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The Freedom to Be Filthy: Pink Flamingos at 51

Posted on by Establishing Shot

Two women and a man laugh and smile at one another

Still from Pink Flamingos

Underground Film Series curator Justin Bonthuys details how the John Waters trashterpiece is still relevant over 50 years later.

Recently, I was talking to a friend from Brazil about screening Pink Flamingos at IU Cinema. After showing him a clip, he asked me why the film was given that title. In trying to explain the low-culture, kitsch association that artist Don Featherstone’s lawn ornament had accrued since it was first released in 1958, I found myself unable to think of a contemporary equivalent. In the decades since the early 1970s, notions of taste have become so democratized and expanded so broadly that no single item can be said to evoke this same mix of cheerful naivety and high-brow scorn. After all, even Croc sandals have collaborated with the likes of high-fashion brands like Balenciaga. Ultimately, we have underground and midnight films to thank for freeing us from these oppressive middle-class norms, and Pink Flamingos did it first and did it best.

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Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide: Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine

Posted on by Chris Forrester

A man in an elaborate feathered costume stands onstage with confetti falling

Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Brian Slade in Velvet Goldmine

Chris Forrester explains how filmmaker Todd Haynes expertly crafted a David Bowie biopic without actually making a David Bowie biopic.

While much better known for his vivid invocations and reworking of classical melodrama — Safe (1995), Far From Heaven (2002), Mildred Pierce (2011), Carol (2015), and May December (2023) — there are few filmmakers who’ve more inventively and rewardingly chronicled the story of popular music than Todd Haynes; as each passing year yields one or two more buzzy-but-dispensable Serious Musician Biopics that awkwardly straddle the gap between box-office crowd-pleaser and “Nominated for Eight Academy Awards” ambitions (A Complete Unknown, Elvis, Rocketman, Bohemian Rhapsody) to add to the canon of long, rambling indulgences that reveal little more about their subjects or the contexts in which they forged their way to canonization than a cursory listen through a few hit singles might tell you, Haynes’ are rich, insightful texts that know better than to flatten the mystique of a great artist into a 135-minute Wikipedia dramatization.

Beginning with 1987’s ingeniously lo-fi Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, this still-unspooling thread in the singular American filmmaker’s oeuvre has yielded a pair of documentaries (2021’s The Velvet Underground, and 2013’s Six by Sondheim) and musical dramas (1998’s Velvet Goldmine and 2007’s I’m Not There) that might each be considered a standard for its potential niche. The jewel in this particular crown — which is to say, excepting the more widely beloved of Haynes’s popular melodramas — is Velvet Goldmine, a glimmering tribute to the glam rock era that prefigures the approach of Haynes’s wry masterwork I’m Not There with a not-quite-biopic about an androgynous, Bowie-esque rocker’s disappearance.

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Piercing the Toast: How The Birdcage Changed Cinema

Posted on by Michaela Owens

A man puts his hand on another man's back as they sit at a restaurant

Nathan Lane and Robin Williams in The Birdcage

Michaela Owens contextualizes the production history of the comedy classic directed by Mike Nichols and penned by Elaine May.

A hilarious farce about a gay couple and the outrageous ruse they’re willing to go through in order to convince their son’s future in-laws that they live a quiet, decidedly heteronormative life, The Birdcage has been beloved by audiences ever since it was first released in 1996. But that adoration was never a guarantee; in fact, when the film was announced in 1994, the political and cultural climate for a big-budget comedy celebrating a family helmed by two gay dads couldn’t have been worse.

Let’s rewind further than that, though. The Birdcage‘s long journey to the screen actually started in 1966 with the play Staircase. Inspired by the plot of a gay couple’s volatile but ultimately loving relationship, French actor Jean Poiret wrote his highly successful 1973 play La Cage aux Folles, which in turn became a 1978 film. Entranced by Poiret’s play, infamous producer and show-biz madman Allan Carr wanted to do an American film version reuniting Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, the stars of the 1959 gender-bending classic Some Like It Hot (which IU Cinema will be showing on September 27!). Carr was only given the U.S. stage rights, though, forcing him to pivot to Broadway, resulting in a Tony-winning musical smash. A film remake was the next logical step, but after producing such misfires as the 1989 Academy Awards ceremony, Carr was out.

Enter Mike Nichols.

