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Apparently they made a bunch of Midnight Run sequels, replacing De Niro with his true successor...Christopher McDonald.



Victim of The Night
Sorry for the delay, had a busier than usual day at work and wanted to reply with a somewhat longer post, so took a while to respond.






I guess my problem with this is that the Martin Henderson, Brittany Snow and Kid Cudi characters do have some sense of making these movies, and as a result I guess I struggle with Henderson choosing to go to a secluded farmhouse or tolerating the knockoff Kieran Culkin. I get that West can't show penetration, but his rendition of a vintage porno is the most rote thing possible that I suspect he's never actually watched one. (Comparatively, even when Boogie Nights makes fun of the Reynolds' characters talents, the actual snippets we see of his work are actually pretty accurate to the real life inspirations. There are some quibbles one can take with the framing, but PTA clearly did his research.)


These are probably minor quibbles, but they're so transparently setting up certain plot developments later in the movie that I found myself completely put off by it.




This is another situation where West's calculation made me disengage with the relationship between the old couple. Maybe the prequel will flesh out the character more interestingly, and I will likely see it because I think Mia Goth is an interesting actress, but it was hard for me to see the handling of the character as actually engaging with her as a person and not in the service of the most obvious shocks.


I think this is a case where if the movie was working for me, I could likely forgive some of these things, but I tend to be put off by such blatant calculation in most cases.


I suspect we will not bridge the gap between us, but I do appreciate you going into your thoughts.
On the first half, well I guess I can understand, you're the expert on this area. But I think that's maybe the problem is, should I take points off of a movie every time they get Medicine wrong. I mean, if I took points off every movie where someone gets shot or stabbed in the abdomen or, god forbid, chest and lives to the end of the movie without high-level medical treatment, I probably wouldn't have a single action, crime, western, horror, thriller, etc. film that I didn't have beef with.
But I actually have seen porno movies pretty much exactly like the one they were making and I was able to imagine that this was pretty much exactly how they got made (until the plot of the actual movie gets going). A bunch of amateurs, maybe a couple who have done it a few times before, with no money and one camera, guerillaing together one of the low-grade pornos from the 70s that I've seen. Now, I am not a porno aficionado, but I've seen my share and I have a strong preference for 70s skin because they would still try to have a story and it seemed a lot less mean-spirited than it became in the 80s and early 90s (and probably after that but then the internet came along and I stopped "watching" porn). I actually thought I even recognized the specific porno he was homaging. Which is to say, I bought it completely. It actually seemed almost perfect to me and I applauded that part of the film as much as any.

On the second half, we just disagree in principle, I definitely felt like Pearl was a sympathetic character until she wasn't. I felt genuine sadness for her and then the movie tricked me because it made me fell sad for her husband, who I had assumed was abusive, for a while after things take their big turn, and then it turned out it had tricked me again.
The three of us that saw this thought it was the closest thing to a perfect Horror movie we'd seen in a while and most of it was because we felt invested in every character at least in some small way. With the husband maybe a little less and of course, the "director" the very least. But at least we could kinda understand his plight. But yeah, we thought the characterizations were good and deep, nobody all good or all bad, complex motivations, and that was particularly true of Pearl, which is, to me, why they have made a whole movie just about her.



Victim of The Night
I'm afraid that this might be another "Rock watches good movies" week. We'll see how it goes.
Boo.



Victim of The Night
This just gave me the feels.
I think I might go home tonight and see if I can learn to play this on my Moog.



Silver Streak (Hiller, 1976)



I recently revisited Midnight Run, and while I found it held up very nicely, I lamented the unfortunate soundtrack it was saddled with. None of this generic watered down blues rock in my action comedies, please. You need something jaunty, peppy, zany, preferably with a lot of synths. You know what had a great soundtrack? Fletch. So I started listening to the Fletch soundtrack again. You got the main theme, courtesy of the great Harold Faltemeyer, a more laid back companion to his iconic theme for Beverly Hills Cop. There’s “Bit By Bit”, there’s of course “Fletch, Get Outta Town”, which plays during the memorable car chase. There’s even “Letter to Both Sides” by the Fixx, whose lyrics exhibit a political consciousness largely absent in the movie. So naturally I was itching for a rewatch of Fletch, only to be foiled by the fact that it wasn’t on any of my streaming services and that I didn’t actually like the movie enough to own a copy. In this demoralized state, I went searching for another action comedy with impressive soundtrack credentials, and settled for Arthur Hiller’s Silver Streak, which had a score by the great Henry Mancini.

