Alan Palomo

“So my first film is Alex Cox's Sid & Nancy. This one's incredible, and of course, like, you know, Alex must have been a punk. You know, you watch Repo Man, you see his influences throughout his career. So this is my first one.”

“My second is gonna be this one here, Maîtresse, which I think is a really incredible film by Barbet Schroeder. The best way to describe this film is kind of like what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. Like, you have this dominatrix that, through some bizarre like home invasion situation, starts dating this giant ogre of a man. And it just sort of becomes about, you know, despite the fact that that he has this physical prowess, that she has a psychological prowess. So the film's always kind of posing the question, like, you know, who's wearing the pants in this relationship? And, without ruining the ending, just to see where they're driving together at the end, well, it's insane. It's just completely demented.”

“Okay, I, I mean, you've got me, you've got me stuck between whether I want the DVD version or the Blu-ray version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, because this I think was the first Criterion DVD that I got in high school. And I remember because it has the little removable outer part of it, which I thought was just an incredible way to kind of showcase Ralph Steadman's work without, you know, without putting the print directly just over it. But, you know what? I'll pick the Blu-ray. You might as well live in the 2020s and embrace the formats.”

“All right, my next pick is going to be Medium Cool, because I haven't seen it, but I love Robert Forster. He was often overlooked, it always felt like he was in a lot of B-movies. Obviously, you know, Tarantino gave his career another surge with Jackie Brown, but I've always seen clips of this and it looks pretty incredible, so let's check it out.”

“My next film is David Byrne's True Stories. I, I grew up in Texas, true story. There's very few films that really capture kind of the, the banality and, and the beauty of, of rural Texas, especially in that time frame. It kind of strikes that same chord as something like, you know, like when you watch King of the Hill and you're like, well, you kind of got to be there, gotta be from there to get the joke. And this film really does a phenomenal job of that.”

“Talk about a music movie. You know, this is, this is an all-time favorite, Jarmusch's Mystery Train. I don't know, I have a strange connection to this film because I used to live in a college town that had a train that would kind of pass through it in the middle of the night, and I was dating somebody at the time that was really obsessed with blues music. So I would kind of be nodding off, you know, listening to Skip James or something, I would just kind of hear that train roaring in the background, and I feel like this film really kind of captures that, that eeriness. You know, I love that in the middle of the night, you know, three people have the same encounter with this one song on the radio. You know, I, I love it when people incorporate like radio as like diegetic audio in a scene. I think it's great, so this one's going in the bag.”

“This is another all-time fave. This is a Felipe Cazals film called Canoa: A Shameful Memory. And it's interesting because I remember, I think I first saw it in a Mexican horror film programming block, and they included this despite the fact that it's not supernatural. It's actually based on a true story, basically, you know, this, this town that was controlled by this priest who convinced everybody that these three backpacking students were actually subversives from the city that were there to protest, and the three of them wound up basically being lynched. And it's a really intense story that kind of occasionally breaks from the narrative to do this kind of like documentary-style interview with the characters, but it's really amazing the way that it kind of drums up tension. Yeah, I could talk about this all day.”

“I think my last pick will be Wings of Desire. I remember I saw this movie in high school and my dad had this really beautiful comment about it, where we were watching Peter Falk in that scene where he can't see the angel, but he's talking to him and he's explaining how, like, you know, it's like, oh, you don't know what it's like, you know, you have a nice, you have a cup of coffee and you rub your hands for warmth, see, and you smoke a cigarette. And he's like just basically explaining what it's like to be a human. And my dad, I remember he just, he just kind of, he leaned back and he was like, "Oh yeah, this is what it's all about," you know? And as somebody that I wouldn't necessarily like label as a cinephile, like when a movie is able to just convey a simple idea to someone and, and it just connects on this fundamental level, I think it's done its job.”