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Passages of Time in Sorry, Baby

Posted on by Noni Ford

Film still of Eva Victor and Naomi Ackie lying on the ground in Sorry, Baby

Naomi Ackie and Eva Victor

Noni Ford discusses the authenticity and friendship imbued in Eva Victor’s acclaimed feature debut. Please note this article contains references to the central story of the film, which involves sexual assault and its ramifications.

“It’s a lot to be wherever.” — Agnes from Sorry, Baby

Memories can be so strong that at times it can feel like there’s a mini movie theater in your mind replaying slivers of your past where you are both the viewer in the audience and the projectionist rolling the film at a moment’s notice. And yet memory can feel slippery sometimes, and it can be hard to define and to collect the tendrils of that night so long ago. Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby is not interested in laying out the before and after of Agnes’s life in exact chronology of ‘that night’ in question. It’s also not interested in voyeuristically displaying the sexual assault at the center of the plot; we don’t need to see it to feel its impact. Our guts twist all the same as we watch her graduate advisor’s house with the lights on and the curtains drawn as the light seeps out of the sky.

People don’t really get shocked the way they used to because it can feel like we’ve seen everything possible on screen. It sometimes feels like in a bid to knock people from complacency and draw crowds, filmmakers are in a competition to find what they can show next to reclaim that old shock value again. It makes this film bolder for not indulging in that race, and for instead showing us these moments and conversations in Agnes’s existence that carry the subtlety and the horror of moving through life after someone has profoundly hurt you. Female rage here isn’t rearing its head by taking the wheel with us cheering it on from the sidelines, it is simmering and present with little outlet. And that feels honest — that’s the part that touches you, the viewer, the most.

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The Many Lives of Inspector Clouseau

Posted on by Michaela Owens

Peter Sellers squints his eyes in disapproval

Peter Sellers as Jacques Clouseau

Michaela Owens takes a deep dive into the various iterations of the iconic detective at the heart of the Pink Panther franchise.

Although Peter Sellers’s career offers many, many chameleonic characters — some even in the same film — there is perhaps one who looms the largest in the cultural conscience: Inspector Jacques Clouseau of the Pink Panther films. However, the legendary role wasn’t even his to begin with. It was Peter Ustinov’s.

The original cast of The Pink Panther (1963) not only included Ustinov but also Ava Gardner as Clouseau’s wife Simone, a role that had actually been turned down by Janet Leigh. When Gardner left the film because her demands for a personal staff weren’t met, Ustinov departed too, delaying production for weeks which also resulted in the production company suing the actor for breach of contract. While vacationing in Rome one weekend, writer/director Blake Edwards ended up meeting Sellers and quickly cast him.

The star of The Pink Panther, however, wasn’t the bumbling police inspector — it was intended to be the always delightful David Niven as the suave gentleman thief Charles Litton, nicknamed “the Phantom.” Niven expected the film to be a big opportunity for his career, but as production got underway, he realized that the small supporting role of Clouseau started to get more and more screentime. Sellers’s slapstick ran away with the movie, so much so that when the Academy Awards wanted to play The Pink Panther theme as Niven walked onstage one year, he requested a change, saying, “That’s not really my film.”

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New Americas Cinema presents: The Fishbowl (2023)

Posted on by Establishing Shot

A woman hangs her head out the window of a moving vehicle as she closes her eyes

Facing an endless battle with cancer, Noelia (Isel Rodríguez) is ready to accept her fate. Much to the dismay of her doting boyfriend (Maximiliano Rivas), she stops treatment and flees to her native Vieques, a Puerto Rican island off the coast of the mainland. Vieques itself is in recovery, having been contaminated thanks to its long history as a U.S. Naval testing ground. Much of the island remains closed off due to hazardous waste, which has caused a spike of cancer cases like Noelia’s. Joining her mother and childhood friend in the movement to make the island a safer place, Noelia must contend with the legacies of colonialism and come to terms with her own health.

One of the few women to have directed a fiction film made in Puerto Rico, writer/director Glorimar Marrero Sánchez was inspired to make The Fishbowl after her mother’s own battle with cancer. The film had its world premiere at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival where it moved audiences with its tender, defiant story, and it became the first Puerto Rican film to earn a nomination from the Goya Awards (Spain’s equivalent to the Oscars). Called “a gracious middle finger to what the people of Puerto Rico must endure” by Screen Speck and “a call to action” by Latina Media Co., you can learn more about the film by checking out Marrero Sánchez’s interviews with the Sundance Institute, Cinema Femme, and ArtsQuest Bethlehem.

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