Netflix Three Pack #2: Soft Core Porn Makes You Think

After I posted the final chapter of “Long Red Nails” (check out http://www.mcstories.com/LongRedNails/index.html for the whole saga), I planned to use my free time to increase my blog output. Instead, I very quickly started writing a new multi-chapter story. Finally, though, I’ve found time to return to my Netflix queue.

My previous three pack dealt with films defined largely by their indie street cred. The following three films are united in being truly soft core porn. I agree who those who say that the mind is the ultimate sexual organ. Really good sex depends on context, i.e. story. Unfortunately soft core movies usually have really crappy stories involving buried pirate treasure or zombie hookers.

The following three films offer thoughtful stories, direction and acting while also showcasing explicit sex. In other words, these are three worthwhile NC-17 rated movies.


Where the Truth Lies

Because this movie stars two household names, the MPAA’s NC-17 attracted attention when it came out in 2005. Where the Truth Lies is certainly not the average erotic thriller: instead it’s a period piece murder mystery. It just happens to feature a devil’s three way between Mr. Darcy and hardest working man in Hollywood.

The threesome is technically an important plot point revealed near the end of the movie. But one look at the DVD’s cover art, a naked woman positioned between Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon, and the message is clear.

Where the Truth Lies centers on Firth and Bacon as Vince Collins and Lanny Morris, a ‘60s music and comedy team based on Martin & Lewis right down to the annual telethon. Bacon is the clown while Firth is the straight man. There are two women who threaten the duo’s partnership. The first is a college student found dead in their hotel suite in 1957, though both men had air tight alibis. The second is Karen O’Conner (Alison Lohman), a journalist in 1972 investigating the other woman’s death.

In a lot of ways, I love the ‘70s because those years are the hangover from the ‘50s and ‘60s. The movie reminded me of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, full of vibrant color meant to convey seediness. Both Vince and Lanny’s ‘70s version are depicted as aged but not washed up. Vince is a fading movie star who agrees to give his life story to Karen for $1 million while Lanny is still a comedy legend, appearing on morning talk shows and picking up aspiring reporters in the first class cabins.

There is splashy sex from the height of Lanny and Vince’s popularity. There is also a very hot lesbian sex scene that combines all the drug clichés of the ‘60s and the nihilism of the ‘70s. I think the film’s central mystery is rather obvious but the director and actors sell it so earnestly that the ride to the denouement is enjoyable.

Also a fun fact, the movie was based on a novel by Rupert Holmes, the guy who wrote “Escape (The Piña Colada Song).” So watch Where the Truth Lies with your old lady…maybe she’s more into it than you would think.


Shortbus

Neither is Shortbus an erotic thriller, but it is the closet to being illegally obscene. It features actual, full genital sex between cast members.

Director John Cameron Mitchell has argued that the sex in Shortbus is purposefully “de-eroticized” to “remove the cloud of arousal to reveal emotions and ideas that might have been obscured by it”. I agree the sex not designed just to appeal to one’s prurient interests, but I disagree that it’s not erotic.

Shortbus is also truest to its independent roots. It features a host of unknown actors playing characters with overlapping story arcs living in New York City. There are basically two couples: sex therapist Sofia (Sook-Yin Lee) who has never had an orgasm, and her husband Rob (Raphael Barker), a loser who looks like a wanna be rocker; and Sofia’s new gay clients, Jamie (PJ DeBoy), a former child star and James (Paul Dawson), a troubled former hustler. Other characters include Jamie and James’s stalker neighbor and Severin, an emotionally damaged professional dominatrix who goes to Sofia for therapy in exchange for teaching Sofia how to orgasm.

Together they all visit “Shortbus”, an underground club operating out of a Manhattan apartment “for the gifted and challenged.” There are a lot of characters sitting around being angsty while the more enlightened have orgies. Shortbus is a warm, welcoming environment in which anything is possible and no boundaries exist except for consent and tolerance. Maturity is negotiable and self-awareness a work in progress.

There is also a lot of gay sex. Jamie and James have a full on threesome and Shortbus is run by a drag performer. In one of the movie’s first scenes, James does the stuff of urban legends: he performs oral sex on himself. I think the film’s greatest ambition and greatest tension is putting gay themes and polygamous heterosexuality in the same frame.

Shortbus does not offer super high production values or even great character development, but is does have a neat soundtrack, an auteur director and a vibrant and creative title sequence. Its porn with the quest for happiness at it core.


Crash (1996)

This is not the Best Picture from a few years ago. Rather than an ensemble cast confronting racial tensions in L.A., the 1996 Crash has James Spader running with a group of car fetishists in Toronto.

I was tempted to save this film for a James Spader trilogy of Crash, Secretary, and sex, lies and videotape. It is amazing that the guy who won an Emmy hamming it up with William Shatner and Candice Bergen has made so many dirty movies.

Among the three reviewed films, Crash is closet to being a Cinemax movie. Spader plays James Ballard, a successful TV producer, who meets Dr. Helen Remington (Holly Hunter) after suffering a car crash. Remington introduces James to a group of people who spend their time reenacting famous car crashes, such as James Dean’s famous death in his Porsche 500 Spyder, for their sexual gratification. The group is lead by the mysterious and craggily Vaughn (Elias Kotseas).

I love Holly Hunter but she does not deserve the film’s second billing. She has little screen time and her character’s only contribution is introducing James to Vaughn. (Interestingly, Hunter has had a similar career to Spader; famous for early Hollywood films, respected for strong independent work, and starring in episodic television late in her career.) The lead actress is Deborah Kara Unger, who plays Ballard’s wife Catherine. I fell in love with Unger during this film. She’s a cool blonde seemingly willingly to do anything in James’s imagination and talk about it afterwards. A true Hitcockian heroine who shows her boobs.

The film’s depiction of sex is also closest to soft core porn. Simulated sex essentially means women’s breasts. In the very first scene, Catherine is taken stylishly in an airport hanger while James copulates with a camera girl during a film shoot.

The movie’s plot meanders along. The conflict largely comes from the audience’s doubt over Vaughn’s true motives and limits. For better or worse, most of the situations are just set-up for the next sex scene between James and Remington, James and Catherine, Vaughn and Catherine, or Ballard and another member of Vaughn’s crew played by Rosanna Arquette, or even James and Vaughn.

I worry that director David Croenberg’s real message is about the modern equation of violence and sex or how technology keeps us apart. To me, the movie’s excitement is its conveying the camaraderie of a fetish. A fetish is so exciting because it’s a code, an entrance into a private club of likeminded persons.

And that’s pretty much what I want this blog to be.