Mostly NP:At the movies

[Dave Monroe]

Always easier for me to talk movies than to open the
books, of course, so ...

--- Thomas Eckhardt <thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de>
wrote:
>  
> Didn't enjoy "Baise moi" that much, although I find
> the idea of mixing hardcore porn with, well,
> normal cinema, highly interesting. 

"... the only real outlaw cinema left is pornography.
There's nothing left that has not been co-opted and
any minute it will be co-opted by Hollywood. In the
next ten years, a major star will cum on film
probably."

John Waters, in Doug McClemont, "Talking Trash with
John Waters, " Honcho (Oct. 2000) ...

http://www.DreamlandNews.com/print/articles/honcho.html

> Certainly, "Baise Moi" is much more entertaining
> than Catherine Breillat's "Romance", last year's
> other highly contentious porn-meets-feature-film
> film, which I thought was boring as hell.

I second that.  Can anybody give me any good reason
for all the pieties bestowed on Romance when it came
out?  But you really ought to check out that July
issue of Sight and Sound, covers all of this ...

> I guess, I just wished that some kind of point were
> being made along the corpse-and-cum-littered way of
> the two female protagonists in "Baise Moi". 

Well, I don't know about a "point" or anything, but
there were some things worth commenting on.  The sex
'n' violence thing, of course, and the gendering
thereof.  Interesting, for example, that, any time any
male character in the film attempted to act out a
stereotypical, cliched pornographic scene, they killed
him, and that the only men who were allowed, er,
visual satifaction were the ones chosen by the two
women.  Sort of a notch up from Thelma and Louise and
The Last seduction (not to mention I Spit on Your
Grave).  Again, see Linda Williams' Hard Core: Power,
Pleasure, and "the Frenzy of the Visible" (Berkeley: U
of Cal P, 1989) here, suggests all sorts of lines of
inquiry.  I also enjoyed the sort of metageneric
commentary, the way in which the two protagonists were
obviously, consciously acting out action (not to
mention porn) movie poses, dialogues, er, actions ...

> British censors seem to be very peculiar people
> indeed. As far as I remember they didn't allow
> "Henry" to be screened in the UK because of its
> "overall bleakness".

A certain irony there?  But I think A Clockwork Orange
is finally available in the UK now, have seen ads ...


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