Full Frontal Mockery
PECKER
When a cinematic social satire is titled Pecker, you can be
pretty sure John Waters is involved.
With Edward Furlong, Christina Ricci, Martha Plimpton, Lili Taylor
Written and directed by John Waters
John Waters' Pecker is the feel-good movie of the year, especially if you like the feel of testicles against your forehead.
Like all of Waters' more mainstream movies - Hairspray, Cry-Baby, Serial Mom - once you get the concept and the primary point of social satire (it's generally the same in all of his movies), you're left with a series of freaky characters and comic set pieces that either do or don't make you laugh. So by that standard Pecker is a relatively successful little movie: It has some good laughs, a few howls, a twangy country theme song, and a sprinkling of lines about fame, art and culture that are de rigueur for one of Andy Warhol's trash-cinema offspring.
The title character in Pecker - portrayed by Edward Furlong, and so named because he pecked at his food as a child - is a thoroughly sweet and ingenuous lad who works as a short-order cook in a greasy sub shop for a surly boss who tells him he's "off the clock" if he takes even a five-minute break.
His only love, other than his girlfriend (Christina Ricci), who owns a laundromat and runs it like a drill sergeant, is his 35mm thrift shop camera. He uses it to take photos of all the working-class schlubs (and fornicating dumpster rats) in the ramshackle Baltimore neighborhood where be lives. And the people love posing for his camera, which gives them all their 15 seconds of fame. (In this neighborhood, you take what you can get.)
Pecker's mother (Mary Kay Place) sells flamboyant-cum-cheesy second-hand polyester clothing with the motto, "If you have 15 cents, we'll make you look like a million bucks." His wrinkled, diminutive Memama, who sells pit beef sandwiches outside their home, is a faithful Catholic and certified loon who has a Virgin Mary doll that she claims can talk, although everyone can see the old woman's lips move when the Virgin mumbles, "Fullograce." His father runs a local pub that's suffering because of a new strip joint across the street. "Pubic hair and liquor," his father fumes, with a copy of state law in his hand. "It's just plain illegal."
Pecker's older sister (Martha Plimpton) proudly works in a gay club where men in jock straps dance on the bar for delighted patrons, although the rules strictly forbid teabagging (that's the thing with the testicles). She's learned to call everybody "Mary" because that's what gay men do. And his younger sister, a wan little girl of maybe 10 or 11, is viciously addicted to sugar and caffeine until a Child Welfare social worker gets her hooked on Ridilin, which turns her into a lobotomized vegan who snorts peas up her nose through a straw as if it's cocaine.
Get the picture? It's a frontal assault (including pubic hair) on everything sacred and ridiculous about middle-class American family life. A Ph.D. friend of mine once defined "camp" as "a gay man's way of making sense of the world." That's the best way to understand Waters' subversive queer cinema. Pecker is his most overt mainstream film yet, from the beefy gay nightclub club dancers who claim they're straight, to the humorless lesbian strippers who snarls at their patrons: "What are you looking at, assholes? You like lezzies, don't you?"
Oh, I almost forgot to mention: When Pecker hangs some of his photos in the sub shop where he works, an art promoter (Lili Taylor) from New York falls in love with his work and makes him a Manhattan art world sensation. Before long all the people in Baltimore who loved having Pecker take their pictures begin to shun his shutter, and some even think they're entitled to a piece of the action.
So Pecker is really about the way pretentious uptown artsy-fartsy types come downtown to slum with the dregs and freaks, and how an innocent like Pecker gets turned inside-out by the phonies who all want to be part of the next pop-cult wave.
Waters' dialogue in Pecker abounds with throw-away digs at how our culture defines and depreciates art. One critic calls Pecker "a humane Diane Arbus with a wonderful streak of kindness." His girlfriend tells him that he "sees art when there's nothing there." But Pecker knows how important it is to escape into art. "Everything always looks good through here," he says with the viewfinder to his eye. In the end, when he recovers from almost selling out, he decides he wants to make a movie.
Acting has never much mattered to John Waters (another of his snubs at convention), and most of Pecker is no exception. Lili Taylor, who doesn't seem like she belongs in the movie, is low-keyed and radiant - an innocent of a different sort than Pecker. But Plimpton is shrill, Ricci is flat, Mink Stole and Patty Hearst are present, and the gaudy people about the periphery get their flashes of instant celebrity as cameo kooks whom Waters puts on display because nobody else will. (He claims that he loves these kinds of people and finds dignity in their strangeness.)
