richard rush - The Screengrab

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

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!

The Top 20 Movies About Movies (Part One)

According to conventional Hollywood wisdom (which, of course, is never wrong), movies about the moviemaking process are bad box office bets, since the subject is far too esoteric for mainstream audiences, too “inside” for Joe Multiplex. Never mind that Americans are obsessed with pop culture, with every other person in the nation either writing a screenplay, uploading their own mini-masterpieces to YouTube and/or tracking box office returns, buzzworthy coming attractions and day-to-day movie star minutiae in every form of media from Entertainment Tonight and our own humble website to CNN and Cigar Aficionado magazine. And never mind the fact that movies about movies are just as likely to succeed (Get Shorty, The Blair Witch Project...yes, The Blair Witch Project! They were making a movie, remember?) or fail (that awful Alec Baldwin/John Cusack movie I rented a few months ago about a fake movie financed by the FBI...ugh) as any other genre.

Naturally, as film geeks, we here at The Screengrab have always had a special place in our black little hearts for stories about the high-powered moguls and desperate hustlers drawn like doomed moths to the lights, cameras and especially action of the Dream Factory (in all its forms).

Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll be rushing out to see Ben Stiller’s latest comedy (about a group of spoiled actors who start off shooting a war film and wind up in a real shooting war), but the release of Tropic Thunder does give us a chance to reflect on past favorites from our favorite post-modern genre: movies about movies!

Baghead Snubs New York, L.A.

Those of who live in the 99.999% of the country that lies between New York and Los Angeles long ago came to terms with being second class citizens when it comes to movie release dates. Sure, we’ll get your Indys and Hulks at the same time as everyone else, but it’s always irritating when the rave reviews for a There Will Be Blood start rolling in and we still have to wait two months to see it. We’ll begrudgingly admit that it does make some sense for movies seeking buzz to open in the two largest media centers first, particularly late in the year when Oscar-qualifying rules require week-long runs in New York and L.A. theaters. Still, in an online age when buzz is transmitted globally with a single keystroke, the platform release begins to seem like an outmoded convention.

Still, it’s at least somewhat gratifying when a movie bucks the conventional wisdom and opens in one of these other American cities you may have read about or seen on the TV.