The Screengrab : divine

Th-Th-That's All Folks! The Best & Worst Endings Of All Time (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 May 2009 20:30:00 GMT

PINK FLAMINGOS (1972)

Okay, first of all...how cool is it that John Waters was the officiant at David “The Wire” Simon’s wedding? But, of course, a certain brotherhood between the seemingly unlikely pair makes perfect sense, given their shared warts-and-all love of Charm City, a.k.a. Bodymore, Murderland. And before he became pop culture’s deviant bon vivant uncle, Waters also shared the hustler rebel aesthetic of Simon characters like Omar and Bubbles, conceiving Divine’s infamous shit-eating grin at the end of Pink Flamingos as more of a calculated publicity stunt than an attempt to pervert the fabric of decent society. As the director says in his book, Shock Value, “I knew I only had $10,000 to work with, so I figured I had to give the audiences something no other studio could dare give them even with multimillion-dollar budgets. Something to leave them gagging in the aisles. Something they could never forget.” Mission accomplished. (AO)

NASHVILLE (1975)

Robert Altman’s clearest claim to having made the Great American Movie has an ending that pulls off the neat trick of seeming both surprising and inevitable. It’s another of those movies that absolutely earns its ending, with the exhausting and exhilarating feeling that we have followed its many fascinating characters to the logical extreme of their stories; and when they all gather for a political rally in honor of the unseen candidate Hal Philip Walker, it seems inexorable, in light of what we’ve seen before, that there will be an attempt on his life. But the gunshot, when it finally comes, finds an unexpected target – and, what’s even more unexpected, the movie doesn’t end there. Instead, it throws out a new wrinkle, as the little-known striver Barbara Harris, in one of the show biz tropes that is rarely handled so masterfully, steps up to calm the crowd and forge her own legend singing “It Don’t Worry Me” as the fallen Ronee Blakey is carried away. The song turns into a transcendent chant for all of America as Altman’s camera, which has captured absolutely everything, goes the only place it has left to go: up, out, and away. (LP)

THE BAD NEWS BEARS (1976)

What was it about 1976 that made losing acceptable at the movies? Was it a Vietnam hangover? The famous malaise Jimmy Carter spoke of? There must be some significance to the fact that the two most successful sports-themed movies of the year – Rocky and The Bad News Bears – ended with the heroes on the losing side. As losing goes, however, the Bears do it right. A thrilling rally in the bottom of the ninth that falls just short. A round of beers in the dugout. And of course, Tanner’s immortal response to the fake rah-rah good sportsmanship of the privileged: “Hey, Yankees! You can take your apology and your trophy and shove it straight up your ass!” Words to live by. (SVD)

DROWNING BY NUMBERS (1988)

For someone so relentlessly postmodern, director Peter Greenaway has often proven himself a master of what Barthes called the “proairetic sequence” – the movement of the narrative through signifiers related to plot and action. Although Drowning By Numbers is as beautifully designed as any of his less narrative structural work, Greenaway creates an almost tangible, physical need to see the plot (involving the murder by drowning of three men at the hands of their identically-named lovers) all the way through to its conclusion. He does this through a trick that’s elegant in its simplicity: almost every scene features a number, starting with 1 and increasing by one in every scene, going all the way up to 100. Greenaway cleverly snares you into an addiction for spotting the next number before you’re really even aware what he’s doing, and by the end of the movie, the number 100 shows up as the typically brilliant Michael Nyman score reaches its frantic crescendo and the story reaches its grim but inescapable conclusion. (LP)

BEFORE SUNSET (2004)

I covered this for a previous list of romantic moments, so pardon me for repeating myself: It's a safe bet that few people who watched backpacking Gen X-ers Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) spend a memorable night together in Vienna in 1995's Before Sunrise ever expected to see a sequel, much less wait nine years for one. When that follow-up finally did arrive in 2004, it could hardly have been confused with a traditional movie romance. As befitting a Richard Linklater film, their belated reunion in Paris is all talk — talk about missed connections, the impermanence of youth and the mysteries of love. Jesse has a flight to catch, so we're always aware of the ticking clock — that is, until the sublime final moments, when the urgency melts away to the appropriate tones of Nina Simone singing "Just in Time." Delpy does a shuffling little dance. Hawke sinks into the couch with a silly grin on his face. And we all learn that the most romantic words of all are not "I love you" — they're "Baby, you are gonna miss that plane." (SVD)

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven & Twelve

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak

Screengrab's Ultimate Exploitation Films!!!!!!! (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 22:30:00 GMT

FEMALE TROUBLE (1974)

Oh, sure, Pink Flamingos has the shit-eating and the egg lady and Hairspray’s the big fat crossover hit, but to my way of thinking, Female Trouble is probably the masterpiece of John Waters’ cinematic career, an epic faux biopic spanning the life of Divine’s iconic Dawn Davenport from adolescence to the electric chair by way of High School Confidential, Butterfield 8 and the weirdest episode of Batman ever. Shock value has always been Waters’ aesthetic and if, say, you were to attend an all-night marathon of his early films tripping your balls off on LSD (like, uh...this friend of mine did once), your jaw would remain in constant droppage at the cavalcade of perversion, blasphemy and scrub-your-brain imagery on relentless display, from Flamingos’ notorious “singing asshole” to Desperate Living’s hung leather goons “digging for gold” in aged Edith Massey’s queenly honeypot. But Waters’ brand of exploitation is so funny and cheerful that, in the end, his off-putting worlds take on a cozy familiarity and you feel nothing but affection for his crackpot characters and the actors who play them, especially Massey (we miss you Edie!)...and never more so than in Female Trouble, which features an endless stream of quotable lines, memorable moments and a brilliant comedic performance by Divine who, as Dawn, not only does flips on a trampoline and trashes Christmas morning like a hell-spawn tornado ("I told you cha cha heels!"), but also gets s/himself pregnant, gives birth and bites through the umbilical cord. Top that, Streep!

