A heart-shaped scientist discovers that inhaling beetroot extract leads to immortality, but the ungrateful populace considers living forever a mixed blessing.
Tag Archives: Mockumentary
CAPSULE: SAFE WORD (2022)
Aishiteru!
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The sixth installment in the Pete’s Perverted Pix series
Safe Word is available for purchase or rental on-demand.
DIRECTED BY: Kōji Shiraishi
FEATURING: Kawase Chisako, Torinomi Nagisa
PLOT: Idol singer Misa is gets recruited by an adult club and becomes a professional dominatrix under the tutelage of a mistress.
COMMENTS: Ladies and gentlemen, and everyone on the spectrum, your humble hedonist has returned from a veritable safari of sex exploring weird movies on the BDSM circuit. Today’s movie, together with “TFTtTfDSHP” and Antiporno, are among the three nakedest and kinkiest films I’ve ever seen. In my quest for the weirdest of erotic fetish cinema, I have hiked through the valley of boobies, twin peaks marching like sand dunes to the horizon. I have seen every body part smacked, licked, tied, or splattered with paint. I have explored enough daddy issues and mommy issues to make Sigmund Freud choke on his cocaine. I’ve witnessed acts not even documented in the Urban Dictionary. In particular, I’ve snorkeled through oceans of estrogen, because the points of view with these movies have been overwhelmingly female. Girls dominate this genre! So far, the kinkiest male-focused erotic film I’ve seen has been directed by Kenneth Anger. Boys, you need to catch up! I’ll say it again, the first director to make a serious film about a male/male S&M relationship will have a name that lives in film infamy. The Yaois alone will carve your likeness into the sides of granite cliffs.
Today’s film, Safe Word (named for the actual BDSM practice of having an emergency signal in case the bottom can’t take it anymore) is almost too on-the-nose for the current project. I picked it after the previous entry based on my interest in diving deeper into Japanese “pinku” and “Roman Porno” cinema subcultures: Antiporno was a send-up of the genre, so let’s see a serious entry. Safe Word is indeed as pink as a cartoon panther alright, with kinks o’plenty paraded and bountiful flesh ahoy. It just isn’t all that weird, though quirky bits and scenes do provide enough strangeness to at least make for an unusual entry. The plot is basic and unadorned with psychedelic fluff. Misa (Kawase Chisako), a singer/celebrity with a tepid career, gets recruited by a mysterious adult club. She’s offered the role of house dominatrix, to be employed on the business end of a whip for high-priced clientele. At first she’s repulsed, until she finds out she can take her aggression out on smiling and willing masochists. Then she dives into the deep end of kink. (It’s clear she was at least curious about this BDSM business to start with.) The story sort of follows the template of Buñuel’s Belle De Jour (1967), with mild commentary on contemporary social and sexual mores, but Japanese hentai style.
Not that Misa gets to crack the whip on clients from day one, oh no… she has to be trained. Wink wink, cue the oft-written BDSM scenario known as “boot camp” where a harsh master/mistress collars a new slave and puts them through an obstacle course of pulse-pounding, edgy fetish activities for a month until the bottom “graduates” to topping. In this case, Misa’s mentor is the scene-dominating Kanon (Torinomi Nagisa), a statuesque femme fatale who instantly snaps a psychological chain around Misa’s neck from their first meeting and leads her though a series of painful, humiliating, or just orgasm-inducing experiences. Later Misa takes on her own clients, whom are satisfied with a standard beating/tie-up/nipple clips routine, for the most part. But what of her former (ongoing?) idol career? What about her public reputation? What can she say to her friends when she’s being paraded around town by Kanon with a remote-controlled vibrator down her pants? And is Misa in a relationship with Kanon, or is she merely the latest in a succession of Kanon’s human playthings? Mild tensions are set up, but there’s really not a heavy plot here so much as a showcase of perversions.
As for those quirks I promised: Safe Word takes itself as a mild comedy. The main running gag is that it’s a mockumentary, which means (despite the cinematography being professional) the cameraman is randomly acknowledged in-scene, sometimes by characters mildly alarmed that their big sadomasochist session is about to be recorded, or sometimes by characters who take the opportunity for a selfie pose. Sporadically Misa live-blogs on social media about her thoughts on her career, stardom, and sexuality. Small details stand out, such as the decor inside the adult club where most of the action takes place: a baroque, elaborately painted parlor whose walls are crisscrossed with knotted rope, as if the walls themselves were bound. That’s honestly the weirdest it gets, if you don’t count the near-constant acts of hedonistic excess playing throughout.
