Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island (1998)
All the boys and girls of Coolsville love Fred. They chase him down alleyways to catch the ripple of his muscle-tight cream sweater, the ruffle of his buttery hair, the sashay of his ascot. Daphne’s style is lethal, Schiaparellian, beyond fleek. And is there any speck of human knowledge—thermochemistry? volcanology? splanchnology?—spared from Velma’s all-encompassing neurological encyclopaedia? We all covet Shaggy’s intestines: a canal for the seamless flow of chocolate and grease, undeterred by stomachache. There is also a talking dog.
Even the dastardly gaggle of freakazoids on Moonscar Island cannot snuff Mystery Inc.’s Coolsville swagger. Zombified spectres of restless pirates, voodooistic werecats, carnivorous alligators of the bayou bog: all in a day’s work. Mystery Inc. conquer their foes, restore order, return to the ice-cream-haven surf-beaches of their Southern California oasis. Catch a wave, unwind in Coolsville.
After school, I hit the supermarkets to check the Coinstars for neglected change. In two months, my piggy-bank stockpiles to a whopping $14. Just enough for a Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island VHS. I dash down roadkill backroads, past legions of fast-food plazas. Two collided Chevrolets sprawl smithereened outside the Pickering mall. Unblinking, I sprint into the HMV.
Back home, I inhale the tape’s sweet aroma of factory plastics. Stroke it against my bare torso. Temptation strikes, but I resist. No, I must not watch it. Not yet. I must commit to ritual. Every night this week, I will drift to sleep with the tape beneath my tear-stained pillow, whispering somniloquies of my innermost desires. Please, Scooby. Let me awaken in Coolsville with you and the gang. Please, Scooby-Doo… Please…
—Ryan Akler-Bishop would readily drop everything, divorce from every dream, and disentangle from every personal relationship to join the Mystery Inc. gang on their escapades against masked monsters.
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
When I tell people from Toronto that I grew up in and around Vancouver, they almost always ask me why on earth I left there—famously and fabulously forested—to come here, Canada’s biggest and most densely populated urban hellhole. First of all, it’s a hellhole with character, and second, anyone who’s seen Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller—a dreary and cynical 1971 revisionist western filmed mostly in Squamish and West Van—will understand what I mean by my standard response: Vancouver is depressing as all hell. Altman’s camera, from the outset, registers the lush, densely arboraceous landscapes as the polar opposite of the desolate plains and sweeping vistas of the classical Western. What was spacious (and sometimes isolating) in those films is compositionally cramped here, with the opening credits following Warren Beatty—buried in a mountain of furs—as he and his horses trudge through the wind and the rain to Leonard Cohen’s The Stranger Song. Instead of imposing our star’s presence on the landscape, Altman visually dwarfs the lonesome cowboy and lets him disappear into the greenery around him. The subsequent shots, in which a medium close-up is obfuscated by out-of-focus foliage in the foreground, form a perfect inciting image for a movie about a man being swallowed whole by the country he seeks to dominate. The only beauty that surpasses the pictorial prowess of DP Vilmos Zsigmond and isn’t weaponized toward a larger sense of mounting dread is in the interior scenes, which follow the titular pair as they give symbolic birth to America’s economy (here inextricably tied to the sex trade) in real time. The small pockets of warmth, however double-edged they may be, are a respite from the gorgeous and unforgiving wasteland waiting for the characters outside. It’s hard to leave any Altman film without feeling Seen in some horribly satisfying or satisfyingly horrible way, but I felt additionally and especially seen by its understanding that even the most unspoiled patch of natural sprawl can be ruined by shitty weather (where else can one see the leaves change colour and then get to watch them congeal into one beige, water-logged mass underfoot?). The film reflects the soul-clogging nature of BC’s temperate rainforest climate as well as the dull, muted townscapes of its lower mainland, but its snowbound climax is what separates the shooting location from its diegetic setting; all Vancouver gets in the winter is rain.
—Alex Mooney is a writer and programmer based in Toronto.
Palo Alto (2013)
Whenever there’s even a hint of fog, I return to Gia Coppola’s Palo Alto. I’m 15 again, on the longest bus ride home, listening to its soundtrack. Even though I’m from San Francisco, I am trapped in the montage of April—stretching her arm out of her mom’s car window, head tilted sideways, dreaming of escape—set to “April’s Daydream” by Devonté Hynes.
The film is a series of faded polaroids: wasted youth, April and her friends lounging around the pool hungover, vodka and vomit in flower pots, the stillness of childhood bedrooms, the dread of doing nothing in bed after school until all the walls around you turn blue.
Jack Kilmer, as Teddy, strums “T.M.”, a hazy distorted track that could loop on forever like the seemingly inescapable cycle of school and parties and ennui. Despite the illusion of freedom—smoking with friends at Hippie Hill after school and bonfires at Ocean Beach—I felt as trapped as April eating lunch inside her locker, waiting for anything to happen.
