LOOK WHO'S STALKING
by Chris Dashiell

A mischievous, playful and endearing child redeems the cynical lives of adults through the power of innocence. It's one of the more well-worn Hollywood themes - from Polyanna to Big to just about every other Spielberg movie, kids are idealized as the saviors of lost adults who long to return to a simpler time of joy and acceptance. Thanks are now due to writer Mike White and director Miguel Arteta for giving us CHUCK & BUCK, a much-needed antidote to this sugar-coated poison.

Buck (played with scary assurance by White himself) is a man in his twenties who has never grown emotionally since the age of eleven. He lives at his mother's suburban house in a fantasy world of toys and games. When his mother dies, childhood friend Chuck (Chris Weitz), now a music producer, attends the funeral with his fiancee. Buck has never let go of the bond he had with Chuck, and when the fiancee politely invites him to visit them in L.A., he takes her quite literally, packing all his belongings, moving into an L.A. motel, and then following Chuck around trying to reestablish their childhood friendship. Buck is immature to the point of creepiness, with no social skills whatsoever, and it is obvious that Chuck no longer has anything in common with him. But because of conventional politeness, and an unwillingness to hurt Buck's feelings, Chuck keeps trying, unsuccessfully, to avoid Buck without having to reject him outright.

White creates a character that is bizarrely funny, but also rather uncomfortable to watch. With his pale, doughy face, nervous twitch, oddly sensual eyes, and a voice that oozes neurotic self-consciousness, Buck embodies every unhappy aspect of childhood. As it turns out, his arrested development has a sexual component, and this partly explains why Chuck can't seem to shake him. The film makes us complicit in his discomfort - we want Buck to go away too, but the camera keeps putting us right up against him. Then, what has begun to seem like just some disturbing comedy about a stalker, takes on a new and subtler dimension.

The movie challenges plausibility on several levels, not least of which is the plot device of having Buck team up with a motherly house manager at a children's theater (Lupe Ontiveros) to stage an execrable play he's written called "Hank & Frank," a clumsy fairy tale about his relationship with Chuck. If you can accept the wild premise, the places the film goes with it can be pretty hilarious. Most amusing is Paul Weitz as one of the worst actors you'll ever see, who develops a ludicrous friendship with Buck after he gets the part of Hank in the play. (The Weitz brothers, Chris and Paul, happen to be the creators of the teen comedy American Pie.)

White has some serious things on his mind, chiefly the split between the adult, public self (Chuck) and the denied aspects of his childhood (Buck). Unlike the Hollywood cliche, however, this inner child is a bundle of fear and unresolved shame. To be stuck in the past is not redemption at all, but a grotesque and even frightening emptiness - Buck seems to have a void where his mind should be. The story is resolved in a way that once again stretches credulity, but makes sense if you think of the relationship in essential terms rather than literal. Chuck & Buck was shot with handheld digital video. It has a low budget look, but the acting is fine for the most part, and the film as a whole is funny, yet tense and intriguing. Arteta wisely avoids caricature - everything is played straight, and that makes all the difference. The biggest shock was seeing this offbeat indie playing at a multiplex. I guess it must have slipped through the cracks.

John Waters' recent films have been criticized as being tame by his usual standards, and it looks as if he's taken this to heart. His new movie, CECIL B. DEMENTED, seems to be as deliberately vulgar, violent, disgusting and trashy as he could possibly make it. Well, one shouldn't expect anything less from him, but I wish I could say that the film is consistently funny. Writing about a Waters film can put a critic into a quandary - since he explicitly sets out to make bad films, it's somehow missing the point to criticize them for that. In the case of Cecil B. Demented, I asked only to be entertained, not edified, but my desire was not totally fulfilled.

Honey Whitlock (Melanie Griffith), a vain Hollywood star, is kidnapped by a group of terrorist underground filmmakers, headed by the title's crazed director (Stephen Dorff). Their purpose is to destroy mainstream cinema in the name of experimental, independent film. With Whitlock as their star, they stage a series of attacks on symbols of Hollywood hegemony, all the while filming their own improvisatory masterpiece, "Raging Beauty." The movie thumbs its nose at Hollywood while also making fun of the faux alternatives of Sundance, Miramax, and "art house" films. I did laugh from time to time - during the credits a marquee is shown which says, "Les Enfants du Paradis, finally dubbed into English," and the gang, known as the Sprockets, first disrupts a screening of "Patch Adams, the Director's Cut" and then the production of a Forrest Gump sequel, "Gump Again." Waters' wildness, his willingness to do and show anything, pays off more than once with a good laugh. But the spaces between laughs become bigger and bigger, and the film - which is actually only eighty minutes long, wears out its welcome way before the end.

Waters has never been a thinker, so his attempts at satire are more like scattershot jokes and gags without a coherent idea to pull them together, or much of a story to propel them forward. Griffith is certainly having fun, but she doesn't have the manic energy that was needed, and although Dorff's relentless efforts to bring life to his stick-figure of a character are admirable, they are not successful. Waters seems out of touch with the present as well - his ideas about indie film seem stuck in the early 90s.

If you're looking for the typical bad taste of John Waters, there's a lot here for you - from the obligatory barf shot to the gerbil crawling up a porn star's butt, there's plenty of in-your-face trashiness in Cecil B. Demented. Despite my occasional laughter, I found the experience rather overbearing and joyless. Waters is straining for his effects now, and his sensibility no longer seems transgressive, just stupid. If I'm going to watch an intentionally bad movie, I think I at least have the right to expect it to be more fun.

CineScene, 2000