Now, I’m not gonna make some insane claim that the score here is bad, or that Faltemeyer is a better composer than Mancini, but I will say that the soundtrack here is nowhere near as jaunty, peppy, zany or synth-heavy as necessary for an action comedy. It’s respectable, maybe a bit too much for its own good. I suppose that quality applies to the rest of the movie, which is diverting enough but rarely as energetic as I want from the genre. The premise, about the hero stumbling across a murderous conspiracy on the titular train, seems like it might provide for some steady forward momentum or acute Hitchcockian suspense, but the way it plays out is languorous, with Gene Wilder’s hero repeatedly getting thrown off the train and taking leisurely detours. (It becomes a bit of a running joke.) And eventually it opts for a big action climax, which looks to be mounted with enough expense but discards much of the humour of the preceding film. While Midnight Run is not the most technically proficient action film, I appreciated that it made room for the characters’ personalities in its action scenes. Silver Streak totally overwhelms them with the spectacle, which isn’t even that sharply directed.

I’m a big fan of Hiller’s The In-Laws, which uses its legendary Peter Falk performance to tap into a wavelength of escalating insanity. I don’t think this ever manages a similar energy level, although the presence of Richard Pryor does slightly alter the film’s DNA for a couple of scenes. Pryor only arrives in the movie at around the halfway point, a likable thief who ends up teaming up with Wilder as the latter tries to evade the cops. While he doesn’t bring all the edginess of his standup work, the movie does use his presence to introduce some racially charged dialogue, usually directed by villainous characters towards him. To be honest, this stuff felt at greatly odds with the relatively genial feel of the overall movie, and the racial element peaks (or bottoms out, depending on your perspective) with a scene where he convinces Wilder to put on blackface to sneak past the cops. On one hand, yikes. On the other hand, this scene manages a certain transgressive, subversive quality that threatens to rupture the film’s fabric. I can’t say we’re better off for the scene, but it certainly stayed with me. I will say that I chuckled heartily at how expensive Pryor’s attempts to help Wilder prove to be. “Crime costs.”

An element that I think is easier to defend is the chemistry between Wilder and Jill Clayburgh, a secretary caught up in the intrigue. The beginning of the movie has their mutual romantic interest build palpably after they brush off an amusingly sleazy Ned Beatty. It helps that both characters bring not just charm but a sense of age and wear, and their scenes together are both tender and sexy. Would I have enjoyed this more had it just been a romantic comedy about these two characters? Very likely.




Daughter of the Dragon (Corrigan, 1931)



When it comes to certain genres, especially ones that are no longer in fashion, it’s an unfortunate fact that a lot of them will contain negative stereotypes and condescending or outright hostile attitudes towards other cultures. I have a weakness for jungle adventures, but I can’t deny that even ones I like espouse colonial attitudes and have less than admiring portrayals of the locals in whatever country they take place. I think it’s possible to appreciate the positive qualities of these films without endorsing the negative ones, and perhaps healthy to try to understand how the interact, and I’m personally not a fan of the checklist approach I sometimes see taken towards evaluating art that contains such elements. I’m also not going to pretend my reactions are representative of the norm. For example, I’ve seen Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom cited as a blatant example of Hollywood racism, but as someone of South Asian descent, I’ve found it difficult to be offended by it because the portrayal of its Indian characters is so far over the top that it severs any relation to reality. (If anything, I’m more offended by Gunga Din, a movie I mostly enjoy quite a bit, as it doesn’t seem quite as fantastical in this respect.)

But I also think older movies can be more thoughtful about their use of such tropes than we give them credit for. Along the vein of Temple of Doom, if I can direct you to this great review of The Tiger of Eschnapur by the Letterboxd user sakana1, who argues much more articulately than I can about the ways in which the movie transcends the kind of orientalist pulp it’s sometimes dismissed as. This dynamic is something I had in mind as I watched Daughter of the Dragon, a pre-code Fu Manchu picture currently playing on the Criterion Channel as part of the Hollywood Chinese series programmed by Arthur Dong. I am not a Fu Manchu expert, but I understand the series is full of portrayals of the Chinese as devious and villainous and is heavy on the use of yellowface, and that’s certainly the case here. But at the same time, I think the movie navigates these tropes more interestingly than I expected given the time period. For one thing, while Fu Manchu is portrayed by Warner Oland, a white actor in yellowface, he’s quickly removed from the proceedings and instead we spend most of the movie with his daughter, played by Anna May Wong, and a heroic policeman, played by Sessue Hayakawa. Fu Manchu seeks revenge on a man for killing his ancestors, and pressures his daughter to continue his vendetta. The way Fu Manchu explains his motivations to his adversary reminds me of Charles Grodin’s explanation of who lied to who first in Midnight Run. In a way, they’re both right.

