Protect Me From Love has not three but five sex scenes ranging from 10 to 16 minutes in length. When you add them up, you have less than half an hour left for narrative development. Think about the challenges of creating characters a viewer will care about, establishing their relationships, giving them a challenge to overcome and resolving everything — in less than thirty minutes. This is no cakewalk. So let’s pause for a moment and give Wicked a little bit of credit here.
A porn parody seeking to bring back a natural look! What are the odds of that? Actually, the odds are pretty high given we’re talking about the Harry Potter porn parody ‘Hairy Twatter: In Search of Bush.’ The erotic fan-fic around this movie franchise is so well-established at this point, Dreamzone literally had thousands — if not millions — of incredible stories online from which to draw inspiration. And yet here is their offering: it’s silly, lacking in creativity, not sexy and even creepy.
Gina is everything Kevin wants in a woman. She’s funny, sweet, sexy and she doesn’t have qualms about being silly around him. They have more fun with each other than they do with anyone else, and keep a perfect balance in the little house they share. There’s just one hitch: Gina and Kevin are best friends and roommates, not boyfriend and girlfriend.
“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.
The relationship between the sex icon and her audience is a pendulum that swings wildly between appreciation and derision. At it’s best, it’s heart-warming and fulfilling but at worst it’s oppressive and soul-crushing. Anyone with any understanding of what it means to capture the desires of any significant number of people would be grossly dissatisfied with the blatant oversimplification and laughable self-pity conjured by the scene.
This is no parody of the controversial work by Nabokov. Nor is there even a nod to the original beyond, perhaps, some pop culture references and those infamous heart-shaped glasses. Given the theme of the novel, this is not a bad thing. As the porn unfolds into a series of little music videos between six and 15 minutes in length, you get a sense of Lolita — a character who until now has been largely presented through her captor’s words and actions. A theme of youthful exploration — including that of desire and power and the power of desire — underline every scene.
Having absolutely zero expectations that the parody would resemble the show or even the two movies that followed, we sat down to watch and were remarkably surprised at how well-written the screenplay by Bensen Herst and Lee Roy Myers was. Myers has proven himself a master of the “sitcum” and it shows: his directing bears a striking resemblance to the original.
Instructional videos about sex are generally filled with fluffy “it’s OK to like sex, sex is natural” kid-gloved affirmations, and it makes our eyes roll so far back into our heads, we see our hypothalami. We’re tired of videos that claim to teach sex, but spend half the time apologizing about it, or assuring people it’s OK if you want to do things differently. This one is different. Finally.