MANSON (1972)

This true-crime film, the movie equivalent of one of those instant paperback accounts of tabloid horrors that have been largely displaced by the Internet and reality TV, has the special, weird distinction of being perhaps the only old-Times Square favorite to be nominated for an Academy Award. (It lost out in the Best Documentary Feature category to Marjoe, religious-con-man-turned-Earthquake-cast-member Marjoe Gortner's self-expose, which was almost as sleazy but a lot more self-aware.) Co-directed by Robert Hendrickson, who never made another film, and Laurence Merrick, whose previous credits included The Black Angels and a gay-porn vampire movie alternately called Dracula and the Boys and Does Dracula Really Suck?, it employs a mix of interviews, news footage, home movies and "recreations", with plenty of emphasis on the freaky hippie-orgy scene it imagines as having gone down at the Spahn Ranch. The movie is less concerned with explaining what happened or why than in infecting the viewer with a sense of unease, based on the idea that it all might not be over; it was, after all, made at a time when plenty of Charlie's followers were still living in society and not yet arthritic. The soundtrack, which is made up of dreamy-sounding '60s trance-rock, some of it taken from the Family's own recordings and some of it composed especially for the soundtrack by a couple of Manson's former associates, adds considerably to the overall creepiness. So did the news, in 1977, that Lawrence Merrick had been murdered by an unbalanced stalker, a development that the film's publicists were not shy about hinting at having possibly been delayed "retribution" from the Family.

HELLS ANGELS ON WHEELS (1967)

This biker flick, starring Jack Nicholson and Adam Rourke, is about as good as the wheeler genre got. It's certainly better than The Wild Angels, the Roger Corman movie that kick-started the genre and, um, Easy Rider, the counterculture statement that grew out of it. As in Easy Rider, Nicholson plays the audience representative, a fed-up working stiff who impulsively throws in his lot with the biker gang, but here we get to enjoy him for the length of the whole picture. Hells Angels on Wheels was directed by Richard Rush, who would later become best known for the cult film The Stunt Man starring Peter O'Toole -- but the more important reference point here may be that he'd already worked with Nicholson on the West-Coast-hippie-scene movie Pysch-Out. (The list of future Hollywood luminaries who worked on the movie also includes the stuntman Hal Needham and the late, great Hungarian-born cinematographer László Kovács, back when he was billing himself as "Leslie Kovac".) The movie also boasts a wordless appearance by Sonny Barger, the president of the Oakland, California chapter of the Angels, who is also credited as "technical advisor". The movie was made during a brief window when the Angels were willing to work with people who professed to be interested in telling their "story", before they withdrew after becoming rankled about being exploited by sundry show-business types, such as Roger Corman, who they felt screwed them over on The Wild Angels. Add it to Corman's list of accomplishments that he left the members of a self-styled outlaw motorcycle gang with a bad taste in their mouths.

THE INTRUDER (1962)

Roger Corman directed this tabloid melodrama about racist rabble-rousing, from Charles Beaumont's adaptation of his own novel. William Shatner plays a leather-lunged agitator from "the Patrick Henry Society" who arrives in a Southern town torn apart by school desegregation and hits the ground running, making hateful speeches and stirring up trouble. Corman has been known to say that this is the one movie he made in his exploitation-movie prime that he lost money on, always with the implication that he got artistically ambitious and made something too good for his target audience. On the contrary, opines Bill Landis of Sleazoid Express: the film failed in its initial release simply because "not many distributors in [Corman's] distribution network wanted to play a film that used the word 'nigger' every few seconds." Corman wound up selling the movie to a rival exploitation master, Mike Ripps, who made a bundle on it by linking it up on a double bill with another Southern melodrama, Poor White Trash, and devising a two-headed marketing campaign, selling the movie to Northern black audiences under the title Shame and to Southern audiences under the name I Hate Your Guts. Of course, it was its star's later promotion to Starfleet Captain that helped Shame to achieve belated, self-contained lift-off. The movie and Shatner's character lack depth -- it's just a picture of a hateful blowhard, with no psychological layers -- but Shatner's youthful brio gives the picture energy, and after he turned into William! Shatner!, grindhouse audiences loved to come out to screenings of the movie so they could see James T. Kirk toss around the "N"-word.

THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1960)

This man-eating plant movie, which Roger Corman directed from a script by Charles B. Griffith (who also wrote A Bucket of Blood, The Wild Angels, and Death Race 2000), is kind of awe-inspiring as some kind of ultimate example of just what Corman and Griffith were prepared to throw into the pot to keep one of their stews cooking. (Accoring to Griffith, Corman instructed him to concoct a script as soon as the sets became available, and that he immediately went to work spitballing ideas at Corman, who rejected several proposals before Griffith came up with the man-eating plant idea, by which time, Griffith recalled, "We were both pretty drunk.") Largely shot in two days -- the amount of time Corman had to use the sets, which were left over from another, completed production, before they were torn down -- at a cost of about $30,000 and with a running time of just seventy minutes, Little Shop's performances range from Corman regulars such as Jonathan Haze and Dick Miller, doing their character-guy shtick, to the Borsht Belt delivery of Mel Welles as the flower shop owner Mushnik to Jack Nicholson's unrestrained bit as a masochistic dental patient. The movie's sheer freakishness kept it alive on TV and the drive-in circuit until Nicholson became a star, an unexpected development that instantly turned it into an unlikely classic. It would, of course, go on to be adapted into a 1982 Off-Broadway musical that was in turn adapted into a big movie musical in 1986. None of which did Corman any good, because he had such sad hopes for the movie's commercial prospects that he never bothered to copyright it, allowing it to slip into public domain.

Warning! No one will be admitted after Part One, Two, Three, Five & Six!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

The Screengrab Holiday Special: Movies We're Thankful For (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 15:15:00 GMT

I grew up right next door to Thanksgiving Town, USA: Plymouth, Massachusetts, former home of the Pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians and future home of Plymouth Rock Studios and a nice big casino.

My next door neighbors used to work at Plimoth Plantation, where docent actors dress up in 17th century drag and mosey up and down the streets of a life-size replica Pilgrim settlement, discussing crops and Calvinism, while modern Native Americans in traditional buckskin attire give their side of the story in a nearby encampment.

So I like to think I know a thing or two about Thanksgiving. And let me tell you: it’s not all about the yams.

In fact, before the Macy’s Day Parade and the advent of that delicious Brundlefly monstrosity known as Turducken, the fourth Thursday of November was all about chowing down eel and corn and celebrating a bountiful harvest. In fact, as I learned on a recent visit to Plimoth Plantation, the name for the annual kick-off to the Christmas shopping season is actually a compound word that literally means “giving thanks”!

And so, as we here at the Screengrab prepare our traditional Turkey Day feast of pretzel sticks, jelly beans, two slices of toast and a handful of popcorn, we’d like to just take a few moments to express our gratitude for the people, places and movies that made us the full-on film geeks we are today.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING FROM THE SCREENGRAB!

ANDREW OSBORNE IS THANKFUL FOR:

WHAT’S UP, DOC? (1950 & 1972)

Forget Mickey Mouse: Bugs Bunny was there from the start, teaching me the importance of carrots, proper directions to Albuquerque and a wised-up appreciation of life (for all its feathered frenemies, megalomaniacal Martians and gun-toting Fudds). So I was a bit disappointed when I realized What’s Up, Doc? (the first movie I can remember seeing in a theater) wasn’t a cartoon...but Peter Bogdanovich’s madcap screwball homage soon won me over with its igneous rocks and silly accents and, especially, that endless, blissful car chase through the streets, alleys and staircases of San Francisco (and, eventually, San Francisco Bay). All that (plus a gratifying act three cameo by Mr. Bunny himself!) made this goofy-smart romantic comedy my first favorite movie, and it only got better with time as I grew up and came to appreciate the chemistry of Ryan O’Neal and Barbara Streisand (both at their cinematic finest) and the comedic brilliance of the irreplaceable Madeline Kahn, Austin Pendleton and Kenneth Mars. But the real reason this movie’s on the list is so I can say thank you to my film geek parents for always bringing me to whatever movie they went to go see on a Saturday night (even when it scared the bejesus out of me), thus instilling a life-long love of pop culture that’s guided my cinematic view of the world ever since. (Thanks, Mom & Dad!)

STAR WARS (1977)

I’ve already written an embarrassing number of posts about the life-changing religious experience of seeing this movie as an excitable, impressionable ten year old nerd, but looking back on it now, I can only say...George Lucas, all is forgiven. (And besides, what’s Thanksgiving without the Star Wars Holiday Special?)

THE BIG CHILL (1983)

Given the embarrassing Baby Boomer reverence for Lawrence Kasdan’s self-congratulatory, navel-gazing Love Generation touchstone of growing up and selling out (not to mention the way the film pretty much ruined all the songs on its mega-hit Motown soundtrack by making them go-to clichés for every subsequent entry in the “Diane Keaton dancing around a living room” genre), this one almost wound up on last week’s Guilty Pleasures list. But despite all the people who deride the film as just a shallow rip-off of John Sayles’ Return of the Secaucus Seven, I have no guilt and nothing but love for The Big Chill. I first saw it after a particularly painful orthodontist’s appointment in my junior year of high school, and though I may not have been the intended target audience, I took the movie instantly to heart, partly for its evocation of the sixties (an era I romanticized desperately in the Just Say No Reagan eighties), but mostly for its celebration of the enduring power of friendship.

