FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 2000. All Rights Reserved

Film by Jaime Frederick Cecil B. Demented starring Stephen Dorff, Melanie Griffith directed by John Waters Opens Friday, September 1 Uptown Screen With a battle cry of "Hey, hey, M-P-A-A, how many films did you censor today?!" John Waters’s latest film blasts off, fully cocked and aimed straight at the heart of everything that is wrong with mainstream cinema. Cecil B. Demented is probably as close as we’ll ever get to an adaptation of the late novelist and screenwriter Terry Southern’s dirty, dirty book, Blue Movie, a savagely witty satire of Hollywood that proposed the ultimate in multiple X-ratings – a pornographic film with a cast of only the most celebrated stars of the silver screen. Of course, today, with so many Hollywood actors prostituting their every excess for the tabloids, Blue Movie would more likely be fodder for a documentary. So, instead, trash auteur John Waters gives us Cecil B. Demented, an inspired, over-the-top satire about a group of extreme cinema terrorists who take Baltimore by storm when they kidnap a visiting Hollywood starlet (Melanie Griffith) and transform her into the star of their next outrageous underground film. The ideologues behind Dogma 95 are stylistic moderates compared to these revolutionary upstarts, who call for nothing less than the complete eradication of the Hollywood system and all it represents. Tattooed with the names of renegade maverick filmmakers like Sam Peckinpah, Kenneth Anger, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Sam Fuller and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, these film freaks wear their influences not on their sleeves but right on their skin, and they aspire not just to make films but to live them. Holed up in an abandoned movie theatre, Cecil (Steven Dorff) and his "Sprocket Holes" spout anti-Hollywood doctrine as they strive for cinematic innovation above all else. As caricatures and alter-egos of Waters and his early collaborators on films like Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble, these characters prove that Waters can poke fun first at himself before he levels other more established targets with his nasty social commentary. No one even remotely associated with movies escapes unscathed from this film – whether it’s pasty studio execs who green-light idiotic sequels to trite, simple-minded films ("Gump Again!"), so-called independent filmmakers whose use their movies solely as a stepping stone to a career in Hollywood, opportunistic producers who remake foreign language films in English, chatty moviegoers who blather away even after the feature has started, or any other identifiable middlebrow enemy of cinematic art, they all receive the full brunt of Waters’s hostility. Most surprising is Melanie Griffith’s good-natured send-up of herself in a rather bold role that could’ve been a career breaker. As Honey Whitlock, the aging Hollywood starlet in distress, she’s painted up like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, although unlike Swanson’s Norma Desmond, Whitlock’s flagging career is somehow revived by her visionary captors. Even so, in a film thats references and homages occasionally border on pastiche, you had to know she and Waters would work in a riff on Desmond’s famous last words. Of course, in this case the line immediately precedes the torching of Griffith’s platinum blonde wig for Cecil’s ever-present camera – self-immolation has never looked quite so deranged. As Steven Soderbergh recently remarked of his work with Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich, "If you’re trying to sneak something under the wire... it’s nice to have one of the world’s most bankable stars sneaking under with you." Waters takes a similar approach with Griffith in this movie, only he’s rarely very sneaky in his methods. He just grabs his leading lady and bulldozes right on through, trashing just about every institution near and dear to the moral majority on the way. "Family is just a dirty word for censorship," hisses Griffith – or maybe it’s one of Cecil’s minions – in one of their guerrilla cinema attacks on a theatre showing nothing but feel-good "family films." It’s a good thing Waters knows how to wring every last joke from his indignation. Sure, like in many of his films the acting is occasionally lame, and even the writing falls flat here and there, but in general those are minor, forgivable flaws – the byproduct of exuberant, gleeful filmmaking that revels in its own insanity. A totally unforgettable return to former glory from the divine Mr. Waters.

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