DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
It’s often said that we’ve become so desensitized as a culture that the things that once shocked us have now become routine. John Waters’ first movie must have been decades ahead of its time, because even in an age when any number of perversions are only a mouse click away, Pink Flamingos still feels dirty, subversive, and boundary-pushing. Anyone who can watch the film’s notorious coprophagic final scene — knowing that no props, camera tricks, or clever substitutions were used — and avoid gagging has a stronger stomach than I do.
John Waters filmed the project on a minuscule budget on weekends in the little Baltimore suburb of Phoenix, because that’s where his star, the trash-queen drag performer Divine lived in a where the art department had used half of their $200 budget to purchase a trailer that served as the set for large portions of the film. Waters’ story, about a contest of one-upsmanship meant to earn a tabloid-awarded title of “filthiest person alive”, was remarkably prescient in predicting the rise of white trash culture as both a spectator and a competitive sport. Jerry Springer Show antics and a number of currently aired reality shows are really little more than pale and innocuous imitators of the bad taste that Waters perfected in 1972. The film was a midnight movie hit, and is really best seen in large groups so as to amplify the screams of disgust; Washington Psychotronic’s shabby chic screenings at the Warehouse are really an ideal environment for this sort of thing.
View the trailer.
Presented by WPFS at The Warehouse at 8 p.m on Tuesday. Free, $2 donation suggested.
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AFI Latin American Film Festival
Every year at this time, the long-running Latin American Film Festival takes over most of the programming at the AFI for three weeks. This year’s festival has over thirty features from all over Latin America, Spain, and Portugal. This weekend alone there are over a dozen films to see, with highlight’s including a second screening of yesterday’s festival opener, Mexico’s I’m Going to Explode, described as a cross between Harold and Maude and Pierrot Le Fou, the Argentinean The Lion’s Den, about a mother raising her child in a prison mother’s ward, and The Passion of Gabriel, a Colombian film about a young priest dealing with civil war and carnal temptations in his post in a mountain village.
Now playing at the AFI, through October 12. See their website for a full listing of films and screening schedule.