JOHN WATERS & DIVINE

Then, after high school, I stopped Saying No and dove headfirst into the psychedelic wonderland of college, that freaky, institutionalized Rumspringa when America’s sons and daughters move away from home and go batshit crazy for a year or three. After spending the first eighteen years of my life as an upright goody two-shoes, I was itching to break bad and take a walk on the trashy side...and when it comes to desperate living, I quickly discovered there was no better tour guide than John Waters and his large and lovely muse, Divine. From Mondo Trasho to Hairspray, Baltimore’s favorite son and fake daughter warped my young adult mind with their glorious bad taste, healthy disrespect for convention and pre-punk aesthetic, while also serving as self-made role models of DIY ingenuity for those determined to live a life less ordinary.

DAZED AND CONFUSED (1993)

In 1993, my then-girlfriend and I attended an L.A. cast and crew screening of Dazed and Confused (with, if memory serves, my future Screengrab colleague Scott Von Doviak). We didn’t know any of the soon-to-be-famous actors in the stellar ensemble cast (including Matthew McConaughey, Adam Goldberg, Parker Posey and Ben Affleck) when the lights went down, but when the lights came up, we suddenly found ourselves surrounded by characters we’d only just met but felt like we’d known forever: hey, look! It’s O’Bannion and Darla! And over there! It’s Wooderson! (All right, all right, all right!) A few months later, I got dumped by the aforementioned girlfriend, but numerous subsequent screenings of Dazed and Confused helped to ease the pain, and today I remember Richard Linklater’s last day of school and first night of summer vacation at least as fondly as my actual high school experience.

PULP FICTION (1994)

Some movies you see and forget just as soon as the lights come up. Pulp Fiction was not one of those movies. In 1994, I spent every last dime I had (and a lot of dimes that I didn’t have) attempting to surf the Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes indie renaissance with my own no-budget 16mm production, Apocalypse Bop (starring the indomitable Mr. Von Doviak), which I’d spent the summer directing back in my home town near Thanksgiving Town, USA. At the time, I was living in Los Angeles, and so when the movie wrapped, I decided to road trip back to the West Coast with a couple of friends from the Bop shoot. Stopping for breakfast in Austin, Texas, one of those friends met a girl and couldn’t stop thinking about her, so when we finally reached California, he called her up and asked if she wanted to go see Pulp Fiction with him on opening night. She said yes, and so he turned around and flew right back to Austin. Meanwhile, my return to L.A. woke me up from my filmmaking fandango to the cold, hard reality that I was unemployed, with no prospects and no money to pay my rent. I had exactly twenty dollars to my name. And I’m happy to say I spent that twenty dollars on popcorn and a ticket to go see the opening night of Pulp Fiction with my pals in the San Fernando Valley, while my other friend was watching the same movie on the same night on his cross-country date in The Lone Star State. He wound up staying in Austin for the next several years, and days after watching Jules and Vincent Vega strut across the screen to the strains of “Misirlou,” my own bacon got snatched from the brink of disaster by an out-of-the-blue offer to go work on a war movie in the Philippines. And so I’m eternally grateful to have once been young and foolish enough to have those kinds of adventures, living in extremis at exactly the right time and with exactly the right people the night Quentin Tarantino got medieval on our ass.

SXSW, THE PROVINCETOWN FILM FESTIVAL & THE MEAT CITY BEATNIKS (2009)

And speaking of Austin, the city of Slacker has been, at different times, my literal and spiritual home away from home for years now, and never is it more glamorous (or crowded) than the middle of March, when the capitol of Texas plays host to the South-By-Southwest music and film festival, a fantastic collision of pop culture, booze and barbecue that makes Thanksgiving look like Arbor Day. Every spring, it renews my faith in the vaunted “indie film” spirit (even though I’m old enough to know better), and then every summer, I take another, mellower sip of the indie Kool-Aid (not to mention the world’s best Bloody Marys) at the Provincetown Film Festival, with John Waters presiding as patron saint in the same way Richard Linklater is the Mayor of South-By...and with all that friggin’ indie spirit washing over me, it was only a matter of time before I succumbed once again to its siren song, so I’ll just wrap up this list with thanks to my collaborators on The Meat City Beatniks, an indie film musical (co-written by me, Scott Von Doviak, Eric Jacobson and Jim Dryden) and starring Elliot Dort, Ben Gallant, Sheree Bass, Matthew Woodward, Rob McKim, Ms. Amar, Joe Gallo, Michael Sesling, Kellianne MacFarlane, Bill Christensen and Amy Jeglinski-Osborne...a production which (thankfully) I mostly managed to wrap in 2008 and which will (hopefully) premiere in 2009...so stay tuned! (And have a Happy Thanksgiving!)

Click Here For More Thanks From Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce & Sarah Clyne Sundberg

Contributor: Andrew Osborne

The Gay Pride Top Twenty (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 21:00:00 GMT

MALA NOCHE (1985)

"You drive like you fuck!" Walt (Tim Streeter) yells at Pepper (Ray Monge), the Mexican boy toy who has accepted Walt's offer of driving lessons, with the result that Walt's car is resting in a ditch. Walt is actually in love -- painfully, head over heels in love -- with the pretty boy Johnny (Doug Cooyeate), who doesn't mind putting up with his adulation so long as it gets him handouts, but has no intention of letting Walt touch him, so Walt, in a spirit of compromise that is familiar to inhabitants of the independent filmmaking scene, makes do with Johnny's friend, the scruffier Ray, and takes what satisfaction he can in being one degree of separation away from his obscure object of desire. This grungy erotic fever dream of a first feature by Gus Van Sant was made for $2500.00; hard to see for most of the years before it came out on DVD as part of the Criterion Collection last fall, it was one of the most exciting directorial debuts of the 1980s and announced Portland's placement on the indie film map.

