Midweek Mention... Pecker

Pecker

Sidey: This is the first time we've ever reviewed a John Waters movie.

Reegs: It is?

Dan: seen this

Sidey: seen this one before, I've seen a few others, but I wouldn't say it was an aficionado. I was recently in LA and at the Academy, they had a thing, you know, a whole Season of John Watt's stuff going on but I didn't go.

Which felt like I probably should have. But anyway

Dan: Pink Flamingos, didn't he? What else did he

Reegs: Hairspray,

Sidey: is a famous one.

Reegs: the one I most know

Sidey: had an unbelievable cameo in The Simpsons. And all sorts of other stuff. He's got a nickname.

Cris: at me. It's

Sidey: Wait there. It's the Pope of Trash or the Duke of Dirt, or the Prince of Puke. The Aya of Ars Assholes

Reegs: Sounds

Sidey: So that kind of gives you an idea of what the, the films are normally like. And they're always, always set in Baltimore. Yeah.

That's his thing. That and all the really queer like stuff.

Because there's loads of that.

Reegs: that.

Sidey: And this one starts off

Reegs: Have we said the name of it yet?

Sidey: It's called

Reegs: I would say that is a double entendre. I am not a genius,

Sidey: Definitely feels that way. And it starts off with Pekka. Played

Dan: Pecking his food.

Sidey: Edward Furlong. You will recognize him from Terminator 2.

Dan: That's

Sidey: And it's got a great, great intro tune.

That I did stay through the credits to find out who performed it and what it was

Reegs: and what it was called. Happy Go Lucky by Paul

Sidey: Definitely Paul someone. Yeah, not Paul Simon.

Reegs: Paul Simon.

Sidey: But definitely look it up if you've not heard it. It's a great tune.

Reegs: tune. An

Sidey: And Edward Furlong aka Pekka just

Reegs: Well in fact the whole soundtrack is by Stuart Copeland from The Police.

So

Sidey: I hate him.

Reegs: Absolutely

Sidey: But it's a good soundtrack. But yeah, Pekka. is a keen photographer, but he just snaps away at the mundane things in life that might look

Unexciting or whatever, but that's what he does

Dan: And the people around him. And the

people

Sidey: around like everyone just walking down the street photo photo.

He must take hundreds of photos

Reegs: Yeah, we see him on the bus taking photos of some black girls and women shaving her legs another woman Who's reading a book fat and furious?

All of and everywhere he goes because he works at a place called the sub pit and he takes photos as he goes even as He's doing his job. He stops to take some photos of some burgers or something that he's cooking.

So yeah,

Cris: the way, look. It did.

Sidey: did.

Reegs: Did look awful

Sidey: And as he gives out

Reegs: and as he gives out the food and then he gets, he gets a flyer.

He's convinced his boss that he can run a sort of art exhibition out of it, the diner where he works. And he goes outside and eats. He serves the guy some chips and a cockroach comes along and he takes a photo of that and then some graffiti that says eat me or something, he takes a

Sidey: like that.

Reegs: is just glorious.

Yeah, exactly. Written and directed by John Waters comes up just as there's two rats fucking in a bin. It's amazing. And he takes a photo of that.

Sidey: It's amazing. Well, first we meet his

Reegs: first we meet his friend, Matt, who's a kleptomaniac and

Sidey: the five finger discount. Yeah

Reegs: and they go off to some store, and they, it's

Sidey: Other people shopping

Reegs: yeah. And they put all the stuff like, you know, like a phallus shaped marrow in this prim woman's bag, and some meat in a, in a, in a hippie's bag, or whatever, in their trolley, and some hemorrhoid cream in this muscle guy's

Dan: there's nothing

Reegs: nothing wrong with my

Sidey: cream in this bus of guys. All the time taking photographs. There's nothing wrong with my ass! And yeah, then we meet, we do get to introduce to his family. His mother runs a thrift store and she's very, very generous.

And she looks after the homeless people around and everyone looks fabulous in

these kind

Reegs: she'll make you look a million dollars,

Sidey: yeah. really wacky, colorful outfits and everything's just larger than life. His little sister,

Dan: with sequins and all kinds of stuff, isn't there,

Sidey: his sister is a sugar addicted, ADHD

Dan: addicted

Sidey: like, nightmare.

