email: latenightpickwick@gmail.com
As a matter of fact, I wasn’t a teenage video store clerk. By the time that I was old enough to work, Blockbuster was already on its last legs, having killed Mom & Pop video stores long before that, so I had a choice: I could flip hamburgers at McDonald’s, I could stock the frozen aisle at [Name Your Local Grocery Store Here], or I could work as a teenaged contract killer (cash only — tax free).
Obviously, I would have liked working at a video store, and now I can, having opened one up outside the ticket gate of the Pickwick Drive-In. And — here — I have a shelf of my own for the Staff Picks section, and I even have a super top secret, 1980s-level espionage film populated by teenagers algorithm to curate five films on a single shelf of a video store.
So, step inside the Pickwick’s sister store and consider selecting one of the films you find on display here, which are merely recommendations — not a “best of” any film list that you could imagine. This month, I had at least some homage to family — with every definition that comes with it — as the holiday season begins.
Maybe think about buying a bag of microwavable popcorn with your rental as well.
And – as always – be kind & rewind.
The Goonies
A D V E N T U R E
1985 | PG | 114 minutes | d. Richard Donner | dp. Nick McLean | s. Chris Columbus
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You will enjoy this movie if you love Baby Ruth candy bars, best friends, The Electric Company, pirate booty, and treasure maps.
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As the working class homes of the so-called Goondocks are set for foreclosure in less than 24 hours, Mikey (Sean Astin) & his friends – “Chunk” (Jeff Cohen), “Data” (Ke Huy Quan), and “Mouth” (Corey Feldman) – discover a decades-old map that may lead them to a famous local pirate’s treasure worth enough to save their neighborhood.
Aided by Mikey’s older brother Brand (Josh Brolin) & others (played by Kerri Green & Martha Plimpton), the Goonies descend into the underground of their community in order to save their homes from being transformed into a golf course or a neighborhood of tract homes – while being pursued by the Fratellis, a family of diabolical yet often inept criminals intent on discovering the pirate’s treasure for themselves.
One of the greatest family films of all time, The Goonies succeeds in that it not only highlights two brothers (of very different strokes) trying to save their family’s home but also of a handful of friends – as different as they are – who also represent a family, trying to save their homes. Each Goonie is fully-formed in their characterization, and the motion picture possesses an overwhelming share of memorable moments that highlight a particular Goonie or demonstrate that Goonies are strongest when they’re working together.
Goonies never say, “Don’t watch this movie when you can!”
You always watch The Goonies.
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The Goonies is streaming on Amazon Prime.
Interstellar
S C I E N C E F I C T I O N
2014 | PG-13 | 169 minutes | d. Christopher Nolan | c. Hoyte van Hoytema| s. Jonathan Nolan & Christopher Nolan
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You will enjoy this movie if you love farming, outer space, sarcastic robots, time, and wormhole theory.
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In a near dystopian future of the planet Earth that could remarkably be the near future of the planet Earth, dust storms, blight, and famine are destroying the human race. And while widowed former NASA test pilot turned farmer Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) fights to raise his kids Murph (Mackenzie Foy) & Tom (Timothee Chalamet) alongside his father-in-law Donald (John Lithgow), Cooper is enlisted to pilot a spacecraft through a wormhole that will lead its scientists to another galaxy with potentially habitable planets.
The mission itself is hazardous enough. And be that as it may, the mission will test not only the limitations of science but also the bonds of family.
Interstellar is what works best when it comes to science fiction, when science fiction ultimately works: stories from the near or distant future that are a reflection of the world today. Here, Nolan’s film comments on the planet’s environment, as well as the culture’s revisionist history that intends to recreate the narrative of the planet Earth.
But the movie is also about family & its constraints. Interstellar is just as concerned with where the world is headed as it is concerned with where the world has been, which includes heartfelt, homebound stories & otherworldly tales that hit very close to home.
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Interstellar is streaming on Paramount+.
Badlands
C R I M E
1973 | PG | 94 minutes | d. Terrence Malick | dp. Brian Probyn & Tak Fujimoto, et al. | s. Terrence Malick
***
You will enjoy this movie if you love James Dean, the Northern Plains, the power of celebrity, road trips, and young love.
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By the time Badlands – first-time director Terrence Malick’s violent exploration of late-1950s America – ends, the film’s opening sequence possesses so much more poignancy, introducing much of the film’s central conflict. When Korean War veteran & drifter Kit (Martin Sheen) meets 15-year-old Holly Sargis (Sissy Spacek), the two ambiguously tell the audience everything they need to know about the film about to unfold.
“I got some stuff to say,” Kit cryptically tells Holly just moments into their introduction to one another, providing none of the stuff & no elaboration on his point. “Guess I’m kinda lucky that way,” he adds. “Most people don’t have anything on their minds, do they?”
And when Holly confesses that her father won’t like her talking to him because Kit is a garbage man, Kit asks Holly what her father possibly knows about garbage.
