The year is 1951 and Wade “Cry-Baby” Walker is the name on everybody’s lips in John Water’s musical, mad cap, do-wop movie Cry-Baby. He also happens to be my favorite bad boy, Johnny Depp. Cry-Baby is a bad boy in Baltimore and a rebel without a cause, leading his gang of “drapes” through a Square’s world. Of course, Mr. Baby (Depp) falls in love with one of the squares, sweet Allison (Amy Locane). Peril, jailtime, musical numbers, and chicken competitions ensue as our modern Romeo and Juliet fight to be together in a world trying to tear them apart.
It spawned a Broadway musical, hurled Waters into Hollywood budget territory, and broke Johnny Depp’s matinee idol reputation, shepherded him into the weirdo, queerdo, mainstream. It’s a celebration of everything corny, stupid, and romantic about the 1950’s.

In typical John Waters fashion, there is a collection of colorful characters and awesome outcast actors. As the Drapes, the perpetually pregnant Pepper (Ricki Lake), the aptly named Hatchet-Face (Kim McGuire), and too sexy for her own good Wanda (Traci Lords), Ramona and Belvedere Ricketts (Susan Tyrrell and Iggy Pop) are as delightful as they are scary. There’s a cameo from a young Willem Dafoe as “Hateful Guard” and Mink Stole as Hatchet-Face’s iron lung bound mother.
Stole particularly shines when her entire performance is filmed through a mirror while she chain-smokes cigarettes. And don’t forget Lenora (Kim Webb), who is obsessed with Cry-Baby and will stop at NOTHING to stop him and Allison from being together.
Waters, our Pope of Trash, is notorious for casting folks on the fringe of society. It’s why we love him and it’s what makes his movies so successful. They’re honest and without pretense. Real life weirdos embracing movies as a creative outlet. Because of that, I’m here to celebrate some of the strange surrounding Cry-Baby.

All this month, we are counting down the 31 best horror movies of the decade and taking a closer look at why each one earned a spot on our list!
6. Raw (dir. Julia Ducournau, 2016)I’m a fair-weather horror fan. I always enjoy when I sit down to watch, but it’s never been my number one genre when I sit down to watch a movie. I’m not a big fan of “bump in the night” horror. Movies that attempt to shock you with loud noises and jump scares. I find them cheap, even though they get me Every. Single. Time. I generally don’t get grossed out by things. The Saw movies make me giggle.
Raw made me want to barf.
The film, written and directed by Julia Ducournau, in a masterful debut, follows Justine (Garance Marillier) a young vegetarian in her first year at veterinary school. Everybody in Justine’s family is a strict vegetarian. While attending vet school, Justine is bullied by her older sister (Ella Rumpf) and participates in a hazing ceremony involving eating raw meat. From that moment, her appetite for flesh grows and grows.
Raw is punk as shit. It’s shot beautifully and stylistically, however stays rooted in the concept of learning who you are at your core beyond familial expectations, education, lifestyle choices, and dietary restrictions. It takes these big concepts and filters it down to a gorgeous horror film that is much more accessible than what these large concepts look like in text form.

Raw is deeply Feminist without being overtly FEMINIST. The film revolves around two sisters who are fully realized humans grappling with real identity issues. Identity issues such as losing your virginity, peer pressure, living up to a family legacy, and disordered eating in the form of an insatiable appetite for human flesh. It grapples with accepting the good, the bad, and the ugly inside all of us.
As the hungry sisters, Garance Marillier and Ella Rumpf are sensational. Despite the heightened circumstances of the movie, they remain rooted in realism and truthfulness. You care about Justine and Alexia, which makes their journey and competitive nature so much harder to watch. 
Raw is also one of those movies that has such a shockingly good twist at the end, you need to watch the film again to catch hints you missed throughout. It’s not a twist that cheapens the movie or makes you feel cheated because you just invested time and energy into this film and the twist undercuts that time and energy. Instead, it deepens the film. It’s okay to sacrifice a large chunk of yourself to love somebody. The ones we love will take a chunk out of us, regardless. We might as well volunteer that chunk. 
Watch it twice, if you dare.
Stray thoughts:

• I watched this film on an airplane on my way to Las Vegas. The person next to me was eating a donut, looked over at my iPad at a particularly gruesome moment (hint: finger), slowly put down his donut and didn’t take another bite.
  