The programming notes indicate that this movie was notable for casting two Asian American stars and letting them share the screen together, and the fact that it lets them speak in their actual accents. (There is some talking in third person, but otherwise the stereotypical qualities of the dialogue are refreshingly toned down.) I was perhaps expecting them to be supporting players, but no, they are the stars of the movie, with one or both of them onscreen for most of the movie, and they’re much more engaging than the less thoroughly developed white supporting characters. And beyond the amount of screentime, it is interesting to see how Wong’s character navigates the pressure placed on her by her father to enact his sinister plan, and how she ingratiates herself with her targets, alternately pushing against and weaponizing stereotypes depending on the situation. I’d like to get more context around the release of the movie (I have yet to see Dong’s documentary Hollywood Chinese, which I hope will provide some interesting information), but judging by the fact that both Wong and Hayakawa are credited on the poster and that this wasn’t the first Fu Manchu movie, I have to assume there was some intent in this subversion of expectations. (Alas, these empowering qualities didn’t extend to the actors’ paycheques, as Wong apparently got paid half of what Oland did despite having substantially more screentime. Also, apparently this was made to capitalize on a Fu Manchu book that Paramount didn’t even pay for the rights to adapt, so it seems the frugality ran deep.)

And the movie is otherwise a reasonably diverting suspense piece, with some nice stormy, rain-drenched atmosphere in the last act. Over the last few months, I’ve developed a growing appreciation for ‘30s Hollywood cinema, largely because I sometimes sleep quite poorly and wake up too early, and at well under an hour and a half, a lot of the movies are the perfect length to squeeze in before I need to log on for work. Clocking in at a cool seventy minutes, this hits the spot. This does however share the “problem” of the Ilsa and Olga movies in that casting an actress as the villain who happens to be substantially more magnetic and sexy than most of the supposed heroes will maybe have you rooting for her over them. All I can say that in one scene Wong wears an outfit with notably sparkly sleeves, which is very important to enjoyment of the movie. Yes, she’s a devious, murderous villainess, but the heart wants what it wants.




Victim of The Night
Silver Streak (Hiller, 1976)



I recently revisited Midnight Run, and while I found it held up very nicely, I lamented the unfortunate soundtrack it was saddled with. None of this generic watered down blues rock in my action comedies, please. You need something jaunty, peppy, zany, preferably with a lot of synths. You know what had a great soundtrack? Fletch. So I started listening to the Fletch soundtrack again. You got the main theme, courtesy of the great Harold Faltemeyer, a more laid back companion to his iconic theme for Beverly Hills Cop. There’s “Bit By Bit”, there’s of course “Fletch, Get Outta Town”, which plays during the memorable car chase. There’s even “Letter to Both Sides” by the Fixx, whose lyrics exhibit a political consciousness largely absent in the movie. So naturally I was itching for a rewatch of Fletch, only to be foiled by the fact that it wasn’t on any of my streaming services and that I didn’t actually like the movie enough to own a copy. In this demoralized state, I went searching for another action comedy with impressive soundtrack credentials, and settled for Arthur Hiller’s Silver Streak, which had a score by the great Henry Mancini.

Now, I’m not gonna make some insane claim that the score here is bad, or that Faltemeyer is a better composer than Mancini, but I will say that the soundtrack here is nowhere near as jaunty, peppy, zany or synth-heavy as necessary for an action comedy. It’s respectable, maybe a bit too much for its own good. I suppose that quality applies to the rest of the movie, which is diverting enough but rarely as energetic as I want from the genre. The premise, about the hero stumbling across a murderous conspiracy on the titular train, seems like it might provide for some steady forward momentum or acute Hitchcockian suspense, but the way it plays out is languorous, with Gene Wilder’s hero repeatedly getting thrown off the train and taking leisurely detours. (It becomes a bit of a running joke.) And eventually it opts for a big action climax, which looks to be mounted with enough expense but discards much of the humour of the preceding film. While Midnight Run is not the most technically proficient action film, I appreciated that it made room for the characters’ personalities in its action scenes. Silver Streak totally overwhelms them with the spectacle, which isn’t even that sharply directed.

