Sept 1-7 John Waters Best of the Year Week: To be fair, these movies aren’t ALL funny, but JOHN WATERS is funny. He’s become more of a writer and public commentator these days. Still, he helps keep the arthouse from taking itself too seriously with his annual top-ten lists, while celebrating the comically serious.

The Green Fog, directed by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson, was commissioned by the San Francisco Film Society for the 60th San Francisco International Film Festival. Along with an original score by composer Jacob Garchik and Kronos Quartet, it retells Vertigo using a cut and paste from movies and TV shows made in San Francisco.

There’s one single image from Vertigo, a hand grasping a ladder. Other footage comes from the 1923 version of The Ten Commandments, Greed, Old San Francisco, Frisco Jenny, Fog Over Frisco, Barbary Coast, San Francisco, The Sisters, Flame of Barbary Coast, The Falcon In San Francisco, Nora Prentiss, A Bucket of Blood, A Night Full of Rain, A View to a Kill, An Eye for an Eye, Basic Instinct, Born to Be Bad, Born to Kill, Bullitt, Chan Is Missing, Confessions of an Opium Eater, Crackers, Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting, Dark Passage, Desperate Measures, Dirty Harry, Dogfight, Experiment in Terror, Fearless, Final Analysis, Flower Drum Song, Getting Even with Dad, Go Naked in the World, Godzilla, Hard to Hold, Herbie Rides Again, High Anxiety, Hotel, Impact, Incident in San Francisco, Innerspace, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, It Came from Beneath the Sea, Jade, Jagged Edge, Julie, Magnum Force, McMillan & Wife, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, Mission: Impossible, Monster in the Closet, Mr. Ricco, Mrs. Doubtfire, Murder, She Wrote, One on Top of the Other, Pacific Heights, Pal Joey, Patty Hearst, Petulia, Portrait in Black, San Andreas, Sans Soleil, Samurai, Sister Act, Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit, Sneakers, So I Married an Axe Murderer, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Sudden Fear, Take Me Away!, Terminator Genisys, The Birds, The Conversation, The Dead Pool, The Fan, The Game, The Golden Gate Murders, The House on Telegraph Hill, The Killer Elite, The Lady from Shanghai, The Laughing Policeman, The Lineup, The Love Bug, The Man Who Cheated Himself, The Net, The Organization, The Presidio, The Rock, The Sniper, The Streets of San Francisco, The Towering Inferno, The Woman in Red, They Call Me Mister Tibbs!, Thundercrack!, Time After Time, When a Man Loves a Woman, Where Love Has Gone, Woman on the Run, Yellow-Faced Tiger and The Zodiac Killer.

This is an amazing film, one that works incredibly. You really need to find it and watch it, as this will never be released.

John Waters commented on this film, saying, “An avant-garde ode to San Francisco, the most cinematic of cities, told entirely through clips of films shot there but with all the dialogue cut out so the parts of the movies that originally didn’t matter now do. Abstractly clever, strangely compelling, and just about perfect.”

You can download this movie from the Internet Archive.

Sept 1-7 John Waters Best of the Year Week: To be fair, these movies aren’t ALL funny, but JOHN WATERS is funny. He’s become more of a writer and public commentator these days. Still, he helps keep the arthouse from taking itself too seriously with his annual top-ten lists, while celebrating the comically serious.

In 49 years, Christa Päffgen — Nico — was born to a father who was a descendant of the wealthy Päffgen Kölsch master brewer family dynasty, a Catholic, and a conscript into the Nazi army, and a lower-class Protestant mother who took her away from the war to the Spreewald forest. Her father was either shot by a sniper and put out of his misery by a superior, went insane, died in a concentration camp or just faded away from combat shock.

Growing to be 5’10”, with strong features and pale skin, she was noticed as a teen as she sold lingerie by photographer Herbert Tobias, who named her after a man who had obsessed him, Nikos Papatakis. She dyed her hair blonde, later claiming she was inspired to do so by Ernest Hemingway. She then became a model in Paris before abandoning that life, running away to New York City.