Even the least memorable days were a Pinterest moodboard—April lying on her stomach with her knee sock-clad legs dangling off the bed—as I sat alone in my room listening to the film’s titular track when I didn’t have money to buy another pack because there weren’t any ATMs nearby and my mom had just recently started reading my bank statements.
I’ve since escaped California, but my friends don’t understand the inescapable malaise one inherits from growing up there. I try sharing the film, but it isn’t the same; they end up arguing over who has it worse, completely missing the longing, the stillness. Perhaps they don’t have this chronic listlessness, a languor only best for staring into space, a void that can be filled in due time.
—Ashley D. Escobar is a bi-coastal writer, filmmaker, and curator of chaos. Eileen Myles selected her debut poetry collection Glib (2025) as the 2024 Changes Book Prize winner.
Goodbye, Poor White Trash: Hollywood Heck In A Small Town
Anyone who grew up in the middle of nowhere understands the thrill of seeing your town acknowledged on television or film, even if it’s the most dire segment on COPS or a Dateline tragedy. In Southern Illinois, we lived our lives largely unacknowledged beyond the local news broadcast. People in my hometown of Marion cheered when Samuel L. Jackson’s character in The Long Kiss Goodnight called the town “a real shithole.”
We were not used to seeing ourselves, or being seen.
Imagine our collective municipal thrill when we learned that a big (-ish) independent movie, Goodbye, Sunrise, would be filming in the region, featuring Sean Young, William Devane, Jason London, Jamie Pressley, Tim Kazurinsky, and the great M. Emmett Walsh. Goodbye, Sunrise could be a showcase of the many subtle virtues of our sleepy little pocket of the world.
Back then, in 1999, I was the film critic for the local alt-weekly, Nightlife, and I visited the set to write a long feature article, published right before I moved to Chicago for college. Meanwhile, not just Benton, but the whole Southern Illinois region eagerly anticipated their coming out in Goodbye, Sunrise, which never happened. Not exactly. Because Goodbye, Sunrise was never released — at least not as Goodbye, Sunrise.
The film was released in 2000 under the title Poor White Trash. It didn’t take a modern Nathaniel West to deduce that the producers always planned to call it that, but concocted a gentler working title to appease the locals.
Southern Illinois took it hard, like a lover whose new soulmate has split before dawn and absconded with their grandfather’s watch. This once greatly anticipated event was almost instantly erased from the local consciousness, ensuring the eternal sunshine of our spotless minds.
But I remember how thrilled we all were to have a sliver of our lives chronicled in some way. To finally be participants in a game we’d only ever watched, as though Conrad Birdie had come to town looking for true love. How eager everyone was to believe in the movies.
—Bryan Miller is a standup comedian, fiction writer, and longtime film critic.
Rock Hudson at the Cinema
Rock Hudson at the Cinema 1945 was the year my parents finished building The Desmond Cinema in Cappoquin, Ireland, it was also the year I was born. Was my arrival memorable? Of course not.
Without a doubt it was the cinema that caused a sensation. Before the opening of the cinema the radio was the life line to news, entertainment, and information for the local people, which consisted mainly of labourers, factory workers, farmers, and stay-at-home mothers to as many children, in Catholic Ireland, that God would send them.
The Desmond Cinema was ahead of its time since it was a new construction and not just a “Village Hall” converted to show movies. It was designed for dances, live theatre, concerts, and movies which we called the pictures.
According to my family’s stories, I was a crying baby except for Sundays, when the Nanny had her day off, and I would lie in my pram at the back of the cinema for the matinee. I never cried there. It didn’t matter whether it was a gun shooting Western or a whispered love story, I was content.
After the Catholic Church, the cinema was the focal point of the town and as soon as I could walk and talk I made it my business to tell everyone I met, especially newcomers to the town, that I owned the “Cimena.”
John Crowley was the Projectionist who wound up the reels of film and fed them into the projector. However, he had no interest whatsoever in movies but was learning how to play the bagpipes. He loved Westerns as there would be a lot of shooting and during those scenes he could practice his bagpipes in the booth.
Gunshots and cavalry charges with the drone of bagpipes for the soundtrack was confusing to say the least. My father would jump up and say to my mother “Mai, Mai, I'm going to kill Crowley.”
My father's mother used to come to the cinema every night and sit in the back where she could watch young couples heading for the back row for a good old grope when the lights went down. She would sit there with her rosary beads clicking and ask for the torch to shine it on any sounds of heavy breathing which weren't coming from Joan Crawford and the ilk on the screen. Then she would report to the parents of the heavy breathers the next day and compulsory confession was on the cards.
I was 10 years old when I first saw the love of my life, Rock Hudson, in Magnificent Obsession. Our small town had nothing that even came close to a man like that, and my decision was made to find my own Rock Hudson which, after a global search, I eventually did. However, many years later it came as a shock when I was forced to accept the reality that I wouldn’t have been Rock’s type. Thinking back on those days, of innocence I now find it sad that it was people like me who forced him to live a secret life to fulfil my fantasy.
