Troy Weaver

In Bruges
I’m a big fan of dark comedies. The darker, the more comedic (for me). In Bruges is a great example: our main character, Ray (Colin Farrell), is a hitman, and on his first hit, he accidentally shoots a child. Hilarious. He also does drugs with a cocaine addicted “racist dwarf” (the movie’s words) played by Peter Dinklage, and at some point he even punches a woman in the face. Yet, despite all this, Farrell is intensely loveable as Ray, who simply wants to come to terms with watch he’s done while he’s stuck in a “shithole” like Bruges. That’s what makes In Bruges so well written and memorable—I love horrible people in the movie for the horrible things they do, but I also get to see how every character is human and unique. Even the “bad-guy,” (a foul-mouthed Ralph Fiennes), is admirable and has a code of honor, even when he calls his wife an “inanimate fucking object.” The audience doesn’t even get a clear ending of what happens—how many comedies do that?—but it couldn’t have ended any other way. Written by Irish playwright Martin McDonagh (author of The Pillowman and the movie Seven Psychopaths), the inseparable drama and meta-comedy of In Bruges is unique as it is ridiculous, such as when a dying Brendan Gleeson says “I’m going to die now,” and then, of course, dies. This movie was so memorable to me that it even inspired me and my brother to visit Bruges, which was, as the movie joking suggests, like a fairy tale.
In the Loop
In the Loop is my go-to comedy that I never get tired of. Most movies I can’t watch more than once every six months or so. This movie, however, is endlessly rewatchable, even when you know the jokes are coming. Part of it stems from the partial improvised nature of the script, and part of it is it’s cutting political savvy—it’s a smart movie about dumb people. This is a movie that’s entirely dialogue dependent: most of the lines are a verbal tennis match between the characters, and everyone sinks their teeth in. One of my favorite insults is when Jamie (Paul Higgins) complains about opera music, saying “it’s just vowels.” But the real star of the film is Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi), who is a wordsmith of expletives: he tells the expletive-sensitive US representative to not be a “F-star-star-cunt.” Same with most things that writer-director Armando Ivanucci does (like his work on Veep or his British television equivalent to In the Loop called The Thick of It). The movie also has a great sense of its own comedy, making jokes out things that wouldn’t make sense out of context. Some of the funniest and most memorable lines (such as “Difficult, difficult, lemon difficult”) are nonsensical outside of the context, which is the exact opposite of a lot of generic comedies that just go for one-liners. I love how In the Loop creates this insular world of comedy that also manages to skewer the political process in the United States while never taking itself too seriously.

Coming up with lists is hard, man. When I was asked to come up with my top five movies that have impacted my life, I thought, “fuck yeah, I’ll come up with the best list ever.” But once I sat down to write, I couldn’t think of where to start. I watch a lot of movies. Horror, comedy, drama, the weird, obscure movies very few people talk about. And anyone that knows me well enough, knows that I’m a huge David Lynch nut. I could’ve easily made a top five list on his movies alone. But I didn’t do that. In fact, I didn’t include a single Lynch film. I thought long and hard about what movies to include on this list, and this is what I came up with. Maybe there’s a theme. Maybe they were influenced by a current mood. Or maybe they were titles drawn at random out of a hat. Who knows. Read and enjoy. And if you ever want to talk to me about movies, find me online and we’ll talk.
Welcome to the Dollhouse

Todd Solondz is a wizard when it comes to awkward/uncomfortable storytelling. He has a way of evoking sympathy for people who, on paper, can be absolutely despicable. And he tells the stories that no one likes to talk about. It can be uncomfortable at times, but goddamn, what an experience. While thinking of his catalogue of films I’ve enjoyed, Welcome to the Dollhouse came out on top. The protagonist is a young girl who only wants to be loved and appreciated for how special she is. But she’s an underdog in every sense of the word. At school, at home, and everywhere in between, she’s yearns for people to tell her that they love her and falls into a quiet acceptance after realizing that no matter what she does, nothing will ever change.