After a small role in Mario Lanza’s For the First Time, she played herself in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and was in the Jean Paul Belmondo film A Man Named Rocca and Jacques Poitrenaud’s Strip-Tease. At some point, she met Nikos Papatakis, and the two lived together between 1959 and 1961. He noticed her singing and paid for lessons. A few years later, she recorded her first single, “I’m Not Sayin'”, produced by Jimmy Page, for Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate label.

Brian Jones introduced her to Warhol and Paul Morrissey, which led to her appearing in Chelsea Girls, The Closet, Sunset and Imitation of Christ. Warhol suggested her to the Velvet Underground as their chanteuse, and she appeared on four songs on their first album: “Femme Fatale,” “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” and “Sunday Mornings.g However, she never got along with many members of the band. That said, Velvet Underground members Lou Reed, John Cale and Sterling Morrison all played on her debut solo album, Chelsea Girl. By her second album, The Marble Index, she dyed her blonde hair red and started a style of dress that we’d call goth today*. She also made seven films with French director Philippe Garrel in the early 1970s, opened for Tangerine Dream — and later Siouxsie and the Banshees—and had a backing band on The End, which included John Cale and Brian Eno.

Somewhere in there, she had time to have a son with Christian Aaron Boulogne, whose father was either Papatakis or Alain Delon.

But her life was not all positive. After all, most of the last 15 years were spent on heroin; several claim she was misogynistic, anti-Semitic and said that black people had “features like animals,” while others say that she often made jokes in bad taste. Who knows? On vacation in Ibiza with her son, she fell off her bike, landed on her head and died a few hours later.

As you can tell, I’m a big fan of her music and the strange stories of her life. So, Nico, 1988 was perfect for me, as director and writer Susanna Nicchiarelli lets you know that Nico was more than the Velvet Underground. Images of Jonas Mekas’s films appear; the framing is meant to remind you of “the decadence and the quality of the VHS.” Actress Trine Dyrholm does more than an imitation; by singing and acting as the role, she becomes a version of Nico that imbues this movie and gives it a heart. The end, where she feels renewed, as well as the manic energy she feels playing the secret show in Czechoslovakia, is the most real feeling of being a singer that I have seen.

Even if you don’t know or like the music, I think you’ll find something here.

John Waters said of this movie, “A small, sad, fearless biopic that asks the question’ “Is junkie dignity possible?” The answer is no. Trine Dyrholm as our heroin-loving heroine plunges headfirst into the despair of showbiz with fierce determination.”

Waters also told Graham Russell: “She played at this disco, and I went. And people went, but not a lot. It wasn’t full. And she was heavy and dressed all in black with reddish dark hair, and she did her (makes guttural moaning noise). Afterwards, I said, “It’s nice to meet you, I wish you’d play at my funeral,” and she said (mimics doom-laden Germanic voice), “When are you going to die?” I told her, “You should have played at The People’s Temple; you would’ve been great when everyone was killing themselves!” Then she said, “Where can I get some heroin?” I said, “I don’t know.”. I don’t take heroin, so I don’t know. But even if I did, I wasn’t copping for Nico!”

*Indeed, in 1982, Nico and Bauhaus played “I’m Waiting for the Man” live, and her supporting acts included the Sisters of Mercy and Gene Loves Jezebel.

Sept 1-7 John Waters Best of the Year Week: To be fair, these movies aren’t ALL funny, but JOHN WATERS is funny. He’s become more of a writer and public commentator these days. Still, he helps keep the arthouse from taking itself too seriously with his annual top-ten lists, while celebrating the comically serious.

I’m Sam and my kink is movies where Nicole Kidman gets railed.

Yeah, I said it.

She’s totally not my type. She’s too wealthy, too skinny, too elite. Yet I love that this phase of her career has been in shows like Big Little Lies, where she Facetime sexted her abusive husband before shoving him down the steps (spoiler, yeah) and Nine Perfect Strangers where she had both male and female lovers, as well as in movies, like when she urinated on Zac Effron in The Paperboy (well, it was a jellyfish sting, but let us live), pretended to be knocked out so her husband could indulge his kink in The Killing of a Sacred Deer and reminded us that “Somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place like this.”

