A Dirty Shame - Been There, Done That

my rating:

I have a magnet on my refrigerator that reads "It's only kinky the first time". It's supposed to be a come-on, a line to coax somebody into doing something they think is too weird for them. But my boyfriend Andy read it differently, as a lament: yeah, "it" will be kinky the first time you do it, but from then on, it'll just be sex. Which is fine and wonderful... but nothing special.

A Dirty Shame is a story about (among other things) sex messiah Ray Ray and his apostles, who are trying to discover a new sex act that no one has ever done. Yeah, they have exuberant and abnormal sex lives, but it's all been done... and for those who get their thrills from kinkiness (i.e. novelty), that's not enough.

Unfortunately, the movie also depends on novelty to shock the audience... and at least in my case, it failed. There were parts of the movie where - perhaps satirising educational movies - they stopped to introduce characters, tell us what their sexual fetish was, and explain what that meant. "Hi, we're bears. That means we're big and hairy and homosexual. This is our younger friend; he's a cub. An otter is someone who..." This isn't a direct quote (it wasn't quite that staged and talky), but it's pretty close.

OK, so the idea of "bears" might be new to some people, but to me it's about as eye-opening as the idea of "stock brokers" (people who buy and sell shares of companies for a living). Even the few fetishes I hadn't heard of before weren't exactly shocking; OK, so there are people who like to leave unflushed turds behind in public restrooms. {shrug} Waters swears that everything in the movie is an actual erotic fetish. Um, sure. Why not? Do people really doubt the existence of, say, autoerotic asphyxiation? I'm pretty sure I've seen that on ER or NYPD Blue. And movies like American Pie and the whole modern gross-out genre have raised the bar for offensiveness.

The same kind of been-there-done-that feeling starts cropping up the fourth or fifth time someone gets hit on the head and is transformed from a prude into a pervert or back again, or the fourth or fifth time that one of the designated prudes stops to rail against some perversion, or the fourth or fifth time that Ray Ray shouts "Let's go sexin'!" like some kind of freak from Reefer Madness... but without the humorous irony of the filmmaker actually taking it seriously.

Some reviewers are saying that the only reason you might not love this movie is if you're easily offended. The other possible reason is that you're not easily offended... because then you might be amused from time to time, but still disappointed. Back in the "golden (shower) age" of John Waters' movie-making back in the 1970's, he filmed things that no one had ever filmed before, and it gaves his films a real edge. To be fair, there are probably a few never-been-filmed (outside of porn) things here as well, especially around the, er, climax (and just maybe the "new sex act" they came up with really is never-been-done). It's still somewhat fun - even the same old Tuesday night missionary position sex can be entertaining - but overall, A Dirty Shame just... isn't kinky any more.