Worst of all in Pecker is Furlong, a young actor whose burgeoning career I simply don't get: He's monotonous, even listless, and he doesn't have the pretty-boy l ooks you'd expect him to have considering his dearth of talent. I suppose directors see him as being a "natural," although in the case of Waters, who is unerringly warped and idiosyncratic, I wouldn't want to guess at why Furlong got the job.
Wild on the Set
CECIL B.DEMENTED
Hollywood gets a soaking in a John Waters comedy.
With Stephen Dorff, Melanie Griffith, Alicia Witt
Written and Directed by John Waters
JOHN WATERS ALWAYS EXPLAINS HIS MOVIES better than he makes them: He's a hoot on talk shows, articulate and clever, with a pungent sensibility about straight white middle-class suburban shopping mall Hell. But his actual movies tend to play better the second time you see them, when you can lower your expectations and focus on the bizarre comic details that he sprinkles throughout each one.
His new movie, Cecil B. Demented, is somewhat shallow Waters, a parodic assault on all kinds of cinema: the bloated exploitation of Hollywood, the pretense of foreign art films, and the self-important no-budget indie cinema whose combatants believe Hollywood co-opted their two biggest assets - nudity and gore.
The mayhem begins, as always for Waters, in Baltimore, this time at the charity premiere of a romantic comedy starring the famous Honey Whitlock (Melanie Griffith). She comes to town for the event, although not by choice: Sanguine to the local press about lovely Baltimore (where her movie was shot on location), she turns sanguinary as soon as they leave the room. And on top of her foul personality, her movie is a stinker that's expected to tank worse than the Prague summer.
Then she gets the biggest career boost a fading movie star could ever desire. All of the ushers at the theater on premiere night are disciples of Cecil B. Demented (Stephen Dorff), a bleached-blond cultural anarchist who's willing to die to make his "outlaw" movie featuring Honey Whitlock, whom the grubby revolutionaries kidnap at gunpoint.
They whisk her away to the Hippodrome, an abandoned theater stocked with stolen equipment, and force her to act in their makeshift movie. Cecil's motto is "no bad takes" - that is, no money for reshoots - and his desperado cohorts shout slogans like "power to the people who punish bad cinema" and "hey, hey, MPAA, how many movies did you censor today."
These celluloid losers could keep a psychiatrist in business for a lifetime. Hunky Rodney is a heterosexual who hates himself for not being able to love a man. Sexy Cherish (Alicia Witt) is a porn star whose was gang raped as a child by her family under the Christmas tree, and whose latest on-screen leading man is a gerbil. Baby-faced Fidget misses his mommy, pretty-boy Lyle is an ambidextrous drug addict, and bearded Raven is a dyke who admires the macho cinema of Sam Fuller. They all have tattoos honoring their favorite directors, from Almodovar and Kenneth Anger to Fassbinder and William Castle. (The autocratic Cecil's idolizes Otto Preminger.)
You can see pretty early where Waters will go with his premise: When Honey realizes what people really think of her, she warms up to her abductors and seizes the opportunity to do some "real" acting. So Cecil B. Demented becomes a loopy reinvention of the strange tale of Patty Hearst, the heiress-turned-Symbionese-liberationist of the 1970s who, since her release from prison, has joined the Waters ensemble and appeared in his movies (this time as Fidget's mother.)
For a John Waters movie, Cecil B. Demented looks remarkably good, with some rare visual nuances and a little bit of pace. It has sufficient humor by the director's usual standard, with somewhat less camp than usual for him (because there aren't any housewives in the story). But not even Waters can come up with fresh Hollywood jokes in these media-savvy days, although his jokes are cruder and ruder than most other assaults, which are usually made by people who really want to be players despite their feigned reproach.
It's just not as much fun watching Melanie Griffith play a stuck-up actress as it is watching Kathleen Turner as a serial-killing mom who pranks people with dirty phone calls from the bedroom of her tastefully decorated home. Nor does Cecil B. Demented have a gag half as loopy as Memama, the granny in Pecker who owns a miraculous Virgin Mary doll that mutters "full o' grace." (It's really the old lady doing bad ventriloquism.) So if you feel like seeing Cecil B. Demented, skip your first viewing and move right on to the second, where you can just relax and enjoy it.