Maybe I like it when rich and famous people do scandalous things.

Babygirl is another one of those movies where a gorgeous woman like Nicole Kidman is bored with sex with a handsome man like Antonio Banderas and ends up hooking up with a way too young boy who doesn’t understand the difference between being a dom and being a jerk, ala 50 Shades of Grey. She gives her the sexual experience that she’s only seen on Pornhub when she’s frigging herself, when her husband finishes too quickly.

Anyways, in this, she plays CEO Romy Mathis, whose husband Jacob is a theater director. She ends up hooking up with her intern, Samuel (Harris Dickerson), who immediately becomes a jerk when he visits her family, disrespecting her boundaries. He also keeps threatening her job to get her to say what he wants her to say, which is another way of just being a jerk instead of being a dom.

Directed and written by Halina Reijn (Bodies Bodies Bodies), this has the kind of empowerment that finds Kidman on all fours like a dog, which unlocks her ability to tell her husband that he’s never gotten her to orgasm, but then he does. Still, then she’s really thinking about her younger former lover playing with his dog. Man, that needle drop of “Father Figure” was way too on the mark, huh?

Kidman is good in this, and the idea of choosing between the life of power that you’ve built and the sex that you really want. Or maybe when you’re rich, you can have everything you want. Also, I think it’s hilarious that Samuel has a bad haircut and mumbles much of what he says, but he has a powerful woman fawning all over him. Whatever it takes to unlock what you’ve trapped inside, I guess.

If anything, this movie has given us Nicole Kidman angrily texting to the tune of “Deceptagon” by Le Tigre.

John Waters said of this, “Okay, heteros are cutting edge this year, too. Nicole Kidman continues taking big chances in her career, and she deserves our salute. Here, she howls, she moans. She’s a verbal power-bottom cougar at the top of her business-executive career who meets a dominant, lowly intern top who makes her lap up milk from a bowl like… like… well, like a pussy.”

Sept 1-7 John Waters Best of the Year Week: To be fair, these movies aren’t ALL funny, but JOHN WATERS is funny. He’s become more of a writer and public commentator these days. Still, he helps keep the arthouse from taking itself too seriously with his annual top-ten lists, while celebrating the comically serious.

Directed by Rose Glass (St. Maude), who wrote the story with Weronika Tofilska, this finds Lou (Kristen Stewart) dealing with her crime family — her father Lou Sr. (Ed Harris) sister Beth (Jena Malone) and her abusive husband JJ (Katy O’Brian) — as well as a heartsick girl in love with her, Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov), and a boydbuilder on her way to Vegas, Jackie (Katy O’Brian) — and the deaths that come in the wake of being part of such a world.

This movie — especially the ending — is crazy. You have Ed Harris with a mullet destroying an entire room, Stewart transcending her teen movie past, and a fantasy close that I never saw coming, to the point that I think it could be An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge in the way that it breaks the film.

In an AP interview, Stewart and O’Brian were asked about what movies they were told to watch:

I read that Rose had the cast and crew watch Cronenberg’s Crash, Paris, Texas and Showgirls. Were any of those new to you, or did you find different dimensions as they related to this?

STEWART: I had never seen Showgirls. I watched it in the trailer halfway through the movie and came out and was like ok, I’m not big enough. I’m not thrusting hard enough.

GLASS: Not walking away dramatically enough.

STEWART: Like ohh that’s why you wanted me to go bigger.

O’BRIAN: I wasn’t able to find Crash in anything other than French, which I don’t speak.

GLASS: That’s crazy!

STEWART: It wasn’t on MUBI.

A movie about escaping the past, the transformative power of finding a lover who hallucinates throwing you up while on stage and leaving your family behind, I wasn’t ready for any of this. Just…wow.

John Waters ranked this his top pick of 2024, saying, “This hilarious, bloody film noir is the best movie of the year, one that Russ Meyer might have made if he had been a lesbian intellectual addicted to steroids. Even the pig-men are cute. Sort of.”

