Review – A Dirty Shame

I’m sorry, John Waters. I really tried with this one. I wanted to see some of the guts it took to make Multiple Maniacs and Pink Flamingos. Certainly there’s some thematic similarity. However, it just doesn’t work. Part of the problem is that society has moved on a bit from the 1960s. While “perverted” sex isn’t openly embraced across the board, as a nation we’ve at least managed to reach a mind-your-own-business accommodation with most of the weird things people like to do behind closed doors. The other problem is that once you’ve gone Hollywood it’s darn difficult to go back. As a result, this comes across as Cecil B. Demented using sex in the place of indie film-making. The joke isn’t the worst one ever told. Waters retains his gift for obscure off-the-rack music, adding his aplomb for library footage to put together some entertaining hallucination montages. But it gets old after awhile. Really old. There’s just a limit to the number of times I want to hear Johnny Knoxville yell “Let’s go sexin’!” within the course of a single movie, or even the course of a single lifetime. Mildly amusing