Reegs: Well, everywhere she goes, she's just stuffed with, she asks for sugar. In fact, she's introduced

Dan: She demands it.

Reegs: to

death on the

Sidey: And demanding

Reegs: demanding

sugar.

Yeah.

Sidey: yeah.

Dan: sugar.

Reegs: a snap of

Dan: snap of

sherbet, everything. It's just coming,

Sidey: at one point, she climbs up in the kitchen onto the cabinet to get a jar down, which is just sugar. And she starts eating that and then it's just like, sort

Dan: dribbling.

Yeah.

Sidey: And that's one of his, that's one of his popular photos that he takes.

His dad is running

Reegs: It's a dive bar, He

seems to be, you know, it's patroned by a load of broke drunks that he gives free

Sidey: gives free

Reegs: yeah and he, you know, he's, his nose is out of joint because they've taken all the business away. The pelt club has opened up opposite and it's full of basically lesbian strippers.

Sidey: It's butch lesbian strippers but still guys watching.

Yeah. Pekka gets caught taking some photos of them through the window. And then he goes to meet his sister who works at what was it called? fudge palace where there's kind of really buff guys, not necessarily gay I think she introduces a few of them and it says even though he's hetero And there's a lot of gay guys watching him stuffing dollar bills into like

Reegs: Well, you get quite a lot of shot of bulges and

Sidey: teabagging, and they, they, they have to refrain, there's no teabagging allowed in the Fudge Palace.

Reegs: His sister is an MC there and, did you recognise her? Martha Plimpton from, Steph from The

Dan: Yeah. right, yeah.

Sidey: She's, and she's shouting out about teabagging and stuff, which, so, you know.

Reegs: aNd also another character we haven't introduced was Shelly. Christina Richie is his girlfriend. She's his Venus de Milo, he says. And she, you know, pretty succinctly, one of the themes of the movie, she says, You're crazy, you see art when there's nothing there.

So, yeah, she's pretty militant at the laundromat but then again, the clients are pretty crazy too. One is dyeing her clothes there with some blue stuff. One is later going to have, try and have sex with

Sidey: with, the washing machine, yeah.

Dan: Yeah, she, she runs a tight ship out there, doesn't she? And yeah, those interactions with the customers you just get to know her straight away. And she's, she's cutting out. She's all the time busy.

She's just all the time. Yeah.

Sidey: just loves the laundromat.

Reegs: And we meet Meemaw as well. That's just after Delaney Williams from The Wire turns up. Did you recognize him as the construction worker? He's in it for about ten seconds, but he turns up because they buy this sandwich called the, what is it, the pit beef sandwich. And Meemaw takes Pekka upstairs to show him her talking statue of Saint Mary.

Which is clearly just her, like, being a ventriloquist, but he indulges this fantasy and she's going, FULL OF CRASH! Full of grace and all this stuff, and Pecker kind of encourages it and takes photos of them.

Dan: Yeah, he doesn't seem to. I was wondering what his angle was there because he, as he goes through the film.

Reegs: got an angle.

Sidey: everyone, they're just painting Baltimore and this particular part of this community, everyone's supporting everyone.

And

Reegs: And everybody's a bit bonkers.

Sidey: only grudge is the bar and the gay bar, really, you know, but they don't do anything about it. They're just like, Oh, the customers

Reegs: about it,

Sidey: Yeah. And so everyone's just Happy, you know, they're all getting along and everything's kind of this distorted, mad, utopian little thing they've got going on, but they've got nothing, but they're happy as Larry.

Dan: Larry. Until the day of the exhibition then, they're all there, and a reporter comes in not reporter, she's a gallery, a, a, a, she's like the,

Reegs: she works at the, the New York Gallery. And she, she's flown in for a local exhibition and saw his flyers and came in for, to see the

Dan: I loved his

Reegs: She's come in coincidentally when her dad peck's dad is staring at a closeup shot of a vagina. Trying to work out what it is 'cause he's not sure,

Cris: And his mate blurts out

Reegs: And his mate blurts out what it is, which causes chaos. I think he steals the charity money in the, in the, in the ensuing

Dan: I love that's the first words Chris has said this this podcast

there.