Sept 1-7 John Waters Best of the Year Week: To be fair, these movies aren’t ALL funny, but JOHN WATERS is funny. He’s become more of a writer and public commentator these days. Still, he helps keep the arthouse from taking itself too seriously with his annual top-ten lists, while celebrating the comically serious.

Max Rockatansky is now Tom Hardy, and the character has transcended those who played the role played before. Now he’s a legend, a man who can walk into the dust and fog of the desert to disappear until he’s needed again.

Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) may be the same level of hero as him, more legend than reality, someone who can lose her arm and remain just as deadly.

Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) is one of the warlords keeping this world together, supplying water while using the women of it to continually repopulate his army.

Soon, Max and Furiosa have a truck filled with five of Immortan Joe’s wives — The Splendid Angharad (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley), Toast the Knowing (Zoë Kravitz), Capable (Riley Keough), The Dag (Abbey Lee) and Cheedo the Fragile (Courtney Eaton) — away from Gas Land and toward a promised secret place where seeds still grow. Women aren’t used as baby factories.

Made as a continuous chase and originally storyboarded with 3,500 frames, this is another example of George Miller taking the expected and making something significantly better. A near-Western on wheels with a gigantic War Rig, Bux (Nicholas Hought) and the War Boys who are willing to die in battle to find Valhalla, women discovering their power and an expansion of the world of Mad Max while still having time for vehicles that have blind heavy metal guitar players on them rocking out in the middle of combat, this feels like a gigantic cartoon, one that explodes all over the screen, a movie I’ve watched so many times and never get tired of.

Isn’t it amazing that the fourth movie in a series, one made after hundreds of rip-offs came in its wake, may be the best one?

Aug 25-31 Natasha Lyonne Week: There’s a new season of her weirdo mystery of the week coming out (I can’t remember the name rn, you can look it up), and she’s been steadily delivering chuckles for decades now.

William Butler was killed in numerous horror movies. In Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, as Michael, the remake of Night of the Living Dead, and as Ryan in Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, he was murdered by some of the main characters of modern horror. He has made several Full-Length Movies since then and wrote Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis and Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave, but he probably hated those just as much as I did, so I won’t say anything bad here.

The patients at Cunningham Hall Mental Facility are being kept as prisoners. At least that’s what some of those patients say, but aren’t they crazy? Intern Clark Stevens (Joshua Leonard) is working for Dr. Franks (Lance Henriksen), who believes that there’s a connection between insanity and the paranormal. For some reason, that gives the guards and nurses the ability to just abuse the patients, like Alice (Natasha Lyonne).

There’s also a killer on the grounds, a secret section called Madhouse, which is where the hazardous people live and perhaps the idea that the doctors are all embezzling funds and giving their patients placebos instead of the real prescriptions that they need.

You’ll see the ending coming. It’s still a feel-good picture.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Aug 25-31 Natasha Lyonne Week: There’s a new season of her weirdo mystery of the week coming out (I can’t remember the name rn, you can look it up), and she’s been steadily delivering chuckles for decades now.

Dennis Mitchell (Mason Gamble) spends time with his friends Joey McDonald (Kellen Hathaway) and Margaret Wade (Amy Sakasitz). He is followed everywhere by his dog Ruff, but to George Wilson (Walter Matthau) — Mr. Wilson — Dennis is Dennis the Menace.

Based on the Hank Ketchum comic strip, which debuted on March 12, 1951, and is still running, this was directed by Nick Castle. Yes, that Nick Castle. It was produced and written by John Hughes. Yes, that John Hughes.

Matthau is perfectly cast in this, as are Lea Thompson and Robert Stanton as Dennis’ parents, Alice and Henry. Plus, you get another great Christopher Lloyd bad guy in Switchblade Sam and Natasha Lyonne as Polly. She’d already been acting for six years, starting as Opal on Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.

If you grew up at the right time — my wife was 9 when this was released — this is the perfect nostalgia.

The direct-to-video film  Dennis the Menace Strikes Again is a sequel to this one and features Don Rickles as Mr. Wilson. I kind of love that. I don’t love that Dennis was dropped from Dairy Queen marketing in 2001, as the fast-food ice cream restaurant felt that children could no longer relate to him.