Once a film had been shown it was returned to the distributor, but for some reason we ended up with a spare reel of a Pathe News version of King George the VI’s funeral and another of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. Occasionally, I would ask my father if John could show them for me and a few friends? What he didn’t know was that I would tell all and sundry that they could come and sit in the “good seats” for a penny.
These illicit screenings were a big treat for the local children and they would line up with their baby brothers and sisters, some in dirty nappies, and their pennies.Of course there were complaints that all I had to show was the King’s funeral or the Coronation and never as a Double Feature. But, once the film started to roll they would be shouting about the horse’s wagging tail and the observers coming in tears. I loved it, but the best part was counting my pennies when “The End” appeared.
—Marie Kusters-McCarthy is a True Crime and Cookbook writer.
I, Daniel Blake (2016)
I’m not from Newcastle but I tell people I am. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) no one has heard of Blyth unless they’ve seen its cameo in a Royal Navy advert where a strapping young lad claims that he was ‘born in Blyth but made in the Royal Navy’ overtop of action-packed visuals of Navy life, a far cry from the run-down mundanity of his hometown. Blyth is a small ex-industrial town on the coast of the north-east of England which, like much of the area, suffered under Margaret Thatcher’s regime of deindustrialisation in the 1980s leaving it now one of the most economically deprived areas in the north-east.
Newcastle, a city in the north-east of England and the closest city to Blyth, is the setting for Ken Loach’s 2016 film I, Daniel Blake, a film that explores the cruelty and absurdity of the state benefits system in Britain. In the film, Daniel Blake, a 59-year-old joiner, navigates the Department of Work and Pensions since he is forced to continually look for employment despite being declared unfit to work after a heart attack. It follows Daniel Blake, a 59-year-old joiner, in his interactions with various sectors of the Department of Work and Pensions as he is forced to continually look for employment despite being declared unfit to work by his doctor following a heart attack.
The film could have been set in so many disadvantaged small towns or city boroughs in the UK as the Conservative government’s malicious austerity has thoroughly infected the country. However, the north has always been a special punching bag for the Tories. I, Daniel Blake is shot in a way that gets described as “gritty”, a synonym for “realism” used when the content is of the working-class variety. Like grit in the eye or underfoot, uncomfortable. But the sombre colour palette and close-quarters shots inside homes, food banks, and job centres are meant to show the drab reality of living at the mercy of unfeeling state systems designed to punish those who fall on hard times.
I instinctively rile against Ken Loach’s films. I know they’re good, they expose the heart of economic injustices and the impact abstract government policy has on the individual and the community in a way that is at once powerful and understatedly real. However, they feel like poverty porn—even if Loach has the socialist politics and political record which suggests a genuine desire to bring the plight of the working classes to the film-going public. I bristle when I hear I, Daniel Blake discussed: how moving it is, how heartbreaking. People watch, have their hearts broken, and then carry on like nothing happened. The film won awards, it reached parliament, Conservative politicians defended their welfare system against it, and again nothing happened.
There’s more to life in the north-east than poverty and degradation: it’s an area known for its friendliness, full of joy and creativity if you know where to look. But what resonates with audiences both inside and out of the area is the suffering, the injustice. It’s a paradox of feeling seen and not wanting this to be all people see.
—Natalie Wall is a culture writer and PhD student from the UK.
Live and Let Die (1973)
I chose the simplest route to the Hometown theme, which made it hard for someone from Montego Bay, Jamaica. Go with a local film, and one like the satirical comedy The Lunatic (1991) isn't streaming (outside poor quality bootlegs). Go foreign, and it’s dubious fare like Cool Runnings (1993). (No.) In a deadline panic, I sorted IMDB’s list of films shot there. Ranked for popularity, at number one was Live and Let Die (1973), in a top ten that included Dr. No at #2, In Like Flint (1967) (a parody Bond film) at #6 just below How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998). The Bond franchise boasted a mostly dismal reputation for depicting anyone who didn’t embody a male British colonizer archetype. But of all the Bonds I’d never had the Roger Moore experience. How bad could it be?
Start at the UN HQ where dark hands fill the screen, pumping fatal high pitch sound waves into a MI6 agent’s ears? (I don’t fucking know.) Cut to a glum New Orleans funerary band procession transformed into street carnival when another agent’s body is tipped into the coffin. Shift into green tropical hills to spy a dancing mass of Black bodies clothed in white writhe to the drum around a white body in the night. Ever since the asshole Columbus days, Europeans have spun this part of the Americas and the people they dragged here into their barbaric, violent imaginary. Dr. Kanaga’s lark as a Caribbean prime minister critical of US hegemony could only be a cover for sorcery, murder and crack deals. His villain crew strip out of dull neutral business suits into brightly coloured blaxploitation gear as Bond tails them through a quaint ye olde “voodoo” shop, committing to fondling a human skull and stuffed snake on the way.
I paused the film to take a photo of the two resort towers in the scene’s background that marked what used to be home. The towers in which my mother worked, by the bay where friends and I fished, inhaling the sharp notes of oil-coloured seawater. There I was amidst the Frankensteined “Haiti”-in-Jamaica filmscape. Even as I endured scene after scene of farcical masquerade on eye roll loop-the-loops and caustic laughter, a part of me is frozen in that still image, stark white towers amidst the blue sea and sky.