Yeah. A very

Cris: chaos.

Reegs: So he sells a picture to Rory, the art gallery enthusiast, whatever, for $30. And she says, come and display your stuff at my gallery. And we, you know, we kind of jumped to Pcca being the new cultural darling.

Sidey: It happens really quick, doesn't it? They bus, they bus it down to New York.

Reegs: He's at an exhibition pretty much

Sidey: it's a propaganda. So, so he gets the sack from the diner because it's just like not right. And people are going into the diner. I think the only reason he's allowed to have it in his thingy is because everyone, everyone has to order something when they come in.

But now we're in a proper high end. Very pretentious you've got all this New York art scene people who are clearly snobs

Reegs: loves him. Everyone's telling him what genius he is.

And they're sort of, it's like, it's a sort of misery tourism where you sort of look upon the downcast and the less fortunate, but you talk about how brilliant it is and all this

they, yeah. There's a load of pretentious shit. Half of the references I didn't get, one of them says he's like a humane Diane Arbus, but with a wonderful streak of kindness, which I didn't really understand.

But there's Mr. Holbrook, the art critic from the times. She said she meets him Pekka's sister. And she says, Oh, I, you know, I know your type. I work at a gay bar. You're a little light in the loafers.

Sidey: loafers. That's what she

Reegs: to him,

Cris: the loafers. And so all his work

Reegs: And so all his work is up on the wall, and it's all the stuff that we've seen so far. The rat's fucking in the bin, I think, has sold like three to You know, we see

Sidey: I think he's, they're selling for a thousand a

Dan: with sugar. Yeah.

Sidey: there's a, there's a three print run of each one, I think.

And they, you know, this old man's calculating, and it's like, My God, you're gonna be rich, Pecker, you're gonna be rich. But See Christina Ricci, Shelly, she's already freaking out.

Reegs: She says, I,

Sidey: I'm a Baltimore girl.

Fun.

Reegs: She says, these people don't even know what a laundromat is.

Sidey: And she says, I'm a Baltimore girl.

I don't belong here. You know, and no one, none of them do. They don't fit in. Don't even have good thrift stores here. The mom says,

Dan: And Pekka all the time has been this character who's just really nice and, and homely.

As he's been taking on this kind of tidal wave, he's, he's finding things and situations happening to him that he doesn't really want to happen. The people around him certainly don't want it to happen. Like him moving to New York and them all being there. They all want to get back to Baltimore.

They all want to get

Sidey: to get home. Yeah. It's not actually

Reegs: by

people

Sidey: People who And from reading the article, someone could work out that he's made loads of

Reegs: made loads of money.

But it's

Sidey: it's not that it's someone

Cris: Overnight, he's famous.

Sidey: someone Was the subject of one of his photographs and is disgruntled about it And so goes and just take some stuff is what he deems to be like fair and you know payment for being in the photo

Reegs: photo.

Sidey: And,

and from here it kind of spirals and everything starts to fall apart

Reegs: Yeah. Well people, they can't go about their normal lives. Matt, his mate, although he's enjoying the sort of success that goes of being trapping the trappings of success, being along with pecker. 'cause he's got women throwing themselves at him. He can't shoplift like it used to, which is a real shame for him.

They're at one point, the pair when they tried to do it, a a sort of, a shop owner who spots them doing it makes them pull their dicks out, so, and she says, maybe this will teach you that some people don't want to be art.

Sidey: to be

Reegs: of cool little bits like that. Shelly's definitely not enjoying it,

Sidey: he's become Distant from her, and she sees it for what it is, and this is just normal stuff.

Reegs: Yeah.

Sidey: This is just our lives, and you're kind of exploiting it.

Reegs: She objects to the, yeah, the the fact that they, the things that they would be repulsed by. They're being pretentiously, sort of, in love with it because they, they've crowned it as

Sidey: art.

Reegs: yeAh. And yeah, it gets worse for everybody. The pelt room is closed because of pubic hair harassment. Beaver brutality.