Hour of the Wolf

Beautiful film about love and mental illness. Not only is this film visually stunning, but it’s the most impactful film on metal health degradation I’ve seen. There’s a character who’s so afraid of dying in his sleep that he keeps himself awake. The more he starts to lose grip with reality, the more characters we are introduced to. I’m already spoiling too much of this movie, but there’s such a creepy, beautiful scene where Johan (the male protagonist) confronts the social parasites he had befriended on the island. And the final monologue? Shit, if I could write anything half as good as that, I’d could happily quit writing forever.

Blair Witch Project

I remember hating television and the movies my parents watched. All my dad watched was Gene Hackman and Spielberg style movies, and sitcoms. All my mom watched was soap operas and made for tv romantic movies. My parents have no taste. I hated how it was all fake, how people didn’t talk or act like that in real life. I remember saying to my dad constantly, “People don’t talk like that.” Then I saw Blair Witch and listening to their dialogue, fuck, it blew my mind. That scene where Heather is screaming at Mike about losing the map. That scene on the river with the two fishing guys telling each other they’re full of shit. It was all so human to me, my friends were obsessed with scary parts, but I was obsessing over the realistic dialogue and how they showed real emotions. The characters in Blair Witch acted how people would act if they were scared, humans scream and cry, their hair gets messy, they complain and throw fits. I ended up seeing it three times in the theater; I have watched it several times a year since.

Every Which Way but Loose and Every Which Way You Can

These two movies did something that American movies and American literature have a hard time with. They have normal everyday Americans working on cars, getting into fights, listening to country music, and grandma shooting a shotgun, but it isn’t miserable. The characters laugh, they have hobbies and goals. People like this are often depicted as stupid or miserable in 21st Centuries narratives. But that isn’t life for normal people, I work at a grocery store with poor white people, Hispanics, African-Americans and ex-Mormons. We aren’t miserable, yes a lot of wealth and power are blocked from us. But we laugh, we take care of each other, we get into little fights, and grandma has a shotgun. I really like the names too, Philo Bedo, Lynn Halsey-Taylor, Orville, Echo, etc, what great names. And there’s an orangutan named Clyde that punches Harley douches, lol, awesome.

Boyz n the Hood

I couldn’t find the movie online to rewatch, going by memory. I remember being around 13 or so and watching Boyz n the Hood, there was a scene in it where Cuba the character Tre is in bed with a girl. There are like helicopters flying above and he freaks out and starts punching the air, it all seemed so authentic, so real. I just stared at the screen, seeing what it means to be powerless. I felt powerless when I was little, I don’t wanna talk about that, but I did, I felt powerless. And that is what it means to be powerless, you can’t do anything, except hide in your room and punch the air. It is like, even now, I feel mostly powerless in public, I can’t buy anything, people look down on me because of my job, I can’t wait to go home and hide and punch the air.

Underworld

I really like how it starts, Selene dressed all black, perched on a building, in the rain. Oh god it is so beautiful to me. I think on the inside, I imagine myself as Selene, dressed all in black, beautiful, sleek, with scintillating blue eyes. Selene doesn’t know the answers to the universe, she doesn’t know anything but how to kick ass. But she has an epiphany that kicking ass isn’t everything, and that the power constructs around her are making life worse and are in general based on false or outmoded ideas about reality. Then there are the lower class werewolves condemned to live in the sewers, but Lucian is an asshole too. The plot of Go to Work ha some similarities with this, Selene doesn’t voice an ideology like Victor or Lucian, Selene just acts, she is movement, she is a force, a new reality on the offense. And of course that head splitting at the end, she holds up the sword and blood drips from it, omg, I love that so much.

Chocolate

This movie is about a Thai mom prostitute who dies slowly of cancer, a Japanese dad criminal boss, an overweight sad boy who everyone picks on, a group of gun toting transgenders and an autistic ninja girl. This plot could only happen in Southeast Asia. It calms me to watch Zen, how she is so full of passion to kick everyone’s ass.

 
Noah Cicero lives in Las Vegas, NV. He has several books published; The Bathroom Reader and Bipolar Cowboy are his newest.

