- Pink Flamingos
This week, the Logan Theatre is showing the musical comedy Hairspray, exploitation legend John Waters’s crossover hit. Waters, of course, is known for his ultratrashy, down and dirty comedies, shot guerilla-style on the streets of Baltimore and often featuring drag queens and miscreants in the cast. But he’s enjoyed as much if not more success in the mainstream, where his campy style jells perfectly with Hollywood gaudiness. I’m wouldn’t call myself a Waters devotee, but I’m drawn to the brazen and outright confrontational nature of his early films. Conversely, I find some of his later work—Hairspray included—relatively toothless. That’s not to say I think he lost his edge when he moved on to bigger budgets—I agree with Jonathan Rosenbaum when he says Hairspray expanded the director’s appeal without compromising his vision—but I love the 16-millimeter grit of the early work, as well as Waters’s ability to produce results out of slapdash, ramshackle clusterfucks. Such is the poetry of all guerrilla cinema, but when you add Waters’s vulgar, transgressive sensibilities, the outcome is doubly unique. You can find my five favorite John Waters films after the jump.
- Female Trouble (1974) For a while, this was one of the director’s more difficult films to see, but despite being generally unavailable for decades, its reputation as one of his best films stood strong. Suitably lurid, the film offers a twisted yet blisteringly honest look at the allure of criminality, a pet theme for Waters that’s expertly explored here. Divine, Waters’s most famous collaborator, pulls double duty here, playing a male character and a female character, and in the film’s most famous scene essentially “fucks herself.”
