby Dick set in British football. Man gets obsessed with white whale—taking over Leeds— and is dragged down by it.

ES: He comes off as a bit of a cock during this first act. But that changes once we flashback and see his journey from the bottom division.

BJD: This is the beginning of Brian Clough’s psychic wound. They’re a bottom ranked team and they’re playing Leeds United, the top ranked. And the Leeds manager, Don Revie, snubs him, thereby setting a years-long resentment in motion.

ES: We were the bottom ranked team tonight and beat the top ranked.

BJD: And what was the score again? Tell us!

ES: Should’ve been 2–0.

BJD: His downfall with managing Leeds was his obsession with Don Revie. Nemesis is such a classic story device. It shouldn’t be slept on! And this nemesis started out as a love object.

ES: He’s leaving fresh oranges for the visiting team and polished wine glasses for the manager. It’s date planning. For a man who won’t pay any attention to him!

BJD: Without getting too esoteric, I think obsession ends up taking us away from the thing we love.

ES: I’d completely agree with that. Wow. Look at Brian Clough’s playing. Damn, those legs!

BJD: Are you exclaiming about Michael Sheen’s legs and ball play?

ES: Going to be honest. They’re very: nice to see you!

BJD: He’s trying to change how Leeds plays and again this so you. He hates cheating and so do you. I think it actually breaks your heart.

ES: In soccer yes. I feel if you have skills, you don’t need to cheat. But in life…there is cheating involved.

BJD: Maybe that’s where you two differ. Every great character has a flaw and his is that he believes the world should think like him. He’s shocked that it doesn’t.

ES: Okay. I hate saying this. These men look a little too old for professional soccer. Maybe it’s the chain-smoking.

BJD: They were an aging team, and it is the ’70s in Britain. Self-care was basically Dunhills and Chivas Regal. I like that they give us the final grim score just as they’re screaming and fist-pumping on their way out to the field. It’s hilarious.

ES: And it’s cheap. They don’t have to show the game and crowds.

BJD: There’s nothing scarier than when the coach gets quiet, is there? He looks so unhinged and it’s so great for Michael Sheen to get to play such a nice guy/psychopath.

ES: When it comes to soccer it’s a fine line. Wait. They won. 2–1!

BJD: You just jumped up and fist-pumped like you’re watching a real game.

ES: I did! But you know I really enjoy playing much more than watching as a fan.

BJD: It’s the same with novelists. If reading other writers was a prerequisite for the job, a lot of writers would be in trouble!

ES: New topic! He just told his team to smile more. Telling people to smile does not go over well.

BJD: Especially with people from Leeds.

ES: This is really a love story between him and two men. His assistant coach is almost his first partner and Don Revie and Leeds—

BJD: His new one! I think what makes for an unhappy relationship is simply that someone chose the wrong person. This also reminds me that this is the third Timothy Spall film we’ve seen this month.

ES: We really should do the Dream Demon/Spencer double bill.

BJD: Brian Clough! This is a biopic sin. Calling the character by his full name, constantly.

ES: And in the third person.

BJD: He has the egomaniac tendencies towards that. But there’s even other characters saying things like, I have advice for you, Brian Clough.

ES: He doesn’t change in this film. I do kind of like that and that’s a very novelistic thing.

BJD: He never stops shooting his mouth off. He just refines it. And we haven’t mentioned it yet but this is a well-crafted film. Everything’s spot on for recreating the 1970s. And the cinematography is the right kind of good looking: smoky and handsome.

ES: He can’t let go of Don Revie. He’s reading about him on the beach in Brighton. I wish he had a social media blocker to use.

BJD: When you’re starting your career it’s so easy to think you have this one special nemesis, and you don’t realize you in fact have many. You have nemesi.

ES: It’s more that it’s easy to think there’s no room for you if other people are already in those positions.

BJD: That’s a very polite way of saying I would murder my rival.

ES: Oh my God. He states his own full name while being fired! Brian Howard Clough. He one-ups biopics.

BJD: Take this scene at BBC Leeds where he’s booked to be interviewed the day he’s fired and they secretly bring on Don Revie to be interviewed beside him. This is the one thing I thought could never be historically accurate and I even said out loud. Come on! And it one hundred percent happened.

ES: This is an on-air slide tackle he’s about to experience!

BJD: What would you score these two films in a game?

ES: I don’t know. This one is the easier watch, but The Firm is such a ferocious character study, even if I watched it through my fingers.

BJD: How about 1–1?

ES: 2–1. Because The Firm would definitely cheat.

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Madonna is back and she’s releasing a new album this summer, Confessions 2. Much like Madonna, we’re relaunching too, and while Medium Cool is under renovations we wanted to re-post one of our wildest talks on Cinema Dirtbag, when we worked our way through Madonna’s 1990s filmography.

