How’s HBO Max doing? Writing this on the 9th of June means you’re going to be reading that question about three-ish weeks in your present and my future. I’m genuinely curious. While it’s easy, and maybe even a little fun, to mock HBO Max’s current struggles in the face of its recent launch, I’m still paying close attention. 

Not enough attention to subscribe, obviously, but I’m curious to see how it fares. We can only hope it works out better for us than the money-burning-monolith known as Apple TV+. It probably won’t be as exciting, even as HBO settles into a numbing routine of high-concept shows that no one ever seems to be happy with by the end, Anime, and the ludicrous idea that Elmo ever needed a fucking talk show, as Disney+. Which in of itself isn’t very exciting either.

It could be the pandemic, or perhaps the fact that we still have to tell some people that Black Lives Matter, but I don’t think there has been a single new streaming service in the past year that has stirred my interest in the least. All of it just feels like a huge well of titles and concepts. The content is endless, or at least vast enough that I’m starting to miss simplicity. Nothing like a future where none of the movies you like have the guarantee of being there when you need them. Unless you buy physical media, which these days is regarded as a brazen act of nostalgia. 

Don’t mention “buying” movies digitally to me. I wouldn’t even count on those always being there for you either. There is a compartmentalization of our stories going on right now. A series of steps that are seemingly designed to cut us off from being able to connect to anything in a meaningful way. It all comes at us so fast now, and in such great numbers, everything can’t help but feel like one degree or another of mindless entertainment. 

Yet because of social media, we also have a degree of access and control to our storytellers that borderlines on abusive. We have created one of the strangest vacuums I could ever imagine. We are locked into absorbing an endless series of stories that have to appeal to everyone, even though everything also has to simultaneously be researched carefully to ensure it is marketed as specifically as possible.

Obviously, there’s no going back. I don’t know if I want it to, which just makes the whole business more exhausting. 

I guess it’s just a weird thing to be in a constant state of feeling over and underwhelmed simultaneously.

I guess we need a new trend, which is why I’m curious to see how HBO Max does, in spite of myself. I don’t think HBO is going to lead that trend. I don’t know where we go from here, which is unusual, and perhaps a little troubling to me.

Despite all these choices, with more on the way, I can’t shake the feeling that we’re just spinning our wheels.

Knives Out (2019): A+

Hopefully, by the time you read this, Rian Johnson’s best work as a director to date will still be available on Amazon Prime. If you’ve been meaning to watch it again, there is certainly no time like the present. I would be surprised, if the movie wasn’t intentionally designed for repeat viewings. 

You might be able to appreciate and enjoy everything about this rich asshole family murder mystery, set to a slightly faster pace than, say, a Poirot story, but I doubt it. If you liked the movie as much as I did, another viewing will be easy. You will almost definitely find something new to appreciate. Knives Out weaves a variety of characters, ever-relevant social commentary, gentle twists to age-old genre tropes, and a genuinely compelling mystery with stunning ease. Rian Johnson has been doing that with his movies for a while now. Knives Out is the most impressive evolution of his filmmaking, and it might be his most likable work to date.

Indeed, there is a lot of charm running through Knives Out, which earned an impressive 309.2 million against a budget of $40 million. That still surprises me, despite Rian Johnson’s stature post-Star Wars. Sure, Knives Out has a long list of names, including stars like Daniel Craig and Lakeith Stanfield, career-changing turns from Ana de Armas and Katherine Langford, and pleasing cameos from Frank Oz and M. Emmett Walsh. That is still less of a guarantee for success than ever.

I think it all comes down to Knives Out being original enough in its juggling of classic themes to create something which justifiably stands out from a lot of the other box office winners for that year.

Blood & Flesh: The Reel Life & Ghastly Death of Al Adamson (2019): A+

With movies featured on both MST3K and Cinematic Titanic, no one is here to make the case that Al Adamson dealt in glossiness, quality, or even storytelling logic. That hasn’t stopped his movies from becoming a staple of cult cinema, with several of the titles from his ridiculously varied catalog of work finding their own passionate niche audiences. 

Blood & Flesh, directed by the versatile, exciting documentary filmmaker David Gregory (2014’s amazing Island of Dr. Moreau documentary Lost Soul), doesn’t make the argument that Adamson was a great director. It does, however, make it easy to see why so many of Adamson’s movies, at the very least, are entertaining. There are bad movies that are no fun whatsoever. That adage occasionally applies to Adamson, who was extremely prolific and varied in a career of nearly 20 years, but there are also movies which emphasize the potential for bad movies that strike you as a weird kind of fun. Those movies are given a rich treatment by Gregory, along with all the rest. 

