MOVIES: A Dirty Shame

Here's my super-clever review of John Waters' A Dirty Shame that I'm sure no critic in the entire country thought of using:

A Dirty Shame... is a dirty shame!!!!!!

Yuk yuk yuk.

No, seriously: I did not care for it.

It's not that I was offended by it -- I mean, it's not like I rented an NC-17 rated John Waters film and didn't expect depravity. The problem, really, is that I wasn't offended by it. For all the sex talk and bizarre fetishes, the film was disappointingly tame. Waters seems to believe that simply saying words like "felching" or suggesting someone wants to hump a tree is inherently wild and crazy enough to offend all those gosh-darn prudes in the audience!! Well, #1, it's not like he's going to be tricking all those squares who think catching a matinee of "Hairspray: The Musical" is taking a walk on the wild side into seeing this film in the first place. And #2, that means that whoever is left in the audience is going to take a lot to be shocked. We've already seen Divine eating a piece of dog shit; dressing a grown man in a diaper isn't going to make any of us bat an eye.

I don't know -- is it just me? Maybe I'm too jaded. I mean, the film did get an NC-17, after all, which it probably wouldn't have gotten ten years ago, before all those prudes and squares took over the country. NC-17 for a film that's all talk -- there aren't any sex scenes, and there's almost no nudity, and what little of it there is is presented in non-sexual ways. Maybe it is shocking simply to show Selma Blair in a gigantic and blatantly fake pair of prosthetic breasts, or to suggest Tracey Ullman's character likes oral sex, or to name a character "Fat Fuck Frank".

But it's not shocking to me. And the film isn't nearly clever enough to justify its existence without the extra kick of shock value. The central battle between the "Neuters" and the... Perverts, I guess, doesn't quite achieve the status of witty social satire. It's just kind of silly and tired. After a while, I got the impression that every one of Chris Isaak's double-takes was explicitly scripted. ("Vaughn sees the three Bears moving into their house. Vaughn reacts with a double-take.") There are a couple of fun gimmicks peppering the film, like superimposing character traits ("W-H-O-R-E") over certain scenes, and I have to admire the dedication of the performers, who play their campy, raunchy roles without reservation. But the comedy never rises much above the level of the slapstick-style head-bonks that transform the Neuters into Perverts. It's like a Three Stooges film with sex talk.