Onlinewsma Absolutely Brilliant!

Afouotos Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Taraparain Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

Aneesa Wardle The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

rokcomx John Waters continues his slow and steady seduction of the mainstream with the first half of the movie, only to reward its arousal by slamming a giant butt plug thru the finale. How many ways can one director demonstrate how much they hate the Hollywood machine, by mimicking it with all the jaded "devotion" of porn parody? The closing sequence at a particularly demented and violent drive-in theater screening rocks in a way not seen since Boris Karloff used his senior Citizen Cane to knock out a drive-in sniper in Targets. Yes, Mr. Waters, we know you love to hate us - you have since you made us sit thru a giant drag queen eating dog poo.But, jeez, won't you ever make a movie that doesn't glorify suicidal sociopaths to the point of murder junkie fetishism?

yolt13-1 John Waters has a wonderful way of poking fun at just about everyone with equal love and ferocity in his films. This hilarious movie is often labeled as a darkly comedic arrow through the cold heart of the Hollywood system, but that's only half of the story. With typical accuracy and aplomb, Baltimore's favorite son here deftly skewers underground and indie filmmakers as well. As always, though we are meant to root for Cecil and his Sprocket Holes, we are also meant to find them absurd, irrational, ridiculous, somewhat hypocritical, and just a bit scary - just like the tens of thousands of would-be cinematic revolutionaries out there shooting pointless nonsense and proclaiming Hollywood the Devil's backyard while secretly waiting for that call from their agent saying they've finally sold their Sci-Fi Channel original series spec script. Just as A DIRTY SHAME would later take on both the sexually repressed and the criminally uninhibited, CECIL B. DEMENTED delights in reminding us of just how crazy we all are.The cast here has an absolute ball with the razor-sharp material. Of particular note are Maggie Gyllenhaal as a Satan-worshiping make-up artist and Adrian Grenier as an actor who has solved all of his other problems by exchanging them for just one, a world-class drug addiction. Melanie Griffith and Stephen Dorff are fun in the lead roles, but it's Alicia Witt who steals the show as pornstar-turned-perpetually horny film terrorist Cherish. In a film full of show-stopping moments (from a projectile vomiting patron at a screening of the director's cut of PATCH ADAMS to a candy fight in front of a theater showing all "family" films), none is more hilarious or memorable than when our idealistic heroes duck into a porno theater having an all night Cherish anal marathon. The group struggles to blend into a crowd of increasingly aroused raincoaters as they watch the on-screen Cherish become intimately familiar with a very adventurous gerbil. Though nothing explicit is shown, this is about as close to classic Waters as a contemporary studio movie could ever hope to get. Not even the water bottle scene in A DIRTY SHAME can touch it for its sheer absurdity and faux-erotic silliness. To her credit, Miss Witt plays this over-the-top scene with the same relish she brings to the role throughout the entire feature.CECIL B. DEMENTED is a hoot. Snooty as this may sound, if you don't like it, it's because you don't get it. And if you don't get it, maybe John Waters is a name you should avoid when perusing Netflix.

Neil Doyle At the start of CECIL B. DeMENTED, we see a cluster of close-ups showing teens posing as ushers, doormen and whatever, getting ready to celebrate the premiere of a new film starring Honey Whitlock (MELANIE GRIFFITH), an overage Hollywood diva making a personal appearance to promote her new flick. All of them are treating the premiere as a countdown to some sort of disastrous event because they're all in on the kidnapping plan.Well, the disastrous event does happen--but it's this John Waters film that scores big in that department! Just awful. All the dialog, all the sight gags, all the performances are just short of amateurish, so painfully bad that I forced myself to pay attention until the final out of control ending, by which time director Waters seemed to have lost all control of his project, his cast and his story.Ironically, the theme of this "comedy" is supposed to be "down with mainstream film-making" as the insane Cecil B. DeMented intends to kidnap movie star Griffith so that he can use her as the drawing card on his own underground film where only the first take is ever used because he's a seeker of "the truth" and pure vision. But Water's film, while making fun of mainstream trash (and sometimes rightfully so), is itself an example of less than mediocre craftsmanship, crude, tasteless, and full of puerile humor, the kind that grosses some people out, as well as an unhealthy dose of vulgarity.It's when director DeMented (played by STEPHEN DORFF) takes his film-making crew on the road into the real world that all hell breaks loose. None of the cast has anything more than paper thin characterizations to worry about so they appear to be having a good time as they wreak havoc everywhere. The laughs are scant and the film itself just keeps getting worse as it wobbles on and on toward what is supposed to be an exciting finale.Summing up: Lots of R-rated stuff. Keep the kiddies home for this one.Strictly amateur night material which had me wondering whether MELANIE GRIFFITH was so hard up that she had to take part in such an enormous mess. She fully deserved her "Razzie" Award for Worst Actress of the Year. Too bad someone didn't do her a favor and really kidnap her to prevent her from showing up at the studio!I felt like I was watching an Ed Wood film, except it wasn't in glorious B&W!

