Hairspray

It was inevitable that filmmaker John Waters, Baltimore's King of Trash, would go mainstream, if only briefly. His Hairspray (1988) is an affectionately kitschy tale of dancing and integration in 1962 Baltimore. Ricki Lake plays the heroine, Tracy Turnblad, who is probably the first fat girl to be the star of any teen comedy. It's a wonderful thing: finally a movie that doesn't glorify skinny little things. It vilifies them instead. Waters revels in the bad taste of middle-class Americans, and even when he's doing it for a mass audience, he manages to be coy and ironic (without seeming mean-spirited, no mean feat.) The mainstreaming of Waters' schtick works for him: it evens out some of the over-indulgent aspects of his brand of filmmaking. Hairspray feels like a movie, where some of his earlier films (such as the notorious 1972 cult film Pink Flamingos) had that insufferable "home movie" feel to them which made watching tedious, even as you waited eagerly for the next shocking moment.

Lake's mother is played by the inimitable Divine, the drag queen who worked on almost every John Waters picture. Divine died unexpectedly, just a week after Hairspray opened. Divine has always imbued Waters' pictures with a sense of legitimate American white trashiness. As Tracy's mom, Divine is quite a showpiece, draped in a moo-moo, sporting a long black wig, and that wonderfully campy, butch persona. Divine's bizarreness keeps Hairspray from ever looking like some benign Hollywoodized teen comedy.

And the supporting cast is equally marvelous and macabre: Sonny Bono (the ultimate used car salesman of cinema) and Debbie Harry (sporting an outlandish blonde wig that transcends the campy fashion that Harry has always brandished as the frontwoman for the punk rock band Blondie) as the villains, Franklin and Velma Von Tussle; Colleen Fitzpatrick as their daughter, Amber (she looks like Kelly Preston), who hates Tracy because she becomes a popular regular on a local TV program called "The Corny Collins Show," whose host (played by Shawn Thompson) is sort of Baltimore's Ed Sullivan (a young Ed Sullivan). Ruth Brown turns in a deliciously fun performance as "Motormouth Maybelle," the black diva who is friends with the "Corny Collins Show" and helps unite the black and white communities with her goofy rhyme-speech. She's a hoot; The always hilarious Jerry Stiller plays Tracy's dad. He has a wonderful kookiness about him that makes him look simultaneously out of it and sharp as a tack; Michael St. Gerard plays Link, the boy who falls in love with Tracy on the dance floor (he looks astonishingly like Elvis Presley, and even played him in the movie Great Balls of Fire!); Leslie Ann Powers plays Tracy's best friend Penny; Clayton Prince as Seaweed; Waters regular Mink Stole plays Corny's assistant, Tammy; and Joanna Havrilla plays Penny's uptight mom, Prudence, who's so terrified of black people that she hands a black man her wallet while walking through the Baltimore ghetto, assuming he's trying to rob her when he isn't.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Richard Burton as George, a prickly, passive-aggressive history professor and Elizabeth Taylor as Martha, his bitter wife, who's the daughter of the president of the college where her husband teaches. They have a young couple (George Segal and Sandy Dennis) over for drinks, late one night after a faculty gathering at the college. Their little after-party turns out to be an opportunity for spectacle that playwright Edward Albee and sceenwriter Ernest Lehman couldn't resist. A night with George and Martha is pure masochism. Burton and Taylor fight like two cats as they churn out clever insults and fling them at each other with ruthless precision. As "raw" as this movie purports to be, it all feels too much like "acting." But the actors are still very good, even if the screenwriting is obviously trying to be "real" and "edgy." It's overly self-conscious, but first-time director Mike Nichols doesn't seem to worried about concealing it, which may be one of the reasons this canned drama works, as an exercise in frothy unpleasantness, but it's hard to watch this and call it a good time. These are some of the most unpleasant people you could ever spend an evening with, and while there's some humor in it, it feels too much like watching movie stars behind-the-scenes after they've had too much to drink.

