Sexual pleasure by any means necessary

8 1/2 WOMEN (1999)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Nope, this is not lost footage from Federico Fellini's own masterpiece, "8 1/2." This is Peter Greenaway's thoroughly underimagined, papier-mache account of old age and sexual pleasures called "8 1/2 Women." I have found most of Greenaway's films to be risky, shocking yet always mesmerizing and unforgettable. This film is sheerly dumb and valueless - an attempt to be comical and daring and succeeding only in being wanting in every sense of the word.

Fitting in with today's standards that sex matters more than anything, we are introduced to Philip Emmenthal (John Standing), a rich man living in his Geneva estate where his wife has just died. Joining him in his grieving process is his son, Storey (Sacha Vierny), who attempts to relieve his father's depression through sexual pleasure. The first attempt is through incest. Though it is implied, it is always clear that incest is an attempt (lest you think that fathers and sons do sleep together naked). After father and son watch Fellini's "8 1/2," they both decide that bringing eight women to the estate to have sex with and be ogled by is a far more successful venture. Some of the women they choose are gambling addicts, nuns, females as female impersonators (!), housekeepers, nymphos, and so on. One woman always gets pregnant and another one, representing the half, is in a wheelchair with no arms or legs. Oh, yes, and how can I forget the woman who rides horses naked (played by none other than Amanda Plummer). The most interesting woman is the nymphomaniac (Polly Walker) who claims to have slept with Philip long ago.

The idea for the film, sexual adventures in an estate with different women who have their own reasons for participating, is a novel one that could build with an erotic, comical charge. But Greenaway is the wrong director for a dark comedy of this type - at times, I felt like I was watching a weird Merchant Ivory production minus the wit. There are some shocking scenes of sexual byplay (like what happens when Phlip has sex with a woman who just had her period) but none of it is likely to seem the least bit erotic or playful to anyone. Greenaway is just interested in shocking the audience and places great emphasis on that prized male reproductive organ, but for what purpose exactly? Every major chapter is introduced by descriptions from the screenplay, but for what reason exactly?

Peter Greenaway is a fascinatingly complex director and sheerly audacious, but this "8 1/2 Women" is just marking time in being outrageous and touching on taboo subjects. There is plenty of nudity to spare but since the story is nonexistent and the acting borders on the extremely mannered, there is nothing left to look at. A major disappointment for Greenaway fans.

An adaptation that is bent out of shape

BENT (1997)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Turning a stage play into a film is almost always a recipe for disaster. There have been the exceptions: David Mamet's adaptations of his plays such as "House of Games" and "Oleanna" come to mind. A film is a visual medium, whereas a play is an actor's and writer's medium. "Bent" is based on historic facts surrounding the Holocaust, but the two main characters seem to be stuck in a stage setting where they have to speak a great deal of dialogue.

Playwright Martin Sherman adapted his groundbreaking play "Bent" that focuses on a rare subject: the persecution of gays and lesbians who were the first rounded up under Hitler's regime in 1934. The main character is Max (Clive Owen), a Jewish homosexual who comes from a wealthy family. At the beginning of the film, in a wonderfully bizarre backdrop, we see Max cavorting with other homosexuals in a wild, all-night Cabaret party that includes Mick Jagger as a singing, black-stockinged transvestite on a swing! This particular night was known as the Night of the Long Knives, when homosexual Nazi commander Ernst Rohm and other bent Nazis were cleansed. The handsome Max and his lover Rudy (Brian Webber), a dancer at the club, escape and are accommodated by Max's gay uncle (Ian McKellen). Eventually, the two lovers are apprehended and taken on a horrifying train ride to Dauchau.

