..,.Gary Dretzka
..,.Leonard Klady
...David Poland
...Doug Pratt
...Ray Pride
...S.T. VanAirsdale

JANUARY 21, 2006

Dirty `Dancing

After two days, the best movie I've seen at Sundance was hardcore art house pornography. Go figure.

The thing about Destricted (and if you have a hard time remembering the title, as I did, think of it as a play on "restricted" using "de" as a prefix instead of "un) is that it is greater than the sum of its body parts. And there are lots of body parts. No fewer than 20 penises, most of which are being yanked, folded, or mutilated in the course of the seven short films.

For me, the best was Marco "Demolition Man" Brambilla's film, called Sync, which uses images from a lot of movies, porn and mainstream I believe, to play out a porn sequence. It's kind of like in a 24 frame per second film world, a different image continues the action every 12 frames. So in just a couple of minutes, there is both a vivid, energetic, colorful, sexy, romp, but also a rather smart statement on the sameness of it all... and with that, the sameness of what we demand from movies that target our sexuality.

Larry Clark delivers his best work in quite a while with a segment (which goes longer than the allotted "up to 20 minutes" each director got) that start with talking head interviews with young men who want to break into pornography. Soon, they are describing their histories and showing off their parts. Once Clark selects his new star, the new star gets to interview a group of no-name but veteran porn actresses which whom to do his scene. There is nothing more profound here than the realities of these young men who have this odd dream. The women are mostly sad and a bit desperate. By the time we get to a scene, most of the sexiness has been drained out of it and the only moments of real interest are the candid moments from both the novice and the pro that would be left out of any real porno movie. But solid and simple and nothing but honest is a pleasure to see.

Marina Abramovic offers Balkan Erotic Epic, which covers some long-lasting sexual mythology from the homeland... all of which are too obscene to repeat here... well, maybe the preparing of the soil with semen is clean enough. And the image of a dozen men humping a grass covered knoll is pretty funny. Abramovic can be pretty graphic, bt she is also very funny.

Gaspar Noe offers "We Fuck Alone," a strobing tribute to stroking, one scene with a man (and a doll) and another with a young girl (and her anthropomorphized teddy bear). Noe predicted beforehand that his film would send many heading for the door. And he was right. But I think more because of the late, late hour and the strobe's effect of putting viewers to sleep. In an irony, it took the girl about half the time to climax as the guy.

Matthew Barney's Hoist puts a naked man in the middle of a machine, sprouting flowers out of his oral and anal orifices. But the truly remarkable part was the opening, as we watch an unidentified lump of flesh sluggishly come to life. It takes a minute, but soon you realized it is slightly lumpy penis. And somehow, the way Barney shoots it, it really has personality. (Later, he will sand it into fine form... the first of many uses of semen in the film. Man, is there a lot of man juice in this thing!)

Sam Taylor-Wood, a female director I never head of before this, did a one-shot piece of a man masturbating on a mountain. I call if Broke Onanist Mountain, but she calls it Death Valley. Amusing, but not inspiring. Likewise, Richard Prince's House Call uses 70s style porn (I don't know if it is a real film from then... kind of doubt it as it is not in the credits of the film) and deconstructs it a bit by pushing in on the video images and making unique editing choices in that way. But mostly, it is a blonde girl with significant breasts and a trim body playing doctor with some guy. The irony part didn't register too deeply with me.

All that explained, this is the kind of film that really could be a cult Midnight Movie for the over 18 set. I don't know how many times I could spend a full 90 minutes looking at so many penises being pulled, but the Brambilla is an instant classic that every adult Video iPod should sport and the Larry Clark would be the best pervy half-hour from HBO since the first season of Taxicab Confessions.

ON THE OTHER HAND ...

A very smart young lady said today, when I mentioned my disappointment with Friends With Money, "By the end of the festival, you'll be begging to see something as good as Friends With Money." And she may be right.

A symbol of that sense of deja screwed is Open Window, a movie which reminds us once again that Robin Tunney is ready to return to some bigger films with some good women's roles... but which is otherwise trouble. Mia Goldman is a highly respected film editor making her writer/director debut here to poor result.

The story of a loving couple torn apart by a rape is familiar territory, so the only way to really make it work is genius writing, genius directing, genius acting or... no, that's it. And while Tunney really digs in here, she can't overcome a weak script that is loaded heavily with cliché'. But worse, her co-star, Joel Edgerton, is simply a disaster as a leading man. He must be something in person, but he rates a 2 on the charisma scale (out of 100) on the big screen. He has a nice looking resume, but here, he is as flat as year old soda. There is yeoman work by vets Elliot Gould and Scott Glenn in tiny parts and Cybil Sheppard camps it up as "mom." But with Tunney going internal and Edgerton going nowhere as a character, there is little hope.

The outline of the movie is fine and one gets the feeling that Goldman knows this couple all too well. She hits all the troubling notes of two people who can't quite deal with a terrible moment in their lives. But she never really digs. And when she tries to work representationally, she comes up short - as in one sequence where, after rejecting him sexually in the wake of her rape, she starts to make herself available again and he either misses or rejects the signals. Truth is, I don't know because the movie doesn't dig deeply enough to let me know. And really, those notes are what can make a movie like this work, as it made a potential Afterschool Special, Speak, which was here a few years back, into more than the audience deserved to expect out of a story of a date-raped teen.

Also today, two good but soft docs, Wrestling With Angels, about Tony Kushner, and The World According To Sesame Street, which offers a look at the development of Sesame Street programming for other countries and the cultural adjustments that must be made to make it work. Wrestling was a good movie, but it failed to push Kushner about his politics and about the depth of feeling behind his ideas. It was nice to see his marriage to Mark Harris - which somehow I had missed completely - but I was much more interested in what he thought the best options on Afganistan were, rather than to just allow off-handed Republican bashing to stand in for a real discussion of ideas.

The World According To Sesame Street, which was the best buyer-attended screening until later in the day when Little Miss Sunshine showed, sent most of those buyers flocking out within 20 minutes. It is not, as it turns out, this year's Super Size Me, with a marketable hook via a huge worldwide brand... because the doc just isn't fun. Interestingly, the filmmakers open with a 10-9-8... countdown from the show, which engenders joy in the audience right away. But the film seems to forget that why we want to see a doc on Sesame Street is because we love Sesame Street and not because we need a lesson on the politics of Bangladesh.

Both are serviceable movies that will turn up somewhere. But no home runs... until the late night pervs arrived...

January 20, 2006

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