KD^3C^3 - 20260201 Because I have dreamed of black horses

Im away from my computer unexpectedly this weekend, so you’re getting whatever I can manage to put out from my phone. So if there’s an above average number of typos (or below average, I guess) that’s why.

The month of January 2026 managed to fly by while also feeling a thousand years long. There’s a classic horse_ebooks post that goes “everything happens so much” and it really felt true this month.

It was my birthday month, and I successfully completed another trip around the star called sol. So that’s nice.

I had set an unofficial goal for the year of 2026 to rewatch more movies. In 2025 my watch:rewatch ratio was about 9:1, meaning I watched 9 new movies for every 1 movie I rewatched. Nothing wrong with watching new movies, to be clear,  it one of the reasons I collect DVDs is because unlike havi by the option to watch things again whenever I want. So divided I wanted to increase the percentage of movies I rewatched this year. I had a rough goal in mind, roughly doubling the number of rewatches. Where as 10% of my movies logged were rewatches in 2025, I figured I could get that to 20% easily enough. I still want to get my backlog down, (I bought more box sets, whoops) so that’s a continuing priority, but I also want to take the time to spend with movies I already know I like.

January 2026 just ended, so what a time to check in on that goal. How am I doing so far? Well I ended January at 44%, over double my original goal. I probably won’t keep it that high, but who knows.

I did end up watching the same movie three times in January, which is a bit of an outlier. I watched Drawing Flies for the first time early in January, then turned around and watched it two more times. In my defense rounds two and three were with the different commentaries by the cast and directors of the movie.

Drawing Flies is a weird movie. It’s one of the small handful of movies that were put out by View Askew productions that wasn’t written and directed by Kevin Smith. Smith, an independent film maker to this day, started View Askew for his own movies, starting with Clerks, the low budget black and white movie he made for twenty five thousand dollars of credit card debt in 1994. Clerks got picked up by Miramax and became a minor hit. Since. 1994 View Askew has put out 15 narrative feature films (plus some documentaries) and and eleven of those are Kevin Smith Movies. That is to say he wrote, directed and edited them. The remaining four are unusual outliers.

Kevin remains pretty humble about his filmmaking talents, and like to talk up the fact that if he can make a movie, anyone can make a movie. And for a while in the 90s he put his money where his mouth is. I’m just speculating about the reasons, but in the 90s Kevin Smith took his modest financial success with Clerks (and later Mallrats, Chasing Amy and Dogma) and paid it forward by giving his friends enough money to make their own weird little indie movies. And the movies are pretty weird from what I know about them. There’s Big Helium Dog, a meta sketch comedy about making a movie called Big Helium Dog, A Better Place, a high school set drama about violence in schools that came out 2 years before Columbine, and Vulgar, a very dark comedy about sexual assault and revenge and a clown. None of these movies was particularly successful commercially. Kevin Smith was the executive producer on them (meaning he paid the bills) and they were all written and directed by his friends from New Jersey.

I think they weren’t successful, because despite his name and financial backing, none of the feel like “Kevin Smith Films” which makes sense, because they’re not. But since Kevin Smith’s name is the reason any body paid attention in the first place, it probably came as quite a shock.

But the first non-Kevin Smith View Askew film iprobably suffered the most for not being a Kevin Smith movie. This is a little film called Drawing Flies. Hey, we made it back around! Drawing Flies is a movie written and directed by Matt Gissing and Malcolm Ingram. Unlike the rest of the View Askew non-smith canon, these guys aren’t friends of Kevin Smith from New Jersey, they’re Canadians. Ingram met Smith on the set of Mallrats, where he was reporting for Film Threat, a movie news/review website. Smith and Ingram became friends and Smith gave Ingram $40k to make his movie with Gissing.

Drawing Flies can’t help but be compared to Clerks, in addition to being backed by Smith, it stars Jason Lee, who Smith basically discovered for Mallrats, follows a group of 20-something slackers and was shot using the same type of camera and film stock as Clerks. 

Despite the similar aesthetics, Drawing Flies is a less straightforward film than Clerks. Clerks is about a day in the life of a couple continence store clerks. They get up to hijinks, talk about pop culture and which girl to date. I love the movie but it’s not trying to say much of anything.  Drawing Flies is much more pointed, although that’s not immediately obvious.  The film starts with five slackers applying for and getting turned down for unemployment. They’re out of money but the last thing they want to do is get a job or ask their parents. It’s got a not insignificant amount of “edgy 90s humor” too, mostly centered around how funny it was considered to call people gay. 

(Spoilers for Drawing Flies ahead, but it’s the sort of movie you can’t talk about without spoiling)
Donner, played by Jason Lee suggests they drive and then hike out to his uncle’s cabin. They can hang out for a while and decide wha to do. The rest of the movie is them camping and traveling in the woods, as Donner acts weirder and weirder, eventually revealing to the rest of the group that he’s not taking them to a cabin, but rather trying to meet up with Sasquatch. 