During this trip, Rudy is severely beaten and thrown from the train by the SS commanders. Max survives and finally arrives at Dauchau - it is there that he develops a relationship with Horst (Lothaire Bluteau) who wears the Pink Triangle. Max has to choose between wearing the Jewish Yellow Star or the Pink Triangle, a statement of gay pride - he sticks with the Yellow Star. The two end up working together in a mindless, excruciating job of moving rocks from one area to another. This is an attempt to drive them into madness and possibly suicide. "Bent" is basically an existential film about the determination to live, rather than to survive, in such a demographically undesirable environment. The problem is that the film resembles a Samuel Beckett play where the characters are stuck in one area and talk to each other endlessly. The setting is a bare area surrounded by walls and dozens of rocks, and it is the same setting for the rest of the film. The characters speak in quiet phrases (which makes sense since the SS is watching around the corner), but writer Martin Sherman and director Sean Mathias make no attempt to transcend the play's origins by making it visually arresting or compelling. And since the locations have an anonymous quality, it could therefore take place in any era, not necessarily the Holocaust.

Another flaw is the casting of Clive Owen as Max: he doesn't possess much in the way of charisma or interest, and is mostly portrayed as a cipher. The rest of the cast is splendid, but they appear in mostly fleeting cameos. Mick Jagger is bitchily perfect as Greta, the transvestite owner of the club, who resorts to betrayal and his old business suits to escape. Ian McKellen is remarkable as the closeted Gay Uncle - his one scene speaks volumes more than anything else in the film. Lothaire Bluteau gives a touching performance as the weak, sickly Horst who begins to love Max though they can't touch each other. It would have been better if Bluteau had a more interesting co-star: how about Jagger as Max?

"Bent" is a fascinating and important story and therefore it should be seen for that reason - I would have preferred, however, to see the unique play since it works better on the stage than on film. The end result is that "Bent" trivializes the Holocaust and, although, there are some superb visual pieces, including the Cabaret club, there's precious else to hold one's interest. An explosive ending made me wish that what preceded it was just as potent.

Pakistanis and British only meet halfway

EAST IS EAST (1999)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

There have been countless films about cross-cultural clashes in small villages or cities. We have seen everything from "La Cage Aux Folles" to just about every variation on the big city life of Italians mixing with Latinos from "West Side Story" and onwards. There are, of course, the big city films dealing with racism and mixed marriages from Spike Lee. "East is East" is one of the rare few that deals with Pakistanis living in a working class suburb in England. Although often fascinating and revelatory, the film is so uneven that you are never sure whether it is meant to be a comedy, a drama or both.

The film stars Om Puri (who has appeared in scores of Indian films, not to mention Hollywood films such as "Wolf" and "Gandhi") as George Khan, the Pakistani patriarch in a household that includes seven kids and his semi-tolerant British wife, Ella (Linda Bassett), in Salford, Manchester. The house is small yet seems accomodating for such a big family. Some of the more colorful kids includes Meena (Archie Panjabi), the daughter who has a predilection for soccer, Saleem (Chris Bisson), an art major masquerading as an engineering student, Tariq (Jimi Mistry), a disco-loving dancer who has a white girlfriend (Emma Rydal), the young Sajid (Jordan Rootledge) who is always wearing a parka and fears circumcisions, and Maneer (Emil Marwa), who is often serious and silent.

But there is friction in the house, mostly involving George and his ideals. A few years earlier, his eldest son, Nazir (Ian Aspinalli), refused to go through with an arranged marriage and was thus ousted from the family, declared by his father as "dead." Now the older sons, Tariq and Abdul (Raji James), are about to undergo a similar fate thanks to George's stubborn upholding of traditions past. What the father seems to forget is that he has married a white woman for the past twenty-five years, despite initially being married to a Pakistani woman. There is also the culture change and how the kids speak in the British tongue, not their own, and have developed and adapted according to their environment. But George will not listen to what his kids or his wife want, it is only what he wants for the family and it finally creates more harm than good.

