Moot Point

1. Life Classes (William D. McGillivray, 1987): I had been told going in that this is the kind of movie professors love, so I was kind of prepared to hate it, but I actually found it really compelling. It’s about this woman who lives in Cape Breton and then she gets pregnant and then she moves to Halifax and she does paint-by-numbers art and then she gets a job as a nude model for life drawing and then she learns to draw for real and becomes self-actualized and I realize how unwatchable I’m making this sound. But it was pretty smart: there’s lots of mocking of the art world (especially this scene where a visiting German sculptor explains that she has people to do all the actual making of her sculptures, she just has the ideas); plus it has all this weird ambiguous stuff with TV; plus her landlady had been displaced from Africville, so it gave me a chance to do my “Canada has a shameful racial history too” spiel to my students.
2. Left Luggage (Jeroen Krabbé, 1998): “Hey Brenda, want to watch a self-consciously excessive melodrama with a cute kid in it?” Yes, yes I do. It’s also about Jewish identity and stuff (apparently the whole over-the-top sentimentality is characteristic in Yiddish popular theatre and literature). Isabella Rossellini was really good as the little boy’s mom, but the story was mainly about the nanny, Laura Fraser, who is not so much good at acting.
3. Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer (John McNaughton, shot in 1986, released 1989*): This is a really interesting movie, that did a lot of really smart things stylistically — like the tableaux with the murder victims that sets up the end. But I don’t know if I can say I really enjoyed watching it because there’s not a lot of pleasure of any kind to be had in the watching. The film is most famous for its affectless portrayal of the violence: there’s no one to sympathize with, as the victims are just a parade of mostly dialogue-less women, who we mostly just see after they’re dead, and Henry and Otis are so powerfully unsympathetic that it’s hard to root for them even in a perverse Norman Bates way. You’re kind of just left…watching them kill people. That said, it’s kind of a fascinating entry in the serial killer subgenre of horror with all the over-explaining of sex hangups and whatnot: it’s hard to know what to do with Henry’s weirdly inconsistent story of killing his mama, with the way he wipes his mouth after Becky kisses him, with Otis’s weird gay moment.
   Actually the main reason I decided I should watch this was reading Analee Newitz’s account of it in her serial killers chapter Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture, which is the rare film studies book that I’d recommend to someone who isn’t a giant film studies nerd but still cares about Marxism and horror movies (which I guess almost presumes you’re a giant film studies nerd). It’s marked cultural studies/film and while it’s a little bit lighter on textual analysis than I’d like (because I am big on close reading), it’s hugely insightful and thought-provoking, and shows a strong grasp on the theory without necessarily requiring her reader to be up on Lukács. Anyway, her basic argument about serial killers is that they’re reflective of capitalism because they mass-produce bodies like capitalism mass produces stuff, because they are alienated, etc. She also takes these kinds of American stories back to their historical literary influences. (I kept thinking of Man Bites Dog and Cannibal Man, but she was just doing American movies.)
4. Pink Flamingos (John Waters, 1972): I am a big John Waters fan, but I am more of a fan of his slightly more accessible 80s and 90s period — Polyester on through Serial Mom — but since I have written academically about his work, I felt like I should see this. Oh boy. You know how sometimes you see movies that were controversial when they came out and now whatever was supposed to have been shocking just seems banal? This is not one of those movies — and I spend a lot of time around fairly “extreme” movies — but man. You mostly just read about a couple of the scenes — the sex thing with the chickens and then the dog shit at the end, both of which are actually as hard to watch as you can imagine, even if you’re kind of prepared — but there’s a whole panoply of other kind of horrifying stuff that never gets mentioned: the male stripper with the gaping anus, the cannibalism, the incest, the poor girls the Marbles keep in the basement to be baby machines in their adoption business, oh and the castration. Actually, mentioning the whole “keeping girls locked in the basement to produce babies for profit” because of the thing that really struck me watching it: as much as it’s a movie about confronting you with bad taste, the whole thing is really tied up in ideas of class. Our heros live in a trailer park; the villains live in a middle class house. Also, I keep mentioning the baby-selling because to me that’s patriarchal capitalism taken to its logical conclusion — people’s bodies reduced to machines of production. There is also the whole party with the eating the police, another example of turning bodies into flesh, but this time the perpetrators are on the wrong side of capitalism. I could write like 5 different papers on this movie, but I feel like someone’s probably already written all of them. I’m making it sound horrible and dry, but it’s a really funny movie and is actually really engaging, with the really strong Baltimore-accented narration and the ’50s rock soundtrack and the utter joy to watch that is the late Divine. I picked this still because it made me think of how Divine fits into the whole “capitalist monsters” category. Newitz gives a chapter to the media and its monstrosities — and I think the fact that Pink Flamingos ends in a murder-cum-publicity-stunt really underlines how much it’s a horror movie as much as it’s anything else. (See also: Serial Mom for more John Waters serial killer media circus action.)
5. Leatherheads (George Clooney, 2008): This was really entertaining and Clooney and Zellweger (surprisingly) were a lot of fun to watch together; I just wish they’d had more of the banter. But it’s kind of an odd experience. For one, the script and the acting styles are really reminiscent of your classic ’30s screwball comedy. However, a lot of the cinematography and editing is really very modern and feels really out of place with Clooney’s mugging, which would not necessarily have been out of place in a Cary Grant comedy. So you’re kind of always aware that you’re watching this exercise in recreating an old genre with the old conventions — similar to The Good German, actually. It starts off with this interpolation of actual video of a football game and black-and-white photos of a football game, which kind of seems to be announcing its nostalgia, which might work if it was an art movie, but doesn’t really for audiences who show up wanting to be entertained. John Krasinski was better than I expected, but only because I read reviews that made it sound like he was just doing Jim Halpert. He does have a pretty limited range and Jim Halpert is obviously the best thing he can ever do, but I thought he did a reasonably good job of making his golden boy who kind of coasts on charm be pretty sympathetic. In conclusion, Clooney’s a good director but I do think he has kind of a nostalgia problem.

*It had troubles with the MPAA and was initially X-rated for its “moral tone.”