The rest of the cast does not take this information kindly and one by one they all decide to head back to civilization, leaving Donner to his madness. It’s kind of a bleak film as I’m describing it! Our last shot of Jason Lee before his friends abandon him is Lee sitting bare chested nestled into the roots of a very large tree covered in mud. But he’s at peace, he knows his friends won’t stay with him, even as he knows he’s right. 

Some indeterminate time later a couple of the friends meet up at a party. They catch up over small talk, but neither has heard from or seen Donner since they were all last together. Pretty bleak. Until we get a monologue in Donner’s voice much like the film began with as he is revealed to be sitting at a campfire, now clean and dressed, as a group of bigfoots sit with him and listen. 

Taken in isolation it’s kind of a silly movie. Low budget, but also strangely structured. A lot of the forward momentum happens off screen. Plus, due to budget constraints a lot of the movie is shot in these wide masters where the camera just rolls on all five characters through a whole scene. They didn’t have enough film for coverage, so they just did it in big one shots. 

But I can’t really watch it in isolation because I also know the greater filmography of Malcolm Ingram, one of the writer/directors on the film. After this, he made another road comedy with a bigger budget and cast (think Jake Busey, Breckin Meyer and Denise Richards) and by all accounts it was even less successful commercially. 

But after that Malcom Ingram switched to Documentaries. His first was a movie called Small Town Gay Bar, about a gay bar in a small town, then he made Bear Nation about the “bear” community, aka large hairy gay guys, then he made Continental, a doc about the continental bath house in NYC, a hub of gay community in the 60s and 70s pre AIDS, then there was Out To Win, about queer athletes in pro sports, the Southern Pride, about queer communities in the deep south in 2016. Are you seeing a pattern here? Sometime between 1996 when Drawing Flies was made and 2006 when Small Town Gay Bar was released, Malcolm Ingram came out as gay and focused on telling the stories of gay communities. He has mad a couple non-queer documentaries, but that’s clearly his area of passion. 

So when when I watch this movie, Drawing Flies, about a man keeping a secret from his closest friends, for fear of abandonment, then being abandoned by said friends for what he knows to be true, then it turns out he’s right and finds happiness with a new community anyway? Well that feels like a queer story even before you know who the director is or the above average amount of homophobia or a male character experimenting with makeup. 

And the thing that really bugs me? Is I don’t see anyone else who is talking about this movie looking at it through this queer lens. I feel like I’m chasing my own Bigfoot here, and nobody else can see the signs. Like the movie isn’t a masterpiece of filmmaking, but that doesn’t mean we can’t look at it with an eye towards themes and nobody seems to be doing that!

So I watched it again, with the directors’ commentary. The commentary isn’t much to write home about, recorded in 2002, Malcolm and Matthew are clearly a little bitter about their lack of success. They know it’s a rough picture, but they put a lot of work into it and are proud of how it came out. There’s absolutely no mention of any queer subtext, but I’m pretty sure that’s because Ingram still wasn’t out in 2002 (as far as I can tell). 

And then I watched it again, with the cast & crew commentary. This one had producers Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier, four of the five main cast and both directors. This one had even less insight into the themes of the movie, with lots of jokes and them trying to have a fun time talking about what it was like to make. One thing that was consistent between both commentaries was  Ingram stating that his interpretation of the ending (Donner at the campfire) was that he was dead, but that they left it ambiguous. 

I’m probably not the best guy to talk about this stuff, as a straight guy I don’t have any lived experience, and my days of studying queer theory directly are way back in grad school. But if nobody else is going to say it, I might as well. This interpretation isn’t going to make the admittedly flawed movie into a better one, but just because a movie’s reach exceeds its grasp, we can still appreciate it for what it was trying to do. 

I also dont want to put too much directorial intent on this reading. I don’t know what Malcolm Ingram was thinking at the time (because he hasn’t said as far as I can tell) and I don’t know what influence is co-writer and co-director had on the narrative either. But directorial intent is just one part of examining a film. Or any piece of art. I remember when there were people passing around websites (I also remember websites) theorizing that The Matrix was a trans allegory. A lot of people dismissed the idea, wrote it off as reading too much into a movie, but also a few years later, first one then both of the Wachowski’s came out as trans themselves and people were a lot more willing to accept that interpretation. I think it would still be a valid reading of The Matrix either way. And I think Drawing Flies is a movie that makes a lot more sense when viewed through a queer lens. 

Now that Malcolm Ingram has embraced his sexuality and been telling stories of his communities, I wonder if he still thinks Donner is dead at the end of this movie. Either way, I hope he’s happy now that he found his sasquatches.