"Head is my favorite film that stars a musical artist, by some degree. And yes, that includes the brilliant A Hard Day’s Night. However, the Monkees’ triumph of a movie is a Pyrrhic victory, because Head accelerated their demise, as it sees Dolenz, Nesmith, Tork, and Jones push the self-destruct button. Directed by Bob Rafelson and cowritten by Jack Nicholson, the movie shows the Monkees tearing down their wholesome network-TV, pre–Fab Four image with wild style. Much has been read into this stream-of-consciousness movie, with its overlapping dream sequences, surreal song numbers, and drug-influenced chaos. The simplest way of describing it is this: the Monkees are sick of being on their network show and attempt to break out of the studio lot, literally and figuratively. There are several scenes where the Monkees are trapped in a box, a live number where they are revealed to be plastic mannequins, and bookending sequences where the members commit suicide. So basically, the Monkees want out. There have been some claims by the Monkees since the film came out that this message was projected onto it by Rafelson and Nicholson, but the script was clearly born of a very real frustration with their image. The movie bombed in 1968, because not many Monkees fans wanted to know that their idols had painted-on smiles. What remains is a gem of rock music cinema, with great songs and images throughout. Plus, as depressing as the theme of entrapment is, it’s frequently very funny. I got to interview Dolenz about it at a New Beverly Q&A once. A young audience member quizzed him on the deeper themes, and he just replied, “Man, I was twenty-three . . .”"

"My first favorite film is The Shining by Stanley Kubrick. I am a huge horror film fan. I love them so much. I’ve always loved them. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been attracted to scary stuff; I don’t know why. When I was younger I would watch a lot of the cheesier process-of-elimination slasher ’90s films. And then I feel like, as my tastes matured a little bit as I got older, I found The Shining, which is a movie that my dad had always spoken about with this weird fear, because he’d never finished the movie. He’s like, “The one film I’ve never been able to finish in my life is The Shining.” So I grew up like, “What is The Shining?” And then, finally I watched it, and it was just incredible. Well, Stanley Kubrick’s my favorite director, so you’ll probably see a lot of his films in the top five. I just love that movie so much, and it’s my favorite on-screen performance of all time, from Jack Nicholson. I think that he’s absolutely incredible. I’m ready to play a role like that."

"The Shining. It was the first movie that I saw when I was a kid that, like, really traumatized me. It was mostly the two little girls as well as being in room 237. That was one of the movies that I remember really, after watching that movie, having a problem sleeping. But as I’ve sort of grown up with that movie, what’s been so inspirational about that movie… if you watch that movie, like everybody watches that movie, it’s terrifying, it’s one of the scariest movies of all time. And what I think’s great about it is that it’s not only a horror movie, it’s more a movie about an alcoholic man who hates his family, and then it’s a horror movie. To me, all the best horror movies are a regular movie first and then they’re a horror movie. That’s true with the The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby as well as The Shining. But what’s most exciting to me about The Shining, and there’s a famous quote from the Vivian Kubrick documentary, from Jack Nicholson, where he says he’s been spending his whole career trying to make his performances real, like no one’s ever seen realness onscreen and he’s going to be the one to make it real and he’s going to do something no one’s ever seen before, this quest to make it authentic. And then he’s like, “Then you get someone like Stanley who says, ‘Yeah, Jack, it’s real, but it’s just not interesting.'” After I heard that conversation, if you watch The Shining and don’t get sucked into it just being a great scary movie, if you walk into it and just watch the choices that are being made, it’s an insane movie. Like, everybody’s performance is, like, the stakes are so high, as if every line they say is the end of the world. Every shot is so grandiose. The locations are so unbelievable, and they’re all built, which is also totally insane. It’s like this constructed movie that’s so hypnotic because every time Shelly Duval comes on the screen and screams, “[falsetto] They’re trying to kill Danny!” and it’s like, in any other movie that would just be like a joke. Or Jack Nicholson, if you look at every take of his in the movie, [it] shouldn’t work. It’s all so extreme with his performance. But it’s consistent and, I guess as Stanley Kubrick said, it’s interesting. Because it’s consistent, the movie has this very hypnotic tone to it and it’s something that Kubrick is obviously very known for. It not only is an amazingly terrifying movie and one of the best horror movies of all time, it also is just this really unique approach to filmmaking that I’ve always found really fascinating. It seems to, across the board, raise the stakes and make everybody just operate on this much higher level, and that’s always been very hypnotic to me."