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A Dirty Shame: John Waters
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[W]hile A Dirty Shame might not be a return to form for John Waters, it is most assuredly a step in the right direction. Certainly this is not the movie to watch with your Aunt Petunia who just loved that Hairspray musical and now thinks she likes John Waters. If nothing else, A Dirty Shame proves that no matter what you may think, Waters hasn't quite sold out. Not completely, anyway. Not yet.
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It probably goes without mentioning that the director of "A Dirty Shame" is John Waters (after all, not since "ET" have the phrase "pulsating butthole" and Steven Spielberg been mentioned in the same sentence). For those who've been holding out hope that Waters has one more great movie in him, "A Dirty Shame" is a lot like getting to the Promised Land after forty years in the desert and having Moses turn around and say, "Just three hundred more miles." One feels betrayed, disappointed, and disproportionately let down. John Waters has made some of the funniest movies in modern cinema, but the last movie he made was "Serial Mom" — since then he hasn't been making movies, he's been making John Waters movies. John Waters movies have EZ pitch, gross-out komedy koncepts, nearly-identical structures (there's always a scene where the square is introduced to a gallery of freaks; there's lots of cutaway humor), and they all indicate broadly that they are funny and shocking John Waters movies, rather than just being funny and shocking movies by a guy named John Waters.
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A Dirty Shame is outrageous for the sake of being outrageous, but unlike some of Waters' other films, it's neither shocking nor funny. In recent years the line of good taste has been crossed in mainstream comedies, making it more difficult for Waters to push the envelope like he did with Pink Flamingos and Polyester. (There's Something About Mary and National Lampoon's Van Wilder, to pick examples on opposing ends of the quality spectrum, feature gross-out gags that would be at home in Waters' films.) Waters and his cast think they're being naughty, but the bawdy jokes, repeated ad nauseam, are feeble and frequently telegraphed. Waters loves B and C-list celebrities, but haven't enough David Hasselhoff jokes been made to eliminate any humor in having the Baywatch star's CGI turds bonk Chris Isaak on the head? Only Ullman's sex club version of "The Hokey Pokey" performed at a retirement home sustains any comedic momentum.
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If A Dirty Shame works at all, it’s at the level of the sitcom (though one that even HBO would refuse). Waters is still able to write funny one-liners (“I’m Sylvia, and I can’t control my … axis of evil.”) and sight gags (Blair trying and failing to downplay her huge bosoms in a Laura Ashley dress), and he throws out one that works every few minutes. There’s fun to be had here, and anyone who enjoyed Pink Flamingos or Desperate Living knows better than to expect (and probably wouldn’t much want) great cinema. Still, it’s disappointing to see Waters finally diving back into the kind of filthy material he put aside over 20 years ago and seeming to have so little fun with it.
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A Dirty Shame ... comes across as ideologically confused. The film's sex-positive message is offset by how the repression is erased. Only the concussed are enlightened. Perhaps it's Waters' way of poking fun at those who desire sexual permissiveness, but that isn't the impression A Dirty Shame leaves. The prudes serve as the main target, but even the most liberal viewers are likely to object to the notion that public masturbation and intercourse in the streets is healthy for society.
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The opening half-hour of "A Dirty Shame" is comic gold, a literally non-stop barrage of brilliantly savage sight gags and hilariously lewd one-liners. The proceeding hour is more uneven, as things go from outrageous to downright bizarre and the plotting, which too closely resembles "Cecil B. Demented" in its look at a group of deviant outcasts, becomes decidedly scattered. Even when the material doesn't always work... one has to admire John Waters' quirky ambition and no-holds-barred attitude, He is shameless in his juvenile mindset, and his joyful onslaught of immorality wears you into submission. Some of the time—actually, most of the time—you are so in awe at what you are seeing and hearing that conventional criticism doesn't really apply.
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