The Mad "Titane" Snaps

by Jason Adams

An inky black oil smudge smeared across a scarred face, big bosoms sway and heave, belly splitting up the seam, the space where sex begins to sound like a car engine revving up to eleven -- Julia Ducournau's Titane doesn't mince a breath of its runtime with anything but pedal-to-the-metal everything. Titane, the director's follow-up to her also-deranged (but somehow less so!) cannibal-drama Raw, won the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes, a perfect signifier for the grease-fingered teetering psychosis of our age. After playing NYFF last weekend, it opens in US theaters tomorrow, October 1st.

And this movie, it is a lot!

As Raw already proved Ducournau loves a car accident (I can't imagine that David Cronenberg's Crash wasn't formative) and Titane offers up a doozy early on...

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NYFF: "Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn"

by Jason Adams

Emi (Katia Pascariu) is having what you might call a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. A respected and talented history teacher at an elite Romanian private school, she's just been notified that an amateur porn video she made with her husband has been seen by her entire classroom of students, their parents, her co-workers and principal -- basically everybody, sitting as it does spread-eagled there on the world wide web for all to take a good long look at. After making some phone calls and visits to involved parties she's forced to sit down in front of an angry mob of parents and teachers and defend herself in order to keep her job. And this is what you would call the "plot" of Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, Romanian provocateur Radu Jude's latest film which won the Golden Bear in Berlin earlier this year and is screening at NYFF this week...

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Tweetweek: Cannes and more...

A collection of recent tweets that made us laugh or think or nod are located after the jump...

If you don't like sex scenes in movies, you've never had great sex.

— Laurie Crosswell (@lauriecrosswell) July 11, 2021

the four different ways academics dress at conferences: pic.twitter.com/gjUMFcBwSp

— Will Mason (@willmasonmusic) July 13, 2021

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Pfeiffer Pfriday takes on "The Fabulous Baker Boys"

by Nathaniel R

Have you been listening to the podcast "Pfeiffer Pfridays"? Each week Jerry and Michael revisit, or screen for the pfirst time, a Pfeiffer movie. Sometimes they have guests in tow. They're not going in chronological order but hopping around. This weekend marks their 30th episode so they're making whoopie and covering one of the greatest pfilms of the 1980s: The Fabulous Baker Boys. Guest starring... me!

We get into it, not just the Pfeiffer ascendance into the pantheon of it all, but the Bridges brothers character arcs, Jennifer Tilly's hilarious supporting role, the movie's Old Hollywood glamour, the screenplay, the cinematography, and the 1989 Oscar race.

John Waters @ 75: Pink Flamingos (1972)

This week Team Experience pays tribute to John Waters for his 75th birthday.

by Nathaniel R

Unlike eggs and fresh meat, both of which are memorable supporting characters in John Waters Pink Flamingos (1972), movies don't come with expiration date. Nor should they. The expiration dates for movies are theoretical, figurative, and cultural, and are thus almost never agreed upon. Some movies magically live forever losing little of their original flavor. Some become even more flavorful and would be better suited to a wine analogy than this ill-advised animal byproducts one we're pursuing. We call these expiration-date busting films, classics. Whether they make you sick, these "old" movies, is entirely up to you. Can you remove yourself from the now while watching them or do you expect all movies to cater to the accepted opinions, values, and mores of the right now (which will have its own expiration date)? These are questions we might ask about any classic especially in our current very volatile and angry social climate, where everything is being reevaluted (which is a good thing) and mostly branded unacceptable (an unfortunately reductive thing, especially when it comes to art from previous eras).

But since our subject tonight is Pink Flamingos (1972) which wants to make you sick, it's the wrong question altogether. Maybe we don't have a question at all. Our eyes are still wide, heads still spinning, and feeling slightly nauseous...

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