Daniel & Ana

Directed by Michel Franco
Alameda Films



Daniel & Ana is an opinion piece, the film equivalent of an op-ed. While it is a forgone assumption that a film will represent the opinion of its authors and that every film necessarily adopts a particular point-of-view on its subjects, Daniel & Ana endorses a position. Daniel & Ana assumes an expository stance, occupying the characters lives in an effort to discuss an issue bigger than they are. This film discusses underground pornography; the analysis is not on the macro level of an industry or the societal impact of the industry on Mexico, but rather on the micro level, this is a case study of this particular pair of siblings.

The course of the film follows the older sister Ana, as she prepares for her wedding, and trails the younger brother Daniel as he exists, for the most part, in his sister’s wake. For most of the film, their relationship is relatively normal. When the siblings begin behaving oddly, their parents suspect nothing, seeing the strains in the siblings’ relationship as a result of the wedding, and nothing more. Ana and Daniel are nothing if not predictable.

While Ana is the central character, the film revolving most directly around the events in her life (despite the parallel surveillance of Daniel), she is not fully formed as a character. Ana is object more than she is subject. Not only is Ana objectified as a sightly woman throughout: not only by the comments of Daniel’s friend saying that she is doable and of the cameraman for the porno saying she is hot; not only by her rape which is a sort of ultimate objectification; but, by the movie itself, by the shallow presentation of her character. In this film Ana is only ever acted upon. As dutiful sister, daughter, and girlfriend, she only causes concern when she temporarily cancels the wedding. The wedding sets the tone of the piece, it determines what is normal, what roles each character is to play, and what behaviors are acceptable. Ana reinstates the wedding in a search for refuge; the wedding is a return to normalcy and an escape from everything else. Everything will end with the wedding.

Review by Elisheva Zakheim

Brilliantlove

Directed by Ashley Horner
Pinball Films

Manchester is taking a photograph of his girlfriend Noon. She’s asleep. He develops the film while she naps and goes outside to lay on a dingy blanket on the gravel driveway that leads to their makeshift garage-turned-apartment. Did she consent to being documented? No one seems to care. When Noon wakes up, she goes outside naked and has sex with Manchester in broad daylight.

A seemingly enviable hipster couple sequestered from the world in their own squalid little space, it doesn’t take long for things to go south. While Noon stays home preparing taxidermy birds, Manchester gets drunk at a local pub and leaves behind his snapshots of her nudity, their lovemaking. Found a bit too conveniently by a local art dealer who then spends an inordinate amount of time tracking the couple down, Manchester’s amateur, low-light snaps are sold and catapult him to fame, complete with praise for his non-technique—“just a willing girlfriend,” he insists. Not surprisingly, their idyllic, secluded, grungy love is ruined by Manchester’s brush with fame and having their privacy traded as consumable art.

Based on the filmmakers’ obsession with objectifying Noon’s ass in every possible shot, with making her the sexual object in nearly every supposedly erotic scene, it’s painfully obvious that the production team is almost exclusively comprised of men. Should the audience be pleased to see female masturbation, so rarely depicted in film, or should we be revolted by the popsicle prop in one scene, that Noon is accidentally hit in the face with the camera during sex, that physical pleasure seems to trump self respect? Brilliantlove isn’t so much a meditation on love, desire, and intimacy as it is degrading soft-core porn with a bit of art world skepticism thrown in for good measure.

I also have to wonder whether this is just a hipster wet dream. Does someone think, "I can just leave these trashy photos in a bar and find fame?" At a time when it’s hard enough to control any aspect of your privacy, I’m so unbelievably unimpressed by the lack of ethics, trust, and respect displayed by Manchester. I also wonder why, within a framework of already shaky ethics, Manchester’s consent was sought at all, or why these photos weren’t just uploaded to the Internet (which is striking absent from the film, as is bathing, eating, and pre-porn employment).

Brilliantlove could have been really interesting. It could have relied on actual character development, on normalizing passion, on queering the perceived normalcy of (hetero)sexual relationships. For many, there’s obviously a big difference between sex and love, and my issue is not with this dichotomy. Rather, this is just one more film made by an all-male team unwilling (or unable) to depict thoughtful, engaging intimacy between two enthusiastic, willing partners.

Both my male partner and I were genuinely disgusted while watching it, barely able to force ourselves to finish it; desperate to cleanse our mental palates, we popped in an innocuous film to chase the memory of this damaging one. If disliking this film makes me sex-negative or some other hip third wave feminist label I deem more judgmental than useful, so be it. This film is a voyeuristic, hedonistic, male gaze fuck fest. Watch at your own risk.