Nothing is Holly’s response. “But he doesn’t want to know,” she conclusively admits.
So begins Badlands, the story of these two young lovers whose lives are forever changed by the torrential choices they make in the shadow of violence.
Badlands has much to say about one’s understanding of the world, but over the course of the movie, Kit makes no attempt to vocally express those understandings with others. Instead, he asserts his identity through violence, and Holly remains absolutely fascinated by it – at first. While Holly & director Terrence Malick remain reluctant throughout the film to pass judgment on Kit’s behavior, how the audience responds to the motion picture says quite a bit about the world in which the audience watches it: whether Kit’s is a violent response to his own anonymity or an indictment of America’s love of celebrity.
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Badlands is streaming on YouTube.
Patrick Still Lives
H O R R O R
1980 | NOT RATED | 92 minutes | d. Mario Landi | dp. Franco Villa | s. Piero Regnoli
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You will enjoy this movie if you love hospitals, movie sequels that aren’t quite legitimate movie sequels, psychokinetic powers, and the color green.
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Good or bad, some motion picture sequels aren’t really legitimate sequels at all, having little to nothing to do with the film(s) that came before it. Almost twenty years after Arnold Schwarzenegger played a police detective going undercover as a kindergarten teacher, Dolph Lundgren starred in Kindergarten Cop 2 as an FBI agent going undercover as a kindergarten teacher, retracing many of the original film’s comedic beats. Meanwhile, horror movie Troll 2 had nothing in common with its predecessor. Though the film spawned a fantastic making-of documentary – Best Worst Movie, arguably better than the original Troll & its successor – there are no trolls present in Troll 2.
And, famously, Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) was not a continuation of Michael Myers’ blood-drenched assault on Haddonfield but a stand-alone horror movie about a novelty Halloween mask possessed with the ability to kill the many children who wear it.
And despite the deviation from the Michael Myers mythology, Season of the Witch is heralded by some as a fantastic Halloween movie – even if it’s nowhere near a fantastic Halloween movie.
Patrick Still Lives manages to exist within the same canon of these films as the debauched story of a young man (Gianni Dei) trapped in a coma & kept alive by his father so that the comatose Patrick can exact brutal violence against others.
This bonkers sequel-but-not-a-sequel hits the ground running as it drops the film’s protagonist Patrick into a coma within the movie’s first 23 seconds, and – as a shameless artifact of the subgenre of sequels-that-aren’t-really-sequels – Patrick Still Lives takes the cake. Where other films of its ilk cross the line when it comes to divorcing themselves from what one would call a “traditional” sequel, this piece of Ozploitation ventures into realms of gore & nudity that will ultimately test a viewer’s tastes & patience, both of which are required in Olympic displays of strength that psychokinesis can’t provide, in order to watch this film.
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Patrick Still Lives is currently available for purchase in physical media form from Severin Films.
Blue Ruin
T H R I L L E R
2013 | R | 90 minutes | d. Jeremy Saulnier | dp. Adam Stone | s. Jeremy Saulnier
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You will enjoy this movie if you love family, haircuts & shaving, hand-to-hand combat & weapons training, revenge, and run-down blue Bonnevilles.
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Things could be going much better for Dwight (Macon Blair), living out of his blue Pontiac and scavenging for food & money in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. There couldn’t be much more “end of one’s rope” than Dwight’s life these days, but when he discovers that Wade Marshall Cleland, Jr. (Sandy Barnett) – the man charged & convicted for the murder of Dwight’s parents 20 years ago – will be released from prison, Dwight returns to his hometown in order to avenge the deaths of his parents.
And things get suddenly & decidedly worse from there.
As possessed as Dwight appears to be for vengeance, Dwight is also possessed with a complete ineptitude to exact it — an effort that the audience will half-applaud, half-lament — as Dwight’s mission generates a ripple effect in the waters of more lives than his, making Blue Ruin a unique, postmodern exploration of revenge films.
While many revenge films conveniently allow the audience to sympathize with the avenger, Blue Ruin never remains so cut & dry, never a film about a tireless hero who deserves revenge and the villains who deserve to be at the end of it. As with his follow-up motion picture Green Room (2015), writer-director Jeremy Saulnier takes a much more philosophical look at family, goodness, evil, and violence – and if there’s a muddy line that quarters those concepts, it casts a significantly dark, bluish hue, like a bruise:
The immediate, obvious evidence of brutality & the very raw, lasting repercussions of it.
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Blue Ruin is streaming on Fandango.
Chris Kaine is the most amateur film essayist whom you may ever imagine. He earnestly contends that he was named after the actor Chris Sarandon, because he was either conceived while his parents watched Fright Night (1985) in his paternal grandparents’ basement, or because of their love for The Princess Bride (1987), which stars a character by the name of “Humperdinck,” which is pretty funny, if you think about it.
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