Safe Word is a well-crafted film which serves as a serious treatment of alternative sexuality every bit as deep and respectful as Secretary (2002), while becoming a near-nirvana for hentai/Asian erotica fans. Note the difference: every culture has practiced bondage, but only the Japanese raise it to its own recognized art form, shibari. Who can help but admire such dedication? Safe Word is not for the vanilla viewer, and barely vouched for as a watch for weirdophiles, but for loud and proud deviants everywhere it’s highly recommended, a leather-and-rubber-clad valentine to the modern civilized sadomasochist.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
I think this movie is weirder than average
I think this movie is better than average
366 UNDERGROUND: CUDDLY TOYS (2022)
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DIRECTED BY: Kansas Bowling
FEATURING: Kansas Bowling
PLOT: Professor Kansas Bowling, with a degree in “Teen Age,” draws on myriad examples of girls’ ruined childhoods to explore the dangers of impressionability and sexual predation.
COMMENTS: There’s a human skeleton arranged on a string, a red backdrop, an old slide projector, and a strange figure: a professor, she tells us, with her field of study situated on the grim intersection of the evil and the mundane. Shattered futures, injured esteem and injured bodies, dogged sunniness, doom, defiance, death, and rape: all these elements, across numerous (“There are 100 actresses in this film”) testimonials, flesh out this frightful and compelling, sometimes experimental and sometimes verité, mockumentary dissecting the teenage girlhood experience in all its harrowing possibility.
These girls’ lives unfold in a murky ’70s-to-’90s era, with postcards sent from the road, nary a portable phone to be seen, and the recurring Scott Walker tune, “It’s Raining Today,” lashing ominously as crooned counterpoint to the poppy Nilsson/Monkees title track. After a brief introduction from the professor, Cuddly Toys dives right into its deadpan-dreadful proceedings with a “Miss Pre-Teen” beauty pageant, setting the tone: we’re in for a nasty ride, made just barely tolerable by the clinical absurdism of our guide and the improbable perkiness of (some of) the girls and women onscreen.
But discomfort—to put it mildly—weighs on the viewer, and appropriately so. As a general rule, I am not prone to guilt by association, but by the film’s end I was truly appalled by the evil potential, and the evil realized by, my fellow men. I had no objections to Bowling depicting this, however. There’s far too great a streak of nastiness in the world, which menaces one sex exponentially more than the other. That said, Professor Bowling slips in a trenchant observation in her closing remarks—one which raises the question as to which sex is actually considered more disposable.
Cuddly Toys is a mind-blowing journey into the casual cruelty found in our culture, weaving harrowing nightmares from grubby dreams. The victims are clear, and the perpetrators—though predominately male—seem to be just about everyone; there is more than enough blame to go around.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
I think this movie is weirder than average
I think this movie is better than average
![Cuddly Toys [Blu-ray]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51xS45EUVTL._SL500_.jpg)
IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: COMING APART (1969)
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DIRECTED BY: Milton Moses Ginsberg
FEATURING: Rip Torn, Sally Kirkland, Viveca Lindfors
PLOT: A psychiatrist sets himself up in an apartment overlooking the East River where he beds a series of women, all the while heading steadily toward a complete mental breakdown.
COMMENTS: It’s hard to appreciate just how strange the conceit of Coming Apart must have felt to moviegoers in 1969. Here in the second quarter of the 21st century, when people document their lives frequently and extensively, the sheer strangeness of a man choosing to capture his illicit second life on film just doesn’t come across the same. Viewers at the time were surely perplexed by a film that seemed to be composed entirely a footage taken from a single vantage point. It must have seemed like nothing short of voyeurism, the worst kind of candid camera. Contemporary reviews of the film frequently flail about for the one point of comparison they have at hand: James McBride’s groundbreaking pseudo-documentary David Holzman’s Diary. But while this intentionally self-aware movie has similar vibes, Coming Apart is something very different. Ginsberg crafts a silver screen salute to a man who feels compelled to chronicle his life for a very compelling reason: self-loathing.
Torn’s erstwhile analyst has ditched his career and his pregnant wife, creating a new identity for himself by setting up shop in a Kips Bay love nest. He doesn’t seem at all clear as to why he’s doing this, and for reasons even he can’t begin to unpack, he decides to film everything, making this an early example of the found footage genre. The footage we find is largely his attempts at seduction, successful to varying degrees; but while this is a film with plenty of sex, it’s much more about the manipulations and deceptions that are perpetrated just to get to the act. The wayward Dr. Glaser is an easygoing seducer, but he gets no enjoyment out of it, neither the hunt nor the kill. He’s like a man grazing at the buffet not because he’s hungry but because there’s food. Anyone approaching Coming Apart looking for sexytimes is likely to end up as disappointed as Glaser.
