Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Cuckolding the Middle-Brow with the Wrist-Bazooka

Two weeks ago, I watched Joe Wright's Atonement. Last week I watched Russ Meyer's Supervixens. It is a sign of the triumph of middlebrow thoughtlessness in our culture that the former is considered high art while the latter is considered b-movie trash. Very few stylistic choices Wright makes serve his material, while no shot, edit, line of dialogue, camera movement, joke, or image is wasted in Meyer's film. Because Wright's film is a literary adaptation about tragic love, WWII, and British upper crusties and contains one of the most memorable tracking shots in cinema history, it is somehow important while Meyer is just a drooling dirty old man making low-budget camp. Yet that technically amazing tracking shot in Atonement is purposeless, inappropriate for the scene, and shows a director lacking in judgment. Meyer's film is inventive, personal, and truly cinematic. I'll take Supervixens!

(The following trailer is borderline NSFW if your office door is open.)

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, hot damn. I like boobs. My decision is made.

junebug

Anonymous said...

Borderline NSFW? Where do you work? And can I get a job there? Bosses that, even if only occasionally, let nudity run rampant at the workplace, is a good boss indeed.

Josh Krauter said...

I probably should have mentioned that I work at Prof. Erotico's Pornotopia.

Plop Blop said...

I'm in the middle of watching Berlin Alexanderplatz, and as I was looking up info. about it online, I came across a quote from John Waters. He said something about how the story of Russ Meyer's life should be called "Berlin Alexandertits." It gave me a chuckle.

That trailer really makes me wanna see Supervixens.

Josh Krauter said...

Berlin Alexandertits! Ha ha ha ha!

Anonymous said...

You're right on the money about Atonement. The only thing that makes that film worse is that the novel it is based upon is nothing if not an exercise in purposeful (as in "with a purpose, i.e., a point") formal innovation. That the adaptation--the movie Atonement--only exists, and garners praise, because it came from a well-crafted book, and yet still doesn't understand the book well enough to even translate its formal devices onto film (or, at least, figure out a way to use form to address the same sort of issues) is just plain sad. (By the by, I wouldn't necessarily advise reading the book, but it is infinitely better than whatever that maudlin celluloid tinfoil was.)

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