Last weekend, Baltimore hosted Honfest. "Hon," short for "honey," refers to those women, often seen in the world of John Waters and '60s kitsch, who sport audacious pieces of style like beehive hairdos, spandex, cat's-eye glasses, bright-blue eyeshadow, leopard print, and pearls. But, like many small niches that start out as celebrations of alternative culture, the festival has become a huge deal where non-hons don their best impressions of retro kitsch-wear.

As the Baltimore Sun notes, not everyone is digging the increasing popularity -- especially John Waters, who says he's leaving the world of hon behind: "To me, it's used up," Waters said of the Hon. "It's condescending now. The people that celebrate it are not from it. I feel that in some weird way they're looking slightly down on it. I only celebrate something I can look up to."

Funny, that's just what I would say about the new Hairspray. It was popular and successful, and I love some of the people involved (Christopher Walken, Michelle Pfieffer, Allison Janney), but the re-do was like Hollywood Halloween -- people trying out "weirdness" for kicks.

Methinks it's time for Waters to reclaim the wonders of transgressive art!

When word hit last year that John Waters was going to make a children's movie, I was all sorts of excited -- the King of Sleaze branching out into new and impressionable territory! I imagined kid-ified versions of his past films, or just what was in store for a film with the name "Fruitcake." But then there was nothing, and the Waterific news seemed like a distant memory ... until now!

The Hollywood Reporter posts that Parker Posey and Johnny Knoxville have signed on to star in the film. This will be Ms. Posey's first foray into the world of Waters, which is ridiculously long overdue, while Knoxville is following John right out of A Dirty Shame. There's no word on who they'll play, but this is what we know of the story: It focuses on a boy named after his favorite dessert. (ew) "He runs away from home during the holidays after he and his parents are caught shoplifting meat, then meets up with a runaway girl raised by two gay men [My Two Dads!] and searching for her birth mother."

Parker and Johnny could be ma and pop itching for some free meat, or maybe he's one of the gay men and she's the birth mother. Whoever they play, there is absolutely no way I'll miss this movie. Not with Waters and Posey together. I just wish this was the sort of film that would have a set visit. You can definitely expect to hear more from me as the cast fills out, but it will take a little while to get to us -- John plans to film it over a real winter.

Before the rain pooed on my parade and the poo rained on my parade at the Independent Spirit Awards Saturday, I had a pretty great time. The highlight for me was being "on set" for a series of interviews between Martin Short's Jiminy Glick and various celebs. I was just tipped off by the good folks at Netflix that those conversations have hit youtube, and if you're a fan of the character, you may want to check them out. Here's Jiminy with Matt Dillon, with a never foxier Illeana Douglas, with the always youthful Dennis Hopper (an interview that opens with a depantsing), with Ed Begley, Jr, with Juno director Jason Reitman and his father Ivan, with Aaron Eckhart, with John Waters, and with Allison Janney. They could all stand to be edited down a bit, but there's a lot of good stuff in there. If I had to direct you to the funniest couple of discussions, I'd recommend the Illeana Douglas and the Ed Begley, Jr, which contains graphic mouth-to-mouth.

I intended to run a live blog from the show, but the internet connection went out -- one of the dangers of doing a live show from a tent in the rain! I did get to see some cool people up close and personal. Philip Seymour Hoffman (a winner for Best Male Lead) charmed the little press room in a fun Q & A with Savages writer/director Tamara Jenkins (a winner for Best Screenplay) and it was a thrill to meet Scott Frank, a screenwriter I truly admire. He won Best First Feature for The Lookout, one of my favorite 2007 films. I always question what they deem "independent," but I do appreciate that the Indie Spirits have special honors -- like the John Cassavetes Award -- to honor the truly independent and low-budget films each year. Did anyone watch the broadcast? I know it's not the biggest awards show of the year (or even the weekend), but the show was really entertaining. Have favorite moments or disagreements with the winners?

Cinematical is live at the 2008 Independent Spirit Awards! Our own Patrick Walsh will report back throughout the afternoon.

Jiminy Glick just wrapped up a graphic conversation with indie legend John Waters and now he is asking Maria Bello what it's like to show her "down there hair" on camera. Oh wow, now he's humping her. Now he's asking Allison Janney if Juno is a film about people who won't tolerate Jews. "Jew? No!" The man is insane. He's interviewing The Office's Rainn Wilson now, who's looking mighty unkempt and unshaven considering he's hosting the show. And now the two are engaged in a huge pillow fight. There's Dennis Hopper! What does Jiminy ask a legend like this? "Why do men have nipples if they're not supposed to breast feed their pets?" Of course.

