John Waters: This Filthy World (NR)

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John Waters is bringing sketchy back. In his humorous live one-man show -- taped at New York's Harry De Jur Playhouse and directed by Curb Your Enthusiasm's Jeff Garlin -- the iconic, razor-'stached writer-director of Polyester, Pecker and Hairspray introduces himself to his adoring Lower East Side audience as a "filth elder." Young people need someone bad to look up to, he explains. For 90 minutes, the counterculture raconteur spins yarns about autographing a tampon for a rabid fan, curating a show of Andy Warhol's 1970s porn films for the Warhol Museum and dressing up for screenings of The Passion of the Christ and acting it out, a la Rocky Horror. Waters -- who recently appeared in Jackass Number Two -- has successfully introduced four decades of moviegoers to the discerning cultivation of bad taste, from Divine's historic ingestion of dog-do in 1972's Pink Flamingoes to Tracey Ullman's snatching up a soda bottle (Lady Sings the Blues-style) in 2004's NC-17-rated A Dirty Shame. Along the way he's become an indie institution.

His banned, censored and protested films of the past seem almost quaint in retrospect. In 2006, those old warped plots -- vying for the electric chair as a shot at superstardom; competing for the tabloid title of "Filthiest People Alive" -- seem like contemporary news stories. But Waters isn't done shaping the future. As a strategy for smartening up America he insists, "We have to make books cool again. If you go home with somebody and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em." In that educational sense, this filmed version of his university and museum circuit lecture is this season's An Inconvenient Truth.

John Waters's filmed one-man show had a small theatrical run, but it was made for DVD distribution through Netflix. What theater audiences didn't see is the 35-minute post-show Q&A included here. Waters's extemporaneous responses reveal that his Baltimore-set movies are more documentaries about his fiercely un-refined hometown than concoctions of his imagination; he's not into hipsters, rather people who think they're normal but are actually quite bizarre. And his target audience is minorities who don't even fit in their own minority. Waters laments that the Golden Age of trash was over the day pornography became legal and Hollywood co-opted everything. Today he's gunning for filth, which has a new appeal. A seven-minute interview with Waters and director Jeff Garlin for IFC Canada, plus a minute of red-carpet footage from the Toronto International Film Festival, round out the DVD extras.

by Rob. Walton