Happier news: There was also another direct-to-video release, A Dennis the Menace Christmas, and a 1987 live-action TV movie, which was later released to video as Dennis the Menace: Dinosaur Hunter. 

In the UK, this was called Dennis because there’s a comic strip called Dennis the Menace and Gnasher, which strangely debuted on the exact same day as the American comic strip.

Aug 25-31 Natasha Lyonne Week: There’s a new season of her weirdo mystery of the week coming out (I can’t remember the name rn, you can look it up), and she’s been steadily delivering chuckles for decades now.

The Rambler (Dermot Mulroney) spent four years in jail. Not long enough for his wife, Cheryl (Natasha Lyonne), to miss him or even enjoy being around him. He heads out down the road to get into an interbarre-knuckle fight and meet a scientist (James Kady) who has two mummies and can blow people’s heads off with a machine. There’s also a waitress (Lindsay Pulsipher) who keeps dying and coming back to life, too.

Directed and written by Calvin Reeder (The Oregonian), this is the kind of movie that people say is like a David Lynch film when it isn’t, because they have no other place to point to when they want it to make sense. So yeah, I guess in that way, it’s like a Lynch movie because it’s strange, but hopefully, Reeder will get to keep making movies like this and finding his way. It’s not for everyone, but it’s for someone, somewhere.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Aug 25-31 Natasha Lyonne Week: There’s a new season of her weirdo mystery of the week coming out (I can’t remember the name rn, you can look it up), and she’s been steadily delivering chuckles for decades now.

Harry Cox (Balthazar Getty) and his mistress Lisa (Lydia Hearst) are having sex just before he gets a call from his wife Alex (Chloë Sevigny). He hangs up, gets his throat slashed and she’s killed.

That’s how #Horror starts.

Twelve-year-old Sam (Sadie Seelert) may not fit in with the rich girls, but she’s been invited to a sleepover at Harry’s house. Hs daughter, Sofia (Bridget McGarry), Francesca (Mina Sundwall), Ava (Blue Lindberg) and Georgie (Emma Adler) have gathered and for some reason have invited their bully Cat (Haley Murphy).

The film has to make the decision that all post-mobile phone slashers do: how to get rid of those phones. Cat’s cyberbullying gets to be too much, so the girls lock their phones in the safe while Sofia throws the keys to get them out inside the swimming pool. When the young women aren’t abusing one another, a masked killer is wiping them — and parents — out and posting each of the murders.

Director and writer Tera Subkoff was inspired to make this after asking a friend’s daughter what horror was. Learning how she was cyberbullied, Subkoff realized that bullying now follows young women everywhere and is a major chunk of their lives.

Aug 25-31 Natasha Lyonne Week: There’s a new season of her weirdo mystery of the week coming out (I can’t remember the name rn, you can look it up), and she’s been steadily delivering chuckles for decades now.

Directed by Chris Miller and written by Pam Brady (who has worked with Trey Parker and Matt Stone on their projects going back to Cannibal: The Musical), The Smurfs is the sixth full-length movie for the cartoon characters created by Peyo.

Rhianna is Smurfette, following Katy Perry and Demi Lovato, while John Goodman is Papa Smurf. This is the kind of movie that has Dan Levy, Kurt Russell, Marshmello, Nick Kroll, Alex Winter, Amy Sedaris, Nick Offerman, Jimmy Kimmel, Natasha Lyonne and more, all to tell the story of how the Intergalactic Evil Wizard Alliance once battled the smurf force of Papa Smurf, his brother Ken and the best smurf ever, Ron for magical supremacy until Papa decided to run following a defeat and hide, occasionally battling Gargamel but rarely getting involved in the world of magic — until No Name Smurf tries to find what his talent is, tries the occult and leads Gargamel’s brother Razamel to Smurf Village where he takes nearly every one of them, doing what his brother never could.

Many reviewers said it was tedious, dull and unfunny. Me, I liked it, but I watched so much Smurfs as a kid that I know who Johan and Peewit are.

I could do without James Corden being a voice in these movies, though. There’s also no Frank Welker in this. Come on, what the smurf?