DOGTOOTH

I made the mistake of watching Dogtooth right before bed. From the opening scene—blindfold around eyes, stilted car ride conversation, slow opening gate—we know we’re in for something twisted. The tone is stark and brutal, but it’s the stasis of the tone that’s most unsettling. Once the gate closes it’s clear the children are not getting out. The parents obsessively shield them from nearly all outside influences, even reinventing everyday language—phone means ‘salt’, sticker means ‘clothes’, sea means ‘chair’—creating a comical yet creepy distortion of realities. The children begin to entertain themselves in creative ways, but once they get a small taste of the outside world, things get seriously fucked.

HOOP DREAMS

Although Hoop Dreams is a documentary that follows the paths of two high school bball stars, it does not require the knowledge, or even interest, in the greatest sport of all time. Complexities regarding race, social class, economics, and politics are brought to the forefront, while exposing the darkness of AAU culture, which essentially begins ranking players at dangerously young ages. The power of Hoop Dreams lies in its ability to confront issues that shoot way beyond the simple (or obsessive) love of a game. The subjects—William Gates and Arthur Agee—are pretty damn lovable, too. I saw this in the theater back in ’94 as a young hoop dreamer and it’s still one of my favorites.

PARIS, TEXAS

My brother left the room about halfway through the movie to let me watch the second half alone. He’d seen it before. Not to give it away (everyone’s seen this, right?) but the moment with the one-way mirror, the phone—I’ve never sobbed so intensely during a scene in a movie. It really got me, and it was nice to have that moment alone. I don’t know what else to say other than if you somehow missed this masterpiece, I suggest you watch it now, with or without others.

THE BROTHERS SOLOMON

Since really dumb comedies occupy at least half the movies I’ve seen in my life, this list should contain one. I was on tour somewhere in the midwest and the rest of the band flew to the next show on the west coast. My brother was selling merch for us at the time and he and I stayed behind for the drive. We had the entire bus to ourselves when we stopped for the night, one of maybe two or three vehicles occupying the dirt parking lot of a hotel off a highway in Idaho. It seemed like the right time to eat a weed cookie. I rarely ingest weed in any way, and when it was slow to take effect, I decided to eat another. The movie was pretty funny at first but about halfway through I had the most insane laugh attack of my life. As my brother joined in, we paced up and down the bus convulsing. We made it to the end of the movie, but when we went to the hotel to get ready for bed, our room keys didn’t work. We became even more hysterical than before and stood in the empty hallway trying to decide who was more capable of handling the task of interacting with another human being behind the front desk. I’ve seen the movie (sober) since and of course this initial experience is tough to top but it’s still very bizarre and hilarious.

DEAD RIVER ROUGH CUT

I’ll leave you with a Maine classic. It’s a documentary about two best buds that reject the outside world for tarpapers shacks in the middle of the woods. They hunt, fish, trap, log. They also philosophize and tell wacky stories in an accent so thick even a Mainer like myself would benefit from captions. Walter Lane and Bob Wagg form an unusual pair that are equally entertaining and enlightening, making a retreat to the woods seem like a sweet idea. This is the most requested movie at the Maine State Prison.

Nat Baldwin is a writer and musician living in Maine. His fiction has appeared in PANK, Sleepingfish, Timber, Deluge, and Alice Blue. He has released several solo albums, and plays bass in Dirty Projectors. He is currently pursuing a BA in English at the University of Southern Maine.

Beetlejuice

When I was around six years old, this and Three Amigos were my favorite movies. I think this combination was integral to the formation of my personality – goth-lite, with some idiotic 14-year-old boy humor thrown in. I used to get nightmares from just about any movie as a kid but for some reason this one didn’t bother me.

River’s Edge

Keanu Reeves is smoking hot in this. He looks so good as a hessian. I want to buy him. Crispin Glover and Dennis Hopper are perfect in this too. I love that Dystopia features clips from the movie in their album Human = Garbage. It’s difficult to sample movie clips in music and not have it sound stupid but Dystopia managed to pull it off.

