a dirty shame movie review

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There is in show biz something known as "a bad laugh." That's the laugh you don't want to get, because it indicates not amusement but incredulity, nervousness or disapproval. John Waters ' "A Dirty Shame" is the only comedy I can think of that gets more bad laughs than good ones.

Waters is the poet of bad taste, and labors mightily here to be in the worst taste he can manage. That's not the problem -- no, not even when Tracey Ullman picks up a water bottle using a method usually employed only in Bangkok sex shows. We go to a Waters film expecting bad taste, but we also expect to laugh, and "A Dirty Shame" is monotonous, repetitive and sometimes wildly wrong in what it hopes is funny.

The movie takes place in Baltimore, as most Waters films do. Stockholm got Bergman, Rome got Fellini, and Baltimore -- well, it also has Barry Levinson . Ullman plays Sylvia Stickles, the owner of a 7-Eleven-type store. Chris Isaak plays Vaughn, her husband. Locked in an upstairs room is their daughter Caprice ( Selma Blair ), who was a legend at the local go-go bar until her parents grounded and padlocked her. She worked under the name of Ursula Udders, a name inspired by breasts so large they are obviously produced by technology, not surgery.

Sylvia has no interest in sex until a strange thing happens. She suffers a concussion in a car crash, and it turns her into a sex maniac. Not only can't she get enough of it, she doesn't even pause to inquire what it is before she tries to get it. This attracts the attention of a local auto mechanic named Ray-Ray Perkins, played by Johnny Knoxville , who no longer has to consider "Jackass" his worst movie. Ray-Ray has a following of sex addicts who joyfully proclaim their special tastes and gourmet leanings.

A digression. In 1996, David Cronenberg made a movie named "Crash (1997)," about a group of people who had a sexual fetish for car crashes, wounds, broken bones, crutches and so on. It was a good movie, but as I wrote at the time, it's about "a sexual fetish that, in fact, no one has." I didn't get a lot of letters disagreeing with me.

John Waters also goes fetish-shopping in "A Dirty Shame," treating us to such specialties as infantilism (a cop who likes to wear diapers), bear lovers (those who lust after fat, hairy men), and Mr. Pay Day, whose fetish does not involve the candy bar of the same name.

We also learn about such curious pastimes as shelf-humping, mallet whacking and tickling. As the movie introduced one sex addiction after another, I sensed a curious current running through the screening room. How can I describe it? Not disgust, not horror, not shock, but more of a sincere wish that Waters had found a way to make his movie without being quite so encyclopedic.

The plot, such as it is, centers on Sylvia and other characters zapping in and out of sex addiction every time they hit their head, which they do with a frequency approaching the kill rate in " Crash ." This is not really very funny the first time, and grows steadily less funny until it becomes a form of monomania.

I think the problem is fundamental: Waters hopes to get laughs because of what the characters are, not because of what they do. He works at the level of pre-adolescent fart jokes, hoping, as the French say, to epater les bourgeois. The problem may be that Waters has grown more bourgeois than his audience, which is epatered that he actually thinks he is being shocking. To truly deal with a strange sexual fetish can indeed be shocking, as " Kissed " (1996) demonstrated with its quiet, observant portrait of Molly Parker playing a necrophiliac.

It can also be funny, as James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal demonstrated in the film " Secretary " (2002). Tracey Ullman is a great comic actress, but for her to make this movie funny would have required not just a performance but a rewrite and a miracle.

