Is it possible to find pornography with any class? Any artistic merit?
For example: Think of a good movie you’ve seen where the protagonist gets the girl/guy and at some point near the end they’ll end up in bed together. Now in a traditional made-for-the-silver-screen run-of-the-mill movie all you get to see are the two kissing then the lights go out leaving the audience to infer the rest. In other words, pornography with a plot.
Does anyone know where to get such a thing? Mulholland Drive was, I think, a pretty good example of this unless you do what I did and rent it at Blockbuster who, for some reason, seem to think they are the guardians of morality and actually edit out the frontal nudity bit. (SPOILER WARNING: Of course that was only kissing again, but it was some kind of kiss wasn’t it?) I’ve also heard that Caligula: The Director’s Cut has a believable sexual encounter as well. Then there’s The Nude Bomb, but that doesn’t count 'cause it’s PG. Oh yeah, The Sex Machine is a good example as well.
So anyway, if anybody knows where I can find some believable pornography or title suggestions that’d be great.
Small nitpick: The edit to Mulholland Drive was not (for once) the result of Blockbuster’s bluenosed meddling. In fact, David Lynch made the decision to throw a few frames of distortion over Naomi Watts’s nether regions, because he knew otherwise DVD users would grab those screens and circulate the image. This was discussed in Roger Ebert’s Answer Man column a few weeks ago.
As far as why porn stories suck, it’s the natural consequence of the ghettoization of sex in our perversely Puritan split-personality media. We’ll happily put bouncing bikini babes in our beer commercials, but actual sex is icky and personal, despite its being the act that resulted in the lives of each and every single one of us. So because it’s been marginalized, it’s produced for the sole purpose of titillation by filmmakers who don’t worry about the extraneous issues (or who don’t have the talent to carry off a story or a performance). There are very occasional crossovers, though; it’s an open secret in Hollywood that reputable cinematographers occasionally made a few extra dollars shooting pornographic movies under assumed names. This practice isn’t very common any more, especially since the advent of video.
That said, there are certainly some high-quality pornographic movies made in this country. For example, Cafe Flesh is generally reputed to be the porn flick with the best attention to story, setting, mood, and theme. I don’t know if I’d agree, but it’s certainly very different from what you normally expect out of the genre.
So instead, I recommend you go the foreign-film route. The best film I saw at the recent Seattle International Film Festival was Sex and Lucia, a Spanish production that includes some very graphic sexual imagery but that is not at all “just a porno.” I found it funny, moving, and deep, and I highly recommend it. You should be able to find it at your local art/repertory cinema in the coming months.
I hate to even mention this movie in a post called Pornography, because it’s the furthest thing from, but Lost & Delirious has a beautifull shot scene of two girls making love to each other. Not f**king, not “having sex”, not showing off “hot lesbian action” (as most of the pricks who try to sell this movie so ignorantly call it), but expressing their feelings for each other in a physical form for the sake of the plot.
It’s one of my favorite movies, and it’s not because you get to see some fairly explicit “girl-on-girl action.”
Ummmm…as far as Caligula goes it depends on what you consider believable. It’s interesting to know that all of the explicit sex scenes were shot After Roddy McDowell had finished his work on the film. He was appalled when he saw the final product and I believe he actually filed and then withdrew a lawsuit against Guccione & Co.
As for the sex, there is a lesbian scene which is more or less straight out of any porn movie, except it has fairly bad lighting and the orgy scene is REALLY boring, the biig thing being a guy getting castrated.
I’d say it’s worth a rental, but I would shop around and see if you can find it at one of those $1 a night places.
Cafe Flesh… I remember that from art house showings in the early 80’s, and while anatomically accurate, hardly art…
Best sex scene? (most realisitic, least contrived, whatever…) check out Desert Hearts, also an early 80s release based on Jane Rule’s Deserts of the Heart…
I’m not sure what we’re talking about, since some people are refering to pornography while others are refering to frontal nudity. But it’s certainly very possible to make a good movie with a lot of sex scenes. 37.2 degrees in the morning comes to my mind because I watched the director cut very recently. The story can easily schock, but not because of the abundance of sex (weel…depends on the people, I suppose), which doesn’t seem gratuitous despite being ever present.