I sort of used River’s Edge as an emotional talisman when I was writing Black Cloud – I wanted to make something that was running-full-speed-toward-a-brick-wall level numb. Out of the Blue functions in the same way, I think. (It also stars Dennis Hopper.) I think these movies encapsulate why I don’t understand the youth of today. There’s no unadulterated rage in their hearts.

No Direction Home

When I was ~24, I was in an inadvisable relationship. Our favorite thing to do was sit around and take synthetic opiates and drink wine and watch every single rock doc we could find on Netflix. It sort of mirrored my freshman and sophomore years in high school, where I liked sitting around and smoking weed and reading every rock biography they carried at Barnes & Noble. This is my favorite rock doc of that time, or, at the very least, is the one I watched most often. The funny thing is I can’t really remember anything about the movie, other than the fact that I found it really soothing.

Santa Sangre

I don’t even know if I really like this movie so much as I enjoy its aesthetic. I’m not really into acts of violence or psychological trauma, but other than that I want to live in a world that looks like this.

High Noon

I just watched this movie for the first time a couple nights ago so I guess I’m technically cheating by including it. But I really loved it! Grace Kelly saves the day, and Katy Jurado is the one who put her up to it – the two women are the true heroes. You could take the movie apart and say that it is problematic – how predictable it is that the blond is the chaste Quaker while Jurado plays the part of the slutty Mexican woman – and I agree, but I like that it is clear that the women end up being the heroes not for some political reason, like “Hey you know what we need to do? Create some strong female leads,” which makes it feel genuinely subversive. Attempts at social equality are never subversive when done as a marketing scheme.

Juliet Escoria is the author of Black Cloud (CCM/Emily Books, 2014) and Witch Hunt (Lazy Fascist, 2016).

2001: A Space Odyssey

I’ve watched The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut more than twenty times each, but each viewing of 2001 has left me altered. Kubrick and Clarke tried to tell a story about the fate and function of life in the cosmos; 2001 is instead a portrait of the operatic gesture of civilization, its reliance on murder, and its amity with the quality that neatly defines a mind that minds itself: cruelty. 2001’s final sequence is more than an approximation of transcendence beyond language (and, for our limited nature, intelligibility)—2001’s final sequence is a pulsing reminder that mystery forms the core of life.

Vertigo

Vertigo’s structure is fractal; its parts compose, riff on, and reveal its whole. If you watch Vertigo five times, you’ll experience five different films, each radiating out from a trunk thick with rings of obsession, deceit, and beauty. Hitchcock smuggled so much structural and emotional sophistication into this movie as to make a psychological drug for critics and careful viewers; give it enough of your time, and you’ll begin to want to force other films to assume Vertigo’s guise.

Shoah

Shoah documents the Holocaust through the speech of its perpetrators, survivors, and witnesses. It does so decades after the systemic destruction had stopped. What is left to the film’s subjects are memories. Claude Lanzmann, the film’s director, believed that a film long and direct enough could approach the reality of the Holocaust, but only insofar as it granted these memories a space unique to cinema. Shoah is over ten hours long, and so requires you to sit amid its facets, faces, and rigor; watching this film dents you. Lanzmann gave the film eleven years of his life, and has since made only films that investigate the lives that the Holocaust destroyed and formed. To witness and engage this film—the only film that faces the Holocaust with the respect and geological steadiness that atrocity begs us to forget—is to ask yourself what culture can posit in response to its most terrible consequence.

Punch-Drunk Love

What does love rescue us from? What does love force us to face? What does love propel us to do? These questions are answered—gorgeously, sleepily—in this film. The movie plants an unsolicited and unwarranted romance in our ground of anxious obligations, consumerist dreams, and novelty toilet plungers. Bloody hands desperately pressing on an abandoned, duct-taped instrument that must be forced to breathe before it sings: Paul Thomas Anderson is in firm command of analogizing tenderness and care in the godless haste of American life. To watch this movie is to coalesce in a puddle of powerful, strange, and rebellious love. And, if you like pain, it’s really fucking funny.