I’m a big fan of Hiller’s The In-Laws, which uses its legendary Peter Falk performance to tap into a wavelength of escalating insanity. I don’t think this ever manages a similar energy level, although the presence of Richard Pryor does slightly alter the film’s DNA for a couple of scenes. Pryor only arrives in the movie at around the halfway point, a likable thief who ends up teaming up with Wilder as the latter tries to evade the cops. While he doesn’t bring all the edginess of his standup work, the movie does use his presence to introduce some racially charged dialogue, usually directed by villainous characters towards him. To be honest, this stuff felt at greatly odds with the relatively genial feel of the overall movie, and the racial element peaks (or bottoms out, depending on your perspective) with a scene where he convinces Wilder to put on blackface to sneak past the cops. On one hand, yikes. On the other hand, this scene manages a certain transgressive, subversive quality that threatens to rupture the film’s fabric. I can’t say we’re better off for the scene, but it certainly stayed with me. I will say that I chuckled heartily at how expensive Pryor’s attempts to help Wilder prove to be. “Crime costs.”

An element that I think is easier to defend is the chemistry between Wilder and Jill Clayburgh, a secretary caught up in the intrigue. The beginning of the movie has their mutual romantic interest build palpably after they brush off an amusingly sleazy Ned Beatty. It helps that both characters bring not just charm but a sense of age and wear, and their scenes together are both tender and sexy. Would I have enjoyed this more had it just been a romantic comedy about these two characters? Very likely.

I love Silver Streak.
Used to watch it over and over.



The Sand Pebbles (Wise, 1966)




This review contains spoilers.

I watched this as part of the Hollywood Chinese series on the Criterion Channel, so naturally my attention turned to the portrayal of the Chinese characters in the movie. The last movie I watched from the series, Daughter of the Dragon, was not free from negative stereotypes. But it surprised me with the way they were navigated, getting some mileage out of the tension between the magnetism of the stars and the roles they either embraced or repelled, depending on the situation. The first hour into The Sand Pebbles, Robert Wise’s epic about a US Navy gunboat on Yangtze River Patrol in 1920s China, I did not think it was finding such ways to subvert the material. The portrayal of the Chinese here is at best condescending and at worst outright xenophobic, with the positive characters infantilized and the negative characters outright treacherous.

One of the positive characters is a coolie played by Mako, who the gruff but upright hero played by Steve McQueen (effortlessly cool and stoic as always) teaches ship maintenance and courage. The character is portrayed sympathetically, cooperating with McQueen even when his coolie boss discourages it, but also as childlike, absorbing lessons from McQueen only in simplistic forms. Mako is likable in the role, but there’s only so much he can do in the face of such blatant stereotyping. The movie does try to bestow upon him a certain dignity, having us root for him in a boxing match against a thuggish racist aboard the same ship, but cuts his arc short in a startlingly violent (by mid-‘60s standards) scene in which he is brutally tortured by locals in full view of McQueen’s ship and eventually put out of his misery by McQueen himself.

The other positive Chinese character is a woman played by Marayat Andriane forced to work as a hostess in a bar where she’s pressured to be a prostitute, but falls in love with McQueen’s shipmate Richard Attenborough. The sexually charged nature of her indenture to a slimy creditor (James Hong in a minor role), and the unimaginably horrible fate she suffers (promptly blamed on McQueen by the real perpetrators) highlights the treachery and cruelty of the Chinese. Yet I think Andriane is able (or at least given the screentime) to humanize her character more than Mako, and I did find her arc quite affecting. On a side note, what might really throw viewers for a loop is that Andriane, whose character is a bastion of purity in a seedy, sinister milieu, is also known as Emmanuelle Arsan, who wrote the Emmanuelle books supposedly inspired by her real life sexual adventures. Needless to say her character here does not partake in similar activities.

That being said, similar to Zulu, which set up a bunch of cliches in its first half only to blast through them one by one in the second half, this movie substantially complicates matters. As tensions rise between the Communists and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, with both sides itching to bait the American presence into combat, the heroes retreat onto the ship, and the surrounding events become filtered through an increasingly narrow perspective as they hold fast on this aquatic stronghold. Adding to the tension is that the ship is essentially stranded due to low water levels, and under orders not to fire at the hostile locals. This was released as the Vietnam War was starting to ramp up, and it definitely invites parallels to the situation, although depending on your political views, your sympathy may be limited for the imperialist dilemma of maintaining an image of strength while being unable to use force and futility of humanitarian aims when you’re an unwanted presence. I don’t know how much I agreed with the film’s conclusions, but I found the way it grappled with this subject pretty fascinating.