Sidey: of

Reegs: Mimama is exposed

Sidey: I was going to say, yeah, that's

Reegs: psycho,

Sidey: There's like a pilgrimage to see the St.

Reegs: of the

Dan: well, this, this story got taken from the photograph and it was on the cover of a magazine and then you had these pilgrims come to see the

Sidey: And they're like, but

Dan: when she does her venquilatrism they're not buying it. And in fact, they think it's downright like sacrilegious, don't they? They hate it.

Sidey: there's a certain like blasphemousness to the whole thing, I think.

Reegs: And Pekka can't even go about his work. He goes down to the Fudge Palace to try and get some, to try and get some photos. And you know, people won't expose, you know, they don't want to expose themselves as being people who, who fraternise at a place like the Fudge Palace,

so.

Dan: place like the Fudge

Reegs: Yeah.

Rory

then makes a play for having sex with him. She's trying to encourage him to, to go to this art exhibition,

Sidey: he's had a meal ticket and he's there's offers from all these massive magazine publications to

Cris: And the Whitney Museum.

Sidey: Yeah and he gets he does end up going to this it's like more like a fashion shoot where it's super pretentious with some famous.

Reegs: That was her mum, wasn't it? Well, that was with the Vogue

Sidey: Let's see it.

Reegs: amazing. It's hilarious, yeah.

Sidey: It ends up

Reegs: It ends up with little Chrissy choking and like gobbing a bit of sputum on the Vogue guy's

Sidey: of sputum on the Vogue guy's camera. She's only allowed to eat vegetables which

Reegs: She's only allowed to eat vegetables which she gorges on.

Sidey: snorting

Dan: extreme the other way. She starts snorting peas. Yeah, right at the end there.

Reegs: So anyway, yeah, Rory and, and Pekka kind of nearly have sex and Shelley is, it's a weird scene because she's like photographing them from outside and catch them and as they run off to go and vote Pekka and her, they have their big make up moment while they have sex in a polling booth.

Yeah, which I think is probably illegal. Yeah,

Sidey: Yeah, I think it's illegal to have two in, two people in, just in a he's also like symbolically replaced his camera with a digital or certainly a more high tech version. It's probably still film, but it's not the thrift store camera that he had before.

Reegs: a Nikon N50, actually, if you wanted to

Sidey: I've got the, the one that he had originally as well, if you want to know that. It's a Canonet.

Reegs: Canonette. Oh, nice.

Sidey: Yeah.

Yeah.

Cris: Heard of them.

Sidey: Mm.

Cris: Powerful stuff.

Reegs: So anyway, yeah, they have the big reconciliation moment where she realises art is life while the screen whirls with cheaply animated colour, sort of, zooming around it. Do you remember all that

Sidey: oh, you mean a mildew stained sheet could still be beautiful?

And he's like,

Reegs: yeah. Urine stains,

Sidey: because, yeah, come on, use your imagination, lean into it, you know. And there's, yeah, these little animations pop up on the screen.

Reegs: Art is life and life is beautiful anyway. And then Pekka cancels his show to force the art world to come to Baltimore, effectively to Pekka's place that they've set

Dan: to Baltimore effectively to build this place that you set up.

Sidey: Yeah, the

Cris: boy who said no to New York

Sidey: and

Cris: and all that

Sidey: Yeah.

Reegs: And so you get these kind of art tourists sort of pretentiously, critiquing the actual Baltimore as they drive through. Oh, it's the stairs from the, you know, and just

Sidey: Oh, look at the marble stairs. It's

Reegs: Yeah, it's, it's great because it's like, it's sort of.

These days, we would call these people influencers, effectively, and it's like a massive spearing of that kind of culture, like, 25 years before it even existed, really.

Sidey: But he's, he's gonna host his own exhibition on his own terms in his dad's bar. Yeah, and

Reegs: And he displays photos of all the people that he's met from the art world in various states of sort of, you know,

Disparagement or Unflattering, light. Yeah,

Dan: Yeah, in the New York art world. So there they are becoming the art now.

Sidey: Yeah.