Fetishes are neither funny not shocking simply because they exist. You have to do more with them than have characters gleefully celebrate them on the screen. Waters' weakness is to expect laughs because the idea of a moment is funny. But the idea of a moment exists only for the pitch; the movie has to develop it into a reality, a process, a payoff. An illustration of this is his persisting conviction that it is funny by definition to have Patty Hearst in his movies. It is only funny when he gives Ms. Hearst, who is a good sport, something amusing to do. She won't find it in this movie.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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A Dirty Shame (2004)

Rated NC-17 for pervasive sexual content

Tracey Ullman as Sylvia Stickles

Johnny Knoxville as Ray-Ray

Chris Isaak as Vaughn Stickles

Selma Blair as Caprice Stickles

Suzanne Shepherd as Big Ethel

Mink Stole as Marge the Neuter

Susan Allenback as Betty Doggett

Paul DeBoy as Wendell Doggett

Written and directed by

• John Waters

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A Dirty Shame (2004)

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A Dirty Shame

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Tracey Ullman (Sylvia) Chris Isaak (Vaughn) Selma Blair (Caprice) Johnny Knoxville (Ray Ray) Suzanne Shepherd (Big Ethel) Mink Stole (Marge The Neuter) Patricia Hearst (Paige) Jackie Hoffman (Dora) Nick Noble (Weird Paperboy) Lucy Newman-Williams (Neuter Yuppie Woman)

John Waters

An uptight, middle-aged, repressed woman turns into a sex addict after getting hit on the head, and she then falls into an underground subculture of sex addicts in suburban Baltimore.

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A Dirty Shame Reviews

This exercise in bad taste is the Dawn of the Dead of nymphomania. Never mean-spirited, A Dirty Shame has some big laughs, but it's a one-joke movie that shows its strain well before the finish line.

Full Review | Mar 13, 2018

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Aug 7, 2008

Waters has made a resolutely unsexy sex comedy, but he hasn't left out the comedy.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Jul 30, 2007

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 1, 2006

No shame here.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Nov 18, 2005

Exploring the wide divide between prudes and the world of sexual excess, there's enough bad taste on display to shock, amuse and entertain. Sizzles when hot, fizzles when not

Full Review | Aug 30, 2005

A Dirty Shame is a fabulously funny exploration of fetishism, a look at the ever-more-insane ways people find to 'get off'.

Full Review | Original Score: 93/100 | Aug 22, 2005

Wow. The challenges of reviewing an NC-17 movie for a family newspaper are, um, challenging.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 9, 2005

More a return to roots than a return to form, this messy carnal-concussion comedy celebrates the libido and every form of sexual practice

Full Review | Original Score: C | Jul 31, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 5, 2005

A Dirty Shame is not a good movie, but it has a good message, and for that, it's well worth seeing.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 11, 2005

Outrageous, filthy and often hysterically funny, this is John Waters' best film since Serial Mom.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 30, 2005

John Waters takes on the decency brigade with a social comedy that's a refreshing return to his unhinged filmmaking style.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 29, 2005

The NC-17 rating and the images of Selma Blair with her gargantuan bosom seemed to promise a return to form - if Waters were going dirty again, how could he disappoint?

Full Review | Apr 23, 2005

A Dirty Shame is outrageous for the sake of being outrageous, but unlike some of Waters' other films, it's neither shocking nor funny.

Full Review | Original Score: D- | Apr 14, 2005

The filmic equivalent of a child reading aloud the Dictionary of Filth with the express intent of giving his nanny a heart attack.

Full Review | Apr 1, 2005

Goes through the surface motions of naughtiness, [but] it all comes off rather quaint in the end.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Dec 5, 2004

It's a marked improvement over his misguided Cecil B. Demented (2000), but falls a bit short of Pecker (1998) as the most entertaining Waters film since 1988's Hairspray.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Nov 29, 2004

What's really astounding is that A Dirty Shame actually is shocking and depraved.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Nov 7, 2004

A genuine cri de couer in the director's long-running battle against the forces of censorship and a banal societal (and cinematic) status quo.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 19, 2004

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A Dirty Shame review

Part of the problem is that the casting just doesn’t work but mostly it’s that the gags that probably made everyone laugh on the page fall thuddingly flat, one after the other, on screen

For years John Waters has got by on a bucket-load of charm, more than making up for the cinematic deficiencies of his signature cocktail of high camp and bad taste. He had a great run in the 1980s and 90s, with Hairspray, Cry-Baby and Serial Mom - but, sad to say, almost all the qualities that made those movies so wonderful have deserted him in this one.

