Pecker

"To the end of irony!" toasts a character at the end of John Waters's Pecker, and the scary thing is, by that point it doesn't seem Waters himself is being ironic. Once he was the definition of subversive independent filmmaking, but his shock value has declined over the years since Divine ate a dog turd in 1972's Pink Flamingos. Particularly over the last decade, as Waters has released the increasingly tame Hairspray, Cry-Baby, and Serial Mom, the problem has not been so much his moving closer to the mainstream as vice versa. The provocation of a title like Pecker seems only quaint when the presidential penis is a topic on the six o'clock news.

In this case, Pecker (Edward Furlong) is an 18-year-old Baltimore innocent, a neighborhood kid with a hobby of photographing his world: his girlfriend, Shelley (Christina Ricci), working in a laundromat; his grandmother (Jean Schertler) chatting with her statue of the Blessed Virgin; a couple rats humping in a trash can. His photos catch the attention of Rorey (Lili Taylor), a New York gallery owner ("He's a humane Diane Arbus," a critic describes him), and his success in Manhattan stirs up issues of high culture versus low, regular people versus the hoi polloi, and, of course, art's exploitation of its subject and the corruption of success. Or rather, clumsy platitudes about the same -- Waters's outrageousness conceals a fundamentally middle-class heart, and his sloppy filmmaking now looks like not so much style as ineptitude. Maybe it's time, God forbid, that, like Woody Allen with Interiors, he got serious? That would be the ultimate irony. At the Avon.

-- Peter Keough