—Akilah White is a freelance critic from Jamaica committed to art, shade, and Jamaica Kincaid.
The Highs and Lows of Middle Earth
The Lord of the Rings franchise put New Zealand (or Aotearoa, to refer to it by its Indigenous name) on the map—literally. We weren’t on a lot of maps. But suddenly there we were, on the silver screen, taking Hollywood and the world by storm.
If you were in the Aotearoa film industry, or the general Wellington vicinity (home of Wētā Workshop and the base of LOTR's production) in the early 2000s, you will have a story to tell, either about your buddy who played an orc or seeing Ian McKellen out for coffee and Billy Boyd playing a spontaneous guitar tune down at the local pub. How funny to think that Courtenay Place—home two decades later to drunk freshers, 3 a.m. smorgasbords and the homelessness crisis—was once a red carpet walked by international legends. In Aotearoa, we’re not quite used to… scale. And perhaps, in contrast, the stars in question found our small-country culture refreshing. You could almost think of Wellington as a city-sized hobbit hole—it has its charms.
Lord of the Rings was a boon to the Aotearoa tourism industry, to the point where we literally rebranded on a national level to make it our whole personality—a Hobbit-themed in-flight safety video, for example, alongside various physical monuments—but it wasn’t all a mug of mead for the little guys. In 2010, the local film industry tried to unionise and advocate for their rights as employees, but Warner Bros said fuck that actually, conspired with our Prime Minister at the time (think Saruman, but with a worse hairline) and, long story short, employees in the Aotearoa film industry were no longer considered employees but individual contractors, and their rights went the way of the Ring… dissolved in the boiling gloop of when ugly businessmen shake hands behind closed doors.
Hollywood proceeded to smite us a second time, moving the second season production of the Amazon Prime spinoff, Rings of Power, to the UK, which I can’t get any tea on because of NDAs. It was a shit series anyway—which is a showrunner issue rather than anything to do with the production team who turned this country into the bygone vision of the lush, abundant land it could’ve been if we weren’t colonised—but it’s still a grievous insult to a nation that continues to milk its time in the limelight (as if we don’t have enough cows).
And as darkness spreads across the land in the wake of the recent election, we turn to face our government, where a Denethor sits with spittle dripping down his chin and a Wormtongue weaves internalised racism in the shadows. With the horns of war emboldening our hearts for battle against those who seek to divide us, we consider the essential question—if this country of ours really is Middle Earth, on which side of Mordor’s border do those in power reign?
—Devon Webb (she/her) is an award-winning writer, editor & connoisseur of cinema based in New Zealand, with work published extensively worldwide. She can be found on social media at @devonwebbnz.
The Dead Zone (1983)
Growing up in St. Catharines, Ontario, I was told we had the most Tim Hortons per capita in Canada, but that turned out to be a myth that was debunked by Maclean’s in 2012. Another local legend is that of the screaming tunnel in Niagara Falls, ON, (which is sandwiched between a highway and a vineyard, in typical regional fashion) where it's said a girl burned to death. The legend goes that you can still hear her screams, but mostly you can just hear the QEW. The legend has now been eclipsed by the fact that this tunnel was used as a filming location for David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone, an adaptation of the Stephen King novel. In this scene the tunnel is beautifully lit in cold, white light, the bricks glistening with melting ice. Shot from one end of the tunnel and slowly tracking backwards, it gives off a claustrophobic and sinister feeling. In The Dead Zone, the tunnel is also the scene of young woman's murder.
The next town over from St. Catharines is Niagara on the Lake. Right downtown is Queen’s Royal Park, situated on the shores of Lake Ontario and surrounded by beautifully maintained Victorian houses, it's like a postcard come to life, and a place I went often as a kid. In the middle of the park is an ornate gazebo, perfect for wedding photos and picnics. It was not built with weddings in mind, however, but by the crew of The Dead Zone.
In the movie, the gazebo is a crime scene, and also a respite from the winter weather, with the cold air blowing off the lake. The killer lures his next victim here and murders her with a pair of scissors, giallo style. It feels so strange, this beautiful white, immaculate gazebo of my youth was created specifically for The Dead Zone. Nowhere on this structure is a plaque informing brides and grooms of its horror history. It is almost like a non-place; a wooden pavilion created out of a writer's imagination, as opposed to that of an architect.
By now, I doubt many people know the original story of the screaming tunnel. Most visitors to Niagara on the Lake might assume the gazebo was built for a visiting royal. As far as having the most Tim Hortons per capita, the eponymous founder of the donut shop did perish in St. Catharines in a crash on the QEW 40 years ago this year. Perhaps his ghost haunts us, driving us to consume, howling “double-double, toil and trouble”. That’s a new myth I’m working on…
—Jordan Cook hosts a monthly movie night called Tapeworm, in Peterborough, ON, and collects VHS tapes in his spare time.
Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island (1998)
All the boys and girls of Coolsville love Fred. They chase him down alleyways to catch the ripple of his muscle-tight cream sweater, the ruffle of his buttery hair, the sashay of his ascot. Daphne’s style is lethal, Schiaparellian, beyond fleek. And is there any speck of human knowledge—thermochemistry? volcanology? splanchnology?—spared from Velma’s all-encompassing neurological encyclopaedia? We all covet Shaggy’s intestines: a canal for the seamless flow of chocolate and grease, undeterred by stomachache. There is also a talking dog.
Even the dastardly gaggle of freakazoids on Moonscar Island cannot snuff Mystery Inc.’s Coolsville swagger. Zombified spectres of restless pirates, voodooistic werecats, carnivorous alligators of the bayou bog: all in a day’s work. Mystery Inc. conquer their foes, restore order, return to the ice-cream-haven surf-beaches of their Southern California oasis. Catch a wave, unwind in Coolsville.
After school, I hit the supermarkets to check the Coinstars for neglected change. In two months, my piggy-bank stockpiles to a whopping $14. Just enough for a Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island VHS. I dash down roadkill backroads, past legions of fast-food plazas. Two collided Chevrolets sprawl smithereened outside the Pickering mall. Unblinking, I sprint into the HMV.
Back home, I inhale the tape’s sweet aroma of factory plastics. Stroke it against my bare torso. Temptation strikes, but I resist. No, I must not watch it. Not yet. I must commit to ritual. Every night this week, I will drift to sleep with the tape beneath my tear-stained pillow, whispering somniloquies of my innermost desires. Please, Scooby. Let me awaken in Coolsville with you and the gang. Please, Scooby-Doo… Please…
—Ryan Akler-Bishop would readily drop everything, divorce from every dream, and disentangle from every personal relationship to join the Mystery Inc. gang on their escapades against masked monsters.
McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)
When I tell people from Toronto that I grew up in and around Vancouver, they almost always ask me why on earth I left there—famously and fabulously forested—to come here, Canada’s biggest and most densely populated urban hellhole. First of all, it’s a hellhole with character, and second, anyone who’s seen Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller—a dreary and cynical 1971 revisionist western filmed mostly in Squamish and West Van—will understand what I mean by my standard response: Vancouver is depressing as all hell. Altman’s camera, from the outset, registers the lush, densely arboraceous landscapes as the polar opposite of the desolate plains and sweeping vistas of the classical Western. What was spacious (and sometimes isolating) in those films is compositionally cramped here, with the opening credits following Warren Beatty—buried in a mountain of furs—as he and his horses trudge through the wind and the rain to Leonard Cohen’s The Stranger Song. Instead of imposing our star’s presence on the landscape, Altman visually dwarfs the lonesome cowboy and lets him disappear into the greenery around him. The subsequent shots, in which a medium close-up is obfuscated by out-of-focus foliage in the foreground, form a perfect inciting image for a movie about a man being swallowed whole by the country he seeks to dominate. The only beauty that surpasses the pictorial prowess of DP Vilmos Zsigmond and isn’t weaponized toward a larger sense of mounting dread is in the interior scenes, which follow the titular pair as they give symbolic birth to America’s economy (here inextricably tied to the sex trade) in real time. The small pockets of warmth, however double-edged they may be, are a respite from the gorgeous and unforgiving wasteland waiting for the characters outside. It’s hard to leave any Altman film without feeling Seen in some horribly satisfying or satisfyingly horrible way, but I felt additionally and especially seen by its understanding that even the most unspoiled patch of natural sprawl can be ruined by shitty weather (where else can one see the leaves change colour and then get to watch them congeal into one beige, water-logged mass underfoot?). The film reflects the soul-clogging nature of BC’s temperate rainforest climate as well as the dull, muted townscapes of its lower mainland, but its snowbound climax is what separates the shooting location from its diegetic setting; all Vancouver gets in the winter is rain.
—Alex Mooney is a writer and programmer based in Toronto.
Palo Alto (2013)
Whenever there’s even a hint of fog, I return to Gia Coppola’s Palo Alto. I’m 15 again, on the longest bus ride home, listening to its soundtrack. Even though I’m from San Francisco, I am trapped in the montage of April—stretching her arm out of her mom’s car window, head tilted sideways, dreaming of escape—set to “April’s Daydream” by Devonté Hynes.
The film is a series of faded polaroids: wasted youth, April and her friends lounging around the pool hungover, vodka and vomit in flower pots, the stillness of childhood bedrooms, the dread of doing nothing in bed after school until all the walls around you turn blue.
Jack Kilmer, as Teddy, strums “T.M.”, a hazy distorted track that could loop on forever like the seemingly inescapable cycle of school and parties and ennui. Despite the illusion of freedom—smoking with friends at Hippie Hill after school and bonfires at Ocean Beach—I felt as trapped as April eating lunch inside her locker, waiting for anything to happen.
