To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995) and Magnolia (1999)

We continue our Camp Cinema season in our fourth episode covering To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995) and Magnolia (1999)

Special Guest: Returning Guest, Rotten Tomato approved film critic, Natasha Alvar from Cultured Vultures

When watching To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, there is an overriding sense of what could have been. Coming out in the mid 1990s, a surprisingly much more open time in American culture, Wong Foo went to number one at the box office. It was a modest hit, but clearly well received by the general public. If this movie was made today, everyone involved would get more death threats than residuals checks. Culture doesn't always move forward, sometimes it backslides.

Magnolia is a controversial pick for Camp Cinema. To me, it is the paradigm of what Susan Sontag called Naive Camp in her 1964 essays Notes on Camp. Magnolia is a manically ambition film with a passionate and serious tone. Paul Thomas Anderson, like Cameron Crowe in Vanilla Sky, strived to reach the artistic heavens, but all he did was take on a tour of the sad and lonely people of the San Fernando Valley. Chris and Natasha offer some good counterpoints to my stance.