The Thin Red Line

Terrence Malick, this film’s director, relentlessly gets at spirit. He makes you see the writhing, thriving grace infused in a shell-blackened hill, in the eyes of a starving prisoner, in the errant questions of a man about to die. This movie takes seriously the consequences and stratifications of civilization, making plain the death conjured out of bureaucracy’s distances and the nation’s quixotic identity. Through a parade of soldiers tasked to kill and die for the temporary rule of a mute hill, this film asks its viewers to see that each heart yearns in its own way, particularly those blasted away in orange pangs of technology, the dead our fear’s choking flow of fodder. This film gently envelops war in the striving, grace, and pageantry that we have systematically denied to nature, and asks us to hold this swaddled child until our arms give out.

Ken Baumann is a writer, publisher, and actor. For more: kenbaumann.com

Killer of Sheep

“The children in the playground
The people that I see
All races, all religions
That’s America to me”
-Lewis Allan and Earl Robinson “The House I Live In”

Going to the movies alone is an act that harkens back to de Tocqueville’s idea of American individualism. Everyone is in the theater for the sole purpose of escape, whether we empathize with the antihero, root for the villain or succumb to the pathos of laughter or tears, gathered in a single space, each one of us with our own memories and opinions of what we just witnessed when it’s over. I sat in an auditorium full of film students and faculty at the New School University, the only person alone to watch Killer of Sheep on a big screen, the feelings of self-consciousness forgotten as I watched the opening scene in which a pre-adolescent is scolded for not protecting his younger brother: “You are not a child anymore. You soon will be a goddamn man. Start learning what life is about now, son.”

Charles Burnett, one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers alive today, studied at UCLA, birthplace of the film movement of realism told from the black American perspective that refuted the exploitation that filled the marquees at the time. The movement was America’s answer to Italy’s neo-realism, post-Rebellion Watts (i.e. a decade after early August 1965) replacing post-World War II Rome in the case of Killer. Burnett’s series of vignettes filmed in black and white and set to a catalog of popular American music spanning nearly a century focuses on Stan, a slaughterhouse worker and the peripheral characters that he and his family interact with on a regular basis. Children spin tops and play King of the Mountain and rock fights in vacant construction sites while the adults roll dice and play dominoes and cards on kitchen tables. The best-known scene is one in which Stan and a friend pool their money together to buy an engine for a car they hope to fix and sell, only for a poor decision to undo all of their work in one of the most-cringe worthy moments that is still difficult for me to watch this day.

The Quiet One

James Agee and photographer Helen Levitt first collaborated on the silent film In the Street, a non-narrative short about life on the streets of East Harlem filmed in the mid-1940s. The Quiet One, released in 1948, takes this several steps further, from children on sidewalks to the story told in narration (written by Agee) of one child, Donald Peters, a boy neglected or else abused by family who goes off to the Wiltwyck School for Boys in upstate New York, which by the time of filming was being kept afloat by donations solicited by Eleanor Roosevelt.
The film, more of a docudrama than a documentary, was an anomaly for its time simply for its focus on a black child in a poor neighborhood. It succeeds in raising the question of the role of environment in shaping the individual psyche of a child as well as the communal psyche of peoples. The scene in which Peters is beaten by his grandmother simply for existing is so starkly filmed by Levitt, so carefully worded by Agee (“The same old hopeless confusion and misunderstanding. Rage and pain and fear and hatred…and the sick quiet that follows violence. Duty without love. And peacemaking that fails.”) that it lingers in the mind long after the movie’s end.
Note: Waltwyck was closed in 1981 due to lack of funding.

