High Sierra (1941)

From "filth" to film noir. This film is noted for vaulting its star, Humphrey Bogart, from supporting player to lead man status. The story, an old gangster employs the help of a younger one (Bogart) to pull off a heist at a California casino, has some big names attached. John Huston, Bogart buddy, co-wrote the screenplay and its based on a novel by Scarface scribe William R. Burnett. I love a good gangster heist picture, and I'm relatively certain no one will be ingesting dog feces during the course of the film!

Perverted is not a synonym for filthy.

And neither is bitchy. Or boring. In a pre-post chat, my partner-in-crime gave me a heads up that there is a serious failure in imagination re: the filthiness of Divine and her nemeses. And boy was she right. What the two parties do to each other and themselves didn't strike me as filthy so much as what an adolescent boy might think was gross and/or titillating. And you just buy yourself trouble when you have the "filthiest person in the world" in your movie, and then try to illustrate said filthiness. It's always going to fail. It's like making Ryan Gosling the best pick-up artist in the world, and then showing him pick people up. It's better to just let people's imaginations fill in the blanks.

Of course, if John Waters had done that, he wouldn't have had a story to tell. The characters were all cartoons, and there was this semi-disturbing misogynistic undertone which is odd for a movie celebrating drag. As I noted in the blurb, I was really dreading this one, and maybe it's because I looked away during all the parts I thought would trigger my gag reflex, but it wasn't nearly as hard to watch as I thought. Well, it was "hard" to watch something so amateurish and unpolished. It's clear that Divine is a brilliant entertainer, and my favorite parts were her clearly just riffing. But it's so unlike the shiny Waters movies I've seen previously.

I'm guessing that maybe, for its time, Pink Flamingos was shocking or boundary testing? I know it has this cult following, and for that reason I'm glad I watched it, but I rolled my eyes more often than I dropped my jaw.

Bet I Can Find Worse

This is one of those films that I was most definitely not looking forward to. Unless you've been living under a rock, you've heard of some of the things that happen in the film--probably one of the three actually disgusting acts. The problems are MANY, of course. In no particular order:

1. A general lack of acting that results in every actor yelling ALL of the lines in a weird monotone. There is no nuance. That seems like it would be important in a film about breaking taboos; otherwise you're just acting like an ape slinging poo just because the poo is there and fling-able.

2. John Waters being high when he wrote the film which resulted in a repetition of just about all of the lines. This comes in two forms: a literal repeat ("Call the police! Call the police!") and a rephrasing ("He's been castrated! His penis is gone!").

3 The strange definition of "filth." So, yeah, a contortionist defecating, Divine eating dog feces, Crackers involving chickens in sex, and Raymond's penchant for indecent exposure seems to fit an idea of "filthy." But, arson? Imprisoning women in order to impregnate them and sell the babies to lesbians? Murder? Those things are illegal and seriously warped but I'd argue they're not "filthy" just by definition.

4. What the "filthiest people in the world" can't take, what crosses the line. Catching the butler in drag? Seriously? It seems the filthiest people in the world would take that as an opportunity for some other fetish. Being sent feces in the mail? You can't stand that but you'll have a guy perform the act at your birthday party? And you can eat dog feces? Having a pre-op transgender woman flash you as you stand in a park with a piece of meat tied to your penis is one step too far?

5. Licking furniture causes it to become possessed?

6. While I appreciated the loooooooooong lead ins to all of the disgusting parts so I could avert my eyes if needed, they kind of kill the impact. I figured out that the blow job was going to happen three or four rooms before they even started talking about it; in fact if the bj didn't happen, THAT would have been more disturbing after all of that build-up. (Meanwhile, to mention the bj--that didn't phase me one bit because it never seemed like those two were actually related and, well, Devine is a big 'ol drag queen so not his mama at all).

7. We have to watch this film but not one of the Jackass films? At least they don't try to act.

Overall, the film feels very amateur. It's obviously low budget but you can do wonderful things with little to no money in film. However, when you add bad acting, a terrible script, and a string of gross (and supposed to be gross but just don't meet the mark) acts to a low budget, not to mention poor editing and poor sets (you can see the Egg Man's breath when he proposes) and you get a disaster. Add in the fact that it's not quite forty years since the film's release and I don't think we need to see this before we die. It doesn't hold up and, save the two feces scenes, I wasn't incredibly shocked by any of it. It was just sad. It felt like a bunch of high school boys got a hold of a video camera. Or, speaking to the age of the film, now that they all have cameras in their phones, they probably already have more disturbing things backlogged. I'd go do a quick Youtube search for something more "filthy" ("Two girls, one cup" comes to mind immediately) but I'd rather retain my pizza, thanks.

Meanwhile, I hope I've met the quota for the use of the word "feces" for this whole project.

And the books says this is "quite possibly the best worst movie ever made--certainly one of the most notorious and beloved pieces of trash cinema to come out of the American underground." At least we're starting off by acknowledging that the movie sucks. But why do we need to watch a bad movie? Apparently just because a LOT of other people have watched it.

So, my question for you Tracy, should we watch a movie just because a lot of other people have watched it? At what point to we consign this to the "not worth it" and "of too little merit to perpetuate" category and move on as a society?