Featuring interviews with Adamson’s contemporaries, coworkers, and admirers, Blood & Flesh is a stellar treatment of a man who was seemingly up for anything as a writer, producer, actor, and director. There is an enthusiasm that permeates the best directors in the low budget and/or exploitation fields. Included in a massive, career-spanning boxset from Severin Films, Blood & Flesh also obviously has plenty to say about Adamson’s disappearance and subsequent, untimely death in 1995. It’s a surreal, unfortunate end to a fascinating life.

I Am Not Your Negro (2016): A+

Another one I hope is still on Prime, by these words reach you, I Am Not Your Negro is the essential crash-course of America’s ongoing history of racism that everyone told you it is. Raoul Peck comes out hard from the moment the film begins, presenting the life and observations of the powerful writer James Baldwin in his own words. These words come from Baldwin’s unfinished novel Remember This House. It is a damming, sorrowful, and eloquent depiction of a life in a madhouse built on white supremacy. Peck brings a confidence to the visuals, including footage of Baldwin speaking, that allows them to enhance Baldwin’s own words to an extraordinary degree. 

It doesn’t hurt either that narrator Samuel L. Jackson finds a tone that supports, respects, and explores the material as its presented to us. Through his narration, combined with the archival footage that juxtaposes legendary film clips with images of racist brutality in America during Baldwin’s time, the film’s historical and contemporary importance can be overwhelming to the uninitiated.

Obviously, don’t look away. And don’t watch this to check off some sort of guilt box. Watch this because there is dizzying evidence to show us that from the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Medger Evers, all the way to the present, precious little has changed. Beautiful in many ways, I Am Not Your Negro will also likely leave you angry.

With everything going on in the news, which has gone on whether you (or I) noticed it or not, you may find yourself wanting to do more. Knowledge is a good place to start. I Am Not Your Negro is one of the best jumping off points you could ask for.

The Vast of Night (2019): B+

The eeriness of The Vast of Night is one of the most emotionally charged experiences I’ve had with a new movie in a while. Growing up in rural Virginia offered a backdrop similar to the one we get here, which is a small town surrounded by the endless emptiness of New Mexico, but my childhood wasn’t nearly this cosmic or creepy. 

The Vast of Night is also beautiful in its disarming simplicity. What starts as a pleasing exchange between two teenagers(Sierra McCormick and Jake Horowitz) becomes an absolutely unsettling adventure in the realm of the deeply disturbing. The Vast of Night suggests something is in the skies. The film then establishes a growing fear of what it might be with virtually nothing more than dialog, performance, and a dazzling, low-key attention to technique and style. 

If you’re hoping for an ending physically and sonically larger than the buildup, you might be disappointed. Otherwise, this debut feature from Andrew Patterson will end with you putting him on your list of people to keep an eye on.

Dead End Drive-In (1986): B-

The streaming service Tubi can be a treasure trove. However, you need to either have a clear idea of what you want, or at least a clear idea of what you’re willing to watch. The strange wilderness which defines Tubi’s free-for-now library might remind you of the weird local video store you visited back in the day. There’s stuff you’ll recognize, but a whole lot of oddities that you won’t.

Dead End Drive-In proves my point. A semi-obscure Australian exploitation film (it was mentioned in the Ozploitation documentary Not Quite Hollywood), it’s just one movie of thousands in the depths of Tubi. My wife noticed it first. I’m glad she did. 

Dead End Drive-In gets a shocking amount of fun and mayhem from the intriguing plot of social rejects trying to make the most of the prison camp they find themselves in. What makes this concentration camp unique is that it’s set at a drive-in, which keeps its prisoners sustained with drugs, junk food, bad movies, and a constant blasting of new wave music.

Honestly, at times, it really didn’t strike me as the worst place to be. The movie clearly wants me to prove its point that many of us are actively doing this to ourselves on a daily basis. Dead End Drive-In makes that point a little too bluntly, but it still does so in hellish, memorable fashion. The only time the movie really falters is when it decides to create a race riot b-story, which doesn’t really go anywhere. 

Still, Dead End Drive-in is a minor gem of its time and place. The cast, including Ned Manning as the hapless Mad Max Jr. type, really just exists to keep the violence and satire moving along, but that’s okay. There is something winning about the reckless course this movie plots, ending with a memorable chase at the crumbling Star Drive-In.

Gabriel Ricard writes, edits, and occasionally acts. His books Love and Quarters and Bondage Night are available through Moran Press, in addition to A Ludicrous Split (Alien Buddha Press) and Clouds of Hungry Dogs (Kleft Jaw Press). He is also a writer, performer, and producer with Belligerent Prom Queen Productions. He lives on a horrible place called Long Island.