ROCK HUDSON'S HOME MOVIES (1992)

When Hudson died of AIDS in 1985 while still trying to remain in the closet, a number of people felt that he had missed his last chance to make his stand against the homophobes. This hilarious illustrated lecture by the experimental filmmaker Mark Rappaport argues that Rock was trying to tell us something all along; you just had to know how to listen. Rock, represented by actor Eric Farr, walks us through a series of clips from Hudson's career, pointing up the suddenly obvious messages conveyed by his skittish relationships with Doris Day and his other virginal leading ladies, his verbal pas de deux with Tony Randall, the mysterious nudge-nudge wink-wink underworld inhabited by the remade men of Seconds, and the shift into horror movies as Rock's youthful beauty began to fade. Like certain films of Todd Haynes, the movie is a satirical commentary on certain strains of pop criticism and a cunning work of criticism itself.

SCORPIO RISING (1964) & UN CHANT D'AMOUR (1950)

Between the two of them, these two short films, made by directors (Kenneth Anger, who made Scorpio Rising five years after the best-selling success of his book Hollywood Babylon, and the legendary playwright, novelist and poet Jean Genet) famous in the literary world, established a whole visual language of gay eroticism, based on fetishistic totems of power on the one hand and a defiant romantic tenderness in the face of imprisonment and institutional mistreatment on the other, that other artists have fed off for generations since. And not just gay artists: Anger's cutting to rock music paved the way for everything from Scorsese to MTV, and Oliver Stone, a director not noted for his sensitivity to homosexuals (see JFK) did his own butch version of the shared-cigarette scene from Genet's film in Platoon, with Willem Dafoe putting a rifle to Charlie Sheen's pliant lips and giving him a little something-something.

VELVET GOLDMINE (1998)

In his later Far from Heaven (after honoring Genet in his 1991 Poison), Todd Haynes paid tribute to the 1950s Technicolor melodramas of Douglas Sirk and the closeted gay subculture that many see being given a shout-out in those movies. In his salute to the glitter rock scene of the 1970s, Haynes sets out to recreate a very different era in pop culture, one that celebrated letting it all hang out -- and he also administers a bitch slap to those who would write off the music as an opportunistic sham. Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), Haynes' David Bowie stand-in, may ultimately sell out to arena rock and heterosexuality, but the fire he lit in the hearts and minds of young adepts such as the rock writer played by Christian Bale continues to burn even as all the color and spark has bled out of the conventional show business world he's joined. Keep watching the skies!

PINK FLAMINGOS (1972) & HAIRSPRAY (1988, 2007)

Back in 1972, when underground filmmaker John Waters had his starlet and muse, the 300-pound drag superstar Divine (neé Harris Glenn Milstead) eat dog shit as a glorified publicity stunt in the final moments of Pink Flamingos (a.k.a. the Citizen Kane of bad taste cinema), the wise-ass, openly gay, proto-punk director probably thought he was being pretty damn subversive in his blatant attempt to shock the bejesus out of the hopelessly square “straight” world he never had any particular interest in joining. Little did he know at the time that the most subversive act of pop culture would come sixteen years later, when he achieved crossover indie success with the (mostly) family friendly Hairspray, starring Ricki Lake as an indomitable plus-size, racially politicized Mashed Potato enthusiast and Divine as haggard Baltimore housewife Edna Turnblad. Tragically, Divine passed on to the great Hefty Hideway in the sky just as Hairspray made Waters and his Baltimore crew of “Hillbilly Rip-offs” shockingly respectable (and at least as famous as Pia Zadora)...but “the Filthiest Woman Alive” lived on (in a beautifully ironic twist Flamingos’ Babs Johnson would have adored) as a beloved family-friendly icon, first as the inspiration for the under-the-sea witch Ursula in The Little Mermaid and later in the gender-bender casting of Harvey Fierstein, Bruce Villanch (and, recently, George Wendt??!?!?) as Edna Turnblad in the smash hit Broadway musical version of Hairspray and (egad!) John Travolta in the super-smash hit re-movie-fied 2007 version of the musical that introduced Waters’ racially and sexually egalitarian Baltimore fantasia to the High School Musical crowd (thanks to that dreamy Zac Efron). Waters’ never bought into the peace & love banalities of the Flower Children he mocked so mercilessly in his earliest films, yet the musical Hairspray’s triumphant showstopper “You Can’t Stop The Beat” rivals “The Age of Aquarius” in its joyous, unabashedly hopeful vision of a world where literally everyone is welcome and accepted at the dance...even assholes like the vain, villainous Van Tussels (as long as they’re willing to chill out, play nice and, of course, shake those fanny muscles).

