The Clairvoyant Zoopraxiscope

You probably haven't seen John Waters' A Dirty Shame, and if you haven't already, you probably won't. But that's not to say you shouldn't. I've never quite gotten John Waters, at all. I always found the overblown, showy nature of the humor in his movies to be too much, too late, not shocking, just loud. But in this case, he seems to have hit just the right note. I mean, geez, maybe my humor is more crude than most, or maybe I just like the contrast between the irreverence of the movie and the hyperhyper quality of the holiday season in New York. But the mix is good... Tracey Ullman plays a superconservative housewife who, after a blow to the head and a "moment" with a pair of horny sex deities, turns into a nymphomaniac. Having previously kept her pornstar daughter (played SelmaBlairishly by Selma Blair, with a strangely large chest) locked up, she now lives to plonk and plotz randomly and indiscreetly, forging onward with her daughter in a fullscale sexual onslaught. A lengthy, convoluted plot follows, with lines such as "There's something wrong with your v****a" and "Let's get sexin'" and "You have a runaway cl**or*s" bouncing off each other with a sort of late-Rome flair. The ending, such as it is, is a happy one... I'll admit that there's something annoyingly useless about John Waters' films, but this one's enjoyable, depending on your stomach for such things.