He just told Matt Dillon he was excellent as Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump, and followed that up with a rave about his work in Saving Private Ryan. Dillon was in neither film. The red carpet is heating up, I just saw Kate Beckinsale, Tom Wilkinson, and now Aaron Eckhart -- who is discussing Mormonism with Jiminy. And now the skies have turned an unsettling gray, the winds are picking up, and I have a feeling a lot of expensive dresses are about to get destroyed. I'm gonna take shelter, but I'll be back.

For more photos and coverage, head on over to Moviefone.

I was actually planning to throw something else up today for Stars in Rewind, but then a good friend in Los Angeles sent me the following clip. We're inundated these days with the woes of smoking. What was first a push to get it out of public places like planes, malls, and restaurants has recently gone a step further, entering the world of cinema. But before all of this, smoking was stopped in movie theaters, and there was one man there to taunt poor patrons with the tufts of smoke curling from his lips. That man was John Waters.

This clip is an old, retro short where Waters tells theater patrons that they can't smoke -- as he delightfully puffs on his cigarette. He begrudgingly tells the audience to refrain, while giving Waters-rationale about why smoking should be allowed. I wish more pre-movie clips could be this fun. There's only so many times one can stomach the irony of those pirating warnings that are shown to those who actually pay to see the feature.

With The Mist coming out this week, which just so happened to get a solid review from our James Rocchi, a new interview with Stephen King has gone up on VH1, via MTV News. The discussion focuses on his relationship with long-term collaborator and Mist director Frank Darabont. In his review, James says: "The plot is vintage King, placing ordinary people in an extraordinary circumstance." This is precisely what King discusses -- praising why Darabont has been successful with his adaptations, via his "adult sensibility," and why some other directors aren't taking on his novels.

Specifically, he says: "A lot of times, filmmakers don't really seem to understand ordinary people. I think there's a reason that David Lynch has never made a Stephen King film, or John Waters, because they don't really get ordinary people. But Frank does." I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that's because they both do their own work, not adapt a popular novelist for mass appeal. Waters has made his career from unique stories about the quirks of society, so let's focus on Lynch. I presume King never watched The Straight Story, Twin Peaks, or most of his other work for that matter.

Reducing Lynch to someone who doesn't understand ordinary people is like someone reducing King down to a plebian, gory horror writer. Take Straight Story, Twin Peaks, or even the wilder works like Lost Highway. The two creators are much more similar than King would care to admit. The difference is that he tackles ordinary people with extraordinary happenings rationally and clear-cut, while Lynch is the postmodern artist of the theme. There's lots of "ordinary" people in Lynch's work -- it's just that he spins the arc in a different manner, one that's not always understandable. Alvin Straight is as "ordinary" as they come. As is many of the Peaks characters, or others. Most just go mad in maddening circumstances. Hmm. Sounds familiar.

I've said my peace, but what do you think? Is King the paragon of the ordinary, or are Lynch and he more alike than he realizes?

It wasn't surprising that Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O'Connor's Obscene had difficulty securing a distributor. After all, it's a documentary that deals with obscenity. Still, as hard a sell as that sounds, it also sounds like an easy sell to the right markets. Also, the film is nearly as entertaining as similar-themed docs like Inside Deep Throat and This Film is Not Yet Rated. Of course, even with Universal distributing, Inside Deep Throat was not very profitable. And neither will be Obscene, which is sure to likewise receive an NC-17 rating. The funny thing is, that rating would be completely for archive footage, stuff that should be long since deemed tame by today's standards. It does feature John Waters, though, and I think the MPAA has a stipulation that if he's involved in any way, shape or form, the movie gets an automatic NC-17.

Anyway, it's a shame the film couldn't sell to a more familiar distributor when it premiered at the Toronto Film Festival a couple months back. Instead, according to The Hollywood Reporter, worldwide rights for Obscene have finally gone to Arthouse Films, a company that has released a number of small films you've likely never seen, or even heard of. I can't imagine that Arthouse could afford the music rights for all the tunes in Obscene, so hopefully they're already paid for.

For those of you who don't know, which is probably for the best since you may not get to ever see the film anyway, Obscene is a biographical documentary about Barney Rosset, a publisher and film distributor who fought many a legal battle regarding his alleged distribution of obscene literature and cinema. By no means did I love Obscene, but I enjoyed much of it and thought only bits and pieces really didn't work. As a whole, I guess I'd recommend it if it makes it way to you, because it's an interesting look into what defines a person's life, which is noteworthy for a biodoc these days. In my review, I said the film, "reminds us that most often is the case that the product -- in this case the thousands of titles released by Grove and Rosset's other enterprises -- is about the person, without whom none of it would have existed in quite the same way."