America's holier-than-thou cult of chastity is Waters' target here: Tracey Ullman plays a grumpy housewife who turns into a sex addict after being hit on the head and Johnny Knoxville (proving once again that life after Jackass is going to be very difficult) is her satanic, fire-breathing tempter. Part of Waters's problem is that the casting just doesn't work - Ullman isn't remotely engaging enough, and Knoxville is plain awful - but mostly it's that the gags that probably made everyone laugh on the page fall thuddingly flat, one after the other, on screen.

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Produced by, released by, a dirty shame (2004), directed by john waters.

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Synopsis by Mark Deming

Characteristics, related movies.

Dirty Shame, A (United States, 2004)

It can be convincingly argued that John Waters' oeuvre is an acquired taste. If that's the case, I haven't yet acquired it. I view Waters as a pre-adolescent male in a state of arrested development. He is obsessed with what kids snickeringly refer to as "potty humor," and his movies reek of it. Rather than being incisive or challenging, they're merely vulgar and offensive. (And it takes a lot to offend me…) There's nothing in Waters' latest, A Dirty Shame , to rival his most infamous cinematic moment (Divine eating a turd in Pink Flamingos ), but there's some pretty gross stuff. The title is apropos.

Waters' sole agenda with this movie is to argue that America's views of sexuality are screwed up. He won't get any argument from me, but isn't this a tad too obvious, not to mention limiting, for a feature length motion picture? A Waters trademark has never been subtlety, and, true to form, he barrels ahead with a sledgehammer approach. There are no characters here, just broad caricatures on both sides of the issue: the "sex addicts" (who believe in free sex, anytime, anywhere) and the "neuters" (who believe that "sex" is a dirty word). The story is trite and uninteresting. And the humor is only occasionally funny, and that's largely because it's almost impossible not to be impressed by Tracey Ullman's manic energy.

Ullman plays Sylvia Stickles, a middle-aged woman who believes that sex is only for perverts. Her attitude makes that of the Reverend Billy Graham seem hedonistic by comparison. Sylvia's husband, Vaughn (Chris Issak), has become so desperate for physical release that he hides in the bathroom and masturbates. When Sylvia catches him in the act, she is disgusted. Sylvia's daughter, Caprice (Selma Blair), a stripper whose stage name is "Ursula Udders" (appropriate considering the size of her breasts, which make Dolly Parton's look small and perky), is under house arrest after her third conviction of public indecency. And Sylvia's mother, Big Ethel (Suzanne Shepherd), is organizing a citizen's decency rally to stamp out homosexuality and public lewdness. Then, one morning, Sylvia suffers a concussion. While she is still dazed, the mysterious Ray-Ray (Johnny Knoxville) arrives, preaching sexual liberation. Suddenly, Sylvia becomes a sex addict, putting her in conflict with her repressed mother. And the battle lines are drawn in the war of sexual liberation on Hartford Road.

A Dirty Shame opens effectively, with a shot of a typical suburban house. Cheerful, '50-style sitcom music plays in the background while birds chirp contentedly. Inside, scrapple is frying in a pan. Unfortunately, after this set-up, which could have been lifted out of a David Lynch picture, it's down hill. Despite the film's obvious satirical bent, it's rarely funny, and some of the big "laughs" are more disgusting than humorous. (A man with a scatological fetish uses a woman's purse for a toilet. She reaches in to get her medicine and…) For roughly 30 minutes, A Dirty Shame is tolerable. After that, it becomes increasingly grating until it comes painfully close to being unwatchable. To get through the entire movie, you'll need a warped sense of humor and a strong stomach, or an unshakable affinity for John Waters. Anyone else will be as put off as I was.

