FIVE EASY PIECES

Director Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces stars Jack Nicholson as a man who insist on being one of life’s losers—even though he doesn’t have to be. The closing scene is the perfect summary of where this guy is going with his life. It’s the kind of open-ended bleak perspective that no Hollywood production would allow from a mainstream drama today.

GUMMO

Panned by audiences and hated by critics, Gummo, by former indie It boy Harmony Korine, is a loosely-connected series of absurdist vignettes. If this film had made its debut in an art gallery rather than an arthouse movie theatre, it would have been lauded as some kind of visionary masterpiece. Instead, it’s mostly regarded as crap—but I think it’s brilliant. The stuff in this movie could only come from the mind of someone with legitimate mental health issues.

KIDS

Larry Clark likes kids—especially screwed-up young male ones. He made a movie about them and called it Kids. Now I like Kids.

THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant: bitchy German lesbians play mind games in a luridly outfitted set-piece orchestrated by writer/director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. What could be better than that?

LOVE AND DEATH

Woody Allen’s Love and Death is a witty, absurd, and very funny farce filtered through the influences of two decidedly non-comedic genres:19th century Russian literature and Ingmar Bergman movies. It’s great the way this movie is highly intelligent and highly stupid at the same time. The combination makes for a very effective slapstick comedy.

STALKER

One of the best movies you could ever see is Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky. It manages to be ugly and beautiful, dreamy and concrete, science fiction and reality, confounding, and lucid, all at the same time. Like most of Tarkovsky’s films, it can be a challenge, but it’s worth it.