• I purposefully didn’t go into much detail. The joy of watching this movie is the shock of it. It’s beautiful and disturbing and so exciting. Enjoy.
  

See the entire list here.

Re-post from Cinema76.com

How does one make a documentary about Woodstock that improves upon the legendary Woodstock documentary from the 70’s? How do you capture that kind of energy on screen again? Haven’t we seen everything there is to see about Woodstock already?
Well, Woodstock: Three Days that Defined a Generation doesn’t reach the groundbreaking heights of the 1970 film. This modern Woodstock is more interested in the folks behind the scenes and the organization of the festival itself, and it’s better for it.
The whole film plays like a solid PBS documentary… because it is. It was made with PBS to release as a companion piece celebrating 50 years from the original Woodstock. We never see the narrators of the film, they remain behind the scenes, like they did during the festival. Woodstock brought peace and love at a time when young people were unsure and scared for their future. The Vietnam War was a dark shadow over their lives, and Woodstock gave them a chance to escape. To tune in, drop out, and drop into the vibes from some the greatest rock, folk, and blues bands of all time.
This Woodstock film is a celebration of the human kindness the festival brought into the world and a celebration of the mundane. For instance, there is a whole section dedicated to timing bathroom trips at Madison Square Garden to see how many bathrooms they would need in the Woodstock field. 
The most touching moment is when the town of Waskill heard the kids of Woodstock were out of food. The community of farmers and self-described “hicks” gathered together and started giving free food to the “hippies” attending the festival. They took care of a community that was disrupting their regular way of life, but it didn’t matter. People were good to one another. They shared.
When choosing between fences and a stage, the creators chose a stage. They chose a stage because, while a lack of boundaries causes cacophony, a lack of entertainment causes a riot. Those “kids in the field would have nothing to do.” In stark contrast to the failed Fyre Festival, and the crazy documentaries about that mess, the creators of Woodstock (also overwhelmed by the Festival turn out) gave the festival away.  Money became secondary and executing the damn thing became the reason for the moment.
This documentary is even paced and calm. For every catastrophe, every flash flood warning, every threat of electrocution, every hint of death by substances, there’s a silver lining. Only two people died at Woodstock. A person sleeping under a tracker trailer, and one overdose. There were 500,000 people attending, and only two casualties. Doctors volunteered their time, did their best, and the music played on.
Watching Woodstock: Three Days That Defined A Generation may not have profoundly moved and changed me like the original Woodstock documentary did when I first saw it as a precocious pre-teen, but it did make me feel a little less cynical about our own scary times.
“If 400,00 people could get together have absolutely no violence, absolutely no conflict, I felt like we could change the world.”
Stray thought:
TICKETS TO WOODSTOCK WERE $6.00.
YOU COULD GO FOR THREE DAYS FOR $18.
BONNAROO COULD NEVER.

Repost from Cinema76.com

Post-Viewing Verdict
I WAS half right! The buddy cop dark comedy formula works. This time, with the help of a grown up little kid in Holly March (Angourie Rice), the Nice Guys (Crow and Gosling) are dumber than KKBB's Kilmer and Downey. I only laughed out loud twice, but I did watch it all by myself in the middle of the day on an iPad. It feels like a big screen movie and I think it loses a bit of its punch when watched on a small screen.
Gosling and Crowe are CLEARLY having a blast, and it makes their on screen chemistry that much better. Holly is a lovely female character and it's nice to have less of a "damsel in distress" feel given to a little kid. Even Amelia, the chick at the center of the wildness, is less a victim of circumstance and more annoyed with everybody's insistence that the "art film" she made with her now deceased boyfriend is a "porno."
Oh, and Kim Basinger shows up as an overzealous, high powered, mom obsessed with Detroit.
The plot.... is hard to follow. It swirls and spirals, and it's very clear that the characters are our main focal point as opposed to the actual mystery, which I'm totally fine with.

Takeaways
The Nice Guys is darker than the usual "studio comedy". It's weird and niche. I guess big budget movies can still be weird. Shane Black is a talented filmmaker and these pulpy 70's style movies are exciting. I'll be sure to remember when the next Shane Black movie comes out and see it in the theatre.  

Passing the baton
That's it! The end! So I'll just suggest movies I like, that are out of everybody's wheelhouse, to everybody without caring if they've seen it or not!