Click here for Part One, Part Two & Part Three

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Andrew Osborne

The Gay Pride Top Twenty (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:45:00 GMT

THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975)

By the time I first encountered the film version of Richard O’Brien’s bizarre musical paean to ‘50s horror movies and polymorphous perversity, it was already a well-established cult classic, regularly attended by freaks and frat boys, geeks and fad-of-the-week trendies. But underneath the audience-participation spectacle was a gleefully subversive last gasp celebration of gender-blind free love (before pop culture sexuality became more repressive yet somehow simultaneously more commodified, fetishized and pervasive in the neo-con '80s and '90s). The invocation of Tim Curry’s infamous sweet transvestite Dr. Frank-n-Furter to “Give yourself over to absolute pleasure” became highly questionable advice in the AIDS era; even in the no-holes-barred world of the film's Transsexual Transylvanians, Frank’s lifestyle’s too extreme (and the character, like many overreaching sensualists before him, meets a tragic demise). Yet, the Rocky cult continues to flourish, years after its early ‘80s heyday, with screenings often serving as safe havens for GLBT (and straight!) misfits seeking community, acceptance and glamour in the midst of a “Science Fiction Double Feature” lost in time, lost in space and meaning. (Mee-eeaaaaa-nnniiinnnggg!!!!)

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (2005)

According to the official Oscar narrative, 2005 was the Year of Gay Cinema, and Brokeback Mountain, which won three Academy Awards that year, was its purest expression. And that’s true, to a point; in a year that seemed to feature more mainstream movies than usual with gay themes, Brokeback Mountain, with its gorgeous scenic cinematography, its elegiac tone, and its powerhouse lead performances by the late Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as doomed, love-struck cowboys, stood out. But more than a simple movie, Brokeback Mountain was that rare thing, a cultural phenomenon: a work of art that transcends its nature as merely a good or bad, popular or unpopular, example of its type and becomes something that permeates the culture and becomes a sort of intellectual shorthand for something greater than itself. Not only did the movie provide us with a genuine catchphrase in “I wish I knew how to quit you”, but it became such a phenomenon that pundits on the left and the right used its box office numbers to defend or denigrate the mainstreaming of homosexuality. One’s very reaction to it seemed to become a referendum on gay rights. And while there’s no denying that a lot of the attention it got was of the negative sort, tinged with a base and hysterical juvenile homophobia, from the first internet wag who dubbed it Bareback Mountin’ to the last sports radio talk-show guest who used its title as a cheap butt-fuck joke, it saturated the very cultural discourse of its time. And in that way, it advanced the cause of gay cinema – and maybe of gay rights in general – more than its makers could have ever dreamed.

BOUND (1996)

Because its action unfolds mostly in a couple of apartments on what appears to be the planet Earth, it's tempting to think that Bound is the only Wachowski Brothers movie to take place in the real world, when actually it's as much a fantasy as The Matrix or Speed Racer. Gina Gershon's Corky may hang out in the sort of bars where the women are built like Brian Dennehy…but she's still built like Gina Gershon. When she hooks up with breathy femme fatale Violet (Jennifer Tilly), it's the sort of lesbian romance that two dudes from Chicago would dream up. (That is, they were two dudes at the time, Larry Wachowski's later gender bending adventures notwithstanding.) Still, their love affair isn't just Skin-emax-style titillation; it's actually handled rather matter-of-factly in what might otherwise be a pretty standard neo-noir flick. Joe Pantoliano's greasy hood Caesar may disapprove, but who cares what he thinks? Violet and Corky aren't just partners in crime, plotting to swipe two million dollars out from under the noses of Caesar and his gangster pals. They have genuine love and respect for each other, a rarity in a genre where everyone is usually out to screw everybody else.

THE COCKETTES (2002)

This tremendously entertaining documentary, directed by Billy Weber and David Weissman, records through vintage footage and new interviews the rise and fall of San Francisco's pre-eminent drug-addled co-ed transvestite hippie song and dance trip. Led by the charismatic Hibiscus, footage of whom provides grounds for a convincing argument that the Second Coming occurred sometime in the late sixties and that Jesus had to leave again but wants everyone to know that he really enjoyed the acid, the Cockettes went from improvisational dancing to the accompaniment of old records before the midnight movie at the Palace Theater to elaborate, high-camp stage musicals. Their story doubles as a parable of the bust-up of the counterculture; the troupe eventually split up over the question of whether they were in it to make money or for love of performance with quasi-religious ambitions. Hibiscus and his devotees broke apart to form the Angels of Light, while the other Cockettes stormed New York for a disastrous run on Broadway before sneering crowds of jaded, black-hearted sophisticates. They crawled back home and had a few more local triumphs (including the sci-fi extravagaza Journey to the Center of Uranus, starring special guest Divine), but time and medical bills began to tear them apart. Some of the survivors interviewed in the movie look as if they're still trying to catch their breath since having stormed the Bastille, but between their stories and the clips of the troupe in action, few movies have made a misspent youth look like such a noble and enviable calling.