"East is East" starts badly with the kind of heavy, indiscernible British accents you usually find in Mike Leigh's films, lots of cheaply comical innuendoes, and some desperate gags. Incredibly, when the film shifts its focus from the overall ludicrous shenanigans of the family to George, it starts to have more meaning and depth. It is no secret that Om Puri brings the film its soul, wavering uneasily between friendliness and seething anger. The transition is abrupt (as it was in "Not Without My Daughter" with Alfred Molina playing a comparable patriarch with similar shifting moods) and unshakable - after all, he is also a hypocrite for thinking that his kids will not see that their mother is not Pakistani. The fact is that even when Tariq acknowledges this to him, George still thinks he is right and that creates frustration with his family, not to mention physical abuse.

My big complaint with "East is East" is that the film never quite makes up its mind as to what kind of film it is. When it becomes dramatic and saddening, it really becomes serious. The comic relief is too reminiscent of low-grade Hollywood comedies so it certainly detracts from its high-minded darkness (there is a scene involving the purported Pakistani girl, whom Tariq is chosen to marry, and her family that involves some crude business with a piece of sculpture that would have seemed right at home in "American Pie"). This constant shifting of moods and tone may coincide with George's character but it does not prove to be as compelling or cohesive a film as it should have been. Somehow, the comedy and the drama only meet halfway.

Hooking till her dad comes home

ANGEL (1984)

Reviewed By Jerry Saravia

There are probably a hundred stories of teen hookers abandoned by their parents who eke out a life of hooking on Hollywood Boulevard. Angel is one of those hookers, hooking since age 12. By day, she is a straight-A high school student. At night, she is a prostitute who has three parental figures - a sassy drag queen (Dick Shawn), an old cowboy actor (Rory Calhoun) who spins tales of his days acting along cowboy legend Tom Mix to a willing crowd of listeners, and her lesbian landlady with painted eyebrows (Susan Tyrell) who paints in her free time.

"Angel" is a pure exploitation piece that benefits from a strong central performance by Donna Wilkes as Angel aka Molly, a tough girl who doesn't want her double life uncovered. At school, she is shy and doesn't participate in extracurricular scholastic activities, nor does she accept dates from nerds. Interestingly, Angel is never shown having sex or even entering a motel room with a john (except for one brief instance). The movie, wisely or not, decides not to get too sleazy. Instead, there is a focus on a mad slasher (John Diehl) who is killing all the hookers and is something of a necrophiliac. After his murderous and sexually twisted deeds are done, he bathes himself with a sponge as if to rid himself of his own immorality.

"Angel" is essentially two movies in one - an ideal double feature mesh for the midnight crowd. The performances are pretty damn good, especially a nicely sympathetic turn by Cliff Gorman as the paternal cop who is on the hunt for that mad slasher. Everyone is paternal to the young prostitute but her reasons for hooking are odd - her mother had died and her father abandoned her and, until he gets back, she will keep on serving the sexual needs of Hollywood's finest - that is, horny men. Why she does this is unclear to me, or what her father has anything to do with it.

"Angel " is serviceable entertainment, neither too gory or too sexy or too sleazy. The movie has a grungy, slightly washed-out Hollywood look from those neon-lit streets to scenes at a high-school that looks just as washed-out and, frankly, rather flat. I don't know what to take away from "Angel" except a drag queen can sucker punch a Hare-Krishna and if a retired cowboy actor doesn't wish to be sent to a nursing home, he might pull a gun on you. As for Angel, she is a sweet, precious soul but only the high-school cheerleaders show full-frontal nudity in the film's sole gratuitous nudity, shot in a locker room. Hmmm, what on earth does this mean?

Tall tales of heroin, murder and Neil Diamond

AMERICAN BOY: A PROFILE OF: STEVEN PRINCE (1978)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Aside from Scorsese's wonderful, beguiling "Italianamerican," "American Boy" is possibly Scorsese's finest documentary - a fiercely alive film with a subject who is a skilled raconteur and has the face of a walking skeleton with bulging eyes who can keep you up all night with dozens of compelling stories.

