USA

In “Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”, Linda Williams put moving-image pornography on the map of contemporary scholarship with her path-breaking analysis of the most popular and enduring of all film and video genres. Now, fifteen years later, she showcases the next generation of critical thinking about pornography and signals new directions for study and teaching.”Porn Studies” resists the tendency to situate pornography as the outer limit of what can be studied and discussed. It moves beyond futile feminist debates and distinctions between a ‘good’ erotica and a ‘bad’ hard core. With revenues totalling between ten and fourteen billion dollars annually – more than the combined revenues of professional American football, basketball, and baseball – this volume acknowledges that visual, hard-core pornography has emphatically arrived as a central feature of American popular culture. It is time, Williams contends, for scholars to recognize this and give pornography a serious and extended analysis. The essays in “Porn Studies” exemplify this effort. The contributors examine varieties of pornography from the tradition of the soft-core pin-up through the contemporary hard-core tradition of straight, gay, and lesbian videos and dvds to the burgeoning phenomenon of pornography on the internet.They explore, as examples of the genre, individual works as divergent as The Starr Report, the pirated Tommy Lee/Pamela Anderson honeymoon video and explicit Japanese ‘ladies comics’ consumed by women.Read More »

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In his career, De Wolf Hopper recited Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat” thousands of times. Here, wearing a tuxedo, he emerges from behind a curtain as if at a theater, gives a short introduction, and launches into the poem. The camera is stationary, and although Hopper stands in one place, his hands and arms, his face, and his voice are animated throughout. In delivery, it’s a minstrel performance.Read More »

Psycopathic killer stalks teens at a run down, abandoned movie theatre.
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“How did they make a movie out of Lolita?” teased the print ads of this Stanley Kubrick production. The answer: by adding three years to the title character’s age. The original Vladimir Nabokov novel caused no end of scandal by detailing the romance between a middle-aged intellectual and a 12-year-old nymphet. The affair is “cleansed” ever so slightly in the film by making Lolita a 15-year-old (portrayed by 16-year-old Sue Lyon). In adapting his novel to film, Nabokov downplayed the wicked satire and sensuality of the material, concentrating instead on the story’s farcical aspects. James Mason plays professor Humbert Humbert, who while waiting to begin a teaching post in the United States rents a room from blowzy Shelley Winters. Winters immediately falls for the worldly Humbert, but he only has eyes for his landlady’s nubile daughter Lolita. The professor goes so far as to marry Winters so that he can remain near to the object of his ardor. Turning up like a bad penny at every opportunity is smarmy TV writer Quilty (Peter Sellers), who seems inordinately interested in Humbert’s behavior. When Winters happens to read Humbert’s diary, she is so revolted by his lustful thoughts that she runs blindly into the street, where she is struck and killed by a car.
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Imdb plot summary : Three bad boy motorcyclists get kicks raping other people’s women and generally being a nuisance. When they rape a veterinarian’s wife, he takes exception and pursues them, teaming up with a Cajun woman whose husband they killed. The leader of the gang, a Vietnam Vet, begins showing signs of being a few slices short of a loaf.Read More »

SYNOPSIS: Ethan (Joe Swanberg) is a director who aims to make meaningful art films, but is struggling with a creative slump and disengagement with his work. His girlfriend Claire (Kate Lyn Sheil), is an actress whose career is beginning to take off. She has accepted the lead part in a werewolf movie being directed by talented young horror filmmaker Ben (Ti West). Ethan’s depression leads to jealousy over both Claire’s success and her increasingly close relationship with Ben.Read More »

From IndieWire:

CANNES REVIEW: Why Walter Salles’ ‘On the Road’ Adaptation Is Better Than You Think

Red flags go up when a filmmaker embarks on adapting a beloved classic. Walter Salles’ long-gestating big screen treatment of “On the Road” spent years in development and the nearly-two-and-a-half hour treatment of Jack Kerouac’s seminal novel of the Beat Generation invited immediate skepticism. Kerouac’s autobiographical look at his friends and their journeys around the country in the late 1940s has become so closely identified with his prose that any attempt to replicate it would automatically create a certain distance from the material — or it seemed. As it turns out, Salles’ “On the Road” does the trick well enough. Overlong and unfocused in parts, Salles’ adaptation nonetheless holds together about as well a movie can when the odds are so heavily stacked against it.Read More »

Subway Riders is an epic NoWave/NY noir-melodrama,
in which a nocturnal saxophonist morphs into a bewitching
serial killer. With transcendant performances by John Lurie,
Cookie Mueller, Glenn O’ Brien, Robbie Coltrane, Bill Rice,
Charli Kaleina, Emilio Cubera and Susan Tyrrell, it captures
the colorful junkie landscape of downtown Manhattan in the
late 70’s with fearless bravado.

– Amos Poe-
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Sam (Joe Swanberg) has feelings for Juliette (Josephine Decker), the lead actress in a sexually explicit drama centered on a couple’s one night stand. He must maintain a professional relationship while directing her. All is going well until Juliette and her co-star Eric (Kent Osborne) develop feelings for each other that they explore off-camera. Sam is happy that his actors have such great chemistry, but simultaneously feels jealous. Juliette senses Sam’s shifting moods and does her best to show him affection, but his own inner struggles threaten to derail the production.Read More »