Watch This With Rick Ramos

David Lynch's Wild at Heart  This week we return to a World of Dreams and the Land of Oz through the dark and chaotic eyes of David Lynch (January 20, 1946 - January 16, 2025). A Homage/Love Letter to the classic MGM masterpiece, Lynch's 1990 Wild at Heart is a pulsating cinematic shotgun blast. The story of young lovers breaking parole and crossing the country to find a future that is never clear...

Victor Fleming's (w/Directorial Contributions from George Cukor, Richard Thorpe, and King Vidor)  The Wizard of Oz A long time coming, this week's episode focuses on the 1939 MGM Technicolor Classic The Wizard of Oz . In the early days of the studio system, each studio focused on a specific genre, Metro Goldwyn Mayer was the home of the musical and The Wizard of Oz is one of the greatest, most rem...

Wolfgang Petersen's The Never Ending Story   This week we look into the cinematic psyche of Mr. Ibrahim Chavez. Our path is Wolfgang Petersen's 1984 Childrens' Dark Fantasy,  The Never Ending Story . A childrens' adventure/heroes journey of youth battling nihilism (in this case The Nothing ), bullies, parental loss, and the power of imagination, self-worth (self-belief), and self-realization. Poss...

John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China  When I first saw John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China , it was a Pan & Scan VHS copy from my local video store. I immediately fell in love with one of the strangest and most imaginative films of the 1980s. The fourth collaboration between Horror icon, John Carpenter, and Disney legend Kurt Russell (doing an over the top and ridiculous parody of...

James Mangold's Cop Land Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta, Robert DeNiro, and Sylvester Stallone in one of the most highly-anticipated films of the 1990s . . . Springing from the headlines of the 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s, and today, James Mangold's 1997 police corruption drama was released to critical acclaim and tepid box-office. In an era of 90s Independent filmmaking, focusing on newspaper/magazine headline...

Richard Linklater's Dazed & Confused (70s Soundtrack) This week Mr. Chavez & I return to Richard Linklater's 1993 "Hang-Out" Masterpiece,  Dazed & Confused , focusing on the importance and use of its soundtrack. Featuring Aerosmith, KISS, Alice Cooper, Ted Nugent, WAR, ZZ Top, Edgar Winter Group, and Deep Purple, among others, Linklater's "Cinematic Soundtrack" would establish nostalgia, youth, fr...

Andrew Dominik's Killing Them Softly It's becoming increasingly difficult to find straight-forward, honest, and personal stories at the movie theater. The low to medium budget films that populated the 1970s have cast a shadow that continues to excite and inspire modern audiences. In the wasteland of re-vamps, sequels, action and comic book dreg, a handful of pictures crawl out of the monotony. In...

Kevin Smith's Clerks The 1990s were a strange, wondrous, and hopeful decade for Cinema. Three decades later we look back on those mid 90s attitudes, trends, screams, and shouts. With the emergence of Sundance, The Weinsteins, and voices such as Tarantino, Fincher, Rodriguez, and others, Independent Cinema was flexing in a way that threatened the studios in much the same way the 70s thrilled, excit...

Richard Linklater's Dazed & Confused  On this week's episode we explore 1976 through the eyes of 1993, with Richard Linklater's slacker/high-school masterpiece, Dazed & Confused . Linklater's love letter to high school coming-of-age films is one of the stand-out productions of early 90s independent cinema; a film that blends aimless storytelling with a pounding and nostalgic 70s soundtrack, to rem...

Michael Mann's Heat   On this week's episode we celebrate our 600th episode with a look at one of the most important films of our generation, Michael Mann's Crime-Thriller, Heist Film, Masterpiece . . . the coming together of two of the greatest and most important actors of their generation, Al Pacino as Lieutenant Vincent Hannah and Robert DeNiro as Professional Criminal Neil McCauley in 1995s He...

Doug Liman's Go (1999) This week, we revisit an underseen/little-discussed comedy from 1999, Doug Liman's Go . In the 1990s cinema was overwhelmed by the influence, financial, and critical success of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction ; any number of copycats and knock-offs would flood theaters. Probably, the very best, would be Liman's three-story, intersecting narrative of young adults, struggling...

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...