Pecker 1998

Pecker is the story a modest boy who works at a sandwich join in the suburbs of Baltimore whose passion is photography. In an amateur manner, he begins to take his own photographs of everything around him and exhibits them in his fast food restaurant.

One day, an art expert from New York discovers his snapshots and is amazed by the freshness of his point of view, so she decides to take the young man to the Big Apple to start a new career as an artist and fulfill his dream. However, sometimes fame does not bring happiness and Pecker must decide between his life or his work. Success totally alters the life of the young man, whose family will be the focus of an unhealthy interest on the part of the pretentious intellectuals of New York. As fame begins to suffocate, his work will gradually lose the initial freshness.

At first glance, Pecker might look like a domesticated John Waters. This film starring an Edward Furlong who goes from being an amateur photographer of his friends and family in Baltimore to triumph in the most snobs artistic circles of New York is one of the best films of the last stage of the director of “Pink Flamingos”. He doesn't have the forced camp hooliganism of “Cecil D. Demented'” or the homemade black humor of “Serial Mom”. However, the director knows how to apply to his characters the same look with which the main photographer observes his loved ones: from the love of those who do not see the freak as someone different. So 'Pecker' works like an endearing comedy that claims that wonderful thing (of “art”) that is in the most unusual everyday people without any kind of caricaturist eagerness. Waters also season the film with some of his touches.

Pecker is an acid comedy about how the twisted circles dictated by artistic fashions can orchestrate the fame and subsequent decline of an artist. The irreverent director John Waters, responsible for other cynical and ironic visions of American society, this time had two young stars Edward Furlong ("Terminator 2" , “American History X”) and Christina Ricci (the macabre Wednesday of "The Addams Family" and “Buffalo 66”). The film is surrounded by the typical eccentric characters, but full of humanity, a redeeming quality in most of his films.

John Waters, the father of creatures as transgressive as the ones in Pink Flamingos or Polyester, however this particular film is one of his friendliest films in the late 1990s. Pecker, another rarity within his filmography full of bizarre examples, the film was received as the author's most mainstream work, a biased judgment because we are actually facing the most sincere and autobiographical of Waters’ movies. Lightened of the exaggerations 'brand of the house', but faithful to the bizarre spirit of its beginnings, Hairspray's father uses high doses of imagination and positive energy to tell us about the personal and artistic future of Pecker, a young photographer who captures his impromptu prints the crazy world around him. The protagonist, symbolic alter ego of Waters, knows success and failure as an artist almost at the same time, a premise that serves Waters to criticize the trends of cultural elites and public opinion, while defending the purity of 'neighborhood' life, devoid of the superficiality and cold sophistication attributed to the great New York. Pecker perhaps sins of a certain sense of being 'goody goody' and a narrative disorder, and at all times the feeling of being attending a private joke of very restrained repercussions weighs on it, but it is also a film with an almost contagious energy. To the usual interpreters of the Waters cinema, we must add a successful Edward Furlong and a grumpy Christina Ricci, at that time they were very popular faces and references of the American indie thanks to works such as American History X or Buffalo '66 respectively. Pecker is a sympathetic and counterculture film, so unique in its kind that it does not resemble any other. It is a harmless story in appearance, but with a lot of bad drool inside, a moral fable that surprises with its grim comedy but rejoicing with a positive spirit about existence.

Script and Direction: John waters

Music: Stewart Copeland

Photography: Robert Stevens

Cast: Edward Furlong, Christina Ricci, Mary Kay Place, Martha Plimpton, Lili Taylor, Bess Armstrong, Brendan Sexton III, Mink Stole, Patricia Hearst

The Rules of Attraction 2002

I have to confess I’m a huge fan of Brett Easton Ellis. His is not my favorite book but the movie is my second favorite after American Psycho.-----If we refer to physics, of course there are laws of attraction, you already know those that say that the opposite poles are attracted and the equal poles are rejected, but the laws of attraction that the story refers are the human ones. In full 2020, I think we have run out of these laws, I mean what does it take to like someone? Be beautiful? Have personality? Be intellectual? If you get someone who has a lot of money or is an influencer, no matter what else, it can attract you. Money is power, money is attraction. Men and women are governed by this absurd law, without discrimination. In human relations there are no laws, if you like someone, you will go for it, despite the lacking social statutes that bind us. The attraction is there and definitely does not need laws to exert its power.