Belly

From the opening sequence of a club that DMX and Nas rob to an all white mansion in Jamaica Estates, Queens to the streets of Omaha, Nebraska, Hype Williams’ feature film debut is an amalgamation of everything he learned directing music videos for the top hip hop acts of the mid to late 1990s, an era rife with the excesses of the Dot Com Boom and the airwave domination of the East Coast. Aside from the electric performance of DMX in a role that seemed written with him in mind, the movie stands alongside the works of Raymond Chandler in making me conscious of the importance of atmosphere when constructing a story through Williams’ signatures of blacklight, single color backgrounds, slow motion and sharp camera cuts. The film is also personally notable for one of DMX’s best quotes, “Fuck a book! Shorty can’t eat no books!” a line that serves as a regular reminder that even though freedom of expression is a right, writing literature is a privileged act in itself.

Bonnie and Clyde

Despite what the movie may have you believe, Clyde Barrow wasn’t impotent or gay. Rather, this was borrowed from John Toland’s novel The Dillinger Days by none other than Warren Beatty himself to play against the actor’s reputation as a Lothario, or what we would nowadays consider a sex addict. Despite this inaccuracy among others, Arthur Penn’s interpretation is made to be deconstructed and discussed, particularly for its depiction of violence considered quite graphic for 1967’s audience who watched the nightly news reports and footage of killings in Vietnam. If the entire film was the final closeup of Faye Dunaway’s sexy, knowing smile and the barrage of bullets that immediately follows I would watch it on a loop.

There Will Be Blood

I actually cried in the theater the fourth time I saw this film, because the flare of blood and fire and misanthropy overwhelmed me. I don’t know if art influences us as much as certain artists guide us toward the expression we carried from the void that we have not yet the language to realize. I can point to a couple moments in my life when I understood a contemporary artist had showed me the kinds of brutal worlds I longed to build but had never quite dared—Blood Meridian, Scorch Atlas, There Will Be Blood, and one or two others.

Fanny and Alexander

I chose Fanny and Alexander over the seven other Ingmar Bergman films I most revere (for the record, my list is: The Seventh Seal, The Magician, Winter Light, Persona, Hour of the Wolf, Persona, and Cries and Whispers), partly because those films are contained and amplified within the sprawling six hour Fanny and Alexander. Bergman touches on every aspect of life in this film, from the wonder of a small boy’s perceptions to the pitch terror of mortality and the vivid mystery of the beyond. Woody Allen has compared Bergman to Dostoevsky, but Dostoevsky never went so far into the dream as Bergman does here.

Meshes of the Afternoon

Almost claustrophobic in its strangeness, Deren here throws us deep into the weird terror of a dream. After Un Chien Andalou, Meshes of the Afternoon was the first truly ‘avant garde’ film I experienced, and it challenged me (as it continues to) to consider possibilities in form and tone that I didn’t even know existed. The movie is also floating, beautiful, poetic, and really opened me to movies by Tarkovsky, Jodorowsky, Lynch, and other practitioners of dream logic.

Andrei Rublev

Tarkovsky’s films all have a way of drifting along, accumulating and growing, and with such skill and power that eventually the full image is there, towering and painful and almost out of grasp for its mystery. There are so many horrific, dreamy moments in this film that I find at once unspeakably beautiful, and there are many that I find absolutely mysterious, which is the greatest compliment I can pay to a great work of art. His films also make me want to strive after some kind of spirituality or religion, although the spirit of his work is the one that I truly strive for—I might spend the rest of my life striving to write a novel that functions like a Tarkovsky film.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

I love everything about Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films—he’s probably my favorite working filmmaker, with Paul Thomas Anderson. Like most of the other movies on this list, Uncle Boonmee has qualities of dream logic, but the dream here (and in his other films) overlaps and mingles with elements of realism and myth and documentary. But where the dream is often coupled with nightmare in Bergman or Lynch, we find tranquility in Uncle Boonmee. The rise of spirits from the forest, the approach of hybrid forms from the night, is natural, loving, and not at all menacing. There is a tenderness within the strangeness in his films, and they have taught me new ways of approaching the world, not just narrative art.

Robert Kloss is the author of the novels The Revelator and The Alligators of Abraham and the co-author (with Amber Sparks) of The Desert Places, illustrated by Matt Kish.

For this week’s Movies that Matter we have a wonderful duo, Bud Smith and Brian Alan Ellis. If you haven’t heard of them, you should probably get to a fucking library.