Steven Prince is the central subject of Scorsese's film - a wiry, fiery coil of jittery flesh with eyes that have seen it all. Prince talks about his days having worked for producer Fred Weintraub, being a road manager for Neil Diamond, his heroin addiction, his trouble with a girl who nearly died from a drug overdose had it not been for an adrenaline needle (Tarantino fans: this is where the "Pulp Fiction" scene of Mia Wallace's near overdose came from) and, in two gripping episodes, the accidental death of a kid who got electrocuted and Prince shooting a man in self-defense at a gas station who was trying to steal tires. Opening scene sets the tone for the film as Prince arrives at his friend's house where the filming will take place (actor George Memmoli is the friend) and they wrestle like schoolyard kids. This looks staged or maybe it is not - but it has an absurdity to it and resembles a story Steven Prince might tell later in life of how he was late to the making of a movie about his own life!

What is riveting about "American Boy" is that the tales Prince tells are horrifying and funny - he is so damn good a storyteller that the stories put very clear, precise pictures in your mind of what he went through. Sometimes there are anecdotes such as Prince's unwillingness to answer a question about his homosexuality to a military personnel - when he does give the answer that he had "latent homosexual tendencies," he is registered as a 4F (unfit for military service to the rest of you). Another anecdote about his addiction to heroin that resulted him in ingesting the drug every 4 hours to coincide with purposely 4-hour connecting flights while being Neil Diamond's road manager is hysterical.

Some of you Scorsese fans will probably recognize Steven Prince as Easy Andy, a gun salesman in the film "Taxi Driver." But what is especially wonderful and captivating about "American Boy" is how intimate the film is, even having scenes where Scorsese himself and Prince share the same shot while Scorsese asks questions (this is also true of Scorsese's "Italianamerican," "Public Speaking" and "The Last Waltz"). Last scene has Scorsese insisting that Prince repeat a story about his dying father three times. By the third time, he is no longer a skilled raconteur at work, pleasing his audience of friends and cronies. No, by then, he is a sad little American Boy.

He NAILED IT!

SICK: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF BOB FLANAGAN, SUPERMASOCHIST (1997)

Reviewed By Jerry Saravia

"Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist" is the most disturbing, nauseating documentary ever made about a man who I am grateful to have never met in person. This film is probably the closest you'll ever want to get to such a freak with a predilection for pain; a man with a debilitatingly painful disease who needs more pain to endure his own.

Bob Flanagan is indeed a supermasochist. From an early age, he was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, a disease that causes the lungs to fill with phlegm and mucus. Most people who are diagnosed with such a disease die at an early age, some reach the age of twenty-four. Bob lived to be forty-three, the longest-known survivor of cystic fibrosis. His way of enduring such a disease was to punish his own body - to show God that he can do worse things to himself than the disease He had wrought upon him! Bob becomes a member of an S & M club where he chooses different torturous techniques such as stitches, nails, steel balls, and the list goes on. There's a truly unwatchable moment where he nails his penis to a wooden board!

The main impetus of the film is Bob's own masochistic relationship with his girlfriend of fifteen years, Sheree Rose, a dominatrix. He agrees to be her slave, and she takes full advantage of his submissive behavior. Whenever he wanted to have sex, he would have to write about in his journal, at Sheree's insistence, or there would be no sex. Bob Flanagan is a noted performance artist and writer, and his masochistic rituals through video installations have become well known in most art communities. In essence, his body has become a decorative sculpture for others to look at, e.g., "Bob and Sheree's Contract" where Sheree carves an S into Bob' chest. Bob even inspires a teenage girl from the Make-a-Wish Foundation, also diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, to meet him and...start some piercing. Sheree privately admits to Bob that maybe the girl's supposed fantasies should be fulfilled.

