Ray-Ray from A Dirty Shame

Quaint as it may sound today, it was once considered scandalous for a movie to end with a 300-pound bald transvestite eating a still-steaming dog turd right off the ground.  That "money shot" from 1972's Pink Flamingos cemented John Waters' reputation as the Baron of Bad Taste and forever raised the bar(f) on cinematic gross-out, but when you ve made the Citizen Kane of trash, what do you do for an encore?

Amazingly enough, Waters found a way to shock even further: he became respectable.  His warmly nostalgic Hairspray became something of a family classic, even ending up as a long-running Broadway musical.  But prudes beware: A Dirty Shame, Waters' new film, is gleefully hellbent on dispelling any notions that his work has any socially redeeming value.  It's a slap-happy sex comedy with the single-minded agenda of making nookie filthy again, and it almost succeeds.

Waters is an obsessive enthusiast of the bizarre, and Shame centers around a perverse proclivity he chanced upon in his readings: the little-known fact that a tiny minority of head injury sufferers develop an uncontrollable carnal lust.  Waters takes the concept to delirious extremes as housewife Sylvia Stickles (Tracy Ullman at her dowdiest) suffers a car-crash concussion and is ushered into an amorous underworld by mechanic Ray-Ray Perkins (Jackass' Johnny Knoxville).  Stickles becomes one of Ray-Ray's 12 apostles of amorality in a quest for a brand new sex act, much to the dismay of her "Neuter" husband Vaughn (played with Ken-doll earnestness by singer Chris Isaac) and "Viagravated" mother Big Ethel (The Sopranos' Suzanne Shepherd), but also the delight of her pneumatically-enhanced daughter Caprice (Selma Blair) who moonlights as erotic dancer  Ursula Udders.

Using every trick in the exploitation handbook Waters takes his concept to hysterical extremes, from pseudosubliminal suggestions flashed on screen to a wall-to-wall soundtrack of songs stuffed with more double-entendres than Mae West at a weenie roast.  His characters speak in an overheated lingo rife with nearly every schoolyard euphemism for sex known to humanity ("Let's go yodeling in the canyon!"  Stickles demands of her husband), and he revels in finding cartoonish ways to depict "adult babies," "bears," and "sploshing" (don't ask).

The only kink in Waters' scheme is that in an era of Jerry Springer, Monica Lewinsky, and ubiquitous penis enlargement e-mail spam, none of this is as outrageous as he seems to think it is.  You're left with the nagging sense of the filmmaker trying a little too hard to regain his crown as the "Prince of Puke," not unlike a leering dirtyoldman uncle who won't stop showing off his naughty playing cards.  Waters works in a clip of "The Ricki Lake Show" as a nod to his former protégé, seemingly without realizing that there's little in his film that viewers of her show won't already be versed in (or practice, for that matter).  Worse yet, some extended jokes fall flat completely, like the ham-fisted "Hokey Pokey" nursing home scene which was obviously conceived as the evil twin of Hairspray's "Madison Time" dance sequence, but which takes far too long to telegraph a lame punch line that even Howard Stern would have a hard time squeezing much juice from.

What ultimately redeems Shame is Waters' benign affection for his characters, which gives everything a rosy afterglow.  Despite a debauched storyline that could easily have played as a creepy nightmare in the hands of say, Todd Solondz (Happiness), there is an underlying generosity of spirit that bestows joyful and unembarrassed pleasure upon all characters men, women, and other with equanimity, wishing a world of perpetual orgasm where the only real sin is the crime of closed-minded intolerance.  In a puritanical time when even common sense seems to be outlawed, filmmakers like Waters will always be relevant, even if their obsessions are becoming just a little...quaint.

An animated still from The Yes Men

A different kind of outrage fuels The Yes Men, a new documentary by Chris Smith, Dan Ollman, and Sarah Price about a small group of low-budget absurdist pseudorevolutionaries who made headlines for impersonating high-ranking members of the World Trade Organization.

The doc focuses on the exploits of Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, whose pedigree includes co-creating the "Barbie Liberation Organization," which exchanged the voice boxes of talking G.I. Joe and Barbie dolls, then stealthily restocked them on toy store shelves to the delight of children and the befuddlement of their parents.  Their "Yes Men" saga began after they were handed the bogus GATT.org website by technopranksters @rtMark; when their satirical Web site was mistaken for an authentic WTO domain, they seized the opportunity to infiltrate straight-laced business seminars, classrooms, and television programs.

Together the pair globetrot from one function to another like a thinking person's Bob Hope and Bing Crosby shambling down "The Road To Anarchy."  In the guise of fictional WTO reps like "Granwyth Hulatberi," they disseminate patently preposterous theories that extrapolate the most exploitive aspects of international trade law to their logically inhumane extremes.  At a conference in Salzburg, Austria, they suggest a form of free-market democracy where political candidates auction votes to the highest bidder; in Plattsburgh, New York, they propose the poor eat the recycled "McDung" hamburgers that can be eaten and re-eaten up to ten times; and in a hilarious segment at a textiles conference in Finland, they unveil a form-fitting golden spandex "Executive Leisure Suit" equipped with a three-foot phallus designed to monitor the activities and moods of "remote workers," i.e. slaves.  It's a truly surreal study in how the clothes make the man, as the utterly credulous and poker-faced responses by fellow "experts" in their fields reveal that any Yes Man could basically get away with anything if he or she possessed as little as the right uniform and a winning attitude.

Eventually they find that their tactics aren't raising eyebrows the way they'd like so they resort to a final ploy that makes some international waves, but in its earnestness is less amusing to pull off.  In a moment of eyebrow-furrowing self-reflection they wonder if it's "less fun to be sincere."  But without too much further ado they find their way, and one of the most heartening and inspiring aspects of both the film and the Yes Men's tactics is the championing of activism as both an avenue for change and a viable leisure activity.

Documentary filmmaker Ross McElwee might take umbrage at the "less fun to be sincere" idea, seeing as he pulls off both with wit and grace in Bright Leaves, his latest autobiographical narrative.  Bright Leaves tackles a curious slice of McElwee family lore, the legend that the 1950 Gary Cooper vehicle Bright Leaf was based in part on the life story of the filmmaker's grandfather John Harvey McElwee, who was allegedly deprived of his tobacco fortune by the devious machinations of James Buchanan "Buck" Duke, the most powerful tobacco magnate of his time.

McElwee plays an amateur detective, hot on the 100-year-old trail of his family's lost wealth.  He's an inquisitive, thoughtful, and mild-mannered crusader whose heart really isn't in the fight, but more in the roads he travels in order to get there.  With wry and understated humor, McElwee brilliantly uses the backdrop of the family saga to ruminate on the pervasive nature of the tobacco industry and its grip on the health and mores of the world, while at the same time digressing into the intimate details of his relationships with his own father and son without them ever seeming like detours.  It's a more contemplative style of filmmaking than we're used to, even from a personal documentary; Bright Leaves isn't as rabble-rousing or flashy as Michael Moore's work, but he still manages to place himself as a central character in what is essentially an essay piece without ever being guilty of the kind of ego trip Moore has been accused of.

By the end of the film McElwee not only seems like someone you'd like to meet and hang out with; you feel like you already have, and are looking forward to your next visit.

THE YES MEN
Opens in October at Upstate Films, Rhinebeck.
(845) 876.2515
www.theyesmenmovie.com

BRIGHT LEAVES
Shows October 23, 7:30pm + October 24, 5pm.
TSL Warehouse, Hudson
(518) 828-8448
www.brightleaves.com