LAW OF DESIRE (1987)

In 1987, American audiences shell-shocked from AIDS and the sexual revolution made a blockbuster out of Fatal Attraction, the movie that created the modern stereotype of the spurned one-night-stand turned stalker as the ultimate embodiment of the fear of the loss of control that can come with romantic obsession and sexual freedom. That same year, Pedro Almodovar, a Spaniard liberated by the death twelve years earlier of the dictator Franco, served up Antonio Banderas as a young, straight stud who experiences one night of bliss with the celebrity director Pablo (Eusebio Poncela) and is so determined to make just one more trip to the well that lays siege to his reluctant love object's life, killing the boy-man of Pablo's dreams (who's such a dullard that the audience couldn't care less) and holding his sister (Carmen Maura), who used to be his brother, hostage until his steamy demands are met. With Banderas in the role and with Almodovar nudging him on, it is very hard to watch this without thinking, "Sure wish somebody loved me enough to put a gun on my family and pitch my significant other off the nearest cliff." Some sniff at early Almodovar as a frivolous artist, but for all his camp humor and extravangance, he was deadly serious in his insistence that respect be paid to those willing to go all the way for love.

Click here for Part One, Part Two and Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Oddball Summer Favorites

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 05 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

“Summer movie” is one of those phrases like “beach novel” or “toilet wine” that causes an immediate, involuntary adjustment of our expectations. (I was going to say “lowering of expectations,” but we make some mighty tasty toilet wine here at Screengrab headquarters.) When we hear “summer movie,” we think of explosions or aliens or exploding aliens, even though by Hollywood’s calendar, there is no time of year that isn’t appropriate for movies about exploding aliens. But by that same token, there are summer movies that feature hardly any exploding aliens at all. To kick off the season, the New York Times asked several motion picture luminaries to ruminate on their favorite summer movies, with surprising results.

Neil LaBute, who would probably like you to forget he directed the remake of The Wicker Man, selects Dr. Zhivago for what turns out to be a pretty good reason. “The only thing more pleasing, however, than a film that really feels like summer is one that is completely the opposite, but viewed during those blistering months… To sit back at a weekday matinee would be heaven; to see those terrific actors and those amazing locations come to life again, to shudder and actually feel chilled when Yuri and his family walk through the 'ice palace' for the first time. The frost that grows on everything in that scene like an albino moss is such a fresh, beautiful image in Dr. Zhivago.”

Sony Pictures Classics co-president Michael Barker has an even more offbeat choice. “Watching Brewster McCloud at a Texas drive-in blew my teenage mind during the summer of ’71. Living on the wrong side of the tracks (the dry part of town) in South Dallas, a late Saturday night could only mean a double or triple bill at the Astro Drive-In. We threw the lawn chairs in the trunk of the car, as well as a teenager or two, and arrived just before dusk to see the main feature… Brewster McCloud was highly anticipated in Texas because it was the first movie made in the Astrodome, that great modern Texas landmark. The trailer also promised some action, some comedy, a little sex and a slam-bang ending. Brewster McCloud had all that, but oh, so much more.”

And then there’s Larry Charles, director of Borat, who brought a date to a Divine movie. Read all about it here.

John Waters Smokes Crack

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 15:30:00 GMT

OK, so it was an accident. In a revealing new interview with New York magazine, the 61-year-old director of Pink Flamingos and Hairspray makes it clear he’s not ready for a life of early bird specials and Matlock reruns. He’s ready to start shooting his 17th film Fruitcake, and Cry-Baby is about to follow Hairspray to the Broadway stage. He’s working on a book called Role Models, “a self-portrait where I write profiles of other people and how much I love them and how much they changed my life and influenced me—famous people, criminals, people you’ve never heard of.” But as Ariel Levy writes, “his interests have remained intact: art, sex, drugs, class, and transgression.”

Levy gets a tour of Waters’ home in Baltimore: “One of the first things you see upon entering is the electric chair Divine died in in Female Trouble…A framed pair of Patty Hearst’s glasses (‘She was wearing those when she got arrested!’) hangs on the wall in the bathroom downstairs, next to some photographs of couch cushions that somehow look a lot like a vagina. On top of the toilet there’s a bowl of fake brownies and cookies. In fact, there is fake food in every room. Fake sushi in the dining room, a leg of lamb in Waters’s office, rubber blueberry pie in his bedroom. In the guest room that doesn’t lead to the bomber’s room, there is a bookshelf on which Waters has organized the books by category, one subject per shelf: extreme weather, psychological disorders, Nazis, Catholicism, high society.”

Then there are some of the director’s favorite haunts, like a feminist sex store owned by one of his assistant directors. (Waters: “Well, let me see the vibrating cock rings.” Sales clerk: “I think we’re out.”) And that crack-smoking incident? “He was having a party at his house in Baltimore and someone passed him a pipe that he assumed was packed with pot, so he took a puff. ‘I thought, Am I addicted? Am I gonna rob my parents now? I had a horrible hangover, but I’d been drinking anyway. I was glad, actually, in a way. I would never now purposely try a new drug, I don’t think, but I’m secretly glad I know what it feels like.’”

All that and much more here.

The Ten Worst Hairdos In Movie History, Part 1

Peter Smith — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Yeah, we know, we know, that haircut soon-to-be-Oscar-winner Javier Bardem sports in the soon-to-be-Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men is pretty disturbing and awful. But that's not even the worst haircut of Javier Bardem's career. (Read on!) Indeed, thinking about No Country got us thinking about some of the other truly monstrous 'dos we've encountered over the years on the screen. Here's our list of the Ten Worst Hairdos in Movie History.