Ah, yes - Betty Blue in the States. A fine film, with probably one of the most erotic ( in a sweaty way ) opening scenes in a “mainstream” movie. Same director as Diva, I believe - Another cult favorite ( I have the DVD sitting on my shelves ).
There actually are porn flicks that are made to look really good. Some of the work by directors like Andrew Blake, Michael Ninn, and others can be visually quite beautiful, and not just for the obvious reasons. Of course, the real attraction in those films is the human body and sexual act(s), but some directors can make a film that looks really good and delivers a high dose of pornography/eroticism.
For other movies that have somewhat more honest renditions of sex than the typical Holliwood 5-second long shadows-turn-pan-cut techniques allow, take a look at Catherine Breillat’s Romance, or the Wachowski Brothers’ first film, Bound, both of which are very good. In the former, I am pretty sure that real sex takes place, and the male involved is none other than porn stallion extraordinaire Rocco Siffredi.
As an item of interest, I just found out on IMDB that Alisha Klass, bless her incomparable gonzo adventures, appeared on Melrose Place years before launching into her porn career. I’m glad to see she moved on to better things.
…are four very diverse things to be shopping for in porn. But if you’re just looking for high production values and good lighting without compromising the degree of sex that qualifies as porn, try going to the porn vid shop and asking for anything by Andrew Blake. He’s made about a dozen films, all shot on film, most with slightly kinky themes and fetish outfits, all hardcore but with a Playboy look and plenty of modelesque babes. It gets a bit repetitive after a while, and his style is considered stale by aficianados, but his work did revolutionize porn in the early 1990s when all else was low-budget crap.
It’s erotic, maybe even classy, but plotless and hardly believable (unless you happen to live in a marbled, greco-roman hillside mansion infested with slinky Euro-chicks in platinum wigs who wear latex bodysuits and spank each other in the courtyard fountain before stripping naked and group-tonguing a hung stud’s erect penis until he ejaculates onto one of their spike-heeled PVC lace-up boots. If that’s your life, Blake is your autobiographer. And I’d like to be your friend. )
I have to say, after seeing the movie mentioned in a similar thread and renting it, that Caligula is the most disgusting movie I have ever seen. If you are really into violence and blood and gore with some sex thrown in, you might like it, but I find it hard to imagine that the average person would be turned on by this movie. Frankly, it just turned my stomach. YMMV.
The upshot is, if you can resist the call, Caligula isn’t at all worth sitting through. But it’s so notorious, it’s almost impossible to resist the temptation.
Correction to Malcolm McDowell (big difference!) already noted… I find it hard to believe that McDowell was that shocked by the final film, since he was in 80-90% of it, spends an awful long time naked and/or having sex with his “sister,” and participated in several of the more blatant scenes… most notably, the scene in which he rapes a virgin bride and then rams his fist up her new husband’s anus. Though the way it was shot suggests he was only pantomiming these things and not actually engaging in sexual acts, I can’t imagine that he was all that shocked by the tenor of the final film. And let’s not forget, this is the guy who also had some pretty blatant sexual scenes in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Ol’ Malcolm was no prude in those days…
Which is all my way of saying, are you sure you got this right? I heard that Gielgud was the one who actually sued the makers of Caligula (he was in no explicit scenes). According to this (a questionable source, but hey), he was reluctant to be in the film in the first place. According to the same source, Gore Vidal sued the producers to have his name removed from it.
Considering McDowell’s contributions to Caligula, I have a hard time believing he was outraged at the final product.
All that said, I have to agree with Cervaise that it was pretty much unworthy. I’m glad I saw it, because now I know what I was missing (not bloody much), but that was the only reason for seeing it. There were a couple nicely tantalizing moments in it, but overall, it left a bad taste in my mouth, and at least a few images that I really didn’t need in my head.
Let me jump in on this. The sex scene happens near the end, and it impressed me. The rest of it is a character study about a woman staying in a Reno motel, waiting for enough time to pass for her to get her divorce.
But you get just that one scene. This is no boom-chaka-boom-chaka-wah-wah-wah.
If you wanted at least some amusing tales, someone should make “The Decameron.” An anthology of funny, erotic stories, sort of an X-rated “Love, Italian Style.”
By all means, AVOID the version done by Pier Paolo Pasolini, for god’s sake, scenes from which are still burned into my retinas.