"Sick" won Best Documentary at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival, and it is the most honest documentary I've ever seen. The irony is that its uncompromising honesty is its main fault: we never get to know Bob as well as we should. Here's a man who says that the masochism and body modification were a way of containing the disease, but he never truly explains how. Why is the agonizing pain of masochism (he deeply feels it in many scenes pleading Sheree to stop) a method of relieving his own pain? And how does any of this constitute as art, or his need to be viewed as an "art object"? The film's best, most powerful scene is when a bloated Bob is nearing the end of his disease, and Sheree wonders why he will not submit to her. This scene, however, says more about their dependent relationship than anything about Bob's personal nature.

"Sick" is certainly fascinating and involving, but it never truly reveals anything about Bob Flanagan, or offer any insights into his behavior. Instead, we get a major dose of "shockarama," and some slight tidbits on Bob's family and his needy relationship with Sheree, but not much else. "Sick" is occasionally haunting, elegiac and lurid, but it says nothing more about this supermasochist other than that he is sick.

The Lovable Ape climbs WTC

KING KONG (1976)

Reviewed By Jerry Saravia

  1933's "King Kong" contains some bad acting, cruddy dialogue and shapeless characters. But what it does right is contain a level of adventure and sense of escapism, and it has the cinema's favorite giant ape beautifully animated as a puppet by the amazing Willis O'Brien. The love story, or was there one really in hindsight, between the ape and the blonde American girl is nonexistent and the movie is slightly confused about whether we should root for the ape or hope the beast is killed. 1976's lavish, equally silly and slightly campy version of "King Kong" doesn't make that mistake - we side with and root for the ape because he cares for the girl. Although it is clear the silverback gorilla didn't want to hurt the girl in the 1930's, it is abundantly clear that he loves her in this version, and it is much clearer in the 2005 Peter Jackson remake that followed.

There is not much plot in this film - it is a serviceable, connect-the-dots storyline. The giant ape is somewhere on Skull Island. A crew is assembled by an aspiring megalomaniac and greedy Petrox Oil executive (Charles Grodin) who is interested in finding oil and is certain that it exists in this island off the Indian Ocean, until an anthropologist (Jeff Bridges) is more interested in the rumored prehistoric creature on that island. There is also Dwan (Jessica Lange), an actress who is brought aboard after being found in a raft unconscious. Eventually, we are in Skull Island which is full of stereotypical natives who desire the blonde woman - she can be used as bait for Kong. Kong (Rick Baker, dressed as an ape) appears, takes the screaming girl, fights pythons (though disappointingly few others prehistoric creatures) and is gassed and transported back to New York City to use as a sideshow attraction. You know the rest.

Kong is the most impressive facet of this movie and gives the best performance. Baker does a stunning job of making Kong real and is able to facilitate a wide array of expressions - when he snarls and pounds his chest, we are awed. Though this is essentially a man dressed in a gorilla suit, one does miss the herky-jerkiness of those antiquated special-effects that made Kong tactile back in the day. Today, or even in 1976, audiences wanted reality and CGI post-"Jurassic Park" makes that reality real. CGI was not around in 1976 and just as well - Kong is a convincingly vivid, living breathing creature and that is good enough for me (Jackson's creation is twice the marvel to witness and possibly the most realistic depiction of a giant gorilla in film history).

"King Kong" also boasts a memorable music score by John Barry, fine special-effects and the ending is far more tragic than the original. Unfortunately, sandwiched in between all the good stuff are the characters and they do not bear as much scrutiny or personality. Grodin is a one-dimensional businessman who turns into a one-dimensional villain. Jeff Bridges barely exists as nothing more than an occasionally irate puppy dog (his long hair and beard cover up all his best features). Jessica Lange is a good screamer and cries on cue but her character is nothing much to work with (she clearly went on to better things).

"King Kong" has some elements that improve on the original (the ape's emoting, the love story) and does nothing to improve the original's slimly developed characters. I like this version overall (I had seen it in theaters back in the day) but, deep down, I feel for the original O'Brien Kong.