I Shot Andy Warhol (1996; directed by Mary Harron)

Valerie Solanis, the woman who shot Andy Warhol, was also the founder and sole member of SCUM (the Society for Cutting Up Men), and the prevailing opinion about her has always been that either she was a feminist martyr or a lunatic. This movie proposes the possibility that she may have been both. As played by Lili Taylor (and I can't imagine anybody else who could have done it), she is clearly emotionally disturbed, but many of her theories about women and men are way ahead of what most people were willing to consider in 1969. Plus, she presents them in a wild, funny and provocative way that is also about 25 years too early.

Jarred Harris is good as Andy Warhol, capturing how he did so much while mostly seeming to be doing nothing at all. The whole scene around Warhol's "factory" is depicted very well, mostly with bits swiped from Warhol's movie "Chelsea Girls" (a great film, by the way), including the misogyny which is pretty close to the surface when real women are mocked for not being more like drag queens.

Andy Warhol wrote in "The Philosophy of Andy Warhol" that increasingly they preferred casting drag queens in the Warhol movies instead of real women, and this idea, that drag queens make the best women, is depicted again and again in this movie, especially in the character of Candy Darling (played wonderfully by Stephen Dorff).


Best of 1999 / Best of the Decade

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