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)

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Some Came Running proprietor Glenn Kenny recounts his Girlfriend Experience at The Auteurs. Kenny has a role in the film that was pitched to him as “the Harry Knowles of internet escort reviewers.” Kenny was not immediately flattered. “Harry Knowles, if you don’t know, is famous for founding Aint It Cool News, a movie fan boy website of large popularity and no small industry influence. Knowles (and I hope he won't mind me saying this) is also, as Kyle on South Park would put it, a great big fat fuck. I am, hence, slightly put off.”

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PHIL NUGENT GIVES THANKS FOR:

BLUE VELVET (1986)



I'm not sure that it's possible to fully appreciate how thankful some of us are for Blue Velvet, the greatest American movie of the 1980s, without having suffered the indignity of being a movie freak in the 1980s, when this picture arrived like cool water to a man stranded in the desert. The biggest surprise may not have been that David Lynch, who by that time had Eraserhead and The Elephant Man to his credit, had this inside him, but that he was allowed to get it out of his system with the financial assistance of Dino De Laurentiis, who bought the property out of development hell and gave Lynch carte blanche to express his vision, asking only that the sucker come in at no longer than two hours. This was apparently De Laurentiis' way of thanking Lynch for all the unhappy work the director had put in cranking out Dune, another De Laurentiis production. Given that Dune failed to result in the intended franchise hit, nobody in Hollywood would have been surprised, let alone appalled, if Dino had told the boy from Missoula to take a hike, and take his leading man (Kyle MacLachlan, who made his film debut in Dune, and who had signed to appear in a string of sequels that were never going to happen) with him. Instead, De Laurentiis succumbed to an unusually well-timed bout of honor, and given the results, only the churlish would whisper that it's too bad that it didn't last long enough for Lynch to cut a deal with him to make Ronnie Rocket. Because of this, anyone who's thinking of talking some shit about Dino De Laurentiis -- the man whose other credits in 1986 alone included Tai-Pan, King Kong Lives, and Maximum Overdrive -- had better check with me first to make sure you've got the right. Unless you've paid for a movie masterpiece and been married to Silvano Magnano, you probably haven't.

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VADIM RIZOV'S GUILTY PLEASURES:

HEALTH (1980)

A lot of Altman films have bad reputations, at least among non-believers, but HealtH was legendarily deemed unreleasable; planned for a release during the 1980 presidential election, it didn't play anywhere before it was finally let into a grudging run at New York's Film Forum in 1982; it's subsequently plunged into obscurity, seen only in extremely rare revivals and occasionally on the Fox Movie Channel. A memorably facile regular charge against Altman is that he did little more than cluster people together and occasionally zoom in; HealtH basically is that movie, but if you enjoy Altman, it's a blast. A naked attempt to update Nashville for the 1980 election, HealtH's political commentary is just as weak as that of Nashville, with less density to cover it up. Kent Jones once wrote that Altman's "tendency ... to go systematic" almost killed this movie, but if you enjoy that process on top of little more than a string of verbal and visual non sequiturs (my favorite: a guy in a tomato costume — don't ask — jumping into a pool for no good reason), it's well worth tracking down. Truly a fans-only effort.

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Our British friends are delighted with America’s choice as new president, which hasn’t always been the case. (Who can forget the Daily Mirror headline from four years ago, “How Can 59,054,087 People Be So Dumb?”) In fact, they’re already prepared with some advice for President-elect Obama, even if that advice is as seemingly unimportant as the five films he should watch before taking office.

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All summer long we’ve been flipping back the calendar to see what was new and exciting at the neighborhood moviehouse thirty years ago. Today is Labor Day, the unofficial end of summer, and the official grand finale of…The Summer of ’78!

A Wedding

Release Date: August 29, 1978

Cast: Desi Arnaz, Jr., Carol Burnett, Geraldine Chaplin, Lillian Gish, Mia Farrow

The Buzz: If your only problem with Nashville was that you thought there just weren’t enough characters – have we got a movie for you!

Keywords: Wedding, Dancing, Dental Braces, Unplanned Pregnancy, Frog, Greenhouse

The Plot: This is about as plotless as it gets, even by Robert Altman standards. The title is no lie – it’s a wedding.

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In the past, we've discussed here in the OST feature how soundtracks often happily combine musicians and filmmakers at the height of their powers in a collision of sound and vision that justifies and enhances the existence of both soundtrack and film.  In some of these entries -- especially Nashville, Blade Runner, and Fight Club -- we've seen composers and directors perfectly suited for each other, starting great partnerships or merely cementing a similar vision that would inform their work for years to come.  Today, though, we're going to look at an excellent soundtrack that's atypical for both participants:  a film score done by a great composer working out of his element and a skilled director whose career would, follwing this film, go into a long, slow decline.

