Pecker | | Cast : | Edward Furlong, Christina Ricci | | Director : | John Waters | | Studio : | New Line Studios | | Format : | Color, Closed-captioned, Widescreen, Dolby | | Released Date : | September 25, 1998 | | DVD Released Date : | September 07, 2004 | | Language : | English (Subtitled), English (Dubbed), English (Original Language) | | Audience Rating : | R (Restricted) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | July 28, 2005 | | Summary | Peckerhead | Content
 | Great movie -John Waters is very impressive.Christina Richie with some baby fat on her looks so good. Loved the movie.No teabagging ! |
| Rating | | | Date | July 18, 2005 | | Summary | Shockingly Addictive | Content
| On one particular Saturday afternoon about a year ago, this movie came on TV and I had nothing better to do so I decided I would watch it. Right from the beginning I thought to myself - WHAT A STUPID MOVIE!! Yet... I was compelled to keep watching it. I had to know what was going to happen next. I couldn't walk away from it... I couldn't turn it off. Then probably about mid-way through, a friend called me and we talked on the phone for a while, causing me to miss a great deal of the movie. I returned only long enough to see events happening at the end which I had no idea how came to be. Ever since then, I have told myself that the movie was stupid anyway, and although I'm curious to find out what happened during the time that I missed, it's really no big deal. But today I have to admit that I haven't been able to get this movie out of my head. Despite its stupidity, it sucked me in and I can't wait to get the unedited for TV version. |
| Rating | | | Date | May 20, 2005 | | Summary | Charm City - Trade Capital of the World! | Content
| From Charm City comes another Waters charmer - another minor masterpiece!
From start to finish Pecker is a delight and Waters infuses his script with enough loveable oddball characters to populate an entire city. Whether it's Christina Ricci's obsessive compulsive wreck of a laundress, the sugar addict Little Chrissy, eternally hopeful Mom, sleaze loving Tina or best of all Memama, who's room contains a shrine to the Virgin Mary - and a statute of the Virgin that shrieks "Full of grace! Full of Grace!" there is always someone to watch and enjoy.
Edward Furlong is all wide-eyed innocence - even when he's secretly photographing bottomless lesbian lap dancers at the and male strippers at a gay bar with the unfortunately hilarious name of "The Fudge Palace." Big sister, Tina offers a rip-roaring good time from Martha Plimpton, and Brendan Sexton III is a delight as Pecker's betrayed best friend. Throw in Mary Kay Place (!), Patty Hearst, Mink Stole, Lili Taylor, Bess Armstrong - and others - and you've got an ensemble that's having one helluva good time on screen!
The jumping off point for Waters here is the snobbism and cultural elitism of Manhattan versus the purity and earnestness of Baltimore "Trade Capital of the World." The New York art scene is an easy target and often lampooned but Waters brings his own unique sick twists and takes us along for a ride full of belly laughs, uncomfortable truths in perhaps his sweetest tribute to Baltimore yet.
There's just enough objectionable material to make the "typical American" uncomfortable - and I wouldn't want it any other way!
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| Rating | | | Date | March 09, 2005 | | Summary | Not as impressive as I thought it would be | Content
| I don't know what I was expecting from this movie. I'm a huge fan of Cry Baby, another John Waters movie (which still hasn't had an official release on DVD), and I haven't seen Hairspray, which has Ricki Lake in it. I dunno. I suppose I was expecting it to live up to Cry Baby, which was set in Baltimore & still had the same eccentric characters, but Cry Baby was much better. The fact that it had a young & ultra cute Johnny Depp, wearing leather and riding a motorbike helped!
The fact is, you can't really base a film around just taking black & white photos of people in your town and expect it to become a success. I'd previously never heard of it, and didn't realise it had Christina Ricci in it - who by the way, is extremely whiny & bratty, I just wanted to slap her. It's so weird seeing Edward Furlong too, as I'd only seen him in Terminator 2 before. He actually looked kinda nice looking in this, as opposed to Terminator 2, where he so wasn't! (I think they should bring him back for Terminator 4) This was 6 years after T2, and he's certainly grown up!
In the opening scene, the number of the bus is 7734. According to John Waters, this is an old Catholic school joke since '7734' upside-down "spells" hell. (Am I the only one that doesn't get this?)
The claw machine in the bar contains, among other things, a box of Ex-Lax, a box of Gas-X, a liquor bottle filled with a dark brown liquid (bourbon maybe?), and a cell phone.
Pecker's camera is an early model of the Canonet, a compact camera made over a period of more than a decade (primarily in the 1960s) by Canon for the consumer market. The camera takes so-so pictures, and today might be worth $20-$40, when it can be found. It is entirely plausible that Pecker might find such a camera in a thrift store, at a garage sale, or the like.
Anyone who knows me, will know I love taking photos (as my boyfriend's found out many a time), although I prefer staying behind the camera, much like Pecker does in this. I was wondering how he could afford all that film (and you never saw him once change the film), but there's a funny scene that explains all that!
It's a very odd movie, I'll give it that. Now if I could just get my hands on an official release of Cry Baby. Or sleep with John Waters. |
| Rating | | | Date | October 06, 2004 | | Summary | semi-maturity works or doesn't work with Waters | Content
| Pecker is a slightly more mature work of John Waters.
Take that statement in. Stare at it, analyze it, mull it through your mind.
The statement is true, and whether or not it is good or bad depends on your opinion of John Waters. If you think transvestite colonies living in trailer parks and literally eating excrement is immature and pathetic, then its a statement of grand relief. If you think aforementioned movies are delightfully trashy and charming, you probably aren't going to like the statement.
Either way, we have a filmmaker waning his status as arbitrary through another increasingly conventional film. This is good if you find Waters does his best work when within the industry, with irony and scathing indictments of modern society concealed within a conventional structure. This is bad if you find waters does his best work when direct, with underlying themes subtle, with a blatant disregard for modern society, and with a penchant for all that is inappropriate.
It's a film that doesn't seem to be as smart as his other works. Yes, the quality of art is arbitrary, yes, suburban people are quirky and thats what makes them great. Yes, we know Waters is from Maryland. Yes. Get on with it.
Its not a film that is as good as it can be, yet despite the negatives, it succeeds in its its own right. Its enjoyable, and the obvious threads that exist within the film still remain pretty true. Its semi-campy, entertaining, fun, and works. Its not great, not bad, but not necessarily special either. |
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