Crybaby

Crybabyⁱ would never have made the bar for a review, except... well, John Waters credit, what the fuck can I do.

The little show stealer mired among the support cast for no conceivable reason, constantly stealing the show from the script's (rather anodyne) protagonist is actually the 23 years old version of a reasonably famous teenage slut slash cum public fuckpostⁱⁱ. Besides her there's little worth the mention in there, except perhaps the observation that throwing money at John Waters ain't going to make a better film. "Production values" never were his problem, not really. Rather, like Ed Wood's narrow, "efficiency"/slum tenement corridors, the true issue are the narrow corridors in his mind, coincidentally expressing themselves as 2 foot 4 inches access hallways but otherwise not remediable through tearing down cheap masonry. The "deliberate" & "by choice" ham-up & (drastic) overacting of the piece makes Johnny Depp pass for an actor, in the sense most teenaged girls can pass for sluts playing, just as most nine year olds can impersonate their fathers passed out drunk. In this limited sense overacting the thing "was a reasonable choice", even wise, perhaps. Is the man who calls whichever portion of floor he falls upon "bed" wise for the procedure ?

The script is particularly terrible ; but not uniformly so. In fact, the portion where the prepster grandmother's last resort is "what if you get your dress dirty" doubtless counts as a stroke of genius. So, so many concerned old womanhood's concerns are thereby summed up and adequately dismissed it's impossible to dismiss this otherwise entirely forgettable piece altogether.

Seriously, why can't this guy be cleaner, anyways!

1. 1990, by John Waters, with Johnny Depp, Amy Locane, Iggy Pop, Traci Lords. [↩]
2. As memorably put by (Bronx' own!) Lionel Stander (while bringing to life an imaginary if quite credible Baron Castorini), "Se per sputare intendi buttargli dentro qualcosa di nostro, su Giovanna ci sputavamo tutti. Ormai era diventata la sputtachiaia della famiglia. Io, te, Paolo, Luigi, una cosa schifoza, una cosa da vomitare, da vergognarsi come ladri."

   Check it out, by the way : "the internet" has never heard of any portion of that speech. And you think it representative! Whenever you run into some question, you actually imagine "asking the internet" (in the sense of, typing shit in google, bing, whatever) is actually going to provide answers. Usable answers, informed, representative... You believe this! [↩]