Netflix Three Pack #1: Explicit Sexuality Isn't Always Fun

My delays have forced me to replace an orgy with incest. This post finally delivers on my promise of three mini-reviews of provocative movies. Because I previously upgraded my Eyes Wide Shut review to its own post, I have added Spanking the Monkey to the pairing of Sleeping Dogs Lie and The Brown Bunny.

While I have been working on “Long Red Nails” (check it out at http://www.mcstories.com/LongRedNails/index.html), I have kept up with my Netflix queue. Last night, I watched the relatively recent, relatively high profile, highly polished and structured NC-17 movie Where the Truth Lies. It was a warm up to my watching the series premiere of Dr. Drew’s Sex Rehab. But For this entry, I am going back to the beginning of my queue to discuss three very indie movies, each documenting various abnormal sexual practices.

Sleeping Dogs Lie

Growing up in the days of independent video stores, I used to rent the Police Academy series repeatedly. So as an adult, I am qualified to dismiss Bobcat Goldthwait as the annoying guy from Policy Academy 2-4.

But Goldthwait is now an indie director. The release of his latest film, World’s Greatest Dad, with decent reviews for star Robin Williams, inspired me to check out Goldthwait’s earlier Sleeping Dogs Lie (alternatively titled Stay).

Sleeping Dogs is about Amy, a young kindergarten teacher who back in college performed a sexual act on her dog. The act occurs, almost entirely off camera, in the movie’s first scene and it is not what I expected it to be. Amy is happy to take her secret to her grave, but after John, her aspiring writer, live-in boyfriend proposes, he asks for total honesty. Amy wants to share but also worries that her night with her dog is one of those secrets even loved ones could never accept.

The movie contains no nudity and adheres to the sitcom school of filming. A lot of the movie’s jokes come from the intrusive presence of dogs in emotionally charged environments. The biggest criticism is that the movie consciously rips off Meet the Parents. Post engagement, Amy takes John to meet her family: her gruff father (played by Goldthwait’s old Unhappily Ever After buddy Geoffrey Pierson), her sheltered mother, and her loser, drug addicted brother. But it’s funnier than Meet the Parents. Amy’s father’s gruffness isn’t made all sweet, her brother is more pathetically strung out during family puzzle night and her mother holds her own hilarious secret sexual past. Also, this segment makes the audience sympathize with John so it’s even more heartbreaking when Amy finally confesses to him.

The best gag is when Amy lies to John, saying her dark secret from college is a lesbian encounter with her best friend. Suddenly John’s giving out lingering hugs when the friend stops by. To me, that’s the joke of Sleeping Dogs Lie. We all want our girlfriends and fiancés to have a hidden sexual depravity, but it’s not all co-ed slumber parties. Sometimes it’s just a dog.

The Brown Bunny

If a director set out to make a film that people would pick up on DVD out of curiosity, get bored, fast-forward to the end, and still be disappointed, he or she would make The Brown Bunny. Maybe Vincent Gallo’s genius is that he purposefully made a horrible film that people would still rent to watch Chloé Sevigny give him an actual blowjob at the end of the movie.

Gallo plays a motorcycle racer who “undertakes a cross-country drive, following a race in New Hampshire, in order to participate in a race in California. All the while he is haunted by memories of his former lover, Daisy (Sevigny).” I know that’s the plot because that’s what it says on the DVD slip. It’s not that this movie is slow or character driven, it’s that half the movie is literally shots of the highway filmed from behind a car’s windshield.

The film is shot grainy and in depressed locations. Even though it was made in 2004, the movie feels like it’s from the 1980s, which is usually how I feel walking into a highway rest area in some parts of the country. I’ve almost willing to forgive Gallo and think he’s really making a film about rural poverty. But that doesn’t explain why he plays his character as a mildly retarded man child who kisses and then runs away from the women he meets on the road.

I defended my giving this film chance because I thought it was a surreal, trippy road trip movie. But I guess the truth is I liked Sevigny in Big Love and I thought she was hot in American Psycho and in real life, so I wanted to see it. Be warned, she’s a much better actress than porn star.

Spanking the Monkey

While The Brown Bunny was booed at Cannes, Spanking the Monkey won the Audience Award at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival. It was the first film by writer-director David O. Russell. Despite controversy for onset behavior, Russell has had success with all of his major films: Flirting with Disaster, Three Kings and I Heart Huckabees. I’ve seen all three and they are all enjoyable, clever and funny in diverse ways. But Spanking the Monkey left me unsatisfied.

Jeremy Davies stars as Raymond Aibelli, who returns home from his first year of pre-med and discovers that instead of leaving for a prestigious internship, he must take care of his mother who is laid up in bed with a full cast on her broken leg.

Spanking the Monkey is pitched as a black comedy but it’s more uncomfortable than funny. It seems absurd that Ray, an obvious over-achiever, though one who may not even want to be a doctor, is denied a chance to advance his career to play nursemaid to his mother so his father can unsuccessfully hock self-help videos across the country. It’s a suffocating environment with no privacy. Even his old high school buddies show up to torment him with driving around aimlessly and drinking beer in the woods.

The best performance is by Albert Watson as Ray’s mother. She’s tormented by wanting Ray to succeed in a career she gave up to be a mother but also isn’t ready to give him up yet. Her anger is real, but we can’t tell if the sexuality is all in Ray’s head. The most explicit scene is brief nudity when Ray helps his mother into the shower. I am not even convinced their relationship is consummated, but every other source disagrees with me.

Anyone who has read “Long Red Nails” knows that this movie’s topic is of particular interest to me. I think there is almost a generation gap. Ray doesn’t even get to masturbate because the family dog keeps scratching at the bathroom door. The implication is that Ray succumbs to his mother because of a sexual frustration/naivety that’s unknown to the Internet porn generation.

Spank the Monkey isn’t a comedy; it’s a 1950s film strip about the dangers of masturbation. Most importantly, it’s not porn. None of these films are. There all feature extreme sexual themes, but none depict those practices as anything pleasurable. The movies are all about tortured desire.