John Waters
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Twin Peaks: The Return: “Something is Missing”
To a generation viewers groomed by two and a half decades of “outside the box” television ranging from X-Files, Northern Exposure, and Six Feet Under to the arabesque mysteries of Lost, Broadchurch, The Killing, True Detective, and Westworld (to name but a few), the hype over Twin Peaks must have always felt overblown. Those of us who lived it the first time around can only say, “Trust us, you had to be there.” Played straight (maybe even a little corny), but with a twist, Twin Peaks captured the American imagination and became the must-watch event of 1990. Simultaneously nostalgic and […]
by Gabriel Wardell on Jul 31, 2017 -
“Can You Make All Your Money Back Just Showing on TV Every Mother’s Day?”: John Waters on Serial Mom
The last couple of months have been good ones for John Waters fans. Last month Criterion put out a gorgeous restoration of the director’s first truly great film, Multiple Maniacs, and on May 9 Shout Factory is set to release Serial Mom, a movie Waters made 24 years after Multiple Maniacs with the full resources of Hollywood at his disposal. A hilariously provocative riff on the true crime genre, Serial Mom follows suburban wife and mom Beverly (Kathleen Turner) as she’s driven insane by everything from loud gum chewing to women wearing white after Labor Day; a pristine overseer of […]
by Jim Hemphill on Apr 25, 2017 -
Top 10 Round-Up: John Waters, Cahiers du Cinéma, Sight and Sound
Year end top 10 lists are, for some reason, an inflammatory exercise. There are those who balk at the notion of reducing 365-ish days of output to tiers, others who seem to pride themselves on plucking unreleased titles from obscurity, along with the underlying question of authority — as though a given arrangement must be the chosen one. In any event, I just think they’re fun, and few, year after year, are as pithy as John Waters’ list for Artforum. Unsurprisingly, Maps to the Stars and Nymphomaniac make the cut, but he also gives a shout-out to the more middle of the road charmer Gloria, […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Dec 1, 2014 -
Watch: John Waters Talks Female Trouble and his Career with J. Hoberman
“Improvisation is like a face lift: if you notice, it’s bad.” John Waters is typically adroit, on-point and witty in this 25-minute conversation with critic J. Hoberman, conducted at Lincoln Center earlier this month on the opening night of the adeptly titled career retrospective “Fifty Years of John Waters: How Much Can You Take?” Topics of discussion include Waters’ influences, filming Divine in prison, and what it’s like to look back at his past provocations.
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 24, 2014 -
Day 2 of 19: Zach Clark and White Reindeer
In an independent landscape of shaky, handheld cinematography, loose improvisation and bare-bones sets, the precise and punchy dark comedies of Zach Clark stand out. Recalling the days in which low budgets meant inventive art direction, heightened emotions and a rebellion against a default naturalism, Clark’s third movie, White Reindeer modulates the director’s deadpan, quasi-Sirkian camp into something more delicately bittersweet. Anna Margaret Hollyman plays a suburban real estate agent who returns home one holiday season to find her husband murdered. Learning he had a mistress, an African-American stripper, she journeys into a world where kinky fantasy is really just another […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 7, 2014 -
Five Questions with I Am Divine Director Jeffrey Schwarz
Before there was RuPaul’s Drag Race, hell, before there was RuPaul, there was the divinely dangerous Divine, actor, singer, drag queen, provocateur extraordinaire. Willing to do not almost anything but anything on screen (including eating dog feces for Pink Flamingos, one of the many films he made with the legendary shocksploitation director, John Waters), all in the name of art. Starting its theatrical run this week at the Cinema Village in NYC and the Alamo Drafthouse Slaughter Lane in Austin, I Am Divine tells the behind-the-scenes story of this force of nature that left no taboo unturned. Filmmaker interviewed the doc’s director, Jeffrey Schwarz, over email. […]
by Mary Anderson Casavant on Oct 24, 2013 -
THE SONOMA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Once-in-a-lifetime experiences abounded at this year’s Sonoma International Film Festival, a boutique event in the heart of northern California’s wine country – complete with complementary wine and cheese before every screening (and a trailer featuring an animated, tap-dancing wine bottle named Tipsy whose tagline read, “Is everything out of focus, or is it just me?”). Held early April, a week apart and an hour’s drive – yet a world away – from that longest running festival in the U.S., SIFF serves as a worthy reminder that attending non-market-driven fests not only allows one the opportunity to discover overlooked diamonds amongst […]
by Lauren Wissot on Apr 24, 2012 -
Director Zach Clark on Vacation!
I first met Zach Clark last October when his excitingly subversive, sex-scene-less SXSW hit Modern Love Is Automatic opened Pornfilmfestival Berlin (where my own short The Story of Ramb O had its premiere). Since we barely had the chance to chat in the buzzing, jam-packed Moviemento hub, I was thrilled when I heard recently that Clark’s follow-up Vacation! (pictured above) was already on the festival circuit and would be playing theatrically at Brooklyn’s own reRun Gastropub Theater in May. Finally I had an excuse to find out what makes this offbeat yet seemingly well-adjusted director of a feature about a […]
by Lauren Wissot on May 13, 2011 -
JENNIFER KROOT, “IT CAME FROM KUCHAR”
George and Mike Kuchar are two of the great camp experimental filmmakers of all time. They represented a pastiche heavy, less self-serious strand of the New American Cinema’s downtown explosion in the early 1960s. Evangelized by Jonas Mekas in the pages of The Village Voice, their work spans over 700 short and feature films, almost all of the executed on the flimsiest of budgets, many of them made in an almost artisanal, fiercely individualistic mode. In a Critics’ Poll of the 100 best films of the 20th century, appearing originally in the January 4, 2000 edition of The Village Voice, […]
by Brandon Harris on Apr 7, 2010