Pink Flamingos (1972)

When Nat and I started this little project, I vowed to watch only 1000 films. Why? Pink Flamingos. I had heard about a scene involving a dog, a drag queen, and doo-doo, and I didn't think I could get through it without gagging. Well, maybe it was Performance that did it, but three dozen movies in, I'm willing to try just about anything. Plus, a little co-blogger told me that I'll have plenty of time to look away. This black comedy by sleazy-and-proud cult director John Waters is hailed as one of the most transgressive of its time and type. Time to see if the taboo gross-outs for which its notorious seem as out-of-bounds as they did in the early 70s!

Links to Review Posts for this Film:
Tracy's "Perverted is not a synonym for filthy"
Natalie's "Bet I Can Find Worse"

Annie Hall was a saint.

It took me three days to get through The Sorrow and the Pity. I cannot conceive of seeing it in the theatre like Annie did.

From the title, I thought it would be a lot more sorrowful and pitiful than it was. There were definitely horrendous things described, but I was expecting more Holocaust or POW footage, not the interview heavy style that the director used. I did learn quite a bit, though. I didn't know the degree to which the Vichy government not only enabled, but also actively aided and abetted the German war machine, including the Holocaust. Collaboration is different than straight-up occupation, and I feel I have a better understanding of that part of the war. I thought that the time spent with the Frenchman who joined the SS as a kid was pretty chilling. His warning to passionate young people to avoid being seduced by ideology is particularly important, I would imagine, in France in the late 60s. I was also, of course, monumentally impressed with the Resistance fighters themselves. I doubt I could have been that brave, and like most really brave people, they don't think themselves brave at all. But, that's something I could learn from a book or History Channel doc. What about this movie makes it important as a movie?

I thought the direction/interviewing POV was pretty subtle. Clearly, the film had an aggressive pro-Resistance stance, but that wasn't shoved down the viewer's throat, Michael Moore-style. Usually, the interviewer let the subjects hang themselves by the way they described their failure to oppose the Vichy government, or their failure to have any remorse about their position at all. This was true with the French subjects, but especially so with the fat cigar-chomping, war-medal wearing, "former" Nazi who seems to have been interviewed at his daughter's wedding. The footage of German propaganda was shocking in its overt racism, and I thought the archival footage was well integrated into the larger movie. But that's sort of film school stuff.

I wish the timeline had been clearer--the movie jumps around a lot during the war years, making it hard for me to get a sense of whether it got easier or harder to resist the occupiers, and/or whether more or less people participated as the war dragged on. I also suspect (from what I could overhear of the English-speaking subjects) that the translation was a bit spotty. So, I'm guessing the book includes this because of its subject matter, not its technique?

Read a Book Instead

I have to confess: I stopped paying attention to this film after 18 minutes and some odd seconds.

I left it running and went in search of what I wrote about Irene Nemirovsky's book Suite Francaise (here if you're interested). And then I went in physical search of my copy of a collection of her other novels (David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn, and The Courilof Affair). And then I started reading David Golder instead of paying attention to the film at all. I looked up at one point to see a skin being shaken/pulled off a dead rabbit, felt justified in my decision, and started to write this. Once the first disc was over, I thought about "watching" the second but it contained just as much footage for me to ignore so I popped the discs back into the Netflix envelope and into the mail slot immediately.

My problem with this film is mainly that it's boring. But, it is boring for a couple of reasons:
1. I couldn't immediately detect an overwhelming narrative. I need an order to all of these things being strung together and I should be able to find that within the first 18 minutes. Part of any effective argument of any sort is to interest and draw in the audience. If I'm not drawn in, I don't see your argument and, worse, I don't care about your argument.
2. I already knew France wasn't the model of resistance to the Nazi occupation so none of this is exactly new information. And, to present information I was already basically aware of in a non-narrative boring manner doesn't lead to great results in terms of my attention span. I'm 100% sure that the film contains something, even if it's tiny, that I don't know already and that I would be interested to know.
3. The length. Yes, I basically gave up after 18 minutes (thank God we made a "have to post something" rule rather than a "have to pay full attention to the whole movie" rule). With a narrative and a less imposing length breathing down my neck, I might have tried to stick it out. But when two discs worth of boring documentary show up from Netflix, I'm daunted.
4. It's French. *Sigh* I know I must have seen a French movie at some point that I liked but so far in this project they're all big snooze-fests in incredibly disappointing ways.

Le livre dit (yeah, I looked that up at the 52 minute mark of the film running in the background) basically we should watch this film because it helped bring to light the inconsistencies of narrative about French occupation: "For over two decades, French society seemed unwilling to examine the moral questions raised by the German Occupation." And, a favorite reason of the book, the film was banned from French national television and had to open in art houses instead.

My thought: read a book instead.

The Sorrow and the Pity (1969)

When this French documentary's number came up, I laughed out loud. Not because I find either the Vichy government's collaboration with the Nazi occupiers or the French Resistance funny, but because of Annie Hall. Alvy Singer always makes his girlfriend Annie go see The Sorrow and the Pity when they arrive to a film too late, and it freaking cracks me up--the title so perfectly encapsulates a movie a Woody Allen character would be obsessed with. As far as the movie itself goes, I only want to see it so I can laugh more authentically at AH. I'm sure that in the late 60s, barely twenty years after the war, the idea that the situation in France during the war was pretty intense was interesting and unexplored. Now, not so much. We'll get through it, Nat, and when Annie's number comes up, it will all be worth it!

Links to Review Posts for this Film:
Tracy's "Annie Hall was a saint"
Natalie's "Read a Book Instead"