These ideas come to a head in the film’s most thrilling sequence, where the gunboat fights its way through a blockade set up by Chinese boats. It’s exhilarating not just because it’s a well directed action sequence, which it certainly is, but also because of the way it shows war as a unifying force, diffusing tensions among the crew as they direct their aggression towards a common enemy. And the switch from relatively distanced naval combat to swashbuckler style action plays like a commentary on how these characters view the locals (“pirates”, to use one character’s words). And a late reveal involving a previously minor character gives us a sense of how badly the heroes had misread the locals’ motivations. Again, the Vietnam metaphor can’t be ignored. I do think the performance of Richard Crenna as the ship’s commanding officer is pretty key to all of this as well. Crenna can have a certain stodginess and that quality is well deployed here, his control of the situation proving increasingly tenuous in the face of the mounting tensions among the locals and on his own ship.

And on the whole, this is just a gripping piece of capital-C Cinema. I’m a sucker for any movie from this era with a sizable budget, and I certainly found the substantial production values, used to meticulously recreate 1920s China, appropriately dazzling. But this is directed by Robert Wise, who as in West Side Story, uses that scale in the service of several bracingly directed sequences. There’s of course the aforementioned naval battle, but even a smaller sequence like a brawl between McQueen and some unfriendly locals turns into a thrilling shadowplay. And there’s the final sequence, a suicidal shootout lent an immense poignancy and futility by the cavernous, shadowy soundstage it’s set on. It’s hard not to be swept up by this, and it’s hard not to feel implicated either.




Mad Dog Morgan (Mora, 1976)




This review contains mild spoilers.

Mad Dog Morgan was made during Dennis Hopper’s “wilderness years”, and it seems like the perfect movie for that phase of his career. For one thing, it is set in the wilderness. But less literal-minded folks, the smarty pants edumacated types, will know that the “wilderness” here is a metaphor, for it was the part of his career when his career practically ended in Hollywood after lame-o studio executives buried The Last Movie and his substance abuse problems escalated. (If I got the literary device wrong, please forgive me, I’m not an English major.) I think that energy greatly colours his performance, which apparently was done under the influence of ill-advised amounts of rum (and I would wager other substances as well, although the IMDb trivia section does not confirm all that he ingested during filming). Hopper, here as in other roles, brings a real unpredictability to the proceedings. There’s a scene where his character stumbles onto a horse (if one can stumble up, this is what it would look like), fires his gun and unexpectedly wounds two people he considered to be his friends. While I’m sure they had to set up the cameras and rig the squibs, it genuinely feels like watching a drunken idiot **** around with a horse and a gun. I have not had first hand experience with substance abuse and I apologize if I’ve put any of this insensitively, I genuinely do love this man.

But you also get that kind of tortured mania that seemingly only Hopper can bring and brings so readily and so effortlessly. There’s a moment when he tells his friend David Gulpilil and tells him “I love you and I’ll always be your friend” and it feels like a transmission straight from his heart. It’s hard not to be moved by his sheer presence, although the movie does do a few things to get us on his side. The opening scene shows him to be sympathetic to Chinese settlers, only for them to be brutally murdered in a horrific scene of racist violence. His character then turns to robbery, only we see that he goes out of his way not to harm his victims, and then gets sentenced to a brutal stay in a prison that looks like a fortress, where he’s physically and sexually abused. These are brutal, oppressive times, and the movie argues that in the light of the injustice around him, the hero is maybe not so bad in comparison, even if Hopper imbues him with enough instability to make him dangerous, intentionally or otherwise. (I am not familiar enough with the real life historical figure to know how much this fudges the facts, but I would wager he’s much more sympathetic here than in real life.) The fact that this movie plays more like exploitation than arthouse (the massacre has some really gnarly violence) adds to this atmosphere. The movie was distributed in the US by Troma, although it plays things more straight than the campier genre fare they’re known for. (It’s also a lot better than anything I’ve seen from them, although I confess I haven’t dug too deep.)

