{"id":1267,"date":"2004-09-27T12:30:57","date_gmt":"2004-09-27T12:30:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/2004\/09\/27\/a_dirty_raspber\/"},"modified":"2024-11-29T23:32:47","modified_gmt":"2024-11-30T04:32:47","slug":"a_dirty_raspber","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/2004\/09\/27\/a_dirty_raspber\/","title":{"rendered":"A Dirty Raspberry"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\"John<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Tracey<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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I curated my own double-feature this weekend,<\/strong> checking out two movies about sexual revolution (more or less): The Raspberry Reich<\/a>,<\/i> the latest rump romp from Bruce La Bruce<\/a>, and then A Dirty Shame<\/a>,<\/i> the latest farce fest from John Waters<\/a>. I didn\u2019t intend a themed afternoon, but part of the way into Raspberry Reich<\/i> it was clearly going to be one, since most of the movie was a tedious rehash of stuff that John Waters has done more successfully (and certainly with better jokes) in the past. It was also a self-described \u201cagit-porn\u201d movie, so it wasn\u2019t much of a leap to consider its kinship to a Waters movie about sexual deviance upsetting a quiet neighborhood in Baltimore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Raspberry Reich<\/i> is the tale of a group of aspiring German revolutionaries aping the gimmicks of the Baader-Meinhoff Gang<\/a>, and they happen to screw each other a lot and quote a lot of radical propaganda along the way. I wanted to stab pencils in my eyes most of the time. No, I take that back: it would have been pleasant enough to watch the gay sex and the punk\/camp art direction if I could be spared the wooden dialogue, the pedantry, and the terrible sound quality. I always want to like Bruce LaBruce movies more than I do because I get what he\u2019s doing (and I like subversion and gay porn), but his movies always strike me as being so blunt, with so little energy. Yeah, there\u2019s some good camp, but it falls flat. It\u2019s interesting to watch pornography and philosophy collide, but not when it has to rely on the comic timing or acting chops of porn stars. \u201cGay is not enough,\u201d as the saying goes, and neither is punk. It still has to come together somehow, and hopefully do something a little more interesting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

John Waters has handled the clich\u00e9s of revolution before (and more adroitly) in Cecil B. Demented<\/a> (and even flirted with it in Pink Flamingos<\/a><\/i> and Female Trouble<\/a><\/i>), and even though his humor can be pretty blunt \u2014 sight gags and one-liners \u2014 he and his casts always revel in the material. Everyone always has fun and plays their parts to the hilt, and often that zeal makes for better performances than traditional acting skills might. His films are like a celebrity roast, somehow managing to spoof and celebrate at the same time. They\u2019re famous for being shocking, but shock always fades over time, and even the earlier, cruder ones still work because they\u2019re smart enough to hint at more than they show. They lampoon both sides of any argument (with more than a touch of sympathy for the underdog), but pretty much leave it to you to figure out who the real freaks are, who goes further over the top in defense of what they believe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And A Dirty Shame<\/i> does it again. Sorry, Bruce, it\u2019s not so shocking to show sex in this day and age, especially if you have a jaded audience. What\u2019s pretty outr\u00e9, though, is to take a subject as highly charged as sex and make merciless fun of it. It\u2019s a movie that\u2019s relentlessly showing, cataloguing, and laughing at every perversion it can think of, and taking the erotic charge out of all of it. It\u2019s not salacious in any way \u2014 it\u2019s just having fun with how much we sexualize everything around us, regardless of whether we think all that sex is bad or good. And it\u2019s having a lot<\/i> of fun with that. The revolutionary part of all this is that it\u2019s daring a jaded audience to take itself less seriously. Do what you want \u2014 and as much as you possibly can \u2014 but you\u2019re not necessarily any more outrageous than the guy down the street. The revolutionary idea, of a kind that always lurks around and under all the jokes and the gags and the camp in John Waters\u2019 universe, is that we\u2019re all kinda freaky, and that\u2019s good. We can all be sexy, as long as we believe we are. Your perversion isn\u2019t bad, but your interference with someone else\u2019s perversion is. Why shouldn\u2019t we laugh ourselves into epiphany? It’s probably more effective than trying to badger or seduce us into one. Enjoy the ride, and let the dangerous ideas creep up on you later when you least expect it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"Tedious<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Tedious<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I curated my own double-feature this weekend, checking out two movies about sexual revolution (more or less): The Raspberry Reich, the latest rump romp from Bruce La Bruce, and then A Dirty Shame, the latest farce fest from John Waters. I didn\u2019t intend a themed afternoon, but part of the way into Raspberry Reich it … Continue reading “A Dirty Raspberry”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,9,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ultracultural","category-ultragay","category-ultrapolitical"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1267"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76964,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1267\/revisions\/76964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ultrasparky.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}