Cecil B. Demented

All right! Kicking off Movie Lottery 3-D with a bang!
"I am Cecil B. Demented and this is a fucking kidnapping!"
Whiny movie starlet Honey Whitlock is attending some sort of movie premiere hospital benefit gala in Maryland when she is kidnapped onstage by a crew of renegade filmmakers, who force her to star in their movie. The filmmakers are as chaotically pretentious as Honey is vapidly self centered but in the end they all learn to work together.
And by "work together" I mean run from the cops, threaten movie executives and hijack the filming of Forrest Gump Two: Gump Again.
If I were a smarter person or a deeper thinker, I could probably talk on and on about what message (or whatever) John Waters was trying to get across with this film and, if I was even smarter than that (or at least snootier) I could point out plot holes and hypocracies with wild abandon.
Luckily I am all about surface area and I really liked Cecil B. Demented. (Guns! Cool costumes! Hideous makeup I wish to emulate! Pretentious ranting by a Jack Black-esque Stephen Dorff! A bunch of cast members who look really familiar that I just can't place! Hooray!)
The opening credits have a lot of shots of movie marquees, some with real movie names on them, some with fake names, some with none at all. One marquee featured Lake Placid 2 (which has since been made), Vertigo The Remake (which I think is just Brian DePalma's Body Double) and Scream 4 (due out later this year). Aww, and they were supposed to be joking. Oops.
Cecil B. Demented came out when I was in high school and I really wanted to see it back then. I didn't get to of course; all my friends went without thinking to invite me (they invited a friend who they all claimed they didn't like as much as they liked me but, as usual, nobody thought "hey, we should give Sally a call." Apparently I'm forgettable or a better time is always had without me. ... I hated high school. I don't know why I brought it up. ... Oh yeah, I remember), and then later they all told me it wasn't a very good movie.
But these were all fans of John Waters's early movies. The impossible to watch nausea fuel movies that, honestly, Cecil's movie within a movie looks like it would be a lot like. I wouldn't want to watch his end product, but the story of how he got there is right up my alley. The making of documentary is more interesting than the movie itself.
Or something.
The point is, of course they didn't like this movie: It's not like John Waters's earlier movies. The only links it has to that past are Mink Stole and a general air of chaos and unpleasantness. It's just that this is a form of unpleasantness I'm attracted to, unlike his early movies which are like the cinematic version of Yellow Triaminic.
I feel like I'm getting a little existential and leaving myself in the dust.
Cecil B. Demented is fun, somewhat cartoony and a movie I would have watched a million times over had I seen it when it first came out. (I've noticed I no longer watch movies a million times over anymore. It's depressing, really. I miss doing that.)
It was also a good, solid start to what is guaranteed to be a long and arduous Movie Lottery 3-D. I've got more than seventy movies in the hat this time, thanks to Lauren's generous sharing of her Netflix account. I have access to anything they have on "watch it now." I may never finish this third edition of Movie Lottery, but I'm damn well going to try. (Funnily enough, Cecil B. Demented wasn't a Netflix addition; it's one of the fifteen or so movies I have on VHS that I acquired between now and the last Movie Lottery.)
Here's hoping it's full of more winners than clunkers.
"Power to the people who punish bad cinema!"

End of line.
-Sally