Watch This With Rick Ramos

Greg Araki's The Doom Generation  This week Mr. Chavez & I explore the 1990s with a cult film that is remembered as an early classic of  New Queer Cinema . Greg Araki's The Doom Generation is remembered as a violent and trashy exploration of 1990s alternative cinmea.  A Gen X Bisexual Bonnie & Clyde/Badlands profile of alienation and stylized camp, Araki's film is the second edition of his "Teen A...

Eddie Martin's We Were Once Kids In a continuation of last week's episode on Larry Clark and Harmony Korine's 1995  Kids , Mr. Chavez & I discovered a documentary peeling back the layers of that problematic and controversial film. Although we continue to believe that the earlier film is - in many ways - exceptional, Eddie Martin's 2021 expose (produced with Kids actor, Hamilton Harris), titled We...

Larry Clark's Kids This week Mr. Chavez & I travel back to the mid-1990s to look at a difficult, troubling, and polarizing film that raises questions concerning good taste, artistic license and victimization, as well as exploitation. Few films have caused the uproar that Larry Clark's  Kids did in 1995. A quasi-documentary examination of aimlessness in an alcohol, drug, and sex driven New York of...

Robert DeNiro's The Good Shepherd  This week we springboard off of Robert DeNiro's 2006 spy film, The Good Shepherd , profiling the birth of the Central Intelligence Agency and its role throughout the second half of the 20th Century. From its origins during the end of World War II thru The Cold War, The Bay of Pigs, and the early days of the Kennedy administration, DeNiro's passion project is a th...

Stefano Solima's Sicario: Day of the Soldado This week we discuss the struggle between the United States, its neighbors, allies, and enemies depicted in the Taylor Sheridan scripted,  Stefano Solima directed, 2018  C.I.A. action thriller detailing border wars, fabricated criminal kidnappings, cartel violence, and the never-ending, never winnable drug wars. Exciting performances from Josn Brolin an...

Ben Affleck's Argo (2012) In 2012 Ben Affleck would co-write and direct Argo, winning the Best Picture of the Year at at that year's Academy Awards celebration. Although a skillful and professional job it's - quite simply and obviously - a hack job, typical of the US's need to paint itself in the proper light while also giving Hollywood the opportunity to congratulate itself yet again (as well as...

Barry Levinson's Wag the Dog  Nothing's Changed/Nothing's New and we learned that in 1996 with Barry Levinson's Wag the Dog . As important 30 years later as when it was released, this week Mr. Chavez & I sit down to understand a film that predicted its own time (being released a few weeks before The Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky White House Scandal would break), but is also a simpler and almost qua...

Denis Villeneuve's Arrival   Since the beginning of this new century Popular Cinema has become increasingly obvious and simplistic. It is rare that a major studio will take a chance with "challenging, thought-provoking" material. In 2016 Denis Villeneuve would adapt Tony Chiang's 1998 novella "Story of Your Life" with a beautifully executed non-linear narrative. A sci-fi drama incorporating alien...

Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story Recognized as "The Greatest Film of All Time" in the 2012 Sight and Sound Magazine poll, Yasujiro Ozu's 1953 masterpiece is a quiet, contemplative examination of generational conflict, modernization, and aging in Post-War Japan. Masterfully directed and beautifully acted by Ozu's stock company, including Chishū Ryū and Setsuko Hara, Tokyo Story is arguably the greatest f...

Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut In 1999 filmmaker Stanley Kubrick would shoot his final cinematic statement. Adapting a 1926 Freudian novella, Kubrick would (seemingly) explore the dark mysteries of sexual trafficking, secret societies, infidelity, and the paranoia inherent in all of it. A Psycho-Sexual Drama centered around a Masked Ball Orgy and images that would haunt the minds of popular cult...

Pier Paolo Pasolini's Saló, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) For most serious cineastes, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Saló, or the 120 Days of Sodom is a bridge that we all arive at and struggle with crossing; a cinematic rite of passage that challenges each of our ideas of art. Is Pasolini's final film - an interpretation of the Marquis de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom - A Political Critique exploring Fas...

Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times In 1936 Charlie Chaplin (arguably the most iconic figure of Silent Films) would produce his final (mostly) silent masterpiece,  Modern Times . This week Mr. Chavez & I continue our look at Cinema that challenges the status quo , with a film that examines the de-humanizing drive of capitalism to push profit over people and the subsequent endurance of the individual to...

