Cecil B. Demented: Fine, Gross-Out Bitchery from John Waters; Aimee & Jaguar's A Taboo-Breaking Love Story

Cecil B. DeMented Directed by John Waters Cecil B. DeMented, the latest work of gross-out bitchery from John Waters, about guerrilla filmmakers who kidnap a Hollywood star and force her to act in their anti-Hollywood propaganda film, is the director's angriest film since the 70s?less a story than a diatribe. Almost every character is a mouthpiece for Waters. The result will never be mistaken for a great movie, but it's often quite funny. Waters' brazenness is a joy to behold. It's as if he looked back over his long, productive career and said, "You know, I've tried to go mainstream without losing my individuality. I made movies with budgets and stars, some of them pretty subversive and interesting. And the industry and Middle America still prefer pap. So fuck 'em."

Cecil B. DeMented gets off to a quick start with Cecil (Stephen Dorff) and his merry band of cinema guerrillas kidnapping Oscar-winning movie star Honey Whitlock (Melanie Griffith) from a premiere in Baltimore and spiriting her away to a warehouse-cum-studio, where she's informed she's to star in a revolutionary underground film. What's the concept? Well, it's basically the same movie Steve Martin was making in Bowfinger, except instead of following Honey Whitlock around and shooting her surreptitiously, the crew forcibly abducts her; and rather than hoping to gain entry into the studio system, Cecil aims to destroy it. The Clyde Barrow gang with cameras, Cecil and his gang bust into film industry events around Baltimore, disrupt them with sloganeering and violence, and film the result. Of course, Honey is appalled and frightened at first, but like most professional actors she gets with the program pretty fast. If Cecil's revolutionary fervor hadn't converted her, the media's snide remarks about her age, crow's feet and career mistakes probably would have.

The performances are pretty good considering Waters doesn't really give anyone an honest-to-God character to play. Griffith's performance starts out a tad punchy and stiff but becomes charming as the film goes on. Dorff lacks the deranged charisma of a cult leader, but he has a fine voice and does marvelous things with his eyebrows. Alicia Witt has some good moments as Dorff's moll, an ex-porn star who specializes in anal action. Jack Noseworthy makes a strong impression as a delicious reverse stereotype: a violent, neurotic, self-hating heterosexual. Patty Hearst, a member of Waters' floating repertory company, has a small role in this film, which draws partial inspiration from Hearst's terrifying misadventures with the Symbionese Liberation Army in the 70s (a wanted poster of Honey suggests the infamous photo of a gun-toting Hearst helping rob a bank). Why would Hearst take part in a film like this? I figure either she has a terrific sense of humor or she's dumb as a post. Either way, her presence in the film adds one more welcome layer of discomfort.

Like many satirists, Waters is no great shakes as a film artist. There are gaps in the narrative, his compositions don't please the eye, his potshots sometimes miss their targets and the overall vibe of Cecil B. DeMented feels about 10 years behind the cultural curve. The director, a product of the counterculture, approaches the subject as if the Sundance wave of indie films never happened. He wants to burn down the system; that's fine, because a lot of indie filmmakers secretly want the same thing. Problem is, the modern, real-world equivalents of Cecil and his gang aren't hampered by such resentments. They don't even need to acknowledge the system's existence. Thanks to digital moviemaking and Internet distribution, the two most familiar excuses of wannabe film artistes?"The industry is keeping me down," and "The filmmaking process is very expensive"?have been eliminated. Anybody who can raise a few thousand dollars can make a feature. The result might suck, but nobody will stop you from doing it.

That conceptual flaw notwithstanding, Cecil B. DeMented has a bracing authenticity. It comes from Waters' status as a veteran troublemaker who appeared to have mellowed with age but was, in truth, only laying low. In certain scenes, you detect genuinely volatile emotions at play: bewilderment at Hollywood for shunning outlaw artists, anger at mainstream America for misunderstanding and sometimes prosecuting those same outlaws. Cecil's multicultural crew, who follow him blindly, are tattooed with the names of filmmakers Waters admires: Almodovar, Preminger, Warhol, Peckinpah, Fuller. This makes sense: Both Cecil B. DeMented and the film-within-a-film are powered by a desperate, almost self-immolating passion for film and filmmaking, a tabloid recklessness. The mad-eyed prophet Cecil wants to destroy Hollywood and its corrupt minions so that cinema can be saved. This kidnap comedy takes the form of a ransom note, but it's really a love letter to movies. If there weren't so many head wounds, curse words, drug references and blunt sex acts (vaginal entry is accompanied by a loud "splorp!" on the soundtrack), Waters could be accused of idealism.

