This is a low budget flick about a young fellow who carries his camera everywhere shooting pictures. Does this ring a bell? Why I might rent it? Why I might like it when anyone else who isn't a photographer might laugh? Why more sensible (subtle, sensitive, serious) photographers would give it the bird? You are warned. Rent it at your peril. Just don't blame me, OK? I'm a sucker for a photographer makes good story.

The movie is Pecker. They say, about a third of the way in, it's because he "pecks" at his food, but forget that, he's a peckerwood, no doubt about it. The director is John Waters, who will ever be remembered as the director of Pink Flamingos. I learned that just now doing a search on the Internet. Quirky, which I like. One nice line, Pecker, played by the actor who played the kid in Terminator 2, chasing after his girlfriend who has just caught him in the embrace of a jaded New York art gallery owner: "I love you more than Kodak!" The usual mix of bar top dancing gay men and crusty lesbian women, a miracle seeking grandmother with her plaster Virgin Mary, a heart of gold thrift shop fashion consultant (Mary Kay Place), a not very lovable kleptomaniac sidekick, a girlfriend in a strange relationship with a coin operated laundry and the photographer, who is shooting pictures of all this. Pictures of people who give him a smile when they look up and see him, where I, in a similar situation, would get a boot and some expletives deleted. Well, what can I say? A genuinely awful but somehow watchable movie.

One line at the end, something to the effect that the resolution to this story (young man creates art, young man is discovered by the corrupt New York art establishment finding instant fame and fortune, young man throws over the corrupt New York art establishment to return to the purity of his art and his Baltimore neighborhood) harbingers the end of this Ironic Age, the movie suggesting, perhaps, that we are slipping back into a more naive, Pecker-like post-Ironic reality, sliding over time even further, all the way back to a Pink Flamingos post-partum fifties. Ironic. Not Ironic. Wherever we're going, it isn't the fifties. Really, not the fifties. (Please.)

Monday OK, I'm pooped. None of what I've written above makes any sense, which doesn't bother me and certainly isn't unusual. Time to stop. I guess this was really a Sunday rather than a Monday entry.