For anyone who knows Torn primarily from the lacerating deadpan he brings to later projects like Defending Your Life, Men in Black, or “The Larry Sanders Show,” his work here is revelatory. He deploys his gravelly baritone infrequently, communicating largely through the subtlest of expressions. It can feel like he’s hardly acting at all, until a crucial scene late in the movie when he goes nearly catatonic and you realize just how emotive he has been all along. Most of the women opposite him, such as Lois Markle’s aspiring fetish-lover or Lynn Swan’s mercenary young mom, are richly detailed, although they can feel melodramatic by comparison. The characters who avoid sex are the most grounded, like Viveca Lindfors’ ex-mistress who tells Torn to his face that his charms won’t work on her anymore. Standing out among the crowd is Sally Kirkland, whose growing mania is grounded by her shockingly total lack of vanity or guardedness. Her role could easily be viewed as “the crazy broad,” but she earns respect and sympathy by giving nothing less than her all. The idea that Torn’s hidden camera captures these people so authentically justifies the gimmick.
While the filming technique suggests gritty realism, the characters and situations we encounter feel forced, as most of Glaser’s sexual partners bring their own lunacy to the show. Were it not for the bad doctor’s slow-motion breakdown, it might be easy to interpret the film’s message as “women be wack.” It is interesting, though, to see documentary formalism deployed in an experimental manner. In the early hangover following the sexual revolution, Ginsberg’s daring feature has the smarts to get out of the way and let the stories of the shellshocked survivors speak for themselves.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by Joel Heller. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
I think this movie is weirder than average
I think this movie is better than average
![Coming Apart [Blu-ray]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41cbhK2CjSL._SL500_.jpg)
Coming Apart [Blu-ray]
- Rip Torn (Men in Black) gives one of the great screen performances as a psychiatrist secretly filming his own mental breakdown in Milton Moses Ginsberg’s classic exploration of dark eroticism and self-referential cinematic form
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Go to AmazonIT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: BROTHERS OF THE HEAD (2005)
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DIRECTED BY: Keith Fulton, Louis Pepe
FEATURING: Harry Treadaway, Luke Treadaway, Tania Emery, Jane Horrocks
PLOT: Conjoined twins Tom and Barry are conscripted into show business by an unscrupulous promoter who plans to make them into gimmicky pop stars, but they follow their own path, becoming punk rock pioneers.
COMMENTS: The original Siamese twins, Chang and Eng Bunker (who were, in fact, born in Siam, present-day Thailand), were a sensation from the moment they arrived on American shores. For a decade, they toured the country shocking audiences with the horrifying wonder of their physical connection. Their private lives were the subject of public fascination: they married a pair of sisters and fathered 19 children between them, fueling speculation about the physical and moral gymnastics required to accomplish such a feat. They kept slaves until the Civil War, returned to touring to rebuild their fortunes after the war, quarreled with P. T. Barnum, and eventually died within hours of each other.
I was starting to think about how much the plot of Brothers of the Head paralleled the tale of the Bunkers, when the film came right out and made the comparison itself. The Howe boys hold up a picture of their predecessors in conjoined fame, noting the similarity of their situations, and when they did, my heart sank a little. Far from pre-empting any protests, it solidified my fear that this story of shocking originality—conjoined twins become rock stars—was only going to walk down well-tread paths.
Brothers of the Head takes the form of pseudo-documentary, unspooling the short but eventful professional lives of the twins through a series of I-was-there talking head interviews and a remarkably deep treasure trove of archival footage. It’s delivered with a high degree of authenticity, which is not surprising considering the nonfiction pedigree of directors Fulton and Pepe, who helmed two different Terry Gilliam making-of documentaries, including Lost in La Mancha. But it also puts the central characters at a level of remove, ensuring that we can never know them except through the interpretations of others. And that choice ends up causing the most damage to the film’s credibility, because it means that any point the filmmakers want to make must be delivered with skull-crushing obviousness. Suggestions of impropriety by the boys’ handlers are conveyed through nervous tics and unsubtle hints. The arrival of a pretty girl to drive a (metaphorical) wedge between the brothers is endlessly dissected by present-day commentators with 20/20 hindsight. And were you wondering if Tom and Barry were working through their troubles via their songs? If the glaring transparency of the lyrics doesn’t tip you off, then the latter-day interviewee observing “Now what do you think that was all about?” with a cockeyed glare should Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: BROTHERS OF THE HEAD (2005)