But he's also a cutup, so he throws in tangentially related targets for our amusement and delight: coffee-table biographies of great directors; overpriced concessions; blurb whores; local film commissions that line up to suck Hollywood's gilded dick; so-called underground filmmakers who can't wait to get a studio deal; moviegoers who arrive after the film has started and talk all the way through (one of whom sat behind me at the 8 p.m. screening of Cecil last Thursday, and he continued to yammer to his date even after Waters' script declared that people like him were "fuckheads"). Waters' list of spiritual allies includes action film buffs, porn junkies and patrons of the few remaining drive-ins. For a director whose most famous scene shows Divine eating a turd, the man has excellent taste.

Aimee & Jaguar Directed by Max Färberböck A taboo-breaking love story with the lush production values of a 1940s MGM historical epic, the German film Aimee & Jaguar is a pleasure to watch even when the filmmaker loses his way. The lovers in question are Lilly Wust (Juliane Köhler), the charming blonde wife of a German Army officer, and Felice Schragenheim (Maria Schrader), a Jewish lesbian and member of the underground. It's a story so preposterous that if it weren't true, you might not be inclined to believe it: In 1943, when the Allies were bombing Berlin into rubble, these two women from seemingly incompatible social classes fell so deeply in love that Felice risked death at Nazi hands to be with Lilly and Lilly gave up her husband, family and respectability to be with Felice. Why were they attracted to each other? Well, there's the charisma of the characters. Lilly's open-faced, slightly mulish innocence was catnip to an elegant, self-confident boho lesbian like Felice, and the reverse was also true. The deeper issue of how, exactly, these women transcended social pressure isn't fully investigated. Though the film is about 20 minutes too long, first-time feature filmmaker Max Färberböck has both a great eye and a facility with actors. Every single part is well-cast, and even actors who are onscreen for a few seconds make an impression. Färberböck and his cinematographer, Tony Imi, photograph the faces and bodies of their leading ladies with a luminous intensity, backlighting them so they pop off the screen, wreathing their more tense and self-doubting moments in halos of cigarette smoke.

But I'm still not sure what, besides pure chemistry, made Lilly and Felice risk so much. And throughout the middle portion of Aimee & Jaguar, the script?credited to Färberböck and Rona Munro?concentrates the bulk of the story's suspense around the lesbian aspect of the women's love, downplaying and even ignoring the even more dangerous question of what punishment awaits a Jew who falls in love with a Nazi's wife. The ending is powerful, of course?nearly as upsetting as the final 15 minutes of Boys Don't Cry?but it has the curious effect of drawing attention to unresolved questions rather than obliterating them.

The real Lilly Wust is still alive and living in Berlin; her same-titled 1994 memoir of the affair, as told to writer Erica Fischer, was a bestseller in Europe. I haven't read it, so I don't know if it explains mysteries the film does not. Either way, despite its flaws, this is a fascinating and beautifully made movie.

Framed X-factor: I was surprised to learn from Godfrey Cheshire that neither he nor Armond White had any burning desire to weigh in on The X-Men while I was away in California during July. Then I saw the movie and I understood their lack of enthusiasm. Bryan Singer's comic book epic is pretty good if you like comic books, but it's neither as precisely made nor as balls-out exciting as The Matrix, my pick for the best comic book film ever made. I wasn't bored by it, but, three weeks after seeing it, I'm having a hard time remembering much about it. The quality struck me as falling somewhere between the second and third Batman movies: great sets, amusing situations, but a pronounced absence of great compositions, witty dialogue and thrilling setpieces. The characters had promise?and in the case of Hugh Jackman's Wolverine and Anna Paquin's Rogue, that promise is partly delivered on. But the result feels too much like a tease for a franchise. The other actors, Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart excepted, don't make much of an impression, and I'd love it if somebody could explain to me what the hell Magneto was doing up there with Rogue in the Statue of Liberty's torch, because I still don't know. Rebecca Romijn-Stamos as Mystique deserves special mention. Her spectacular body is painted, choreographed and filmed for maximum visceral impact, and the result is magically intense. Because of her, a whole generation of boys may hit puberty early.

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Atom films: Anthology Film Archives is sponsoring a retrospective of films by Canadian writer-director Atom Egoyan, whose chronology-shuffling, angst-ridden dramas have as many foes as fans. Since his recent work got a fair release in the U.S.?notably Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter?I'll direct readers to a couple of lesser-seen but worthy efforts. My favorite Egoyan film is 1992's The Adjuster (Aug. 10, 12-13), a mysterious fable about suburban malaise that captures some of the same jarring sensations as Don DeLillo's classic White Noise. His follow-up, 1993's Calendar (Aug. 11-12), which stars Egoyan as a troubled photographer and real-life wife Arsinee Khanjian as his wayward onscreen spouse, is one of the more haunting meditations on matrimony that you're likely to see.