• Garrett: 12 Angry Men
• Alex: Delicatessen
• Andy:  Hedwig and the Angry Inch
• Santelli: Paris is Burning
• Gary: His Girl Friday
• Scully: Hercules
• Catherine: Get Low
• Jill: Carrie
• Ryan: Raw 

Editor’s Note: We are taking a break from this column for a cool project, and will bring this back after!

Let’s be very clear: I was excited to see this movie. Robert Mapplethorpe is an interesting figure. Patti Smith’s sometimes lover was extraordinarily polarizing during his time on the art scene. Everybody knows at least one of his images, even if you weren’t sure who shot the shot. Ondi Timoner’s documentary-style filmmaking (this is her first narrative film) includes actual footage of Mapplethorpe and co. spliced between the narrative, as well as footage from the gorgeous 70’s/80’s Bohemian, Heroin chic, New York City. Timoner embraces the phallic nature of his art. There’s peen in a movie about peen! And lots of it!
So why is this movie so lame?
Why wasn’t it an actual documentary, since those moments are the most successful parts of the film?
The movie is the stuff of straightforward biopics:
Man starts one way (straight laced, Christian, in the army), changes and adapts as he finds himself (discovers drugs and photography), falls in love along the way (with many different partners, men and women), struggles with family (said straight laced Christian dad and brother who idolizes him), and dies in a tragic, but ultimately inevitable (AIDS complications), way. I wish it didn’t boil down so cleanly, as the real Mapplethorpe’s life was anything but paint by numbers.

​At the center of the movie, Matt Smith (boasting an incredibly convincing New York accent), is an almost picture-perfect Robert Mapplethorpe. Smith’s performance is multi-layered and well-studied. Robert is a gangly character with big eyes and an endearing slouch and half-hazard way of moving through the world. It isn’t until a camera is put into his hands that he feels truly alive and able to commit to the person he wants to be. Smith is simple and isn’t acting too hard, which makes it easy to follow him, but as the movie goes on, it becomes clear his performance belongs in a better film.
Marianne Rendon’s Patti Smith (famous Rowan University, my alma mater, drop out) is not even a shade of the real Patti. Her and Mapplethorpe’s “meet cute” is better suited to Garden State than the Just Kids memoir stars. Robert is pouting on a bench, and Patti bounces over to him, puts her arms around his neck and tells him to pretend to be her boyfriend. She has nowhere to stay, you see, so they go back to his apartment and she dances around in a striped shirt with no pants on and they have sex, so she stays.
They pretend to be married so his parents accept him, and when she meets them, she wears wacky shirts because “wooooaaaahhhh, she’s just so DIFFERENT and STRANGE.” But then one day Patti, the love of his life, storms out because she’s upset that he’s taking pictures of men and not of her. Robert persists, stating “If you leave me, I’ll turn gay.” This happens because the truth (Patti staying by his side for most of their young lives, through thick and thin) isn’t dramatic enough?
Robert is left on his own and quickly meets a whole bunch of people who only exist as plot devices. Eventually, Robert finds a rich boyfriend in Sam (John Benjamin Hickey, in a performance that is simple and affecting). Sam gives Robert the camera he uses throughout his art world rise, as well as an apartment. So, kids, get a rich partner and you’ll be aight.
Then the photos begin. The men pulled off the street. Robert’s cocaine addiction and his super sketchy ways of seducing young men (particularly young, beautiful, black men) and sweet talking them to undo their pants so he can take pictures of their penises. The abandonment of everybody, including his little brother (Brandon Sklenar) who is trying his best to be a famous photographer like his hero brother. It’s hard to watch while our society is enveloped in “me too” culture, and I hope that’s a connection Timoner is making but I’m not 100% certain the connection is on purpose.

