Director's Cut

Rating:
Summary: Magnificent Obsessions
Review: and a lot of wasted paper! None of the pictures included are clearx--certainly not money well spent! This book is slight and doesn't even include any insightful commentary.

Rating:
Summary: SEVEN FULL COLOR PICS OF DON KNOTTS!
Review: and a lot of wasted paper! None of the pictures included are clearx--certainly not money well spent! This book is slight and doesn't even include any insightful commentary.

Rating:
Summary: More great obsession and desire from John Waters
Review: John Waters is one of the few artists who would accept acomplimentary comparison to Jeffrey Dahmer. "I didn't wantthem to leave," Dahmer said of his attempts at zombie-making. The simple poignancy of Dahmer's needy rationale and the horror of its expression are a jolting juxtaposition, an engrossing exhibition of desire and obsession. Director's Cut presents an engrossing exhibition of Waters' obsession: a highly twisted, idiosyncratic altar to celebrity and the movies. Waters doesn't want movies to leave. His photographs are almost exclusively movie stills taken off television screens, creating a marvelous freedom from the motion of motion pictures. Like VCR freeze-framing, they allow you to gaze to your scopophilic heart's content upon normally fleeting moments. As a specific memory detail may encapsulate a larger event, Waters' stills crystallize his vision of a film or career. A jock strap draped across a brass desk lamp stands for an entire sexual encounter; Baby Doll is reduced to Carroll Baker's empty crib. Like the crackling TV static in David Cronenberg's Videodrome, Waters' images are rough and sensually tactile. Moire patterns, pixels, and the curving black frame of the TV screen itself imbue the photographs with a lush, visceral texture absent from high-gloss art photography or porn. Jean Seberg burning at the stake, hypos puncturing veins, a**holes spread wide, Lana Turner's neck, the numeric countdown of a film leader: desire charges the innocuous and the explicit alike. The book elicits the same fascination as pornography for a fetish you don't share. Obese women or amputees may not send you, but expression of the obsession in and of itself is riveting. With comedic self-portraits and stills of famous, infamous, and mediocre director's credits (including Waters and the legendary pseudonym Allan Smithee), Director's Cut turns Waters' obsessive gaze back onto himself and his own filmic celebrity, extending his inquiry beyond even the scope of his films.

Rating:
Summary: Magnificent Obsessions
Review: Waters once wrote that he never uttered the word 'art' "unless referring to Mr. Linkletter." In "Director's Cut", he has distilled a lifetime of obsessions down to a very artful collection of film and video stills that are simple and beautiful even if their meanings aren't apparent. The book is essentially a visual companion to his hilarious essays in "Shock Value" and "Crackpot", especially the ones about movies, his own and others. You don't necessarily need to be familiar with them to enjoy "Director's Cut" but it certainly helps. This is one of the more interesting art books I've seen in that most of the images are presented completely out of their original context; Waters lends his own sensibility to them and they become transfixing. Through Waters' eyes, the juxtaposition of Francis the Talking Mule and stills of Jessica Lange in "Frances" isn't merely a joke; the 'low' culture presumption of one image makes you question the 'high' (or middlebrow) presumption of the other. My favorite images in the book come from 'The Bad Seed", a Warner Brothers movie from the Fifites about a homicidal little girl that is the summation of everything Waters believes in: obsession with the outwardly mundane, willfullybad (or even murderous) behavior in social situations, crime as personal expression, the artist as outlaw and social misfit. And his stills from "The Tingler" have a mysterious beauty that remind you of early Surrealist photography; they have a depth to them not present in the original movie, which could be said of almost all the stills. Overall , the book is a triumph: it's extremely personal for Waters and yet vastly entertaining if you let his sensibility overtake you.