Mickey Rourke, YEAR OF THE DRAGON (1985)

In his shambling youth, Mickey Rourke had a tough veneer with a sensitive undertone. He might have become a major movie star (as opposed to an object of cult worship in France and some of your better dorm rooms) in the Hollywood Heartthrob, Good-Bad-but-Not-Evil division, if he'd found a few more roles like the Baltimore honeydripper he played in Diner. But he drove his career into a ditch in a misguided effort to show what a tough, hard-slugging badass he was. His performance in this descent into the Michael Cimino-Oliver Stone Thunderdome tells you everything about what went wrong, and much of it is concentrated on his hair. Twenty-eight years old when the film was shot, Rourke seemed a little young for the role of a much-decorated NYPD veteran who learned about the deviousness of the Asian criminal mind while serving in Vietnam, more than ten years earlier. So the decision was made to send him down to the high school and have the erasers clapped together over his head. His chalk-encrusted tresses here make his entrance a guaranteed laugh-getter, especially since he wears a hat that he must have borrowed from a flatfoot in a Bogart movie; when he plops it down onto his noggin, you expect a cloud of white dust to envelop the room. (In some scenes his hair darkens to a grayish tint and then goes white again, suggesting that the testosterone release of beating up Chinese punks and having sex with Dutch-Japanese-supermodel-slash-godawful-actress "Ariane" has youth-restoring benefits, but they wear off fast.)

Sean Penn, CARLITO'S WAY (1993)

Penn's performance as Al Pacino's fast-talking lawyer, who lusts after the bad-boy cred and sleazy thrills that his client has outgrown, is a beautiful comic turn, and the selflessness that makes it possible extends fully to his scalp. With a little mop of frizzy curlicues that suggest that he's had his pubic hair transplanted onto his head, he looks like Art Garfunkel, Superstar. (This effect was especially funny back in 1993, when it was possible to go from this movie to see Jennifer Lynch's Boxing Helena and see that the actual Art Garfunkel had turned into Larry Fine, C.P.A.) His red mop grows more excitable and unruly as his character grows ever more dangerously unhinged. At the end, we hear a gunshot that signals that his character has been put out of Carlito's misery, and it is a great disappointment that the camera cuts away without showing his hair scurrying away under its own power. Nobody in Hollywood knows how to set up a sequel anymore.

Javier Bardem, PERDITA DURANGO (1997)

You think his hair in No Country for Old Men is bad? Pfft. For some of us, our first impression of Javier Bardem was with another bad hair cut, the one he had in Alex de la Iglesia's Perdita Durango (aka Dance With the Devil). Playing a homicidal, kidnapping voodoo priest, Bardem sports an unholy mullet that could scar your eyeballs. It's a scary character, and the hair cut makes him scarier because you know he knows he can get away with it. And you fear what would happen if you accidentally made fun of it. Nobody's making "business in front, party in the back" jokes around him, we guarantee you.

Anne Bancroft in THE HINDENBURG (1975)

In 1937, a German passenger zeppelin caught fire and exploded as it was preparing to land in New Jersey. The catastrophe was captured on film by a newsreel cameraman, and in 1975, some master of taste and sensitivity got the inspiration of trying to tap into the mid-'70s "disaster movie" fad by making a period melodrama leading up to the horror. Looking to tone this idea up a little, the movie posits that the explosion was set off deliberately, as an act of anti-Nazi sabotage. An alternate theory is that the saboteur felt that it was necessary to wipe Anne Bancroft's hair off the face of the Earth, whatever the cost. Bancroft plays a German countess who is also a morphine addict, which must be pretty mild stuff compared to whatever the hell her hairdresser is on. Since this is the kind of movie that tries to impress you with the historical accuracy of its fashions and knick knacks, Bancroft's grisly coiffure must have been the result of intense research. But could the researchers not have kept it to themselves that the stylish German junkie of 1937 walked around looking, as Pauline Kael put it with baleful accuracy, as if she had "black potato chips stuck to her head"?

Keith Carradine in TROUBLE IN MIND (1986)

Every once in a while, the writer-director Alan Rudolph feels the need to make a movie so strange that all his other movies will consider reporting it to Homeland Security if it threatens to move into their neighborhood. At present, the holder of this title is probably his 1999 Kurt Vonnegut adaptation Breakfast of Champions, but Trouble in Mind, a sort-of-futuristic daydream set in "Rain City", a drizzly place where the local criminal kingpin is played by Divine, took on all comers for quite a while there. This is one of the few times Divine played a non-drag role, but he must have brought his make-up case with him, because it looks as if Carradine got into it and made a hell of a mess. He plays a dopey young punk from the sticks who falls in with the wrong crowd and becomes overly enamored of the decadent thrills that Rain City has to offer. The most garish of these are apparently dispensed at the local Supercuts, because he keeps disappearing for awhile and then returning with his hair drenched in sticky-looking glop and twisted into fun house shapes, with his face painted as if he'd gotten a job as David Bowie's stunt double on the cover of Aladdin Sane. All in all, this may have been Keith Carradine's unstudliest hour.

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Vern, Bryan Whitefield

Click here for Part 2!