Review by Brittany Shoot

Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel

Directed by Brigitte Berman
Metaphor Films



The documentary Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel aims to rise above traditional pit stops of jiggles and giggles while recounting the tale of Playboy Magazine’s founder and editorial icon. This is an investigation into a man who consistently pushed the envelope in the name of freedom; a gentleman baffled by repression, who sensed an incredible opportunity to create a magazine that catered to the curious and the liberal, personifying a sexual revolution that lasted for decades. Yes, there’s nudity and plenty of footage exploring the heyday of Playboy parties, but the picture is more concerned with the man behind the ears, who built an empire while changing the world.

Chicago-bred Hugh M. Hefner, scraping together loans and favors, published the first issue of Playboy in 1953, using well known but little seen nude pictures of Marilyn Monroe as a hook to bring readers into a world of sophistication. The magazine took off like a rocket, with Hefner firmly in command; a control freak who pored over every last detail of the publication, firmly believing what he was putting out monthly was a critical tool in releasing America from the grips of destructive, conservative thinking. Employing some of the brightest minds and the softest bodies, Hefner built a kingdom with Playboy that still stands today, over five controversial decades later.

Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel recounts the less illuminated side of Hefner, beyond the pajamas, blondes, and pipes. Director Brigitte Berman seeks out the history of Hefner as an activist and philosopher, who used Playboy as a vessel to challenge mores and promote liberation during America’s darkest periods. Playboy wasn’t solely about skin, but a platform for ideas, with Hefner employing authors such as Alex Haley and Ray Bradbury when publishers turned their backs, or using the pages for his own thoughts on the repressed state of the union. Starting with Playboy’s introduction to the newsstand, the documentary sets off on a vast journey of illustration, with film footage and Hef’s own scrapbooks covering the vicissitudes of Playboy, which soon became a number one target for censorship by anyone looking to set a volatile example for the media.

While scattered at times, Berman colors her subject wonderfully, sitting down with Hefner as he recalls his battles with a certain world-weary creak. Interviews with friends, commentators, and contemporaries (including Gene Simmons, Jenny McCarthy, Mike Wallace, and Bill Maher) fill out the discussion some, while the director also makes room for Hef’s detractors, including Susan Brownmiller, a feminist author who retains distaste for the Playboy mastermind decades after their rather combustible debate on The Dick Cavett Show. The conversations look to expand Hefner past his reputation, shedding light on his drive to combat racial tension during the ‘60s and ‘70s (erasing color lines on his popular television programs and inside the Playboy Clubs), his troubles with the law facing trumped-up charges that sought to destroy his reputation, and his arc from panty-twirling revolutionary to pariah as the 1980s ushered in a conservative, religiously rigid era that didn’t show much patience for the Playboy lifestyle.

Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel is certainly reverent of Hefner’s cultural accomplishments, delivering a convincing argument with a smooth, efficient visual style that combines talking heads with insider footage and a few splashes of animation. The documentary does a swell job positioning Hugh Hefner in a different light, showcasing the man’s forward-thinking ideals and his hopeless addictions (love being a major failure in his life), while stripping away the glamour to find a sensitive, concerned core. At eighty-four years of age, Hugh Hefner has boxed himself into a cartoon reputation of sorts with the success of The Girls Next Door, but here he’s offered the chance to reignite his passion for life though conversation, and there’s no better boat captain of memories and accomplishments around.

Review by Brian Orndorf

Gurlesque: The New Grrly, Grotesque, Burlesque Poetics

Edited by Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg
Saturnalia Books

The problem with books with two introductions is that one can inevitably doom the other and, at worst, the entire book. This just might be the case with the contra(dictory)dance of introductions to the anthology Gurlesque, edited by poets Lara Glenum and Arielle Greenberg. According to Glenum, Gurlesue poetry “assaults the norms of acceptable female behavior by irreverently deploying gender stereotypes to subversive ends.” Both editors relate this poetry to cultural movements like riot grrrl, burlesque, kitsch, camp, and more.

For Greenberg, Gurlesque is “not a movement or a camp or a clique.” (Okay, so what is it then?) It is “just something [she] saw...born of black organza witch costumes and the silver worn-out sequins mashed between scratchy pink tutu netting and velvet unicorn paintings and arena rock ballads…” Her list continues and is reminiscent of the sub/counter culture detritus that has wound up at mall stores like Hot Topic. I really wanted to love the idea of Gurlesque and was looking forward to some in-depth and sophisticated rendering. Unfortunately, Greenberg sounds like a chatty scenester at a party, making the anthology seem little more than a self-serving, self-validating effort.

Luckily, Glenum’s introduction is more intellectually sound and includes some interesting theory; however, both seem resistant to lay any more than spotty groundwork about what Gurlesque is or isn’t, at the same time that they see the selected poems as being exemplary of this “idea”. From Greenberg: “Being in this anthology doesn’t mean anything about the poets in particular: we are just trotting these poems out on our sideshow stage because of what we see in them.” And from Glenum: “I am not insisting that this genealogy forms a common knowledge base for Gurlesque poets…I intend the above merely as a loose sketch of aesthetic tendencies and impulses, an artistic and theoretical heritage from which the Gurlesque draws its manifold, relentless energies.” Yet wouldn’t the artifact of the anthology prove more than a loose sketch?