For our generation, talking about Madonna is like early humans discussing the Sun. It’s going to involve a lot of gesturing and pointing at something we don’t quite understand but regard as lifegiving, albeit in a terrifying way. Especially as Emily and Madonna are homegirls—Madonna’s family being from Pontiac, Michigan and Emily’s being from Berkley, a mere 20 miles away. That’s why we thought doing a 1990s Madonna movie installment of this column would result in a passionate conversation between myself and Emily. It eventually did, but only after spending three months struggling to land on a film good enough to talk about. We were reminded that cinema was the one media Madonna could never quite conquer as a lead actress. It seemed a matter of bad timing and chronic miscasting, combined with a backlash from the pearl clutchers of the Clinton era who were pushed over the edge by her brand masterpiece, Sex.

As it turns out, Madonna’s greatest performance was a version of herself in the 1991 tour documentary, Truth or Dare. Countless celebrities, from Bob Dylan to Taylor Swift, have attempted to frame their own narrative through self-produced documentaries, but it’s never been as quotable, filthy, and fun as when Madonna did it.

BRIAN J DAVIS: Should we give a warning to all the new subscribers from your popular essay? That usually on Medium Cool we’re doing things like talking about Madonna for two hours?

EMILY SCHULTZ: I think people like both Madonna and abortion rights!

BJD: Madonna was probably your last pop star. Right before you got all very serious.

ES: I was already very serious by the time this movie came out. I was moving into my depressing music era.

BJD: I don’t think there would have been Riot Grrrl in the 1990s without Madonna in the 1980s.

ES: Hmm. Keep going.

BJD: The part of Riot Grrrl and Madonna that’s shared is that they’re both about the revolutionary power of the brat—and way before anyone else tried. They both present teenage-centric feminisms.

ES: I mean at age 13 my friend Kristy was the one of us that was big into Madonna and because of Madonna, and especially True Blue, we had conversations about abortion where she had views that surprised me that then opened my mind. We had conversations about sexuality, the fact that Madonna thought it was okay to be queer. True Blue was actually the first album I ever bought.

BJD: I didn’t realize Madonna’s genius until the 1990s. I disliked 1980s Madonna, and it’s not because I was a tiny punk snob. I loved pop music too—I did do Belinda Carlisle drag for lip syncing at school.

ES: I’m sure you knew every word.

BJD: That the Go-Gos wrote themselves! Okay, I guess I was a tiny snob. But it was around Like a Prayer that Madonna started changing how she worked. She was sort of pulling a Bowie by doing his hustle of Victorian collecting of different subcultures. Here’s some alternative hip-hop. Here’s some ballroom culture. And it’s all going through the Madonna-mill. That made her incredibly successful, and artistically successful as well. There is nothing better than “Like a Prayer.” But it also opened her up to the criticism that stuck with her: the queen of appropriation.

ES: That drove many, many cultural studies classroom discussions at the time.

BJD: Let’s restate our mission to find a good Madonna film. What I’ve realized after we gave up is that quite simply the universe said to Madonna Louise Ciccone of Pontiac, Michigan: You’re going to be successful at most everything in life…except film. Stay away from film and you’ll be fine. More than fine actually.

ES: I suppose we have to get Dangerous Game out of the way first.

BJD: Even though I loved most of Abel Ferrara’s berserk 1990s films, I had never seen Dangerous Game until last week. And I like the filmmaking of Dangerous Game—but I hate the ideas in the movie. It is truly an ugly film for its ideas.

ES: I hated every minute of it.

BJD: But at the same time, we both said… best Madonna performance ever?

ES: They put her through things that they should not have.

BJD: I think it’s fair to quote Madonna in full on Dangerous Game and leave it at that.

“You have control over your performance when the camera is going, but you can take that performance in the editing room and completely change the character. That’s what happened to me with Abel. Because it was an entirely different movie when I made it —it was such a great feminist statement and she was so victorious at the end…He took my words off me and turned me into a deaf mute, basically. When I saw the cut film, I was weeping. It was like someone punched me in the stomach. He turned it into Bad Director. He’s so far up Harvey Keitel’s ass, it had become a different movie. If I’d known that was the movie I was making, I would never have done it, and I was very honest with him about that. He really fucked me over.” —Madonna

BJD: So from the peak of Truth or Dare—which was the highest grossing documentary of the decade—to the Sex book and Dangerous Game, which was barely released, and then Body of Evidence, and League of Their Own—it was only 24 months!

ES: That’s insane. So peak Madonna was all in two years?

BJD: You know I have such a soft spot for 1990s erotic thrillers. Even the bad ones. Even Jade I can say nice things about. But Body of Evidence was like an erotic thriller written by an A.I. It’s not fun, and it was filmed in Portland. Portland!

ES: From the long tradition of Your honor, she killed him and the weapon was…her body! I think that’s just Madonna catching things at the end of the cycle, right?

BJD: Exactly. That’s the problem of being at the rarified level of pop culture. You’re going to be out-of-touch quicker than most people. Madonna makes an erotic thriller, but it’s at the end of the cycle, after all the good scripts are gone. She makes a violent indie movie, but it’s not with Tarantino. It’s with an actually insane director.

