Cecil B. Demented

Insane filmmaker Cecil (Stephen Dorff) and his devoted cast and crew, the "Sprocket Holes," kidnap a Hollywood star (Melanie Griffith) and force her to appear in their no-budget outlaw movie. At first horrified by her new surroundings, the actress is won over to her captors' values during the shoot. Writer/ director John Waters's compulsion to cast himself as a light-comedy director has never seemed so limiting as in Cecil B. Demented. The subject needed to be treated either savagely or with cruel detachment, but Waters serves up a glib, Film Threat-addled fantasy of how an "underground" film unit might look, sound, and function. Vincent Peranio's cluttered set design and the pumped-up, eclectic soundtrack provide gestures of aggressiveness, and Cecil and the Sprocket Holes seem to be quoting from some Little Red Book of filmic doctrine (best quip: "We believe technique to be nothing more than failed style"). But by never defining Cecil's vision except in negative terms, as a rebellion against loathsome "mainstream cinema" (represented by such cooperative targets as Patch Adams and Forrest Gump), the film betrays its premise. And though Griffith is fine as the displaced star, Dorff's cartoon caricature of Cecil is strangely uncharismatic. At the Cable Car Cinema.
-- Chris Fujiwara