So what about the actual poetry? What does Gurlesque poetry look and read like? I asked a poet friend who said “pile on the cum, pile on the vomit, heap on the porn.” Poet Ariana Reines doesn’t disappoint with lines like “First he spit on my asshole and then start in with a middle finger and then the cock slid in no sound come out only a maw gaping, grind hard into ground.” While this might seem like a performance of pornographic crassness, it could be seen (and I tease this from the Exoskeleton poetry blog) as skillfully employing the savvy irony of our cultural moment: self-consciously using played out shock-for-shock’s sake.

These aren’t easy poems to read. They aren’t your grandmother’s poems, and they aren’t Hallmark greeting card poems. They aren’t like most poems you would read in a book grabbed off the shelf in Barnes & Nobles, or even the library. If you make it through the bric-a-brac of the introductions, you get a good sense of some very new and innovative (if not all that good or likable) poetics.

Readers might be jarred by Chelsey Minnis’ excessive use of ellipses, to the point of frustration. The visual disorientation of the work gives the reader the sense that so much else is going on around and outside the poems, they become part of a much wider extended dialogue in which the reader is invited to imagine the activity in the pauses. Excerpts from Geraldine Kim’s “Povel” recalibrate our sense of poetry, prose, and the quotable. Lines like “I was barn./I was razed./I was mot this flame with no’s sum else blue’s blame noir yearning down the house” from Heidi Lynn Staple’s “Fonder a Care Kept” are going to test even the most adept readers of contemporary poetry.

There is a great deal of variety in this anthology, and as a woman of color, while I was happy to see Asian American women represented, I was strongly disappointed by the apparent lack of work by African American, Latina, or Native American women. While I suppose it is possible (though unlikely) that such women of color aren’t writing Gurlesque, it seems more plausible that when it depends on one’s field of vision that this is an effect of “just something I saw.”

Review by L

Seven Minutes in Heaven: Coming Out!

Directed by Courtney Trouble
Reel Queer Productions


**This video is not in the least bit suitable for work!**

Courtney Trouble, the creator of Seven Minutes in Heaven: Coming Out!, is one of the hottest new directors of queer porn. After creating No Fauxxx in March 2002—a website with 150 models, twenty videos, and a free social networking community—Trouble started making full-length queer porn videos. She has also been in a few porn films herself, which she says adds to her respect for those in front of the camera. To date, she has ten feature films available.

Seven Minutes in Heaven is the first film of a three-part series of “reality porn,” unscripted amateur porn where the participants get to choose partners, sex toys, and chat about their experiences. It is set up like a wild slumber party night, with scenes being fueled by those timeless junior high games, spin the bottle and truth or dare, though these versions definitely end up in a lot less awkward and a lot sexier scenarios then making out sloppily in a closet! The truth or dare sequence leads to some brief food play and some of the hottest group sex scenes in the film. Seven Minutes in Heaven was nominated, like many of Trouble's films, for the 2010 Feminist Porn Awards.

I liked the parts where participants talked about their experiences or discussed certain issues, like sucking cock and having it be your first time in a porn—though at times the conversations dragged on a little long and were a bit too reminiscent of the familiar reality television confessionals, leaving a viewer feeling like they want the action to get going already! A lot of new queer porn films, including this one, have real musicians add to the soundtrack, which I think is a cool idea in theory. Seven Minutes in Heaven included Purple Rhinestone Eagle, Jenna Riot, DJ European DJ, and Diamond Beats. However, when it comes down to it, I don't generally feel like there truly is good porn music. The way I see it, if you barely notice it, that's probably the best. This soundtrack, at times, sounded pretty riot grrrlish, though that might be a turn-on for some!

The inclusion of S&M and kink was prevalent throughout, though pretty mild with some role play, flogging, gagging, fisting, and a few moments of knife play. There was definitely a lot of use of sex toys, mainly vibrators; a crop; and a good amount of dildo use for some steamy fucking and lessons on sucking. Many times there were multiple scenes going on at the same time, though you could only hear or get a glimpse of the indirect scenes, which definitely spiced things up.

Though the cast wasn't super diverse, it is always refreshing when there is a variety of real-sized bodies. Also of note was the use of safer sex; gloves and condoms were utilized throughout. Since there is generally not a lot of sex education oriented towards queers, I was glad to see a film where it encourages the notion that safe sex can be both easy to do and not make sex play any less erotic.