PART ONE

MOVIES DISCUSSED: Silver Bullet, Lucas, My Cousin Vinny, Ghostbusters

BUD SMITH: My favorite movie when I was a little kid was Silver Bullet because I liked the werewolf stuff. My brother loved that movie too because he wanted to have me break both his legs so our parents would buy him an electric wheelchair.

BRIAN ALAN ELLIS: I don’t think I’ve watched Silver Bullet all the way through. I think I got it confused with that other Corey Haim movie, Lucas. Like, I thought the Lucas character got paralyzed in the football game at the end and the story picked up where he was now in a wheelchair and was suddenly being chased by werewolves.

SMITH: Lucas 2: Silver Bullet is great and does have werewolves, and then Lucas 3: Rudy is a beautiful closer because Lucas overcomes his handicap (and the werewolves) and plans for that Notre Dame one-down. I also loved My Cousin Vinny, like a lot.

ELLIS: I like the part in My Cousin Vinny when Joe Pesci shoots the busboy and everybody’s all. “Why’d you do that, you crazy motherfucker,” and Pesci is all whatever about it, so they kill him and dump his body in some cornfield. Pretty heavy. By the way, I never saw My Cousin Vinny.

SMITH: My Cousin Vinny is this movie with Marissa Tomei in it and some courtroom stuff that is moot. Marisa Tomei in that movie was why I stayed living on the east coast. My plan as a little kid had been to relocate to Jupiter. Marissa Tomei kept me here.

ELLIS: My favorite movie as a kid was Ghostbusters. My mom sewed me a Ghostbusters jumpsuit for Halloween, and I wore it to school the whole year. It was badass.

SMITH: What character?

ELLIS: I don’t think I was a particular character. Just some fat kid who decided to be a ghostbuster.

SMITH: Oh, like if they hired a fat kid and had him shoot atomic laser beam rays. To fight the undead. That’s a bad plan for them. I got the ectoplasm for Christmas and it was purple and I smeared it on all the walls of my room.

ELLIS: That shit was fire. Also, I just remembered, this other kid dressed like a ghostbuster that Halloween and I was jealous ’cause he had like an actual toy proton pack and my shit was just cardboard and tinfoil.

SMITH: The real proton pack kids are going to hell first. That’s my only Christian sentiment. Spoiled little rich real proton pack bitches.
PART TWO

MOVIES DISCUSSED: The Crow, The Wedding Singer, A Clockwork Orange, Toy Story 4, Irreversible, Requiem for a Dream

BRIAN ALAN ELLIS: Do you remember the first movie you ever took a date to?

BUD SMITH: I took a date to The Crow. She said it was pretty weird and dark but then she said that her mom and dad had their first date at A Clockwork Orange and that they were making out until the rape scene. You never know with movies. Like even Toy Story 4 could be viciously harrowing.

ELLIS: That’s like taking a date to see Irreversible, or Requiem for a Dream. Brutal. The Crow had a nice moral center, at least. I saw The Wedding Singer with my first girlfriend. She loved it. She was like a goth/riot grrl-type and was way into the ’80s. She loved Billy Idol, and Bauhaus. I listened to Rancid so the movie obviously wasn’t punk enough for me at the time, but I’ve grown to appreciate it.

SMITH: How do you feel about Rancid now, though? I dated a girl early on who loved SKA. That was a tough one.

ELLIS: I was totally into SKA. Actually, the first time I made out with a girl was at, like, a Toasters show. I think I even wore a tie. It was pretty bad.

SMITH: What was the appeal? The plaid pants? The horns? The Doc Martins?

