Julie Klausner’s Top10

I’m a huge John Waters fan, so I had to choose this one to represent our Filth Elder. (Real ones know.) I’m paraphrasing the Prince of Puke himself when I say there’s nothing better on God’s green earth than the first twenty minutes of this masterpiece. It’s a sugar rush; crispy, nasty, filthy, crackling fun; Divine at his most divine. Ruined Christmas? This movie is Christmas!

An absolutely exhilarating melodrama and musical comedy—high and low and all of the in-betweens at a tinnitus-gifting decibel. One of my favorite things in the world that this Meyer/ Ebert collaboration captures handily is that liminal moment of people who don’t know anything about swingin’ sixties counterculture being very confident portraying it. It’s eye- and button-poppingly beautiful, addictively entertaining, and completely inappropriate. Also: I’m nearly fifty, and I still wear my hair like Dolly Read.

As delicious as the melodies of the Monkees’ songs, and as dark as the moment they were hired to romp through. Life during wartime, served frantic and sweet, but melting—like Peter’s vanilla ice cream. It feels like the end of the summer. Just a marvelous subversion of this frosted fabrication. The Monkees’ graduation into this queasy but defiant zenith of pop-music-meets-new-cinema lands on its own vibration and rips your heart open with the opening chords of “Porpoise Song.” They glide through the sketch-comedy tropes with the calluses you get from enough pricks of the pin, warp the personae they outgrew, and use the setting of a real-world nightmare, post-sitcomland, to keep things consistently psychedelic and suicidal. What a monumental convergence. Baptism by Coca-Cola.

When I first saw it as a kid, it scared the shit out of me. Then, when I saw it as a teenager, everything I ever loved about it all came together. Welcome to the fish tank.

There’s so much to say about this absolute pinnacle of nonfiction storytelling, but I’ll just say that, in terms of influencing me as a writer, listening over and over to all the speech patterns in this film really helped me write dialogue.

Id-revealing, but never vulnerable, Fosse is always in control. I always tear up at the end during “Bye Bye Life,” when Joe Gideon hugs his daughter goodbye like he knows she’s the one person who’s going to miss him for who he is, not what he does or did. I think about Crumb saying that the only woman he’s ever really been in love with is his daughter, Sophie, but I could be mixing and matching. I think Fosse is underrated as a filmmaker. He’s seldom mentioned in the same conversations as Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Brian De Palma—maybe he’s considered less “serious” because of . . . theatre with an re? Either way, I think his ego survived the slight.

All About Eve is as much about friendship as it is a portrait of a woman who is at her peak but has to take a step back because of the way the world is. She knows that just as you start getting really good, it’s over, but she learns that winning the game isn’t everything, as long as you have real friends.

The whole screenplay is so irresistibly quotable and intelligent. I love that it’s a film about complicated relationships among creative people—not just their romantic relationships but their friendships. It shows how show-business people and show-business friendships, especially among those of us who don’t have kids, can create and commit to a chosen family of loyal collaborators and cheerleaders. When Eve tries to break up their friend group, that’s a bigger sin than anything else. Like: The work stuff? Whatever. The guy stuff? Who cares. But the friendship that those two couples have? Don’t you dare.

I was never a big fan of dystopian stories until Brazil enthralled me. It wasn’t just the world-building and propulsive energy, but that corroded, corrosive wit beneath the surface of the shiny metal. The imagination behind the film’s understanding of institutional cruelty. The darkness is so dark, it’s blue-black. Thank you, comedy people, for making my favorite kind of “scary.”

I feel very strongly that Pee-wee’s Big Adventure is a perfect movie—unless you’re scared of clowns.

It follows a structure that I associate with John Waters movies, starting with a character who is very happy in a universe of their own making until some piece of shit comes along and decides to fuck it all up. Pee-wee loves his life so much he can barely finish breakfast! But then he has to go out into the world and interact with all these uncomfortable, ugly things. But it’s worth it. At the end, he gets what he wants and he finds what he needs. And he does end up taking Dottie to the drive-in.

There’s an anxiety and darkness to After Hours that comes from the main character’s fear of women. All of the women he encounters are interesting and fabulous, and yet he’s repulsed by them. It’s not until halfway through the movie when you realize he’s the villain, and you’re left asking how you got tricked into rooting for this yuppie. He’s doing this cultural tourism downtown—and he doesn’t even know how to walk home? The worst is when he doesn’t realize how cool Teri Garr’s character is, with her retro furniture and her beehive and her Monkees albums. He can’t get out of her apartment fast enough. Pearls before swine.

Even as a fear-based person (or maybe because I’m a fear-based person), I love Defending Your Life. Rip Torn gearing up for his role in The Larry Sanders Show; Meryl Streep eating a long noodle; the banal, paper-pushing realities of the afterlife; Barbra Streisand’s The Broadway Album as the soundtrack to a premature death. Plus, this was the first time Albert Brooks made a film that ended with something other than a textual addendum in scroll form. I love the big Hollywood ending. I always cry.