Posts tagged crime and punishment
Trailer Park: Cruising (1980)
William Friedkin’s misunderstood Cruising was actually based on the real-life “bag murders”, where dismembered parts of missing gay men washed up on the shores of the Hudson River in sealed black garbage bags.
Uncanny coincidence corner: Paul Bateson, who had worked with Friedkin on the set of The Exorcist, confessed to the murders.
Trailer Park: Victim (1961)
“What crime links an aging hairdresser and a famous star of the theatre?” Hmm, I wonder.
One Sheet: Deliverance (1972)
If you’re in Istanbul and looking for trouble, tell a few well built guys that you’re after a weekend trip along the lines of Kurtulus, and watch the feathers fly:
Eat shit and die
SALO O LE 120 GIORNATE DE SODOMA (SALO OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM)
ITALY 1975
Director: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Stars: Paolo Bonacelli, Girogio Cataldi, Aldo Valletti
Review by Noel Murray
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 opus Salò, Or The 120 Days Of Sodom was one of Criterion’s first DVD releases back in 1998, but the title quickly went out of print, and in the decade since, secondhand copies of Salò have sometimes commanded upward of a thousand dollars. But in a way, Salò is a movie that should be distributed under the counter. Pasolini marries the perverse visions of the Marquis de Sade with the decadence of Italy’s fascist era, trapping the audience in a ritzy Italian mansion with an assortment of naked young people and the coolly philosophical aristocrats who torment them. The movie comments on the degradation of the human spirit by subjecting its characters to some of the most nauseating sexual encounters ever simulated on film. Shit is eaten. Tongues are severed, eyeballs are gouged out, genitals burn. In the words of the movie’s authority figures, “All’s good if it’s excessive.”
Throw away the key
LOCKED UP (GEFANGEN)
Germany, 2004
Director: Jörg Andreas
Stars: Marcel Schlutt, Mike Sale
When my parents went away for the day my developmentally-disabled cousin and I used to rent cheapie soft-porn videos and we’d watch them in hard-on silence like a pair of losers and so it’s flabbergasting and appalling to see how today, twenty-five years later, such films are marketed to gay audiences as artistically rendered love stories perfect for headlining their city’s next gay and lesbian film festival. Most hilarious is this is simply an edited version of a XXX Cazzo flick, with the explicit fucking and fisting taken out, then repackaged as a commercial release.
200 American, O Fantasma, and now Gefangen (Locked Up) are part of the turgid sewerage that’s shovelled to the gay market as great films that they simply have to see but what’s worse is how enthusiastically gay consumers take up the bait. Hetero audiences know the difference between films that happen to feature nudity or sex and soft-porn wank films - retrograde gay culture needs to play catch up (as usual) in this regard.
Movie Of The Day: Cruising (1980)
No serious gay film lover’s collection of DVDs could possibly be complete without the infamous and widely misunderstood classic Cruising. It’s from the director of The Exorcist AND The Boys in the Band for crying out loud! If you don’t have it yet, buy it now.
Doing lines: Barbra’s head is full of responsibility, Nuts (1987)
The safe sex basics are beginning to penetrate even the thickest of gay skulls but as per usual, Barbra was on the scene first, talking about taking responsibility for your choices in 1987, in this memorable moment from Nuts.
In a typically overwrought scene, playing top-shelf call girl Claudia Draper (wtf?) she blindsided her passive lawyer (Richard Dreyfuss) to command the courtroom and convince the judge that Yentl wasn’t mental.
Watch, repeat and memorise so the next time someone asks you for it raw, you can say something along the lines of this:
CLAUDIA: So don’t judge my blowjobs - they’re SANE! I knew what I was doing every goddamn minute and I’m responsible for it. I lift my skirt, I’m responsible. When I go down on my knees I. AM. RESPONSIBLE.
Words to live by.
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