The Ring: From 2005, I’m pretty sure this was one of the first films I rented when I went on my first big renting spree that year. I’ve always wanted to pinpoint this movie as the beginning of Easy Horror–gutless, bloodless, slick-and-generic PG-13 rated stuff meant to make lots of easy money and disappear from the cultural discussion within two years, based on jump scares and sloppy explanations for what’s going on and stories that fall apart if you look at them for about 10 seconds. I’m probably wrong–the real answer to that is likely Exorcist II: The Heretic, which I also would have watched around this time, and which is a zero-star pile of shit. The Ring isn’t, not quite–a few of the images in it admittedly still work, but I doubt I’ll ever watch it a third time, and besides, the high point is when that horse falls off the boat and gets shredded, with a big gout of blood appearing in the water. All I really could think to say is that it was depressing to see Naomi Watts go from Mulholland Dr. to this, and that the film is amusingly dated because it revolves around a piece of physical media.

UHF: I “like” Weird Al Yankovic…but only in small doses like “Smells Like Nirvana” and “White And Nerdy,”” and this isn’t a small dose. He wasn’t devoid enough of acting talent to do a whole movie, mind you, but this is too much of a kid-friendly film (albeit with about two or three R-rated jokes for one to spot) for me to ever love. I guess if I had to say something nice about it I’d point out that it’s a bit proto-90s in its constant pop-culture references and in-jokes, and maybe a bit proto-now in its depiction of a low-rent TV station airing whatever junk it can and becoming a sensation with the public, y’know a bit like Youtube…but a lot of those jokes are obvious and dated and cutesy now. Oh, and Michael Richards’ cartoonish dipshit janitor character wears thin after about two minutes. No wonder his career was ruined by accusations of racism! /s

Gummo: Another one I probably watched during the original 2005 spree, I’ve already revisited this film at some point. In 2005 I’m pretty sure I hated it–it seemed like such an easy target, having been directed by also-easy-target Harmony Korine, and consisting of little more than white-trash exploits, most of them of a lurid sexual nature, set in a redneck Ohio town that has been destroyed by a tornado. (There was a Gummo hate site, one that I can’t locate even using the Wayback Machine, but which I laughed very hard at back in the days of Web 1.0, and which probably influenced me to hate the film the first time I saw it.) It doesn’t have any point to save its life, but it’s not entirely without craft; I will say that at least some of the trashy imagery kind of works, and I still laugh very hard at the “cowboys” scene where two little redneck kids harass a kid with bunny ears. (On the flipside, the scenes involving Korine himself playing a guy trying to flirt with a gay black midget, and the scene with the redneck girl murmuring “Jesus loves me this I know” are a dumpster fire.) It was never a great movie though and never will be, just one I can’t quite bring myself to dislike anymore. (One side note: I somehow didn’t recognize Chloe Sevigny in this film, despite having seen her in plenty of other stuff.)

Straw Dogs: From 2005, I think. I used to dislike this film for stacking the deck at the end (the Cornish bad guys trying to break into Dustin Hoffman’s house to drag David Warner away have no idea that he’s accidentally killed that girl, they merely suspect that he has…and they, y’know, kill a police constable in a drunken rage) and for failing itself artistically (Peckinpah said that you’re supposed to see the Hoffman character as a villain for being a rude, ugly-American interloper, which of course falls apart when one realizes that nothing he does even begins to compare to the Cornish guys strangling his cat, gang-raping his wife and assaulting his home) and for having Hoffman and Susan George engaged in the least believable marriage in film history…but now I just dislike that it’s too damned long. The violence at the end is quite entertaining, and I’ve happily watched it many times, rooting for Hoffman every single time–and this is, of course, not how you’re supposed to feel at all. As for the rape scene, it is admittedly a bit embarrassing due to the way the wife-character starts seemingly enjoying it halfway through (and for how that beady-eyed creep Peckinpah treated the actress in real life–watch the documentary on the Criterion 2-disc!) but the wife is depicted as being a thoroughly immature and unlikable young woman, and whether or not that’s intent–or stacking the deck–I no longer care to dissect. (Oh, and the Hoffman performance is, frankly, at times, bad–cartoonishly wimpy in places and uttering several lines that elicit unintentional laughs.)

Clerks: Excruciating. I once claimed that this was the only Kevin Smith film that I could stick up for, due to the scene at the end where the main character’s best friend cusses him out for being a go-nowhere loser and excoriates Generation X in a way that I wasn’t expecting at all. Watching the film again 20 years later, not only was I surprised to find out how short that scene actually is, but that it’s damn near the only good thing in the movie at all. The rest? Dated indie edginess, unfunny comedy, lame beginnings of the lame “Askewniverse” with lame Jay and Silent Bob, the most annoyingly self-promoting thing in film history, obnoxious youth playing obnoxious postadolescent boy-girl games, actors who seem to have come from community theater (if that) and who almost always sound like they’re reading their lines off of cue cards. Oh, and a grand total of one memorable joke (“People always come here and rent the dumbest movies.” “Oooo, Navy Seals!”) And I’m supposed to forgive all this shit because of one brief scene where Generation X gets verbally knifed? Not this time, bruh. And I did forget the rest of it, anyway! I like to nostalgically look back on the mid-90s indie-film scene with rose-tinted glasses, deliberately buying into all the myths about what a culturally rich time it seemed to be, with all those edgy new “voices” being discovered…but Kevin Smith’s was not one of them. Not only can I not believe I’m saying that I’d rather watch Mallrats than this, but now I don’t even like anything associated with Smith. Why is he still alive?!?

Rushmore: I still don’t like the ending of this film at all, but I’d even be willing to forgive it if any of said ending had been funny. Other than that, I think I’ve been a bit hard on this film over the years. Bill Murray’s character probably needed to be a bit better sketched out (it’s a bit of a laugh that anybody thought he deserved an Oscar nomination for it!) but I think a lot of my negativity towards the film has to do with seeing a bit of myself in Max Fischer–I didn’t take up fifty school activities, but I certainly was always trying to pass myself off as more intelligent than I actually was when I was his age, and just ended up annoying the living fuck out of most people within my orbit as a result. And I still don’t think he grows out of it at the end of the movie–there’s a scene where apologizes to Dennis the Menace for saying stuff about his mom that I’d forgotten was there, but he “triumphs” by going back to being his old self, doing things he would have done at the beginning of the film. I guess at least Wes Anderson’s cutesiness isn’t a problem for me anymore, at least not in this film–there are lots of funny little bits throughout the first two thirds of the movie to sort of salvage it, and if Max Fischer is an unlikable little shit, he would still have been an interesting movie character if not for that ending (for an example of how to pull off having a loathsome adolescent as your main character, see Superbad.) Maybe I should just stick to hating The Darjeeling Limited instead. Which I did.