At one point in D.E.B.S. a team member uses the term supervillain, not ironically but descriptively, leading to a new rule for Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary: “Movies that refer to supervillains not ironically but descriptively reveal an insufficient disconnect between the pitch and the story.” The rule has countless subsets, such as characters referring to themselves or others as heroes. Best friends who say, “I’m only comic relief” are given a provisional pass.
The Charlie figure in the movie is the president of the D.E.B.S. Academy, played by Michael Clarke Duncan, who looks spiffy in a tailored suit and rimless glasses. He gives them their orders, while never asking himself, I guess, how goes the homeland security when bimbos are minding the front lines. For that matter, Lucy Diamond, whose middle name I hope is Intheskywith, would rather make love than war, which leads to some PG-13 smooching.
Mrs. Peatree (Holland Taylor), headmistress of the D.E.B.S. academy, asks Amy to turn the situation to her advantage by using herself as bait (“like Jodie did in that movie—you know the one, what was its name?”). I confess at this point I was less interested in Jodie’s filmography than in the news that the D.E.B.S. academy has a headmistress. I found myself wanting to know more about the academy’s school song, lunchroom menu, student council, and parents’ day. (“Janet has perfect scores in lying and cheating, but needs work on her stealing, and is flunking murder.”) The uniform is cute little plaid skirts and white blouses, with matching plaid ties.
Other notes: I think I heard correctly, but may not have, that one character’s “Freudian analysis” is that she suffers from a “dangerous Jungian symbiosis.” Now there’s a Freudian analysis you don’t hear every day. I know I heard correctly when two of the girls share their dream: “Let’s pretend we’re in Barcelona, and you’re at art school and I’m renting boats to tourists.” The young people today, send them on junior year abroad, they go nuts. I note in passing that the movie quotes accurately from the famous shot in Citizen Kane where the camera moves straight up past the catwalks, drops, ropes, and pulleys above a stage. For me, that shot was like the toy in a box of Cracker-Jack: not worth much, but you’re glad they put it in there.
Dirty Love
(DIRECTED BY JOHN MALLORY ASHER; STARRING JENNY MCCARTHY, CARMEN ELECTRA; 2005)
Dirty Love wasn’t written and directed; it was committed. Here is a film so pitiful it doesn’t rise to the level of badness. It is hopelessly incompetent. It stars and was scripted by Jenny McCarthy, the cheerfully sexy model who, judging by this film, is fearless, plucky, and completely lacking in common sense or any instinct for self-preservation.
Yes, it takes nerve to star in a scene where you plop down in a supermarket aisle surrounded by a lake of your own menstrual blood. But to expect an audience to find that funny verges on dementia. McCarthy follows it with a scene where the cops strip-search her and she’s wearing a maxi pad that would be adequate for an elephant. She doesn’t need to do this. It’s painful to see a pretty girl, who seems nice enough, humiliating herself on the screen. I feel sorry for her.
The film basically consists of McCarthy and her half-dressed friends Carmen Electra and Kam Heskin grouped awkwardly on the screen like high school girls in that last heedless showoff stage before a designated driver straps them in and takes them home. At times they literally seem to be letting the camera roll while they try to think up something goofy to do. There is also a lot of crude four-letter dialogue, pronounced as if they know the words but not the music.
The plot: McCarthy plays Rebecca, who seems well dressed and with great wheels for someone with no apparent income. She is cheated on by her boyfriend, Richard (Victor Webster), aka Dick, who looks like the model on the cover of a drugstore romance novel about a girl who doesn’t know that guys who look like that spend all of their time looking like that. When she discovers his treachery, Rebecca has a grotesque emotional spasm. She weeps, wails, staggers about Hollywood Boulevard flailing her arms and screaming, crawls on the pavement, and waves her butt at strangers while begging them to ravage her because she is simultaneously worthless and wants to teach Dick a lesson. Then, to teach Dick a lesson, she dates scummy losers.
These events are directed by McCarthy’s former partner John Mallory Asher and photographed by Eric Wycoff so incompetently that Todd McCarthy, the esteemed film critic of Variety, should have won the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for generosity after writing the “whole package has a cheesy look.” This movie is an affront to cheese. Also to breasts. Jenny McCarthy has a technologically splendid bosom that should, in my opinion, be put to a better use than being vomited upon.
The Carmen Electra character meanwhile struts around like a ho in a bad music video, speaking black street talk as if she learned it phonetically, and pulling out a gun and holding it to a man’s head because she thinks, obviously, that pulling guns on guys is expected of any authentic black woman. A scene like that would be insulting in any other movie; here it possibly distracts her from doing something even more debasing.
I would like to say more, but—no, I wouldn’t. I would not like to say more. I would like to say less. On the basis of Dirty Love, I am not certain that anyone involved has ever seen a movie, or knows what one is. I would like to invite poor Jenny McCarthy up here to the Toronto Film Festival, where I am writing this review while wonderful films are playing all over town, and get her a pass, and require her to go to four movies a day until she gets the idea.
A Dirty Shame
(DIRECTED BY JOHN WATERS; STARRING TRACEY ULLMAN, JOHNNY KNOXVILLE; 2004)
There is in showbiz something known as a bad laugh. That’s the laugh you don’t want to get, because it indicates not amusement but incredulity, nervousness, or disapproval. John Waters’s A Dirty Shame is the only comedy I can think of that gets more bad laughs than good ones.
Waters is the poet of bad taste and labors mightily here to be in the worst taste he can manage. That’s not the problem—no, not even when Tracey Ullman picks up a water bottle using a method usually employed only in Bangkok sex shows. We go to a Waters film expecting bad taste, but we also expect to laugh, and A Dirty Shame is monotonous, repetitive, and sometimes wildly wrong in what it hopes is funny.
The movie takes place in Baltimore, as most Waters films do. Stockholm got Bergman, Rome got Fellini, and Baltimore—well, it also has Barry Levinson. Ullman plays Sylvia Stickles, the owner of a 7-Eleven type store. Chris Isaak plays Vaughn, her husband. Locked in an upstairs room is their daughter, Caprice (Selma Blair), who was a legend at the local go-go bar until her parents grounded and padlocked her. She worked under the name of Ursula Udders, a name inspired by breasts so large they are obviously produced by technology, not surgery.
Sylvia has no interest in sex until a strange thing happens. She suffers a concussion in a car crash, and it turns her into a sex maniac. Not only can’t she get enough of it, she doesn’t even pause to inquire what it is before she tries to get it. This attracts the attention of a local auto mechanic named Ray-Ray Perkins, played by Johnny Knoxville, who no longer has to consider Jackass his worst movie. Ray-Ray has a following of sex addicts who joyfully proclaim their special tastes and gourmet leanings.