Film is something we do. We just do. Whether we watch the big budget block-busters or involve ourselves with Bergman’s Persona or Tarkovsky’s Stalker, we engage nonetheless, as a unit, in a way that is far and wide removed from all other art forms. Film is about a shared experience, however singular your intake. Not everybody reads, nor does everybody enjoy looking at paintings on walls in museums, and I have even, believe it or not, actually met a few folks who don’t even care for music, but: Golly, did you all catch that new spidey flick? Everybody goes to the movies—kids, teenagers, parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, great grandparents. Everybody searches endlessly through their Netflix accounts on the weekends—EVERYBODY. Everybody (at least those of us born before 1990) feels that little pang of nostalgia whenever they come across an old VHS tape in their attic while spring cleaning. I’m tired of reading articles about writers talking about writing and other writers and whatever else it is writers write and talk about. So here it is, folks: writers writing about exactly those things—whatever that means.

First up is Kevin Maloney.

Kevin Maloney is the author of Cult of Loretta (Lazy Fascist Press, 2015). His stories have appeared in Hobart, PANK, and Monkeybicycle. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his girlfriend and daughter.

Burden of Dreams

During a 2006 interview with the BBC, a sniper shot German director Werner Herzog in the stomach with an air rifle. Despite the bloodstain on his shirt, he insisted on continuing, saying, “It’s not a significant bullet.” Sometimes I worry that our generation of writers is soft. We write what we know, and in the process, we neglect the epic. I love Werner Herzog for doing the opposite: creating symphonic, grandiose art. Art so big it endangers people. Art that verges on madness. This mania is captured in Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, a documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo. In one scene, Herzog delivers a speech about the jungle that includes the glorious line: “The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing; they just screech in pain.”

Gummo

The truth is I hate most movies. I’m almost always disappointed by their lack of gumption. In literature, there are so many blazing oddities: Flannery O’Connor, Franz Kafka, William Burroughs, Harry Crews. But movies require budgets and actors. Making a movie is like running a small business, and the result is that most feature films feel like 90-minute infomercials concocted by advertising executives. Every once in a while a movie comes along that not only defies this rule, but takes a shit on it. Gummo is one of those movies. It is genuinely fucked up. Harmony Korine depicts an America we know exists, but which we rarely see on screen because it is beyond redemption, and most of us require redemption with our darkness. Gummo is just the darkness.

Vernon, Florida

I only get stoned about once every two years. The most recent time was in a canoe. The time before that was right before watching Errol Morris’ Vernon, Florida. I haven’t seen the movie since, so I have no idea how it holds up to sober viewing. But stoned, it was a psychedelic experience. I kept saying, “Wait, so this is real? These are actual people?” Errol Morris goes down the rabbit hole of humanity and finds a turkey hunter named Snake and a preacher lecturing at bizarre length about the word “therefore.” At one point, three old-timers sit outside a general store arguing about the best way to commit suicide with a shotgun. Every one of these people is worthy of a Flannery O’Connor story, but in Morris’s deadpan documentary, it’s just another day in Vernon.

Taxi Driver

There’s a reason every college student in America has this movie poster hanging on their dorm room wall. Watching it is a rite of passage, a journey from light into darkness. It’s like reading Crime and Punishment and The Idiot in 113 minutes. But Travis Bickle is more complex than any Dostoyevsky character. He’s the place where the saint becomes the sinner, where good touches evil. There are so many great scenes in this movie, but my favorite is the climactic shootout. Apparently the scene was too gruesome for the ratings board; in order to get an “R” rating, Scorsese de-saturated the film, giving the ubiquitous blood an orange, almost rust color. The result is haunting and dreamlike, one of the few instances when a change made to appeal to censors actually improved a film.

My Own Private Idaho

I was pretty good at football in the 6^th grade, but by middle school I was a gangly giraffe lining up across from young men who’d very much gone through puberty. One day at practice, the coaches wanted us to run into each other as fast as possible for the satanic purpose of discovering which of us would get up afterwards and beg for more. I wasn’t having any of it. I took off my helmet and walked into the forest and looked up into the canopy of trees and marveled at the beautiful shapes the branches made as they laced together a hundred feet above me. A few days later, I watched My Own Private Idaho for the first time. Everything about it fascinated me: gay street kids, hustlers, narcolepsy, Portland, Oregon circa 1991. Maybe I just had a big crush on River Phoenix… I don’t know. Whatever it was, I quit sports, declared myself an artist, and never looked back.