Word: jape
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Patty Hearst in a small role. But since this is a movie about movies--spoiled film fatale Honey Whitlock (Melanie Griffith) is taken hostage by a cinematic liberation army led by a dreamy buff who calls himself Cecil B. DeMented (Stephen Dorff)--an air of fantasy permeates the entire jape, detoxifying it. There's a geniality to gags about ratings ("Hey, hey, M.P.A.A., how many movies did you censor today?") and Robin Williams weepies ("Patch Adams does not deserve a director's cut; the original was long enough"). Waters wants everyone to have a good laugh, targets and audience included...
With high art butting up against crass industry, and the sublime meeting the slime, Cannes is catnip for a connoisseur of bad taste like trash auteur John Waters, who showed his fizzy anarchistic jape Cecil B. Demented out of competition. "When I hear people say they hate the festival," he told TIME's Jeffrey Ressner, "I wonder why they bother to stay in show business." Cecil B. was typical of the American films premiering at Cannes this year. Ribald or sedate, they were all off-Hollywood. The Coen brothers offered a surprisingly genial odyssey, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, with...