John Waters’ response to boxes — the kind in which we tend to place others and ourselves — is to vomit on them. And then sell them, his pencil-thin mustache twisting in a good-humored smirk. Throughout his career as a director, writer, artist, road tripper, provocateur, etc., Waters has been interested in revealing society’s obsession with reductive categorization. It has hardly been easy, therefore, to characterize his work, or even his characters, without sounding glib or without forgetting that, when he employs stereotypes — in exaggerated, extreme, crude forms — he’s usually commenting on, or skewering, the audience’s one-dimensional notion of what is “right.” A traveling sideshow is not merely that in Multiple Maniacs — its perversities upset the suburbanites walking.
Nor is a contest in Pink Flamingoes just a contest — it brings filth to the masses and upends the natural order of moralism. The people in Waters’ movies are as complicit in upholding some sort of moral puritanism as the ones showing up to see them. Too often, critics and commentators apply the term “camp” broadly, regardless of whether it fits; the labeling has become a willful dismissal of the gradations of emotion and experience that color womanhood.
Such rhetoric suggests that women’s emotions matter only in the context of (primarily) gay men’s access to them. Yet Waters has always seemed to elide this issue; though he still frames his works within the lens of camp, his camp does not disregard female experience by consigning women characters to the modes of camp usually allowed them: extreme elation or fury/depression. He gives them room to play, to explore gradations of personality and emotions. You have successfully signed up for your selected newsletter(s) - please keep an eye on your mailbox, we're movin' in! In Serial Mom, Turner can sound like she’s mimicking a 1950s TV mom, then smirk as she exacts revenge on a neighbor, then show genuine tenderness to her children.
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Here the “wink” that’s so often couched in camp isn’t one of superiority but rather an acknowledgment of the character’s fun. Waters has a history of writing incredibly verbose screenplays in which female characters are given a lot to do and the opportunity to show a range of emotions and ideas, always with the Waters edge. He gives his female characters, including his iconoclastic housewife, a life beyond that label, outside that box. Beverly isn’t easy to understand. Nor should she be. Even as her murder trial rolls on, the facets of her character deepen; she finds marginal sins (not recycling, wearing white after Labor Day), but not her retribution in response to those acts.
She exists as an anarchic response to the idealized housewives who proliferated in media over most of a century, especially after World War II. She takes every opportunity to tweak that image: You’re a suitor who stands up her daughter (Ricki Lake)? A fire poker in your poker. You don’t recycle? A knife in your stomach. When she gains fame for her killings, she has an ambivalent relationship to celebrity: She lights up when her daughter tells her she’s become bigger than Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees but is irked at much of the scrutiny she receives, by the media’s insistence on turning her into an archetype. “The only ‘serial’ I know anything about is Rice Krispies,” she says, disinclined to be labeled as “Serial Mom.”.
Conversely, she uses that title to her advantage when getting into a concert venue. Beverly walking in with fresh meat on the brain.
She plays Sharon Stone’s Basic Instinct game during a key witness’s testimony. She knows how to wield her iconography. She has learned from those who came before her what femininity means in the modern world: the way it’s wrangled into a narrow role and exploited, and how, by subverting that ideal, she can capitalize on it — and even gain autonomy. The power of the absurdities of Serial Mom have been dulled, mildly, by the proliferation of properties such as The Real Housewives franchise and the various dysfunctional families on E!, USA Network and TLC, whose every flaw is presented for us to judge (without asking that we hold ourselves accountable).
But Serial Mom, perhaps a predictor of this kind of audience obsession (in its world, TV viewers avidly follow Beverly’s trial), challenges the prevailing belief that such judgment should be levied in the first place, sans contrived narrative trauma. We expect even more that our female characters might fit neatly into categories, under labels, within boxes. Instead, Beverly will be there, brandishing a box cutter.
Alexander Payne's seriocomic THE DESCENDANTS, an adaptation of the novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, stars George Clooney as Matt King, a middle-age Hawaiian who runs a trust responsible for millions of dollars worth of untouched real estate that has been passed down to him and various cousins. He is preparing to sell the area, and make millions for everyone in the trust, when his wife suffers severe head trauma during a boat race. As he attempts to get her affairs in order, he learns that she had been having an affair.
With his two daughters in tow, along with his oldest daughter's doofus boyfriend, Matt sets off to confront the man who made him a cuckold. Beau Bridges, Judy Greer, and Robert Forster co-star. THE DESCENDANTS screened at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival. Designer/Director Of Photography/Director - Designer/Director Of Photography/Director - Director/Screenwriter - First Assistant Director Jr. - Star, BEERFEST, (2006) - American actor, THE FABULOUS BAKER BOYS (1989) III - American actor, THE FABULOUS BAKER BOYS (1989) - American actor/director - Actor, ANGEL OF H.E.A.T.
- Canadian Actor - American Actor/Director Jr. - American Actor/Director - Featured, STEP INTO LIQUID (2003) - Actor/'Serial Mom' - Actress, RENO 911 - Actor, HOW TO EAT FRIED WORMS, 2006. Reviews: 'Alexander Payne has made his best film yet with THE DESCENDANTS.George Clooney is in very top form in a film that will connect with any audience looking for a genuine human story.' - Hollywood Reporter 5 stars out of 5 -- '[W]riter/director Alexander Payne returns in top form with this extraordinary dramedy.George Clooney has never been better.' - Box Office '[A]n exceptionally smart and enjoyable comedy.' - Wall Street Journal 4 stars out of 4 -- 'Clooney gives one of his best performances in this film.Payne is gifted at using the essence of an actor.' - Chicago Sun-Times '[T]he film is conversational in its pathos, wry in its wisdom, very much an extension of the smart, sardonic sensibility Payne brought to SIDEWAYS and ABOUT SCHMIDT.'
- Los Angeles Times 'Throughout this beautifully textured portrait of a family at a crucial juncture, we're swept up and buoyed along, as if riding a series of waves in Hawaii, the setting for the film.' - USA Today 'Mr. Clooney and the director, Alexander Payne, proceed to shake up our expectations.Surprising, moving and frequently very funny.' - New York Times 4 stars out of 4 -- '[A] pitch-perfect movie that threads a microscopically tiny needle between high comedy and devastating drama.' - Washington Post 'THE DESCENDANTS thrives primarily because of Paynes staging.the Hawaiian setting gives the story a distinctive flavor.'
-- Grade: B - A.V. Club '[A] beautifully chiseled piece of filmmaking -- sharp, funny, generous, and moving -- that writes its own rules as much as ABOUT SCHMIDT or SIDEWAYS did.' -- Grade: A - Entertainment Weekly '[T]he film plays to Payne's strengths -- not just the emotional complexity and the constantly shifting kaleidoscope of moods, but his skill at eliciting in-depth performances from his cast.'
- Sight and Sound 4 stars out of 5 -- '[A] wry, intelligent look at the contradictions and complexities of human emotions. And the cast is exemplary, down to the smallest role. Eminem Not Afraid Mp3 Download Bee here. ' - Total Film.