Fritz Lang's Metropolis In 1927 Cinema was still in its relative infancy. The great German auteur, Fritz Lang would revolutionize the film industry with his first masterpiece, Metropolis. Nearly eleven years earlier D.W. Griffith had established the "grammar of cinema" with  his epic masterpiece, The Birth of a Nation . The subsequent decade would showcase spectacles ( Ben-Hur, Intolerance ), come...

Remakes, Re-Imaginings, Expansions. In 2004 Director Jonathan Demme would explore the world of Politics, Espionage, and Cold War Brainwashing with a new and novel take on John Frankenheimer's 1962 Cold War Classic The Manchurian Candidate . Demme would expand and manipulate Richard Condon's source material (a best-selling novel from 1959),  replacing the Korean Conflict with an updated Persian Gul...

John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate  On this week's episode of WatchThis W/RickRamos, Mr. Chavez & I sit down to discuss a classic of Cold War, Political Cinema, John Frankenheimer's groundbreaking 1962 The Manchurian Candidate . Based on the 1959 novel by Richard Condon, Frankenheimer's film would captivate audiences with a paranoid and chilling story of American soldiers brain-washed b...

Shinya Tsukamoto's Tetsuo: The Iron Man 2026 finds us digging into the Beautiful, Strange, and Challenging filmography of auteurs unafraid of being misunderstood or the offensive nature of the stories and images they deliver. It would be difficult to find a film that challenges it audience more than Shinya Tsukamoto's 1989  Cyber-Punk Classic Tetsuo: The Iron Man . There is no simple way to descri...

Akira Kurosawa's Ran  Happy New Year WatchThis Fans. Depending on Your Perspective, 2025 was a horrible year or the beginning of a grand awakening, returning America to its rightful place as Leader and Benefactor of the Unwashed Ignorant Masses. There are many ideas of what 2026 can and will be. We here at WatchThis W/RickRamos believe that Akira Kurosawa's 1985 masterpiece, Ran , is a film that o...

Robert Wise's Odds Against Tomorrow & James Foley's After Dark My Sweet  This week Rick Ramos flies solo for a new episode of WatchThis W/RickRamos and the last new episode of 2025. After a heartfelt look at the past year, dreams, the job, and making sense of the art, we look at two Noirs that have been criminally overlooked: Robert Wise's 1959 Classic Odds Against Tomorrow and James Foley's After...

Scott Sanders's Black Dynamite  We're finishing out the month of December - two more weeks left in 2025 - and having a great time exploring the world of Cult Cinema and Midnight Movies. This week we take a look at one of the best comedies of the 21st Century . . . a film that should have been exactly the definition of Midnight/Cult Movie. In 2009 Director Scott Sanders and Writer/Star Michael Jai...

Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain This week we continue our love for Midnight and Cult Movies. For this episode we return to the great Chilean-French filmmaker, Alejandro Jodorowsky. A Visionary Artist and Poet of the Cinema, Jodorowsky has created some of the most beautiful and challenging images and concepts ever conceived. Problematic, Polarizing, Poetic, and Personal, Jodorowsky's films...

Mike Judge's Office Space  Recorded some time ago, we've been holding onto this episode until the right time. As we move into our second month of Midnight & Cult Movies it is clear that Director Mike Judge (creator of Beavis & Butthead , Idiocracy , and King of the Hill ) is a director whose filmography is almost entirely cult films and television shows. In 1999 he was approached by 20th Century F...

Robert Aldrich's Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Not a "Midnight Movie" but certainly one of the great Cult Classics, 1962s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? was an audience's dream pairing. The coming together of Oscar winners Bette Davis and Joan Crawford - two of the greatest stars the medium has known - created a film that has captivated film lovers for decades. The story of two sisters - volati...

Russ Meyer's Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!  If you allow it to do so, Cinema will take you to strange, hypnotic, and brilliant places. For close to forty years I have known about Russ Meyer's Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) and have assiduously avoided it. Cinematic Snobbery stopped this podcaster from one of the strangest and - seemingly - sexist and self-indulgent exercises in moviemaking....

David Lynch's Eraserhead This week we continue our look into Midnight/Cult Movies. One of the earliest films to find an audience (and build its directors career) was 1977s Eraserhead . A film that baffles description, this weeks episode takes the angle of describing the "feelings" and memories that have followed our initial viewings of this brilliant debut film. Brilliant Black & White cinematogra...

Jim Sharman's The Rocky Horror Picture Show Cinema is art, Viewing Cinema is an artistic experience. We sit in the theater and drift into the beauty of a story that either entertains, explains, or enlightens. Sometimes all of these and even more. In 1975 20th Century Fox would distribute a film that would fail miserably with mainstream audiences, but would survive box office death and be reborn on...