Film Notes: Pink Flamingos / Female Trouble

In all of cinema’s short history, has there ever been another joke as filthy, funny, perverse – and of course, well-earned – as the canonization of John Waters? At this exact moment, you can go out and spend forty hard-earned dollars on a “culturally important” boutique Blu-ray of a film which concludes on a cross-dresser eating literal, actual dog turds. If there's a more beautiful representation of the lurking good taste which occasionally threatens to puncture the bubble of our stolid society, I've yet to see it. But then again, Pink Flamingos was never about good taste.

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Furiosa’s Mythmaking Roars

George Miller and company’s Mad Max movies run on a variety of tensions, and from these tensions arises impeccably staged set pieces, striking character work, and narrative flexibility in the form of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.

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A Walk In A Killer’s Shoes, or, The In A Violent Nature Review

What if Terrence Malick (Days of Heaven, Knight of Cups) took on Friday the 13th? That conceit is the backbone of Chris Nash’s In A Violent Nature, which on paper comes across as a spiritual sequel to that one Saturday Night Live sketch of Wes Anderson making a home invasion horror movie. Pairing wistfully beautiful shots of the Canadian wilderness with over-the-top violence and gore, In A Violent Nature becomes just a bit more than Mad Libs creation.

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Baby Blood: Make Pregnancy Gross Again

Baby Blood transgressively counters the ever so nauseating idealized, kitsch aesthetic of pregnancy that we are accustomed to. The kitsch aesthetic of pregnancy arises out of societal expectations of what a mother should be, transforming what is a neutral occurrence into a moral imperative. The horror aesthetic in Baby Blood turns these expectations on their head, creating a narrative that encourages the pregnant character to refuse all repressive expectations of motherhood and pregnancy she encounters.

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Nature’s Phantom: The Guised Violence of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist

Following the breakout success of his Oscar-winning Drive My Car, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi gained a larger audience: a Western one that was primed to see his vision expand, perhaps beyond the borders of his native Japan. But his followup, Evil Does Not Exist, instead remains within his present field of vision and becomes his most contained film to date.

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