Even the least memorable days were a Pinterest moodboard—April lying on her stomach with her knee sock-clad legs dangling off the bed—as I sat alone in my room listening to the film’s titular track when I didn’t have money to buy another pack because there weren’t any ATMs nearby and my mom had just recently started reading my bank statements.
I’ve since escaped California, but my friends don’t understand the inescapable malaise one inherits from growing up there. I try sharing the film, but it isn’t the same; they end up arguing over who has it worse, completely missing the longing, the stillness. Perhaps they don’t have this chronic listlessness, a languor only best for staring into space, a void that can be filled in due time.
—Ashley D. Escobar is a bi-coastal writer, filmmaker, and curator of chaos. Eileen Myles selected her debut poetry collection Glib (2025) as the 2024 Changes Book Prize winner.
Goodbye, Poor White Trash: Hollywood Heck In A Small Town
Anyone who grew up in the middle of nowhere understands the thrill of seeing your town acknowledged on television or film, even if it’s the most dire segment on COPS or a Dateline tragedy. In Southern Illinois, we lived our lives largely unacknowledged beyond the local news broadcast. People in my hometown of Marion cheered when Samuel L. Jackson’s character in The Long Kiss Goodnight called the town “a real shithole.”
We were not used to seeing ourselves, or being seen.
Imagine our collective municipal thrill when we learned that a big (-ish) independent movie, Goodbye, Sunrise, would be filming in the region, featuring Sean Young, William Devane, Jason London, Jamie Pressley, Tim Kazurinsky, and the great M. Emmett Walsh. Goodbye, Sunrise could be a showcase of the many subtle virtues of our sleepy little pocket of the world.
Back then, in 1999, I was the film critic for the local alt-weekly, Nightlife, and I visited the set to write a long feature article, published right before I moved to Chicago for college. Meanwhile, not just Benton, but the whole Southern Illinois region eagerly anticipated their coming out in Goodbye, Sunrise, which never happened. Not exactly. Because Goodbye, Sunrise was never released — at least not as Goodbye, Sunrise.
The film was released in 2000 under the title Poor White Trash. It didn’t take a modern Nathaniel West to deduce that the producers always planned to call it that, but concocted a gentler working title to appease the locals.
Southern Illinois took it hard, like a lover whose new soulmate has split before dawn and absconded with their grandfather’s watch. This once greatly anticipated event was almost instantly erased from the local consciousness, ensuring the eternal sunshine of our spotless minds.
But I remember how thrilled we all were to have a sliver of our lives chronicled in some way. To finally be participants in a game we’d only ever watched, as though Conrad Birdie had come to town looking for true love. How eager everyone was to believe in the movies.
—Bryan Miller is a standup comedian, fiction writer, and longtime film critic.
Rock Hudson at the Cinema
Rock Hudson at the Cinema 1945 was the year my parents finished building The Desmond Cinema in Cappoquin, Ireland, it was also the year I was born. Was my arrival memorable? Of course not.
Without a doubt it was the cinema that caused a sensation. Before the opening of the cinema the radio was the life line to news, entertainment, and information for the local people, which consisted mainly of labourers, factory workers, farmers, and stay-at-home mothers to as many children, in Catholic Ireland, that God would send them.
The Desmond Cinema was ahead of its time since it was a new construction and not just a “Village Hall” converted to show movies. It was designed for dances, live theatre, concerts, and movies which we called the pictures.
According to my family’s stories, I was a crying baby except for Sundays, when the Nanny had her day off, and I would lie in my pram at the back of the cinema for the matinee. I never cried there. It didn’t matter whether it was a gun shooting Western or a whispered love story, I was content.
After the Catholic Church, the cinema was the focal point of the town and as soon as I could walk and talk I made it my business to tell everyone I met, especially newcomers to the town, that I owned the “Cimena.”
John Crowley was the Projectionist who wound up the reels of film and fed them into the projector. However, he had no interest whatsoever in movies but was learning how to play the bagpipes. He loved Westerns as there would be a lot of shooting and during those scenes he could practice his bagpipes in the booth.
Gunshots and cavalry charges with the drone of bagpipes for the soundtrack was confusing to say the least. My father would jump up and say to my mother “Mai, Mai, I'm going to kill Crowley.”
My father's mother used to come to the cinema every night and sit in the back where she could watch young couples heading for the back row for a good old grope when the lights went down. She would sit there with her rosary beads clicking and ask for the torch to shine it on any sounds of heavy breathing which weren't coming from Joan Crawford and the ilk on the screen. Then she would report to the parents of the heavy breathers the next day and compulsory confession was on the cards.
I was 10 years old when I first saw the love of my life, Rock Hudson, in Magnificent Obsession. Our small town had nothing that even came close to a man like that, and my decision was made to find my own Rock Hudson which, after a global search, I eventually did. However, many years later it came as a shock when I was forced to accept the reality that I wouldn’t have been Rock’s type. Thinking back on those days, of innocence I now find it sad that it was people like me who forced him to live a secret life to fulfil my fantasy.
