Kalifornia

Awesome flick! It works on so many levels. It's a thriller because it's about taking a road trip with a sociopathic serial killer. It's funny because, like me, the protagonist has a weird fascination with serial killers, and sort of glamorizes them and psychologizes them...until he finds himself on the victim's end. It's even more hilarious because the movie plays up that whole bleeding heart intellectual snob angle. In the beginning, Brian (David Duchovny) proselytizes about how killers are mentally sick, and that they need to be rehabilitated instead of executed (ps, I think I'm against capital punishment too, but I also don't have much faith in rehabilitation), and how these aberrant personalities are just products of troubled childhoods...and then he asks Early (Brad Pitt) cliched stuff like why is he so angry at his father, and if that's why he kills...

...and in the end he finds the smoking gun in his own hand.

Also, Kalifornia works on the level of surrealist comedy, because there's just something fantastic yet a propos about Brian accidentally ride-sharing with the very subject of his book, and learning important lessons about a topic he would otherwise be totally unqualified to write about. He thinks he's being enlightened and progressive, not judging Early for being such a yokel, but then he realizes that "humanity" is not the shared condition he thought it was.

Fabulous performance by Juliette Lewis, who plays the serial killer's girlfriend who is almost too dumb to exist. Brad Pitt delivers as well; he really is quite a convincing actor, he just happened to stop picking good roles for himself. There's something about Americana and Brad Pitt that has the making of an epic.