mentalcritic As Cecil B. Demented begins, the cast of characters begin repeating slogans that express disgust with the MPAA-led studio system and what it stands for. What's ironic is that as the film goes its other eighty minutes, one cannot help but get the feeling the MPAA censored it in order to turn it into an in-cohesive mess. This would make a perfectly satisfactory in-joke, given that many a film has been cut to the point of not making sense by a studio system that, for all of its expenditure, just cannot make a decent film more than once in a blue moon. Indeed, those of us who sat through the monumental disappointment of the recent Lord Of The Rings, Resident Evil, or Alien/Predators films and counted the euphemisms for acts designed to preserve a PG-13 rating, will find much to agree with here.The problem is that when Cecil B. Demented is not delivering the most unsubtle criticisms of a studio system more concerned with playing it safe than making art, the film falls into the trap of stereotyping. All the stereotypes of people the MPAA system wishes didn't exist are accounted for here. The porn star who was abused as a child? Check. The Satanist who cannot blend into the rest of the world? Check. The spotty teen who discovers with a rude shock what he has actually got himself into? Check. About the only stereotype Cecil B. Demented manages to effectively avoid is the black man who uses slang to make his daily speech indecipherable. Perhaps that one ended up on the cutting room floor.Another big problem is a lack of cohesion. The jokes are given plenty of punchline, and the titular character's name is a good riff on how a biblical theme is basically a free pass with the MPAA. The problem is that the jokes spin by so fast, and with so little setup, that oftentimes one doesn't know what to laugh at, leave alone when. About the only consistently funny character is that portrayed by Alicia Witt, who isn't exactly unpleasant to look at, either. Stephen Dorff makes a decent fist of the titular character, but since his motivations are never explored, and his character never given a second dimension, he is literally swimming upstream here. Melanie Griffith's character shows a little development in the form of a one-eighty-degree change of heart in the midst of shooting, but it comes across as so unmotivated that it seems more a matter of convenience than storytelling.The main reason I took a look at this film in the first place was because Zoë and Basil Poledouris feature in the music it contains. Some of the contemporary numbers performed and written by Zoë are quite refreshing to listen to, but like a lot of the rest of the film, the music is buried under the director's confusing intentions. If you watch the end credits and take a look at the listings for the music, you'll barely be able to remember one of the numbers given a name and writer here.About the only moment in the film that truly hits the mark is when the renegade filmmakers manage to crash their truck outside a theater with a marquee that says "No R, X, or NC-17 films shown here ever". The mentality of the passers-by they encounter here is so ugly that it shows quite boldly what sort of monster would sanitise all entertainment until it is only suitable for four-year-olds. Attempts are made to satirise sequilitis. The joke about a sequel to Forrest Gump is obvious, and unfortunately doesn't work. Worse yet, the joke about Hollywood consumer types basically watching this stuff because they are told to watch it does not work either. Partly because Dorff is reduced to shouting it at a theater, but also because last I checked, the studio that financed one of the most subversive films of the past couple of years was a division of Disney (another division thereof also released the Paul Verhoeven classic StarShip Troopers). Go figure.In closing, I gave Cecil B. Demented a three out of ten. With a little more refinement and effort, it could have been a subversive classic along the lines of Bad Santa. Instead, it is little more than a tax write-off. If you have a chance to see it on the cheap, do so, but don't expect anything from it.