Reegs: one of the women eating the spring onions looking stupid, one of the museum curator looking down the famous photographers. Top one of a girl like adjusting her breasts in a mirror One of the times guy looking very gay or

Sidey: looking very gay or something.

Yeah. Yeah. As Rory

Reegs: As Rory says what a great success this is what a brilliant thing here's my new guy Randy the world's first blind

Sidey: first blind

Reegs: Yeah, he's just like randomly snapping his camera he says he can feel portraits and smell landscapes, but he's presumably less interested in lighting and focus, is what I would say.

Sidey: Yeah. And

Reegs: It ends with some strippers disguised as bikers dancing on the table, and people discussing whether they have pubic hair and agreeing that it's good that they don't.

Sidey: don't.

Yeah. And then it just with a shot of Pekka and what you're gonna do next and he says, you know what? I think I might like to direct a movie and and that's it

Reegs: then straight back into happy go lucky me.

Sidey: It sort of breezed along, it's quite a short run time, it's about 85 minutes and

it's fairly, like, heavy handed with the messages trying to give out, I'd

Reegs: All

of the eccentric characters and it's satirization of all the pretentious art and stuff.

That's all quite good and funny and the themes are all good about where art is everywhere and what is art and all that. All that stuff is great. I, Edward Furlong has got like no charisma at all and there's zero chemistry between him and Christina Ricci. Which, and that love story is kind of supposed to be part of it, but it's nitpicking really.

It's pretty good this.

Dan: Yeah, I enjoyed it. There wasn't a lot between all the, all the characters. It was it was more around the, his journey as much as anything else that he wasn't that interesting. He was just so nice, like, you know, it was, but that's the way that he built this world and sort of innocence goes along with it.

And it's taken advantage of, and then he's able to. to flip it back on itself in it, in his perfect little world there, but yeah, as you say, 85 minutes. I've not seen this before and it was one of those

Sidey: many have

Dan: I'd remembered maybe watching the the trailer on an old blockbuster video. Never got around to watching it and he did Pink Flamingos, which I

Sidey: Yeah, I've

Dan: and I've seen Hairspray as well, but yeah, this was worth, you know, A short one time movie, you can do worse.

Sidey: I don't know.

Cris: Chris,

Sidey: what the

Cris: you feel about this? They wanted to have a shot at what before used to be the people that influence people with magazines and rather than what you say influences today with through social media and that it used to be the people that would write articles and it's kind of the same like how to win friends and alienate people or that the where the devil wears Prada where you you know you kind of get into with these cool people and you pretend to be cool just so you're accepted by all these people but Yeah.

I get the message, but I couldn't understand. No one acted well. The storyline was, I thought it was very simple and I could see the end before the movie even started. I, I mean, it was funny, but especially because English is not my first language, sometimes some of these, like the ones that you thought was funny, I didn't really understand the sub layer of a joke.

So I was just thinking, I'm pretty sure this is funny, but I don't understand why. Does that make sense? So when they would say all these things about the, the lesbian pole dancers and all that stuff, the reference to certain things, I couldn't really understand why it would be

Dan: Yeah, a lot of those jokes be dated as well, you know, I didn't get all of them to be, to be

Sidey: well there's loads of specific like photography Yeah. References and

Dan: but what I did like, there was plenty of cameos or, or people that you've seen in other films like the Goonies girl Edward Furlong. I've not seen him in much more, but a few of the other characters, I've kind of seen him in other films. And yeah, I enjoyed it. I must say, I, I think

Reegs: a great theme. I mean, it, its theme is essentially that art is everywhere and everyone is an artist, which is an amazing theme. So

Sidey: Also, I like that he brings

Representation to all these weird like subcultures and stuff that no one really want to be other people doing it but He's

sort of crossed over and so you get exposure to all these mad things that are going on out there and all these people having a

Reegs: It's a pretty white

Dan: this? Ninety? Ninety eight. Okay.

Reegs: It's pretty white for Baltimore is all I would say. It's a

pretty

Sidey: he's got like way weirder stuff than this of course. This is like verging on mainstream for him. But it's still out there. So, I strongly recommend for me.

Cris: Yeah, definitely.