The Pink Panther series marked director Blake Edwards at the peak of his powers.  While he would never be considered a great director, he at least would develop, largely on the strength of the early installments of the series, as a competent and sure-handed director of comedies, and with the first of the series -- appropriately named The Pink Panther -- he was at his very best, giving the movie exactly the style, atmosphere and pace that it needed.  It's not  Citizen Kane by anyone's measure, but it's light-years away from the dross that he would later helm in movies like A Fine Mess, Skin Deep and Switch.  Henry Mancini, likewise, was a titan of film music, but it was largely through professionalism and dedication than brilliance or inspiration.  He had a reputation as a good, fast worker, capable of quick turnarounds of impressively hook-laden scores; while he may never have taken your breath away, he certainly fought you for its attention.  Mancini had an extensive background in jazz, but it was never his speciality; he was too tempted by the sounds of '50s pop and exotica to nail down anything like an authentic sound.  If anything, he tended to gravitate towards what was known then as "exotic", a sort of symphonic jazz-lite tinted with hints of what would later be called "world music" and heaping helpings of cheese.  He too would decline in power as the decades dragged on, but here, both of them hit their strides something fierce, resulting in a widely hailed comedy classic that produced one of the most memorable figures in cinema, and a soundtrack whose main theme is one of the most recognizable tunes in movie history.

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YOUNG MR. LINCOLN (1939)



One of the most famous lines from any John Ford movie is, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." Not great advice for a reporter, but Ford got away with in this picture, which isn't a straight biopic but a romantic fantasy about the pre-fame Abraham Lincoln (Henry Fonda) as we'd like to imagine it. The movie's script does have a basis in history: the story is built around a murder trial that young Abe took on as a fledgling lawyer. The movie uses this set-up to provide Fonda with the chance to show Lincoln demonstrating his folksy sagacity, his humor, his basic decency and the canniness that would make him a successful politician, but in embryonic form, as a young leading man learning the ropes on his way to becoming a legend. He may not know, as we know, that he's the great Abraham Lincoln. But as we see him figuring out that he has that in him, the movie elevates patriotic corn to the level of folk poetry.

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Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

As was the case with Devil Fish, this low-budget 1976 tale of reptilian horror has made its way onto the Bottom 100 list courtesy of its appearance on Mystery Science Theater 3000. I suspected this would become a recurring problem, and that appears to be the case. (I’m not 100% certain only because I’m not peeking too far ahead on the master list. You see, I view the Unwatchable series as a major league baseball team views its season. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. You’ve got to take it one game at a time, lest ye be overwhelmed by the insurmountable odds of achieving your goal. In this case, my odds are roughly equivalent to those of the Washington Nationals.)

I find the MST3K situation problematic for several reasons.

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Ever since a November afternoon in 1963, a man in a high place with a rifle and a head full of malice directed at the President of the United States has arguably been our most persistent national nightmare.  And from Abraham Lincoln's assassination by one of the nation's best-known actors to the appropriately ham-handed attempt on the life of the ineffectual Gerald Ford by a Manson Family hanger-on, the murder of famous politicians has absorbed our national attention in the news, so why shouldn't it equally influence the kind of movies we watch?  Pete Travis' Vantage Point opens across the country this weekend; early buzz has it that the movie, about the assassination of someone pretending to be the president, is all style and little substance, wasting its interesting cast on a movie filled with jump-cuts and car chases.  The assassination of a political leader, more often than not (especially in recent big-budget actioners like Shooter), is just a McGuffin to carry us to the punch-outs and crashes.  Still, there have been a number of movies in which the killing of a high-profile politician has driven the plot with highly engaging results; today in Take Five, we'll look at a few of the best.

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)

One of the first post-Kennedy assassination films, John Frankenheimer's best film was actually completed before that fatal day in Dallas; but its release was unluckily ill-timed to just after November 22nd, 1963.  It was almost immediately pulled from release and remained unavailable for decades until Frank Sinatra, who played the movie's protagonist, personally intervened to help get it back into production in the VHS era.  It was a generous decision:   the original Manchurian Candidate remains a masterwork of suspense and intrigue, with a towering performance by Laurence Harvey as the doomed assassin of a presidential candidate.  The movie's stunning fantasy sequences, bittersweet moments of drama and romance, constant air of paranoid menace, and final bloody ending make it an assassination classic.

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