If you're going to make a documentary about obscenity and censorship, you must have the obligatory John Waters interview. The Pink Flamingoes filmmaker is building quite the side resume for himself appearing in docs like Inside Deep Throat, This Film is Not Yet Rated and now Obscene, which even recognizes the Waters asset by putting him front and center as its first talking head. Despite the need to feature Waters as an appropriate expert on shock, indecency laws and freedom of expression, the guy is also one of the most enjoyable personalities and storytellers that one could put in a non-fiction film. At one point, Waters comes on and supplies the film its greatest line, in which he retrospectively critiques Vilgot Sjöman's 1967 film I Am Curious (Yellow) as nothing more than "a limp dick and some ugly women naked."

The relevance of this comment is that Grove Press, whose founder, Barney Rosset, is the subject of Obscene, distributed the Swedish film. It is also a great assessment of what the obscenity law battles of the 20th century look like to us in the 21st. Rosset continually faced courtrooms and politicians who were offended and/or threatened by things that are embarrassingly tame and bland compared to what we've got nowadays. Rosset was the one who fought to get books like Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Naked Lunch, The Autobiography of Malcolm X and others onto American bookshelves and later to get films like I Am Curious (Yellow) into American theaters. Grove wasn't all about contention, though; it also put(s) out less controversial classics like Waiting for Godot, A Confederacy of Dunces and Godard's film Week End.

Over at Hollywood Elsewhere (a frequent site of heated debates on issues like homosexuality and fatness versus thin-ness) Jeff Wells really pushed some buttons with a post about this New York Times piece on Hairspray star Nikki Blonsky by Monica Corcoran (note: login with a free account required to read it) in which Ms. Corcoran makes observations like, "To see Ms. Blonsky caper through "Hairspray," the musical adaptation of the John Waters camp classic, is to watch a Botero come to life as she wiggles her broad backside and flaps her ample arms." and "When plates of ribs and roast chicken arrived, she dug in with gusto." Golly gee, with those ample arms flapping in the breeze, however did she manage to even hold onto that plate of ribs, much less sign autographs for fans?

Wells doesn't actually weigh in (yeah, pun intended) with an opinion on Blonsky's proportions, but boy, oh, boy do his commenters get into it. This isn't the first time Wells and his readers have gotten into it on the issue of weight, but I find it interesting nonetheless that people are going after Blonsky for her weight (and I love all the concern about the poor girl's health) -- after all, the role of Tracy Turnblad calls for a "fat girl" -- that's kind of the whole point of the story, right? I mean, seriously ... imagine, if you will, if Adam Shankman had cast uber-skinny Keira Knightley as Tracy, and stuck her in a fat suit like they did with John Travolta in the film. Plenty of people are peeved also at the casting of Travolta in a fat suit instead of a real woman of larger proportions playing that role, by the by, even if the casting is a sort of homage to Harvey Fierstein and Divine.

I've not seen Hairspray yet, but by all the accounts I've read of the film, Blonsky's performance is pretty darn good -- how about discussing how she compares to Ricki Lake, or to any of the actresses who played Tracy on stage? Here's what I predict: Within a couple years, Blonsky's agent and PR people are going to convince her that she has to lose weight in order to continue having a career (after all, there are only so many roles for fat girls out there, right?) and we'll see a miraculous transformation ala Ricki Lake -- I can see the tabloid headlines now: "Former Fatty Nikki Blonsky: How I Stopped Eating Ribs With Gusto and Shed 50 Pounds!" Then she can start hanging out with Paris Hilton, get drunk at nightclubs, flash her crotch getting out of limos, and end up in rehab. Maybe then people will talk about her talent, and not her weight.

John Waters 1988 hit movie-turned-Broadway-musical is heading back to the big screen on July 20 -- this time as a musical -- with Adam Shankman (The Wedding Planner) at the helm and a bevy of A-list stars in the cast. We have an exclusive first look at 10 Hairspray character posters below, from an in-drag John Travolta to a still-smokin' Michelle Pfeiffer. Click on the images for larger versions.

Newcomer Nikki Blonsky stars as Tracy Turnblad, a chubby teen who wins a spot on the American Bandstand-esque Corny Collins Show in 1962 Baltimore. Amanda Bynes plays Tracy's saucy best pal Penny Pingleton.

John Travolta plays the plump Edna Turnblad, mother of the aforementioned aspiring dancer. Yes, that's correct: A virtually unrecognizable Travolta plays a woman. And he's married to Christopher Walken. Great stuff.