Arguably, the film's most clever moment isn't as smart as it thinks it is. There's a brief cameo featuring David Hasselhoff poking fun at his image. A few months, that might have been amusing; however, Dodgeball beat A Dirty Shame to the finish line, offering a more ingenious version of the same gag. Even if Waters got the idea first, his execution is less likely to induce chuckles - unless the sight of Hasselhoff sitting on a toilet will bring on convulsions of laughter.

Tracey Ullman is a bright spot in an otherwise sordid, murky production. Ullman does as much as she can with her character, and, for a while, Sylvia is enough to carry the film. But, after about a half-hour, even her charm wears thin. Selma Blair gets to wear what may be the biggest prosthetic breasts ever used in a motion picture. Kudos to the makeup department - they look real. But this is another joke that rapidly loses its comedic value. Seeing tiny Blair with such huge jugs is only funny at first. Johnny Knoxville (the "Jackass" guy) bears an uncanny resemblance to Timothy Olyphant. A few Waters "regulars" have roles, including Ricki Lake, Patricia Hearst, and Mink Stole.

The MPAA awarded A Dirty Shame an NC-17 rating, and I'm at a loss to understand why. I have seen films with equally vulgar, sex-related humor walk away with an easy "R." (The American Pie movies come to mind.) There's nothing groundbreaking about this movie, and slapping an NC-17 on it once again calls into question the means by which the MPAA makes its decisions. Waters, however, probably wears the restrictive rating like a badge of honor. And it's hard to rant too loudly against the MPAA in this case. After all, anything that restricts this movie's audience, thereby saving the money and time of potential viewers, can't be all bad.

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A Dirty Shame Review

27 May 2005

A Dirty Shame

John Waters' idiosyncratic mirth hasn't come this scatological since he made Divine eat dog poo in Pink Flamingos. Sexual healer Ray-Ray (Knoxville) lays hands on Ullman's repressed mousewife Sylvia, transforming her into one of his nympho apostles to combat a 'Decency Campaign' as pervos assimilate a drab Baltimore suburb and Blair's exhibitionist stripper Ursula Udders (arrested for "nude loitering") bounces around in humungous inflatable boobs.

Waters veterans Mink Stole and Patty Hearst are also on hand, which alone should indicate the tone. This is absolutely, ludicrously, appallingly crude, but on the modest plus-side has some vintage Waters hilarity - gotta love the tragic maypole incident - and David 'Knows No Shame' Hasselhoff as himself (yes, again!). With this, Dodgeball and The Spongebob Squarepants Movie, he's fast becoming the Christ of Kitsch.

A Dirty Shame

A dirty shame review.

By Rob Blackwelder

Facts and Figures

Year : 2004

Run time : 89 mins

In Theaters : Thursday 30th December 2004

Box Office Worldwide : $1.9M

Budget : $15M

Production compaines : Fine Line Features, This Is That Productions, Killer Films, John Wells Productions

Contactmusic.com : 3 / 5

IMDB : 5.1 / 10

Cast & Crew

Director : John Waters

Starring : Tracey Ullman as Sylvia Stickles, Johnny Knoxville as Ray Ray Perkins, Selma Blair as Caprice Stickles, Chris Isaak as Vaughn Stickles, Suzanne Shepherd as Big Ethel, Mink Stole as Marge the Neuter, Patricia Hearst as Paige, Jackie Hoffman as Dora, Nicholas E.I. Noble as Weird Paperboy, Lucy Newman-Williams as Neuter Yuppie Woman, Scott Morgan as Neuter Yuppie Man, Wes Johnson as Fat Freak Frank, David A. Dunham as Mama Bear, David Moretti as Papa Bear (as Dave Moretti), Jeffrey Auerbach as Baby Bear

Also starring : Paul DeBoy , Susan Allenback , Ricki Lake , David Hasselhoff

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