Once a film had been shown it was returned to the distributor, but for some reason we ended up with a spare reel of a Pathe News version of King George the VI’s funeral and another of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. Occasionally, I would ask my father if John could show them for me and a few friends? What he didn’t know was that I would tell all and sundry that they could come and sit in the “good seats” for a penny.
These illicit screenings were a big treat for the local children and they would line up with their baby brothers and sisters, some in dirty nappies, and their pennies.Of course there were complaints that all I had to show was the King’s funeral or the Coronation and never as a Double Feature. But, once the film started to roll they would be shouting about the horse’s wagging tail and the observers coming in tears. I loved it, but the best part was counting my pennies when “The End” appeared.
—Marie Kusters-McCarthy is a True Crime and Cookbook writer.
I, Daniel Blake (2016)
I’m not from Newcastle but I tell people I am. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) no one has heard of Blyth unless they’ve seen its cameo in a Royal Navy advert where a strapping young lad claims that he was ‘born in Blyth but made in the Royal Navy’ overtop of action-packed visuals of Navy life, a far cry from the run-down mundanity of his hometown. Blyth is a small ex-industrial town on the coast of the north-east of England which, like much of the area, suffered under Margaret Thatcher’s regime of deindustrialisation in the 1980s leaving it now one of the most economically deprived areas in the north-east.
Newcastle, a city in the north-east of England and the closest city to Blyth, is the setting for Ken Loach’s 2016 film I, Daniel Blake, a film that explores the cruelty and absurdity of the state benefits system in Britain. In the film, Daniel Blake, a 59-year-old joiner, navigates the Department of Work and Pensions since he is forced to continually look for employment despite being declared unfit to work after a heart attack. It follows Daniel Blake, a 59-year-old joiner, in his interactions with various sectors of the Department of Work and Pensions as he is forced to continually look for employment despite being declared unfit to work by his doctor following a heart attack.
The film could have been set in so many disadvantaged small towns or city boroughs in the UK as the Conservative government’s malicious austerity has thoroughly infected the country. However, the north has always been a special punching bag for the Tories. I, Daniel Blake is shot in a way that gets described as “gritty”, a synonym for “realism” used when the content is of the working-class variety. Like grit in the eye or underfoot, uncomfortable. But the sombre colour palette and close-quarters shots inside homes, food banks, and job centres are meant to show the drab reality of living at the mercy of unfeeling state systems designed to punish those who fall on hard times.
I instinctively rile against Ken Loach’s films. I know they’re good, they expose the heart of economic injustices and the impact abstract government policy has on the individual and the community in a way that is at once powerful and understatedly real. However, they feel like poverty porn—even if Loach has the socialist politics and political record which suggests a genuine desire to bring the plight of the working classes to the film-going public. I bristle when I hear I, Daniel Blake discussed: how moving it is, how heartbreaking. People watch, have their hearts broken, and then carry on like nothing happened. The film won awards, it reached parliament, Conservative politicians defended their welfare system against it, and again nothing happened.
There’s more to life in the north-east than poverty and degradation: it’s an area known for its friendliness, full of joy and creativity if you know where to look. But what resonates with audiences both inside and out of the area is the suffering, the injustice. It’s a paradox of feeling seen and not wanting this to be all people see.
—Natalie Wall is a culture writer and PhD student from the UK.
Live and Let Die (1973)
I chose the simplest route to the Hometown theme, which made it hard for someone from Montego Bay, Jamaica. Go with a local film, and one like the satirical comedy The Lunatic (1991) isn't streaming (outside poor quality bootlegs). Go foreign, and it’s dubious fare like Cool Runnings (1993). (No.) In a deadline panic, I sorted IMDB’s list of films shot there. Ranked for popularity, at number one was Live and Let Die (1973), in a top ten that included Dr. No at #2, In Like Flint (1967) (a parody Bond film) at #6 just below How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998). The Bond franchise boasted a mostly dismal reputation for depicting anyone who didn’t embody a male British colonizer archetype. But of all the Bonds I’d never had the Roger Moore experience. How bad could it be?
Start at the UN HQ where dark hands fill the screen, pumping fatal high pitch sound waves into a MI6 agent’s ears? (I don’t fucking know.) Cut to a glum New Orleans funerary band procession transformed into street carnival when another agent’s body is tipped into the coffin. Shift into green tropical hills to spy a dancing mass of Black bodies clothed in white writhe to the drum around a white body in the night. Ever since the asshole Columbus days, Europeans have spun this part of the Americas and the people they dragged here into their barbaric, violent imaginary. Dr. Kanaga’s lark as a Caribbean prime minister critical of US hegemony could only be a cover for sorcery, murder and crack deals. His villain crew strip out of dull neutral business suits into brightly coloured blaxploitation gear as Bond tails them through a quaint ye olde “voodoo” shop, committing to fondling a human skull and stuffed snake on the way.