ES: But look how much fun she’s having in Truth or Dare.

BJD: I know the feeling of being able to say “This is our last night in fascist Toronto.”

ES: Now I’m trying to remember how explicit this simulated masturbation scene during “Like a Virgin” is.

BJD: Oh, there’s some reaching.

ES: I mean, is it any different from Mötley Crüe?

[Emily is genuinely impressed as the choreography progresses.]

BJD: I’m so thankful for being groomed by Madonna.

ES: I really do like this next part of the film, though. It’s her homecoming to Detroit. I might cry.

BJD: It’s the homeland. And this would be classic reality TV now, right? The constructed moment that is felt authentically, but is also completely contrived.

ES: Right, like her brother being there—Martin, the problem brother.

BJD: You worry about the sex scenes in your books and your family reading it. Madonna’s worried about her family. She’s just like you!

[Her stepmother complains about the intensity of the show.]

BJD: Oh my god, that is a Michigan mom. “It was just exhausting, the show. Just exhausting to watch it. It was like being stuck on the Lodge.”

ES: She didn’t say that last part!

BJD: I think this movie does capture Madonna as a person. She’s fucking hilarious, and filthy, and quite frankly a goofball.

ES: And that’s what I was going to say about Dangerous Game. The scenes where she was the best are where she’s actually being herself. Whereas the other roles she went after… I mean, Evita of all things?

BJD: It’s genuinely difficult for one of the most famous women in the world to disappear into a role. Good god, the high school best friend scene!

ES: This is pre-Facebook and Madonna has to literally deal with this woman, in person.

BJD: And this poor woman, this moment is probably the highlight of her life.

ES: Hey, she made it into the movie, with her kids, and she’s telling the story of her and Madonna’s friendship. This is such a wonderful setup where they’re interviewing them separately about what they remember.

BJD: And now she’s asking Madonna to be the godmother to the new child she’s pregnant with. And Madonna responds with such a perfect, see you next Tuesday-deflection. “That’s a very important decision so I’ll think about it. And my assistant has all your numbers.” This is how you do fame: brutal yet humane at the same time.

ES: She tells her she loves her, though.

BJD: I do believe it’s an authentic scene. I know we keep saying that this is the roots of reality TV. But there’s no reality TV as good as this movie.

ES: Okay, can we... Oh, my God, the mother’s grave montage.

BJD: “I wonder what she looks like now. Just a bunch of dust.” You know there’s such a naiveté about Madonna. She almost gets away with everything. So this is the famous scene where her then-boyfriend Warren Beatty warns her against doing this all on camera. He’s not wrong, per se.

ES: No, he is wrong! Because look what’s preserved. Magical moments that will never be again. Madonna in her youth, being sassy, having fun. And owning the room every single time. Now we have New York Pride in 1991.

BJD: It should be said that this documentary is so iconic that there is a documentary about this documentary, that follows the dancers and the effect the film had on their lives. And make no mistake, this is the real reason for the critical backlash against Madonna. From the right-wing, because she put scenes of New York Pride—of her dancers being out—in a wide release movie. Then you had the media getting a bit fancy with their stank and saying it’s all contrived nonsense. In between there are people who were like, to be honest I am a little freaked out by the Sex book.

ES: My friend Kristy saved up her babysitting money for weeks and bought Sex on her 18th birthday, the day she was legally allowed.

BJD: All right, what’s your favorite photo from the Sex book?

ES: You’re putting me on the spot. What’s yours?

BJD: Maybe the urinal photo? The Udo Kier sequence?

ES: I think there was one of her squeezing a bottle of sunscreen onto a woman and she’s holding it like it’s a penis.

BJD: Pop stars of this level do not take Madonna-sized risks anymore, let alone humping a rotating bed on stage.

ES: Wait, music on, please!

[Emily cranks the volume for “Holiday.”]

BJD: Okay, newly blonde Emily. Blonde versus brunette Madonna?

ES: It sets up a dichotomy of the authentic brunette Madonna who’s taking on serious material and compositions versus—

BJD: Oh shit, it’s the fellating-an-Evian bottle scene. I just noticed the waiter behind in the background just staring.

ES: How happy do you think Evian was with this scene?

BJD: Like, high-fiving across the board table happy. But I think we could have done without this ten-minute-long Fosse tribute ending.

ES: It’s a lot of theater kid energy. It’s getting pretty sappy here, actually. We might need to do some shit talking.

BJD: Okay, at the end of the day, did Madonna make a movie about how much her employees love and need her?

ES: They didn’t make it themselves, did they?

BJD: “Hey Madonna, we made this thing for you. It’s about how awesome it is to be around you. When we just want to sleep.”

ES: Ouch.

BJD: Oh, we’ve been way too nice to Madonna.

ES: We probably have.

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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 t…

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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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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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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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