Quick recap: Bob (played by Matt Dillon) and his crew spend their days getting high and robbing pharmacies. It’s all fun and games until dogs are mentioned and someone puts a hat on a bed.

subtlety is overrated

Fun (?) fact: I couldn’t find much trivia for Drugstore Cowboy, unless you are into knowing which celebrities love this movie. I did learn, however, that a hat on a bed as a sign of bad luck is totally a thing and has been for awhile.

also starring Baby Heather Graham!

My thoughts: Movies about drugs educate me in a way the DARE program did not. I always expected saying no was going to be a bigger deal than it actually ended up being. That’s two years of my life spent on learning how drugs are bad when someone could’ve just shown me the toilet scene in Trainspotting or the arm in Requiem for a Dream and I would’ve been scared straight. And if I’m being completely honest, that Muppet All-Stars special was pretty damn terrifying as well.

I’d never want to disappoint ALF

Until Drugstore Cowboy, I never realized how much work was involved to stay high. That was literally all Bob and his crew did: rob pharmacies and get high. And sometimes they got high in order to rob more pharmacies. At one point in the film, detectives get wise as to their illegal operations and so the crew sets out on a cross country trip in order to-you guessed it- get high and rob more pharmacies. But they couldn’t just stash their….stash, so they bagged it up and sent it ahead of them so that there would always be plenty of drugs when they needed them. Director Gus Van Sant never makes a morality call about the crew’s life choices and instead leaves the audience to draw their own conclusion. Once Bob decides to get clean and get a real job, it’s not clear whether his life has improved. The same can be said for his former crew. I appreciated this perspective because I could focus on the characters rather than whether or not doing drugs was a good idea or not.

That being said, for no reason in particular, I just didn’t really like Drugstore Cowboy. The music was good, acting was good, the storyline moved at a reasonable pace, but I never really got into it and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. At times it felt like van Sant was trying too hard to get into the indie market with his film, but that’s also just who he is as a director. I wish I had better reasoning as to why this film rubbed me the wrong way, but sometimes that just happens.

Final review: 2/5

Up next: Umberto G

Quick recap: There’s nothing quite like young love: Going on a cross country adventure together,  being wrapped up in the very essence of the other person, going on a shooting spree after violently murdering your girlfriend’s father. So sweet.

That Martin Sheen was quite a looker back then

Fun (?) fact: Martin Sheen’s sons, Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez, have uncredited roles as boys playing under a lamplight.

EVERY.SINGLE. TIME Emilio Estevez’s name is mentioned, this clip comes to mind

My thoughts: Usually, I try to crank out a review about a day after watching the movie. I like it to be fresh on my mind as I add my All Important Opinion to this tiny space on the internet. This time, however, life got in the way, so it’s been about three days since I watched Badlands. Had I stuck to my schedule, I would’ve given this movie a negative review with plenty of sarcastic comments thrown in for good measure. As it is now, more time means more opportunities to think about what I watched and I’ve  come to an understanding that  Badlands really is an exceptional film.

As the credits rolled the other night, I would describe my mood as ‘unimpressed’. I really enjoyed Sissy Spacek’s performance, especially considering she was in her 20s perfectly playing a teenager. Her diary voiceovers were so unnerving because she sounds every bit like a normal girl having her first romance, but here she is, on the lam with the guy who murdered her father as well as several other people along the way. She mostly gives off an air of boredom, as if small town life in South Dakota was the worst so why not join a killing spree? My nonchalance was mostly due to the inevitability of the ending, I think. Of course Kit and Holly couldn’t run forever and seeing as how I disliked the two of them as a couple, I was relieved when it all went down and both were captured. My mistake in dismissing this movie was the focus on the characters and their relationship instead of literally everything else in the film.

Seeing as this is a Terrence Malick film, it should go without saying that Badlands is gorgeous. Despite the horrible and sometimes needless killing, everything about the drive Kit and Holly made was beautiful. I’ve always had a fantasy of driving West but this film has me thinking that North might be the best direction to go. As for the theme, it really resonated with me how the entire country lived in fear of Kit and Holly until they were caught, and then he became a celebrity of sorts. He got his comeuppance in the end with a trip to the electric chair but Malick really captured America’s obsession with true crime and how we are constantly in a state of fear and adoration over the same people.

Final review: 4/5

Up next: Drugstore Cowboy