Now, there’s one part where the hero tries to see how well he’s recovered from an injury by throwing a boomerang. Now, perhaps it wasn’t the intention, but as an ignorant Canadian whose only knowledge of Australia is through nature docs and Crocodiles Hunter and Dundee and that one episode of The Simpsons, I couldn’t help but laugh at something so blatantly stereotypical. But I do think the movie leans into satire, as when it juxtaposes the grim proceedings in the main plot with two government officials comparing bird calls, discussing evolution (and specifically whether the hero is more man or ape) and other such matters, as well as a scene where the hero throws a bunch of animal innards on a man who betrayed him, only for the man to think he had been disemboweled. There are also several scenes where we see characters speaking to the camera, trying to editorialize the proceedings while posing for carefully staged photographs. This is directed by Philippe Mora, best known for his Howling sequels. Howling III in particular shows a keen interest in Australian history, and that skeptical strain is present in this movie. Which also explains the ending, which I won’t reveal outright even though it’s based on historical events, but will note that it’s preceded by around twenty minutes of Hopper pestering the residents of a house he’s barged into, like a drunk who won’t leave you alone at the bar, and is followed by the government official assigning him the most undignified of fates. If you were looking for a grandiose ending, you won’t get it here.

Mora is maybe not the most polished director, but with the sheer presence of Hopper (whose character development is measured by the growth of his beard) and the surrounding wilderness (the attractive, slightly sunburned cinematography capturing what Werner Herzog calls the “voodoo of location”), the movie has a power beyond what mere technical finesse might offer. I suspect Mora didn’t have the easiest time making this movie, but he apparently thinks pretty highly of Hopper’s performance. (Difficult productions might be a recurring theme in Mora’s career. Howling II forced him to stick in a halfassed explanation about reverse evolution after the studio sent him Planet of the Apes costumes for his werewolf movie. I do genuinely like that film for its dopier, cheaper Hammer vibes, but it’s generally regarded as a “so bad it’s good” classic.) Now if I can end the review with two anecdotes about the movie, from this article by Mora about the production:

We flew to Taos, New Mexico, to meet Hopper after talking to his agent Robert Raison, who had also represented Cole Porter. Hopper greeted us at the rugged runway holding a rifle as we jumped off the single-engine plane. "That's our Mad Dog!" I thought – it was a bit like Zero Mostel in The Producers, shouting "That's our Hitler!"
A fitting note to start the movie.

In 1974 when we finished shooting Mad Dog Morgan, he rode off in costume, poured a bottle of O.P. rum into the real Morgan's grave in front of my mother Mirka Mora, drank one himself, got arrested and deported the next day, with a blood-alcohol reading that said he should have been clinically dead, according to the judge studying his alcohol tests.
And a fitting note to end it on.




I like that this thread has turned into a coin flip of "Porn or Criterion Channel?"

And only in the Doris Wishman collection shall the two ever meet!



Hey! There's Bruceploitation as well.


AIso...I learned not too long ago that there is a modern hardcore porno adaptation of the events that In the Realm of the Senses is based on.


So perhaps one day I can do a double feature and cross the streams.


Although the porno is like three hours long, and in the five seconds I watched they spelled Nagisa Oshima's name wrong, which is not encouraging.


So we'll see.



Also, I decided to get a Letterboxd Patron subscription recently and took a look at my stats.


None of these are my most watched actor so far this year (who is a classier pick than the winner last year), but I've seen the same number of movies this year starring Paul Newman, Bruce Li (not Lee) and John Holmes, all at six each. I think that means I've covered my bases.



Hey! There's Bruceploitation as well.


AIso...I learned not too long ago that there is a modern hardcore porno adaptation of the events that In the Realm of the Senses is based on.


So perhaps one day I can do a double feature and cross the streams.


Although the porno is like three hours long, and in the five seconds I watched they spelled Nagisa Oshima's name wrong, which is not encouraging.


So we'll see.

I know Obayashi also has a Sada movie (I felt his style did not work with the material, but the viewing experience was a weird one, so my impression isn't very reliable there).


Though it's weird hearing there's a porn version of an arthouse nc-17 movie. It feels like Jess Franco's The Demons that came out a year after Ken Russell's The Devils.



I know Obayashi also has a Sada movie (I felt his style did not work with the material, but the viewing experience was a weird one, so my impression isn't very reliable there).


Though it's weird hearing there's a porn version of an arthouse nc-17 movie. It feels like Jess Franco's The Demons that came out a year after Ken Russell's The Devils.
Yeah, I haven't seen the Oshima, but doesn't it even have



WARNING: spoilers below
penetration



?


Making an actual porno seems a bit redundant in this case. But if someone here's gonna watch it, I guess it has to be me.



Btw, I'm holding off because because I'm trying to be good (and because the shipping to Canada is steep enough to offset the savings), but Severin is having a clearance sale, with a lot of titles on DVD going for $3 to $5.