Is it my imagination or has John Waters been making the same movie for the past 15 years? He’s the only director in Hollywood that can elicit such poor performances from his actors. I know he is trying to be campy and make a statement about something or other, but his “John Waters” characters, while trying to be satirical, have become satires of themselves. What was once witty and cutting edge is now tired and annoying. He is trying to continue in a genre that has passed him by, as other indie film-makers have discovered how to write quirky characters that still have depth and sincerity.
Do we care about Pecker and what happens to him? About as much as we care about what happens to our soapsuds after we wash them down the drain. Waters’ statement about how the resistant artist is destroyed by fame and money falls way flat, and if Martha Plimpton (as Pecker’s ultra-annoying sister who MC’s at a gay strip club) had one more minute of screentime, I was going to throw my shoe through the TV. The same man who once had a three-hundred-pound transvestite eat steaming shit from a dog’s ass now thinks we’re going to be shocked by a talking statue of the Virgin Mary, a guy who likes to say pubic hair and an art critic who likes to have men’s balls bounced on his head. Ohhh, shocking! I kind of equate Water’s films with The B-52s: at first the songs are kinda fun, but with each play you start to notice Fred Schneider’s voice more and more until the songs are unbearable and you want to just make it go away…