Seven Minutes in Heaven: Coming Out! has a lot to offer, and scenes get better and better as the film progresses and the participants get more comfortable with each other. Watching this film certainly made me very curious to explore Courtney Trouble's other films. If they are as appealing as this one, I would say she deserves all the credit she has coming her way.

Review By Lesley Kartali

Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualisation of Girls

Edited by Melinda Tankard Reist
Spinifex Press

Getting Real is a collection of essays that are charges against the worldwide phenomena of the pornification of childhood through advertising, marketing, and pop culture. This was a great book to read, particularly as the authors are Australian and I sometimes wonder how much of our collective reaction to porn and adult images going mainstream is a reflection of our country's Puritanical leanings. For the contributors to Getting Real, the problem is embedded not just in faux-feminism but also a twisting of feminism by marketers and others to make women believe that if they are "in charge" of their sexuality, then there isn't anything wrong with stripping, making out with other women to turn men on, and so forth.

About half way through the book I came across a few statements that made me think, "Wait a minute...This isn't a feminist book!" There's just a tinge of anti-sex sentiment in some essays. So I did some investigating and found that editor Melinda Tankard Reist is part of a women's think tank. Upon further digging, I came to the conclusion that the Women's Forum Australia seems to be what one might get if the National Organization for Women and the Independent Women's Forum had a lefty baby. (If anyone has more information about them, I'd love for you to leave it in the comments.)

While some essays wade into slut-shaming and defaming strippers and sex workers, on the whole Getting Real is a pretty good book. One eye-opening essay on street billboards makes the point that even though it is illegal for people to have porn in the workplace, we have to walk through porn-infested streets on a daily basis. Another essay brought up how many of us are using Flickr and YouTube to share our children's lives, which teaches them to perform publicly. There is also a discussion about the medicalization of girls' bodies. From HPV vaccines to plastic surgery, it's all there to ponder.

The best part of Getting Real was learning a new term: corporate pedophilia. "Sexualizing products being sold specifically for children, and children themselves being presented in images or directed to act in advertisements in ways modeled on adult sexual behavior." This goes far beyond the dress-up of our youth to performance on a daily basis. "The task for today's teenagers is to win back their freedom from the adults who run the advertising agencies and girls magazines and the 'sex-positive' media academics who insist that 'bad girls' are powerful girls."

The essays are well cited, but avoid a lot of academic jargon, making Getting Real a quick read. The book is feminist, but with a dash of moderate conservatism thrown in. The topic brings together some typically opposing forces, and that's always good for the discussion.

Review by Veronica I. Arreola

Cross-posted from Viva La Feminista

Sometimes She Lets Me: Best Butch/Femme Erotica

By Tristan Taormino
Cleis Press

So, I sometimes forget that reading erotica and looking at BDSM queer porn in the library of an Ivy League university is not necessarily standard practice. Lucky for me, I go to Brown, where I’m concentrating in Gender and Sexuality studies, and have somehow managed to legitimize studying sex manuals with postmodern theory in order to (supposedly, so they say) get a degree next year. Along with my academic studies and personal intrigues, I am also active with various events and groups on campus explicitly related to sexuality, so am known on campus for… well, let’s just say, when I pulled out Tristan Taormino’s Sometimes She Lets Me: Best Butch/Femme Erotica in the middle of the bustling Science Library lobby during the mad rush of studying for midterms, I got simply passing (mostly jealous) chuckles from friends venturing down into the depths of the stacks with unread textbooks in their arms.

This exciting collection of twenty-three stories is edited by author, director, and educator Tristan Taormino, and is a part of the Best Lesbian Erotica series, which has won three Lambda Awards. Cleis Press, who published the book, focuses on queer sexualities, putting out various sex guides, gender/queer theory texts, and works of fiction.

As the publisher notes, Sometimes She Lets Me: Best Butch/Femme Erotica is about “dispelling myths, realizing fantasies, and delivering outstanding writing with distinct contributor voices.” In the introduction, Taormino expresses the desire to “queer gender throughout the spectrum,” viewing gender as multilayered, constantly changing, and problematizing the reductionist and prescriptive discourses around butch/femme identities:

Butch/femme is bulging jeans, smeared lipstick, stiletto heels, and sharp haircuts. It’s about being read and being seen. Sometimes it’s about passing or not passing. It’s about individual identity and a collective sense of community. It’s personal, political. It’s performance and it’s not. It’s the visceral space between the flesh and the imagination.

The stories focus on the separation and convergence of the personal and the political, the body and fantasy, and address some examples of what really goes on in bed between self-identified butches and femmes. As a new reader of butch/femme lesbian erotica, I was surprised about the diversity of relationships, identities and desires, and found that while some of it was a real turn-on for me, others not so much. But that is okay. In the end, the appeal of the collection is about the confidence and attitude that exudes from the authors as they own their own identity expressions, desires, and pursuits of pleasure.

Review by Abigail Chance