I paused the film to take a photo of the two resort towers in the scene’s background that marked what used to be home. The towers in which my mother worked, by the bay where friends and I fished, inhaling the sharp notes of oil-coloured seawater. There I was amidst the Frankensteined “Haiti”-in-Jamaica filmscape. Even as I endured scene after scene of farcical masquerade on eye roll loop-the-loops and caustic laughter, a part of me is frozen in that still image, stark white towers amidst the blue sea and sky.
—Akilah White is a freelance critic from Jamaica committed to art, shade, and Jamaica Kincaid.
The Highs and Lows of Middle Earth
The Lord of the Rings franchise put New Zealand (or Aotearoa, to refer to it by its Indigenous name) on the map—literally. We weren’t on a lot of maps. But suddenly there we were, on the silver screen, taking Hollywood and the world by storm.
If you were in the Aotearoa film industry, or the general Wellington vicinity (home of Wētā Workshop and the base of LOTR's production) in the early 2000s, you will have a story to tell, either about your buddy who played an orc or seeing Ian McKellen out for coffee and Billy Boyd playing a spontaneous guitar tune down at the local pub. How funny to think that Courtenay Place—home two decades later to drunk freshers, 3 a.m. smorgasbords and the homelessness crisis—was once a red carpet walked by international legends. In Aotearoa, we’re not quite used to… scale. And perhaps, in contrast, the stars in question found our small-country culture refreshing. You could almost think of Wellington as a city-sized hobbit hole—it has its charms.
Lord of the Rings was a boon to the Aotearoa tourism industry, to the point where we literally rebranded on a national level to make it our whole personality—a Hobbit-themed in-flight safety video, for example, alongside various physical monuments—but it wasn’t all a mug of mead for the little guys. In 2010, the local film industry tried to unionise and advocate for their rights as employees, but Warner Bros said fuck that actually, conspired with our Prime Minister at the time (think Saruman, but with a worse hairline) and, long story short, employees in the Aotearoa film industry were no longer considered employees but individual contractors, and their rights went the way of the Ring… dissolved in the boiling gloop of when ugly businessmen shake hands behind closed doors.
Hollywood proceeded to smite us a second time, moving the second season production of the Amazon Prime spinoff, Rings of Power, to the UK, which I can’t get any tea on because of NDAs. It was a shit series anyway—which is a showrunner issue rather than anything to do with the production team who turned this country into the bygone vision of the lush, abundant land it could’ve been if we weren’t colonised—but it’s still a grievous insult to a nation that continues to milk its time in the limelight (as if we don’t have enough cows).
And as darkness spreads across the land in the wake of the recent election, we turn to face our government, where a Denethor sits with spittle dripping down his chin and a Wormtongue weaves internalised racism in the shadows. With the horns of war emboldening our hearts for battle against those who seek to divide us, we consider the essential question—if this country of ours really is Middle Earth, on which side of Mordor’s border do those in power reign?
—Devon Webb (she/her) is an award-winning writer, editor & connoisseur of cinema based in New Zealand, with work published extensively worldwide. She can be found on social media at @devonwebbnz.
The Dead Zone (1983)
Growing up in St. Catharines, Ontario, I was told we had the most Tim Hortons per capita in Canada, but that turned out to be a myth that was debunked by Maclean’s in 2012. Another local legend is that of the screaming tunnel in Niagara Falls, ON, (which is sandwiched between a highway and a vineyard, in typical regional fashion) where it's said a girl burned to death. The legend goes that you can still hear her screams, but mostly you can just hear the QEW. The legend has now been eclipsed by the fact that this tunnel was used as a filming location for David Cronenberg’s The Dead Zone, an adaptation of the Stephen King novel. In this scene the tunnel is beautifully lit in cold, white light, the bricks glistening with melting ice. Shot from one end of the tunnel and slowly tracking backwards, it gives off a claustrophobic and sinister feeling. In The Dead Zone, the tunnel is also the scene of young woman's murder.
The next town over from St. Catharines is Niagara on the Lake. Right downtown is Queen’s Royal Park, situated on the shores of Lake Ontario and surrounded by beautifully maintained Victorian houses, it's like a postcard come to life, and a place I went often as a kid. In the middle of the park is an ornate gazebo, perfect for wedding photos and picnics. It was not built with weddings in mind, however, but by the crew of The Dead Zone.
In the movie, the gazebo is a crime scene, and also a respite from the winter weather, with the cold air blowing off the lake. The killer lures his next victim here and murders her with a pair of scissors, giallo style. It feels so strange, this beautiful white, immaculate gazebo of my youth was created specifically for The Dead Zone. Nowhere on this structure is a plaque informing brides and grooms of its horror history. It is almost like a non-place; a wooden pavilion created out of a writer's imagination, as opposed to that of an architect.
By now, I doubt many people know the original story of the screaming tunnel. Most visitors to Niagara on the Lake might assume the gazebo was built for a visiting royal. As far as having the most Tim Hortons per capita, the eponymous founder of the donut shop did perish in St. Catharines in a crash on the QEW 40 years ago this year. Perhaps his ghost haunts us, driving us to consume, howling “double-double, toil and trouble”. That’s a new myth I’m working on…