We consider ourselves worldly folks here at the Screengrab, with a wide array of interests and an encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture minutiae. But every once in a while, we’re reminded that there’s an inexhaustible supply of weirdness in the world. Perhaps my colleagues were already aware of “Stalags,” but I’d never heard of them before reading Beyond the Multiplex this morning. “As many older Israelis apparently remember, the then-new nation was afflicted by a perverse pop-culture craze in the early '60s, at a time when nearly half the population consisted of Holocaust survivors, nationalist sentiment ran high and moral codes were extremely puritanical. Yet the newsstands in the Tel Aviv bus station sold racks of semi-pornographic pulp novels known as 'Stalags,' whose utterly implausible, Penthouse Forum-meets-Marquis de Sade plots ventured into the most forbidden terrain imaginable. Stalags all followed essentially the same formula: An American or British World War II pilot (generally not Jewish) is shot down behind enemy lines, where he is imprisoned, tortured and raped by an entire phalanx of sadistic, voluptuous female SS officers. His body violated but his spirit unbroken, the plucky Yank or Brit escapes in the end to rape and murder his captors.” Hey, good times! These Stalags are the subject of a new documentary by Ari Libsker, who “meets a couple of the dubious characters who collect them; one insists that his face be obscured on camera (like a corporate whistleblower or a child molester on 60 Minutes), and also appears to believe that the scenarios depicted actually occurred during World War II, or at least could have.”
Speaking of porn, Glenn Kenny is inspired by the release of Zombie Strippers to reminisce about his visit to the Adult Video News Awards, which he attended in his capacity as editor of a famed David Foster Wallace piece for Premiere magazine. “Cat with a C or K wanted to know whether it would be a good idea to go to acting school, as she thought that might be a useful place to make connections. She was stage and table dancing at the Cheetah, and wanted to step up, and was wondering about doing some loops, but not sure it would stigmatize her. I sympathized. But I advised her that going to acting school in order to make "connections" was kind of a fallacy. What you want to go to acting school for, I said, was to explore yourself and find your inner instrument...”
In a more wholesome corner of the blogosphere, Reverse Shot pays tribute to Teri Garr. “With her slightly askew beauty and her compelling but unorthodox mix of neuroses and earthy sexiness, Teri Garr was always destined for underappreciation. Usually relegated to small parts and cast more often as screechy second bananas than leading love interests, Garr nevertheless always manages to cast off tremendous light from whatever corner she's been put into, whether she's vacuously rolling in the hay (Young Frankenstein) or staving off the salacious come-ons of Martin Mull (Mr. Mom); and in more serious-minded supporting roles, as in Close Encounters of the Third Kind or Michael Apted's unfairly forgotten Firstborn, she's played conflicted, angry wives and mothers without the slightest hint of trying to ingratiate herself to the audience.”
At Scanners, Jim Emerson is still writing about Judd Apatow’s taste in leading men. “Apatow makes movies about guys -- and heterosexual relationships with women, but mainly about what used to be known as ‘male bonding.’ (The fashionable term now is ‘bro-mance,’ which is cuter and invoked largely by what used to be called ‘metrosexuals.’) The Apatow guy tends to be underemployed, white, slobby, geeky, smelly, childish (not just ‘childlike) and more or less happy, unaware that he's desperate for a woman to complete him. Then, once he becomes aware, he's not entirely sure that's possible, or desirable. This, I submit, is a minor breakthrough in romantic comedy. OK, perhaps I am single and bitter, but I'm also right.”
And finally, this week in List-o-Mania brings the Cinematical Seven: Films with Hilarious Nudity. We started this post with Nazi porn, and we end it with “the horrifically transfixing moment when a naked man turns his back to the audience, bends over, and serenades us with his butt” in Pink Flamingos. We just give and give and give.