Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

 20. Little Murders (1971) Alan Arkin's directorial debut amplifies Jules Feiffer's comic surrealism with neurotic characters and seemingly random outcomes. It's basis in Feiffer's stage play seems evident in its apartment settings, but Arkin also readily channels much of Feiffer's typical manias that appear throughout the cartoonist's body of work. Patsy Newquist (Marcia Rodd) and her boyfriend, Alfred Chamberlain (Elliott Gould), live in the darkest 1970s embodiment of New York City that accentuates how its residents might have felt as crime seemed eternally rampant and law enforcement could never cope. The film's stark commentary does not provide answers, but speaks to collective neuroses, while the actors' choices singularly mirror how we might react to pure chaos. I highly recommend this one for its ability to question existing power structures in novel and unexpected ways.  19.  The Loveless (1981) Kathryn Bigelow and Monty Montgomery's rockabi...

A spiritual successor to Anthropophagus , Joe D'Amato's  Absurd borrows heavily from John Carpenter's  Halloween , adding gore in the inimitable Italian fashion. Eastman plays the hulking killer who was the victim of an experiment that gave him healing powers at the cost of his sanity.

Film Twenty Five: You Are Not I (1981). Sara Driver's adaptation of a Paul Bowles short story exemplifies her ability to tell a quiet story about relationships and agency as bolstered by haunting imagery from her regular collaborator, Jim Jarmusch. Not that different in tone or pacing from When Pigs Fly , the thesis film was feared lost after her projection copy became unplayable. Another turned up in Bowles's holdings in 2009. The film depicts Ethel's (Suzanne Fletcher) journey as she comes across a terrible car accident after escaping from a mental hospital. Responders at the scene take her to her sister's house instead of back to the hospital. Watch for an absurd or possibly satisfying conclusion, depending on your perspective.

 Film Twenty Four: X-Ray , or The Hospital Massacre (1981). A typical slasher film set in a hospital.

Film Twenty Two: Vernon, Florida (1981). Errol Morris's quirky documentary captures the daily lives of citizens in a Florida town. Focusing on their stories, dreams, and philosophies, he creates a compelling portrait of small-town life and the larger-than-life, passionate characters that can inhabit out of the way places. Brief moments in the film with the turkey hunters, the police officer, or the man who collects various animals attests to the power of story telling and how human interaction can teach us a lot about how others see the world.

Michael Mann's Thief is a rare neo noir that captures the style of early noir without sacrificing any of the substance and power of the genre. Based on the 1975 novel, The Home Invaders: Confessions of a Cat Burglar , written by a real-life jewel thief, it captures the drama of hard-lived characters making the wrong decisions based on personal codes of honor. The characters are realistic and well cast and the acting is top notch. The relationship between Frank (James Caan) and Jessie (Tuesday Weld) works because Frank emotionally bares his soul to her. He needs an anchor to leave his criminal life behind and pins his hopes on her. His one last heist leaves him alone again after he is double crossed. The final long take of Frank walking down the sidewalk after dispatching his enemies is poignant and memorable.