Catwoman dresses like a dominatrix, with the high heels and the leather skirt, brassiere, mask, and whip. But why? Because the costume sketches looked great, is my opinion. The film gives her a plot that could have been phoned in from the 1960s: She works for a corporation that’s introducing a new beauty product that gives women eternal youth, unless they stop taking it, in which case they look like burn victims. When Patience stumbles over this unfortunate side effect, she is attacked by security guards, flushed out of a waste pipe, and is dead when Midnight finds her.
Soon she has a dual identity: Patience by day, Catwoman by night. She already knows Tom Lone. They met when she crawled out of her window and balanced on an air conditioner to rescue Midnight, and Tom thought she was committing suicide and saved her after she slipped. Uh, huh. That meeting begins a romance between Patience and Tom that is remarkable for its complete lack of energy, passion, and chemistry. If the movie had been ten minutes longer it would have needed a scene where they sigh and sadly agree their relationship is just not working out. One of those things. Not meant to be.
The villains are Laurel and George Hedare (Sharon Stone and Lambert Wilson). He runs the cosmetics company and fires his wife as its model when she turns forty. She is not to be trifled with, especially not in a movie where the big fight scene is a real catfight, so to speak, between the two women. Stone’s character is laughably one-dimensional, but then that’s a good fit for this movie, in which none of the characters suggest any human dimensions and seem to be posing more than relating. Take George, for example, whose obnoxious mannerisms are so grotesque he’s like the Saturday Night Live version of Vincent Price.
Among many silly scenes, the silliest has to be the Ferris wheel sequence, which isn’t even as thrilling as the one in The Notebook. Wouldn’t you just know that after the wheel stalls, the operator would recklessly strip the gears, and the little boy riding alone would be in a chair where the guard rail falls off, and then the seat comes loose, and then the wheel tries to shake him loose and no doubt would try to electrocute him if it could.
The score by Klaus Badelt is particularly annoying; it faithfully mirrors every action with what occasionally sounds like a karaoke rhythm section. The director, whose name is Pitof, was probably issued with two names at birth and would be wise to use the other one on his next project.
Cecil B. Demented
(DIRECTED BY JOHN WATERS; STARRING MELANIE GRIFFITH, STEPHEN DORFF; 2000)
My best guess is that John Waters produced the talent shows in his high school. There’s always been something cheerfully amateurish about his more personal films—a feeling that he and his friends have dreamed up a series of skits while hanging out together. Cecil B. Demented takes this tendency to an almost unwatchable extreme, in a home movie that’s like a bunch of kids goofing off.
To be sure, he has real stars in the picture; Melanie Griffith stars as a Hollywood star, and Stephen Dorff plays the cult leader who kidnaps her as part of his guerrilla assault on mainstream cinema. But they’re used more as exhibits than performers (Look! It’s Melanie Griffith!). The movie has a radical premise, as Weathermen-type movie lovers try to destroy dumb commercial films, but it is pitched at the level of a very bad sketch on Saturday Night Live.
Cinema guerrilla Cecil B. Demented (Dorff) and his cult group kidnap Griffith, who will be forced to star in their own film. Their targets include the Maryland Film Commission, the big shots who produced Griffith’s own new film, and Gump Two, a sequel to Forrest Gump, which is being shot in Baltimore. Some of this stuff is funny in concept (when they attack the director’s cut of Patch Adams, that’s good for a laugh, although the scene itself isn’t).
And Griffith, as a spoiled star named Honey Whitlock, gets into the spirit. She makes the life of her assistant (Ricki Lake) miserable, she makes impossible demands, she sends back a limousine that’s the wrong color (not fiction; I once actually saw Ginger Rogers do this), and she is not a good sport when it comes to eating Maryland seafood. (“I’m not interested in some kind of meal you have to beat with a mallet while wearing some stupid little bib, while families of mutants gawk in your face.”)
But the story and dialogue are genuinely amateur night, and there are times when you can almost catch the actors giggling, like kids in a senior class sketch. It’s been like that in a lot of Waters’s movies, from the raunchy early sleazoids like Pink Flamingos, through his transitional phase (Polyester) to his studio productions (Hairspray, Cry-Baby, Serial Mom). Now he seems to have returned to his middle period again, if such a thing is possible.
Cecil B. Demented got its title, Waters says, because that’s what he was called in an early review. Like Ed Wood (but inevitably at a higher level of artistry), he seems to enjoy the actual process of making films: He likes to go to the set, have actors, say “Action!” and see everyone have a good time. Sometimes, in this film, that geniality works against him; the actors are having a better time than we are.
Too much of the movie feels like the kind of film where you’re supposed to say, “Look! There’s …” and fill in the name of a faded TV personality. Patricia Hearst, who appeared in Waters’s funny Cry-Baby, is back, for example, to add ironic weight to a story about a kidnap victim who identifies with her captors. How entertaining is that really supposed to be?
Waters has always embraced a tacky design look in his films, and here a lot of the sets seem decorated by stuff everybody brought from home. Old movie posters are plastered on the walls, the cult hangs around in what looks like a rec room, and there are movie in-jokes everywhere. (Cult members have the names of their favorite directors tattooed on their arms.)
Cecil also tells us, “I don’t believe in phony life-affirming endings.” He sure doesn’t. The ending of Cecil B. Demented may be phony, but it’s not life affirming. One wonders if the script simply says, “Everyone runs around like crazy.”
There will however always be a (small) corner of my heart filled with admiration for John Waters. He is an anarchist in an age of the cautious, an independent in an age of studio creatures, a man whose films are homemade and contain no chemicals or preservatives. Even with Cecil B. Demented, which fails on just about every level, you’ve got to hand it to him: The idea for the film is kind of inspired. When this kid gets out of high school he’s going to amount to something. You wait and see.
Charlie’s Angels
(DIRECTED BY MCG; STARRING CAMERON DIAZ, DREW BARRYMORE, LUCY LIU; 2000)
Charlie’s Angels is eye candy for the blind. It’s a movie without a brain in its three pretty little heads, which belong to Cameron Diaz, Drew Barry-more, and Lucy Liu. This movie is a dead zone in their lives, and mine.
What is it? A satire? Of what? Of satires, I guess. It makes fun of movies that want to make fun of movies like this. It’s an all-girl series of mindless action scenes. Its basic shot consists of Natalie, Dylan, and Alex, the angels, running desperately toward the camera before a huge explosion lifts them off their feet and hurls them through the air and smashes them against windshields and things—but they survive with injuries only to their makeup.