The plot is told through the portrait of a young man who falls into the downward spiral, his relationships, his thoughts and the questions he will go through. The rules of attraction go beyond the understanding of a few people. The mythical American landscape is pure drugs, excesses, sex and alcohol.

Sean Bateman played by James Van Der Beek is a young man who lives in a sleepy state much of the time, when he wakes up he is not sure where he is. The only thing he cares about is his motorcycle, and being able to sell drugs to his rich acquaintances. The story is based on characters who fuck with everyone, who respect absolutely nothing, but who will hardly remember what they did the day before, be drowned in alcohol and feel nothing while having sex, but this is not exclusive to young Americans, but a faithful reflection of young people all over the world. The characters are quite American, a drug dealer, a homosexual, a girl who sleeps with everyone, an indecisive rich girl, and more that reflect what we have seen in a hundred books and movies. It is based on a book that serves as a reflection of a society that is still valid almost 30 years later.

The Rules of attraction, the second novel of the twentieth Bret Easton Ellis, after the famous Less than Zero, that was also made into a not very successful film. The story is an unusual document, elegant, ironic and stark, from the University of New Hampshire in the eighties. A gang of rich children revolves frantically in an obsessive round of sex, drugs and rock and roll, promiscuous and compulsive, trapped in a whirlwind and vertiginous whirlwind, in which hilarious moments are not lacking. It's the mocking story of A wants B, B wants C, C wants A; everyone ignores everyone's feelings, they give themselves to their persecutors and, closing their eyes, they dream of others. What are the laws of attraction to which these young people are subjected to? Is the desire of a body more intense than the desire to buy a designer suit? The kaleidoscopic narrative structure, in the form of monologues, it is bright and brutal, its style is surprisingly effective. The apathy, the despair and the anguish of living, the criticism of always divorced and absent parents, who just send money, the inability to communicate, except through music that sounds endless they barely camouflage themselves in the episodic mood and the consumption of drugs.

The writer-director is Roger Avary, who directed "Killing Zoe" and co-authored Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction." (Whether he casted James Van Der Beek as his lead because he looks more like Tarantino than any other working actor, we cannot guess.) In all of his work, Avary is fond of free movement up and down the timeline, and here he uses an ingenious approach to tell the stories of three main characters who are involved in, I don’t know, five or six pairings. He begins with an "End of the World" party at Camden College, the ultimate party school, follows a story thread, then rewinds and follows another. He also uses fast-forward brilliantly to summarize a European vacation in a few hilarious minutes.

.Avary weaves his stories with zest and wicked energy, and finds a visual style that matches the emotional fragmentation. I have no complaints about the acting, and especially liked the way Sossamon kept a kind of impertinent distance from some of the excesses. But by the end, I felt a sad indifference. These characters are not from life and do not form into a useful fiction. Their excesses of sex and substance abuse are physically unwise, financially unlikely and emotionally impossible. I do not censor their behavior but lament the movie's fascination with it. They do not say and perhaps do not think anything interesting. The two other Bret Easton Ellis movies, "Less than Zero" and "American Psycho", offered characters who were considerably more intriguing. We had questions about them; they aroused our curiosity. The inhabitants of "The Rules of Attraction" are superficial and transparent. We know people like that, and hope they will get better.

Cast:

Shannyn Sossamon as Lauren

Ian Somerhalder as Paul

Jessica Biel as Lara

Kip Pardue as Victor

Kate Bosworth as Kelly

Written and Directed by Roger Avary

Based On The Novel by Bret Easton Ellis