Artisan Entertainment Presents in association with Le Studio Canal+. A Polon Entertainment Production. A John Waters Film. Produced by John Fiedler, Joe Caracciolo, Jr., Tark Tarlov; Executive produced by Anthony DeLorenzo, Fred Bernstein; Written and directed by John Waters.
Opens August 11, 2000.
There are a lot of things you could call Cecil B. Demented, John Waters' latest art-house ornament about a obsessed independent filmmaker who goes by the nom de poseur of Cecil B. Demented - movie joke, get it? With the same level of comedic class, Waters could also have titled it Eric von Strokehead, Otto Derringer, Orson Ills, on and on with similar creativity. Preeningly pompous and so knuckleheaded in its thematic onslaught against mainstream culture, the only thing surprising about this piffle is that the end credits do not list grant money from the NEA.
Even by the ever-plunging standards of the film-festival circuit, this Artisan release is no work of craft, but merely a pretentious piffle and sub-sophomoric rant against mainstream moviemaking. In artsy vernacular you could call it a cult film, but cult and another four-letter word beginning with c are one in the same here.
Cecil B is about a bottle-blonde film fanatic, Cecil (Stephen Dorff) who convinces a gaggle of loser lowlifes to join him in kidnapping a Hollywood star, Honey Whitlock(Melanie Griffith) from a regional movie premiere in Waters' own burg of Baltimore. The crime is Cecil's not-too-brainy way of attacking Hollywood, and, in his ego-crazed mind, he thinks his act will rally the little people who yearn for more edgy moviemaking. Right on, Cec.
His grand design is to force Whitlock to be in his film, which he will be shooting off the cuff, and, naturally, he envisions that this is just the sort of populist art that the nation is yearning for. That a matronly character died in the kidnapping is sloughed off, and even for a dark comedy that poses as social satire, Cecil is even more morally bankrupt than the ultra-violent mainstream garbage it attempts to dis. We will die for our art, Cecil intones. Obviously, he will kill for it. So goes our passion for this crud.
Cecil is kind of a power-to-the-people sort of nut, an arts fascist who thinks his vision is the one and that he is graced by some sort of divine aesthetic. His idea of filmmaking comes from the turn-the-camera-on school, having probably never even benefited from one of those two-day film schools you can sign up for in every back alley of New York and east Hollywood.
Staged as a dark satire, Cecil, one might say, is artistically challenged. Waters, who both scripted and directed the feature (on the bright side, you can only blame one person for this inept monstrosity) has sludged up a thick wad that is devoid of any aesthetic or intellectual grace: It's comedy is bone-headed, its philosophy is what one might call neo-blue shirt, or leftover, leftie fascism from the '60s, and it's narrative is mindless minimalism. Quite simply, Waters has neither the finesse, creativity nor comedic skills to execute a dark comedy that requires more than buying kitschy, inexpensive props. The only thing aesthetically apt about this film is that its lead character is named Whitlock - knock off the h and you've got the word that perfectly describes its aesthetic.
Dramatically, CDM consists of a herd of characters in, seemingly, Halloween costumes running through empty streets in groups. Visually, it looks like the outtakes from one of Troma's Toxic Avenger movies, albeit without the subversive humor or the panache. In short, Waters' characters are all stereotypes but tramped up in such a cheap way as to appear to be satiric, including: a sex-maniac porn star, a Satanist, a junkie - fill in the usual suspects. As they introduce themselves to the strapped-down starlet, they all thrust out their forearms, whic