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I'd assume so as well given I love everything by him including that one episode of Clueless.

therewillbeblus wrote: Mon Mar 09, 2020 11:17 pm

knives wrote: Mon Mar 09, 2020 6:20 pm All of his films are certainly black comedies, but I was making a differentiation between the wryness of Eating Raoul and the more medium dependent sensibility of Death Race which you said you didn't like.

I’d definitely say that Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills contains that wryness, even if it is a bit more animated in tone toward John Waters, but I think they’re similar enough in comedic delivery to cite a greater overlap

I finally got around to this last night after years in the unwatched pile and my first thought was that this is the kind of film John Waters probably thinks he's making-- consistently tasteless, but somehow also oddly not mean-spirited. Everyone knows they're in trash and are completely into it. Contains a lot of amusing barbs, some broader than others, but clearly the best line is, re: the skills of poor people in the bedroom: "They'll suck your box so hard your nose will bleed." The kind of film that has a restraining order on subtlety, but that can be fun in the right hands.

It was of course also very sad to see the infamous (and ultimately quite mild, especially for this film) bedroom scene with Rebecca Schaeffer from My Sister Sam that led to her stalker going over the edge and killing her after seeing it.

Spoiler

I did enjoy the dark punchline to Bartel's effeminate character apparently putting on the long con with regards to her in the end, though!

Bartel's final feature, Shelf Life (1993), has finally had a commercial release, with Bartel's personal 35mm print housed in
the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences' archives being the source of the digital copy. The cast/co-writers did a Zoom
Q&A with the American Cinematheque that you can watch here

domino harvey wrote: Fri Sep 18, 2020 4:06 pm

therewillbeblus wrote: Mon Mar 09, 2020 11:17 pm

knives wrote: Mon Mar 09, 2020 6:20 pm All of his films are certainly black comedies, but I was making a differentiation between the wryness of Eating Raoul and the more medium dependent sensibility of Death Race which you said you didn't like.

I’d definitely say that Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills contains that wryness, even if it is a bit more animated in tone toward John Waters, but I think they’re similar enough in comedic delivery to cite a greater overlap

I finally got around to this last night after years in the unwatched pile and my first thought was that this is the kind of film John Waters probably thinks he's making-- consistently tasteless, but somehow also oddly not mean-spirited.

I'm now curious what you think Waters' films actually are as my own definition is pretty similarly though with the adverb switched to quaintly.

Also have you seen the turgid Lust in the Dust which actively is trying to be a Waters' knockoff?

Not for Publication is so far the Bartel film I've seen that most emulates John Waters' tasteless sensitivity mentioned above, locating a strange hybrid that's part screwball comedy, using the spunky female-journalist archetype, and molding it against the 70s political thrillers, finding the commonalities between those early self-actualized screwball leading ladies and the feminist protagonists of the 70s; e.g. Fonda in Klute. This film actually feels inspired by the Pakula in a bizarrely inverted way, since Allen is a straight-shooting overclothed asexual prude on the surface, up against the city's dark underbelly -which is synonymous with kink- and seemingly immune to the ubiquitous smut with a sense of naivete. It's a little fun to watch Allen's natural sexuality unveil itself as she gains attention in various ways, transforming into a traditional female stereotype disrobed of her identity through flattery and lustful validation. Here that development is reframed into supposing that she was suppressing this side of her all along, and only filling the empty hole of self-actualization in submitting to her societal 'role' - which I suppose is also a call-back to those early screwballs! The film isn't coherently strange in a consistently amusing way, and there were long stretching where I wasn't laughing, though you have to admire Bartel's audacity to throw in a non sequitur musical number with David Naughton making the Lord Love a Duck dad-faces throughout. The early ideas gesture at the absurd in provocation, but the film fizzles as it progresses and doesn't seem to ever know what kind of film it wants to be, especially whenever the action descends into a standardized model of sleuth-corruption plots. Still, if one looks at it like a reimagining of those neo-noirs with spontaneous nonsensical interruptions, you're better off than expecting a wacky Bartel flick. I was ultimately underwhelmed because my hopes were with the latter.

knives wrote: Fri Sep 18, 2020 9:04 pmAlso have you seen the turgid Lust in the Dust which actively is trying to be a Waters' knockoff?

It’s funny because Bartel was apparently self-conscious about this looking too much like a Waters film (though I’m sure that was the basis in the script phase that Bartel had no part in). Unfortunately that’s probably the funniest thing about this movie. The sexually obscene stuff with Divine already reached peak inspiration back with Multiple Maniacs so the gags that are left rest in western genre reflexivity and they they were all D.O.A. for me. I can’t for the life of me see the comparisons made upthread between this and Eating Raoul as the most in sync in terms of sense of humor, partly because this one is so actively parodying while ER was satirizing (Beverly Hills is so far the closest cousin), but also because the comedic styles and methods of formulating gag delivery just aren’t the same. Maybe if one takes “wry” in definition to broadly mean perverse, but still there are much better examples of his work that fit a dryer nonchalant tone while this is just obnoxiously bombastic in its farce. Bartel’s absence from the construction of the script is probably the first detail that should be looked at, since he was hired as director here after Waters passed, so the significant differentiation in humor and cleverness between this and the other films in which he wrote makes a lot of sense from that angle.

Paul Bartel’s last feature, Shelf Life, is finally getting a Blu-Ray. Only a single 35mm print exists, as all of the original materials have vanished.