There is a bit of style to it (Haskell Wexler won an Oscar for his black-and-white cinematography, and the editing by Sam O'Steen nicely lifts the material off the stage, even though it's still very much a talky film), and in 1966, this was probably a lot more exciting than it is in the era of celebrity meltdowns and the desensitizing spectacle that is reality television. I keep wondering: Were people really enjoying, even reveling in, Elizabeth Taylor as the frumpy drunk with the acid tongue? You really miss the Elizabeth Taylor of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Giant and even Suddenly, Last Summer, the one you could root for, even when she was over-acting. She always looked so ravishing, and exuded such electricity on the screen. She turned each of those roles into a performance. That's what's so enthralling, to this day, about Elizabeth Taylor, the movie star. She certainly gives us a performance in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but somehow, seeing her turn into a vulgar lush (still pretty sexy though) is a disappointment. She won her second Oscar for this movie, and it's as if she had to go ugly and mean to get it. (She won her first Oscar for playing a high-class hooker who's killed in a car crash at the end of Butterfield 8, and the Academy was most rewarding as a result of her punishment.) But when an actress like Elizabeth Taylor is awarded for giving the kind of antithetical performance (and yes, it's a damn good one at times) she gives in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, it's a reminder of something that Taylor in her prime always helped us forget: that stars weren't real.

When they're drunk, though, Burton and Taylor have a wonderfully funny chemistry together. And George Segal is enjoyably perplexed as the young new biology professor who, along with his wife, becomes a pawn in George and Martha's matrimonial boxing match. (Sandy Dennis has a bubbly, aloof charm to her, and she gets to have her own mad meltdown as the night winds on and more skeletons tumble recklessly out everybody's closet. This feels like Albee's version of a Tennessee Williams play, full of corny, histrionic lines that are delivered with the right amount of tongue-in-cheek from this cast. They give each bad line a bit of ersatz class. (It would be frightening to see this performed by amateurs.)

Dead Man

A dull Western about a man named William Blake (Johnny Depp) who takes it on the lam after he kills a another man, sort of in self-defense. Then he meets an Indian named Nobody who spouts off philosophical sounding ramblings that make no sense. Writer-director Jim Jarmusch confuses pretension for art with this antithetical Western. It's in black-and-white, a crucial mistake. Perhaps some color would have made the movie feel less embalmed, but I'm afraid that was Jarmusch's intent all along: he's trying to make something poetic, and all he really does is make a film that reminds us why we hate bad poetry, or why we don't give poetry a chance when it's delivered to us without imagination.

The camera stays in close-up for much of the film, so we don't even get the usually standard pleasure of the vastness of space that many Westerns capture. This, combined with the grim ugliness of the black-and-white photography, makes much of Dead Man pretty dead indeed. Johnny Depp is okay, especially since he's playing a relatively normal character, but he's such a subdued personality when he's not hamming it up, that he's hardly magnetic enough to pull this long, meandering movie out of its self-induced sleepwalk. If people were mesmerized by all the poetry of the black-and-white and the false wisdom of the mystical "Nobody," it's because they were probably ready to embrace something that was different, and there weren't many good traditional Westerns coming out of the 1990s. But turning this genre into something bland and plodding is no way to save it from the tiredness of doing the same thing over and over.

There are interesting moments, and at times Jarmusch finds the humor in it. Some of the bandits trying to capture William Blake--who's got a 500 dollar bounty placed on him by the father of the man he killed--are funny in a ruthlessly sick sort of way, like the man who allegedly murdered his parents, and then engaged in necrophilia and cannibalism with their bodies. And the character of Nobody doesn't seem to totally buy into the BS he's peddling to William. Is he an ironic Indian? (He's also convinced that William is the William Blake, as in the 18th century British Romanticist poet.) But, like Dances With Wolves, the film tries to imbibe the Native Americans with wisdom and mystical powers, all dispensed in the form of hokey sounding proverbs, and you never buy any of it: it's too patronizing, and too laughable. It's the never-ending search for self-importance that dooms so many "indie" films. (There's also a running joke about tobacco that isn't funny--it's done to death and never had any juice to begin with.)

With Gary Farmer as Nobody, John Hurt, Lance Henriksen, Michael Wincott, Eugene Byrd, Iggy Pop, Gabriel Byrne, Jared Harris, Mili Avital, Crispin Glover, Robert Mitchum in a small role as the man who's funding Blake's capture. Neil Young provides the one-note music score via his electric guitar. It's simply anachronistic, and one more part of Dead Man that enervates the entire movie. 1995.