Matt Dillon is objectively irritating as an actor, and he’s the leading man here, which truncated my appreciation for Drugstore Cowboy when it first came out. I remembered it as potentially fascinating, but damaged by Dillon’s face and demeanor.

Ever since, I’ve been told that I misjudged a masterpiece, so on Tuesday I gave the film another watch. It hasn’t changed, nor has my opinion.

A young junkie (Dillon) leads his gang of 2½ other junkies (Kelly Lynch, James Le Gros, Heather Graham) in raids on drug stores, to fuel their addictions. Their drug-addled world might look apocalyptic to normals, but you can see the appeal of it, which is largely about not wanting a normal life.

I should love a movie about not being normal, and there’s nothing wrong and plenty right in the script, but here’s the problem: Have you ever known a junkie in their 20s? I’ve known several. They look and act like junkies, and Dillon captures none of it. Zero. He never looks even slightly mussed up, glassy-eyed, out of it, hungry for it. Hell, he’s never not clean-shaven!

When he tells his drug-addicted wife that he’s going into rehab, it’s with all the emotion of deciding on a ham sandwich instead of chicken salad for lunch. When he digs a grave to bury a acquaintance who’s overdosed, he’s just a guy with a shovel. A cop who’d beaten him up pops into his room a week later, but there’s no apprehension. Dillon’s face says nothing. He could be a billboard for Botox™.

The movie is quite good, Dillon notwithstanding. Lynch and Le Gros nail it. Graham’s not bad, and Director Gus Van Sant even squeezed a performance out of William S Burroughs, playing basically Burroughs, spouting drug wisdom built on a lifetime of injected experience.

But every scene with Dillon (who’s in nearly every scene) is like watching a movie about a movie star pretending to be a drug addict.

Verdict: YES, anyway.

♦ ♦ ♦

The Drumlin (1980)
Streaming free at Digital Film Archive

A couple of kids are playing hide-and-seek on a rocky beach, when a giant space alien or maybe space robot appears out of nowhere. It’s a strong opening for this amateur short from Roy Spence (Attack of the Saucer People).

The space alien pied-pipers the town’s children, with music only the young can hear. It’s a slightly effective film, with bad acting, thick Irish accents, a panicked musical score, and some unexpected politics.

Verdict: MAYBE.

♦ ♦ ♦ Duck Amuck (1953)
Streaming free at Internet Archive

If you’re too young to have experienced cartoons in a theater before the feature, you’ll never know what you missed. Here’s one of the all-time great Merrie Melodies, wherein Daffy Duck thinks he’s making a Musketeers cartoon, but almost immediately the scenery is gone. Igloos instead?

Daffy breaks the cartoon’s fourth wall to complain, and when he gets too smart alecky, director Chuck Jones deletes the background, and soon an eraser appears on-screen and rubs Daffy out. Jones plays with the sound and sound effects, even steals away Daffy’s voice (Mel Blanc, of course) — whatever it takes to annoy Mr Duck.

If you’re thinking you’ve seen these jokes before, this is where the jokes were stolen from. And they’re still very, very funny, when told so perfectly. Duck Amuck is among the most inventive and imaginative of the classic Warner Brothers shorts.

Verdict: BIG YES.

♦ ♦ ♦ Earth vs the Flying Saucers (1956)
Streaming free at YouTube

This isn’t as hokey as I’d hoped from the title. It’s actually kinda good. As promised, there are space aliens in flying saucers, but unlike a lot of sci-fi from the ’50s, they don’t instantly attack. They’re in communication with a scientist (Hugh Marlowe), and tell him they’re trying to avoid a war that would ruin the Earth. All the aliens ask is our unconditional surrender, but if I’ve learned anything from sci-fi, it’s that Earthers don’t want to wave a white flag for no space aliens.

Marlowe is wooden as always, but the story and script are better than average, it’s in crisp widescreen black-and-white, and some of the special effects by Ray Harryhausen look quite realistic. Don’t take this the wrong way, but the leveling of the Washington DC is beautiful.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Easy Rider 2: The Ride Back (2013)
Streaming free at YouTube

In case you missed it or wondered, there were no survivors from the original Easy Rider, and really no unanswered questions. A sequel seems odd and unnecessary, but here it is.

The star is Phil Pitzer, a lawyer and lifelong Easy Rider fan who bought the rights and financed the film. He’s not an actor, but I’ve seen worse, and he looks kinda like Peter Fonda. He plays Fonda’s character, Wyatt, in  reenactments of motorcycle rides from the first movie, which is unintentionally eerie.

Mostly, though, Pitzer plays Wyatt’s older brother Morgan, who was never mentioned in the first film. And yes, there’s a third brother named Virgil, just like the Earp brothers at the OK Corral.

Morgan has restored Wyatt’s iconic motorcycle, and rides it wearing the matching iconic helmet. Nothing much happens, and the slow proceedings are often interrupted with flashbacks to Korea, pop songs all hoping to be “Born to Be Wild,” and hazy, possibly stoned
narration from Pitzer, decrying homelessness and hunger, ecological ruin, and telling us how he misses Wyatt.

Obviously, this is a bad movie, but it’s never bad enough to be enjoyable.

Verdict: BIG NO.

♦ ♦ ♦ Easy Street (1917)
Streaming free at Daily Motion

“Policeman wanted, at once,” says a sign outside the police station. Charlie Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” needs a job, so he applies, and soon as he can be fitted with a uniform, he’s sent to fight crime on Easy Street.

Coincidentally, there’s just been a riot, instigated by a big bully with bizarre makeup on his face. He could be a backup player for KISS. Chaplin beats the bully with his billy-club, gasses him to unconsciousness with the fumes of a streetlamp, and later drops a cast-iron stove from a window onto the big bully’s head.

There’s a chase, with the KISS bully pursuing Chaplin down the street, into a house, into an alley, and into a side plot where a heroin addict tries to rape a young woman, but Officer Chaplin is there to rescue her.

I’ve seen perhaps a hundred silent movies, so I’m no expert, and for comedies I’ve mostly focused on Buster Keaton, because he’s reliably funny and a favorite of mine. This is only the second Chaplin film I’ve seen, after his luminescent City Lights, but it’s a distant second.

Easy Street is frantic, arguably a spectacle if you like that sort of thing, with lots of running around and around. What it’s not, in any way, is funny. Best I can say is, it’s over in less than half an hour.

Verdict: NO.

3/11/2024

• • • Coming attractions • • •
Ed and His Dead Mother (1992)
8½ (1963)
Eight Men Out (1988)
Einstein and Eddington (2008)
Elephant (2003)
… plus schlock, short, and surprises

There are so many good movies out there — old movies, odd or artsy, foreign or forgotten movies, or do-it-yourself movies made just for the joy of making them — that if you only watch whatever’s on Netflix or playing at the twenty-plex, you’re missing out.

To get beyond the ordinary, I recommend:Alter • Cineverse • Criterion • CultCinema Classics • DocsVille • Dust • Fandor • Films for Action • Hoopla • IHaveNoTV • IndieFlix • Internet Archive • Kanopy • KinoCult • Kino Lorber • Korean Classic Film • Christopher R Mihm • Mosfilm • Mubi • National Film Board of Canada • New Yorker Screening Room • Damon Packard • Mark Pirro • PizzaFlix • PopcornFlix • Public Domain Movies • RareFilmm • Scarecrow Video • Shudder • ThoughtMaybe • Timeless Classic Movies • VoleFlix • WatchDocumentaries • or your local library. Some people even access films through shady methods, though of course, that would be wrong.