Movie Reviews from
By John Ruch
© 2000 CM Media, Inc.
Cecil B. Demented (2000)
In John Waters’ new comedy, “Cecil B. DeMented,” revolutionary filmmakers disguised as multiplex workers kidnap a star at a preview and burn the theater while shouting, “Power to the people who punish bad cinema!”
I can relate to this.
In fact,
I’m leaving “The Other Paper” because I’ve recently been disfigured by acid and
plan to retreat into the bowels of AMC theaters. I shall become the Phantom of
the
This film has similar ideas—and not just because its dialogue includes the line, “Bomb Planet Hollywood!”
The titular character, played by Stephen Dorff (“Blade,” “I Shot Andy Warhol”), is an independent director bent on turning his movie into the ultimate act of protest.
In his film-within-the-film, workers at an art-house theater are outraged when nobody comes to their Pasolini festival. So they embark on a terrorist campaign against mainstream film, tear-gassing a “Patch Adams” screening and gunning down members of the Baltimore Film Commission.
To make this an effective protest, not to mention a more exciting movie, DeMented and his cast actually commit these crimes.
And to attract top publicity, DeMented kidnaps a bona fide movie star (played by bona fide movie star Melanie Griffith) and forces her to be in his film—until she too becomes a willing convert to “outlaw cinema.”
Perhaps the biggest disappointment of this movie is that Waters himself didn’t commit real crimes to make his movie. After all, it’s largely an homage to his own past as an outrageous, prank-loving guerilla filmmaker. The title “Cecil B. DeMented” (a pun on the late spectacle-director Cecil B. DeMille, y’know) was originally a name applied to Waters by a newspaper writer.
It’s hard
not to see this film as a little tame and behind the curve, coming after such
similarly themed
Nonetheless,
still filming in his beloved
And I’ll say this for John Waters: When he makes a movie with a Patty Hearst-style plotline, he also gives the real Patty Hearst a cameo.
That’s the real value and joy of a John Waters movie, whatever its theme and however successful it is—it’s a big party thrown for all of society’s freaks, misfits and outcasts. Are revenge fantasies against the mainstream self-indulgent? Yes. Is it about time we got to indulge in them? Abso-friggin’-lutely.
As one small example, this is the first film in history to star a woman with facial hair in a non-freak role and without comment.
It’s the only film you’ll see this year with a character whose conflict is, “I’m straight and I hate it!”
It also finds an amusing way to stick up for the $5 billion-a-year shadow-Hollywood of porn films; DeMented escapes some pursuers by hiding in a porn theater, whose customers defend him in their own hilariously disgusting way.
I can think of no better answer to Gore and Lieberman’s bigoted censorial stance against “incivility”—one person’s impoliteness is another person’s way of life, and this entire film shows just how humane rudeness can be.
Waters likes to market his works as big anti-The Man rollicks, and I do find it impossible to leave one of his films without feeling giddy and strangely uplifted.
But I do think this film is more complicated than he’s letting on—and maybe sadder, too.
Its
assaults on the stupidities of mainstream film are relentless, a long parade of
closed classic theaters, English-dubbed foreign films and
But it also seems to be laughing at DeMented and his Dogma Manifesto-cum-Warhol Factory pretensions. Waters seems to be telling us that a revolution with no sense of humor isn’t a revolution at all.
There’s also the issue of hypocrisy. After all, Waters is putting out this film via a mini-major studio, one which screened it for critics only on videotapes (utter vandalism), with “Property of Artisan Entertainment” blazing across the bottom of the screen. And the film was submitted to the Motion Picture Association of America to be rated—the same group the film refers to in the line, “MPAA, MPAA, how many movies did you censor today?”
But then, I don’t think this is hypocrisy, because I don’t think this film is really a call to arms.
I think the title, newspaper puns aside, may refer more specifically to DeMille’s appearance in a certain 1950 Billy Wilder film. I think this is Waters’s punk version of “Sunset Boulevard,” with his atypically somber final shot suggesting the death of truly independent filmmaking.
Still, no reason it can’t become a call to arms.
Women in film!
Bomb Planet
Power to
the people who punish bad cinema!