Meet Shine Louise Houston, an award-winning director and a vital part of an incredible revolution happening in pornography right now. This revolution, centered in San Francisco’s indie porn scene, is focused on creating more inclusive offerings for consumers and opportunities for performers. And you can be a part of it. You’ve been needing something on your IMDB to feel proud of.
The country that brought you Georges Bataille, Pauline Réage, Charles Baudelaire, the Marquis de Sade, Catherine Millet, etc., doesn’t see what the fuss is over Fifty Shades of Grey. The film, which got an R rating from the Motion Pictures Association of America for its depiction of dominance and submission, will be accessible to movie-going French minors as young as twelve.
So, there it is. The Fifty Shades of Grey movie trailer is out. No matter how hard you’ve been avoiding all discussions about this “phenomenon,” you’re bound to be a little curious. Just how awful will this be? The answer is shocking, if unsurprising: not very. This is unsurprising because long, tedious and incredibly juvenile internal monologues don’t translate well to film, which instantaneously neutralizes one of the most annoying aspects of the book. Yay?
Most people involved with social issues and film know Dhruv Dhawan as an acclaimed documentary filmmaker. But in his family, Dhawan is the eldest son, which means that success is more than making a mark in one’s industry. Ever since he graduated, the pressure to marry has mounted. Finding the idea of life-long monogamy difficult, Dhawan decided to explore the basis of marriage and monogamy in the only way he knows how — through film. This is the result.
Red Umbrella Diaries are storytelling events where sex workers share their experiences with an audience. Over one hundred sex workers have told their stories since their inception in New York’s Lower East Side. Now, the organization that runs them, RedUP, is making a documentary to bring the Diaries to the world. Formatted in the style of the concert documentary, a crew will follow seven sex worker story-tellers as they prepare to go live in front of 200 people at New York’s multicultural musical clearinghouse, Joe’s Pub.
I’m hard-pressed to think of anything which works the same in movies as it does in real life. Movies are, first and foremost, narrative art: they’re trying to tell a story, which means that everything which isn’t part of the story will be stripped down, which means that meaning and structure will be imposed on the sequence of events that you’re watching. Yet there seems to be a particular perversion that porn sex needs to be “real.”
Paul Schrader has the classic Hollywood thing going, porn star James Deen dishes. “‘I’m gonna put you in a movie!’ It’s like, who cares? … I have more IMDb credits than you do, Schrader! I’ve been in more movies than fucking Al Pacino! Just because they’re not the movies that you categorize as big Hollywood movies!” This is how porn’s favorite basically told Hollywood to go fuck itself.
The body of her relationship with long-time boyfriend Mark Griffiths wasn’t even cold when rumors started to circulate that actress Gillian Anderson was dating her former X Files co-star David Duchovny. According to gossip site Celebrity Dirty Laundry, Scully and Mulder have been shacking up in his L.A. home.
“Portrait of a Call Girl” won several awards at the AVNs and Gram Ponante is not wrong when he says that it’s the most “thoughtfully acted, beautifully shot, and sparsely, elegantly orchestrated” porn flick out there. It is right up there with the original “Emmanuelle.” It even pays passing tribute to Buñuel’s “Belle du Jour” and uses voice overs reminiscent of “Gia.” Even so, the film has some serious issues.
Ali Carter in a whipped cream bikini in Varsity Blues. We can’t remember what the movie was about, but we will never forget the whipped cream bikini. It looks awkward now, laughable. We’ve graduated from cherry-nipples and a huge triangle-shaped covering down there. Lucky for us, whipped cream has graduated, too.