Mapplethorpe is only 102 minutes and feels a lot longer. When flashes of Mapplethorpe’s actual pictures appear onscreen, the movie becomes alive and immediate. We’re reminded of what made him so incendiary in the first place. His work was kinetic and intense. It was dangerous and taboo. Robert was an enigma. He was quiet and temperamental, the type of person folks who love “tortured artist” stereotypes are drawn to. Robert died of AIDS related illness at age 42, but before he did, he spread the disease to a lot of unknowing people. I appreciate embracing the subject matter’s less than desirable traits, I just wish this movie was better at capturing the things that made Robert special in the first place.
Read Just Kids if you’d like an intimate portrayal of the man behind the camera. Patti Smith captures a time and a place in much more vivid imagery than this plodding tale suggests. But if Mapplethorpe is any indication, Matt Smith will be putting out more beautiful performances and Timoner is a stylish filmmaker with a bright future. I hope the movies in their futures are more on par with their talents.
Stray observations:
-What is the MPAA’s beef (heh) with front bits? Butts are cool. Boobs are usually fine. Penis and vagina is out. (Unless they’re Viggo Mortenson or Michael Fassbender and your contract insists you must show pee-pee.) Matt Smith’s front bits are always tastefully hidden, even as he gets up from a naked rendezvous. Does Robert never showing us his privates act as the filmmaker’s way of metaphorically, and literally, showing that he is always in hiding? Or is it because movie stars are reluctant to show bitsies? Food for thought.
-From Just Kids by Patti Smith:
“Robert trusted in the law of empathy, by which he could, by his will, transfer himself into an object or a work of art, and thus influence the outer world. He did not feel redeemed by the work he did. He did not seek redemption. He sought to see what others did not, the projection of his imagination.”
This paragraph describes Robert Mapplethorpe in more detail and specificity than the movie Mapplethorpe.

Repost from Cinema76.com

We follow Westwood's history from early days as a single mother, smitten by Mr. Westwood at a young age, and then increasingly bored of him and his dreams of a Leave it to Beaverhome life. She left him for Malcolm McLaren, an art student at the time, and history was spray painted in the sky. McLaren and Westwood took up residency in Camden Town (a strange little pocket of a town, filled with underground stables and music venues) and sold records for a time in a little store called "Let it Rock". Over their partnership, "Let it Rock" changed names a handful of times (Notable legendary names include: "Too Fast to Live, Too Young To Die", "Sex", "Seditionaries", and now it is the beautiful "World's End") and customers came and went. Some customers, as is the case with Johnny Rotten, were handpicked and styled into superstars. As Westwood became increasingly interested in fashion and selling sex and destruction through fashion, McLaren because jealous. As she did with her husband before, Westwood out grew their relationship and moved on.
In this documentary, Westwood is uninterested in talking about the Sex Pistols and the pair's time together. The subject is dropped fairly quickly to focus on Westwood's own legacy, but if you are interested in those formative days of Punk Rock, read Please Kill Me: An Uncensored Oral Historyby Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain. It's fire.
The second half of the documentary focuses on Westwood's humanitarianism and her rise to popularity. Nowadays, Westwood and her husband, fellow designer Andreas Kronthaler, are working diligently to make sure the brand she built from nothing is quality assured. Westwood is concerned that her brand has gotten too big, and is more interested in her humanitarian efforts than making money by brand expansions. There are more than a few shots of Westwood marching against fracking with fashionable shoes, smash cut with clips of her accepting Designer of the Year awards.
It's a little upsetting to see the designer's humanitarian efforts skated over when Westwood so clearly wants that to be the focus of the film's runtime. The Westwood camp put this on twitter in regards to the documentary: "The Vivienne Westwood documentary set for release this year, Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist has been made and produced by a third party and as it stands is not endorsed by Vivienne Westwood. Lorna Tucker asked to film Vivienne's activism and followed her around for a couple of years, but there's not even five minutes of activism in the film, instead there's lots of old fashion footage which is free and available to view online. It's a shame because the film is mediocre, and Vivienne and Andreas are not."
Fascinating.
At its heart, I believe Tucker's documentary tried to get us closer to a woman who is not very interested in letting us get close, and in doing so, the film is just as frustrating and fascinating as fashion and punk was at the time of Westwood's rise. It's a straightforward movie about a woman who is anything but. Westwood certainly led a wild and weird lifetime, but underneath the safety pins and the cigarettes, there is a heart of good will and true artistry. To get a true sense of the icon, watch standalone interviews with Vivienne Westwood. She's incredible.

Stray thoughts:
Punk has always existed in a strange in-between of culture and consumerism. There is a hilarious cut away where a museum curator is carefully steaming and folding an iconic Westwood/McLaren piece: A ripped to shreds, dirty sweatshirt, covered in swastikas and "Anarchy in the UK" lyrics. That moment defines the documentary. Westwood has become high art to be observed and cared for, but also, ya know, Get pissed. Destroy.

Re-post from Cinema76.com