All My Best, Aria

REVIEWED BY CHARLES LONBERGER

At the end of a decade that began with almost promiscuous productivity, Andrew Blake’s production schedule is slowing to a crawl. The malaise, aggravated by piracy problems, that has turned into a crisis for Adult, has forced the filmmaker to raid his archives and assemble compilations, the footage re-released with his own commentary added to it. This look backward approach implicitly places his cinematic relevance, rich as it is, in the past tense, even as it is bathed with the insight of his introspection when re-released.

In truth, his latest compilation, All My Best, Aria, could just as accurately have been titled All My Best, Andrew, as the footage assembled, a retrospective from the years 2000-2003, is drawn from the period when the machine known as Andrew Blake was operating at full efficiency. It is an ode to impossibly perfect physical beauty, and presents the female of the species at its most exquisite. It is the ultimate in Glamour.

In contrast to earlier compilations, Blake uses his commentary here as a shield, contenting himself to establish time and place, and to introduce scenes. Nonetheless, he exhibits almost as great a gift with words as he has with images (Dominance is “fiery” and background is “hard and metallic”). Blake’s narration is detached, with many references to wealth, or expensive real estate surroundings (Holmby Hills, Bel Air, Rome, Lower Manhattan with “vintage view cameras”), which betray a concurrent implicit obsession running parallel to his explicit fixations. Despite the assumed bisexuality of his performers and the sexual superiority of breast size depicted, it is precisely Blake’s essentially softcore style that saves his material from becoming base.

The filmmaker shows great insight into his artistic creation’s, Aria’s, “teasing sexuality and natural coquettishness,” while casually referring to “jealous boyfriends,” the combination of “corsets and cleavage,” sophisticatedly observing that “the release from bondage is as arousing as the restraint.” The wacky fetishism that Blake has made his own is to be seen primarily in accents, such as clothing and caps, wine and podiatry, lipstick, nylons, hair curlers and cigarettes, none of which is tinged with the torment that has hallmarked certain images, particularly alcohol, of late, although certain scenes suggest visual threats and violation via scissors, even as the performers indulge in mutual breast worship. Although the title performer, Aria, ends up so wet you could feel it, Blake’s highest compliment comes when he describes her as “well adjusted.”

Although he stops along the way to portray oral foot worship and catfights, Blake is best when lingering on girl/girl lip locks, showing kissing to be an intensely erotic act. Aria takes a shower in candle wax, her flesh rolling as her butt gets beat in slo mo. Her inverted nipple pops out, as her face gets slapped by heavy breasts; she is flogged, reminding us why she was Blake’s most popular fantasy submissive. Getting dressed was never more visually intoxicating.

Behind his tasteful visual veneer, beneath his worldly pose, beyond the commerce that this release represents, is concealed an artist who creates to communicate. Andrew Blake seeks to be understood, even as he entertains with this remembrance of the beginning of a decade as seen from its end.

All My Best, Aria is distributed by Studio A.

The Hurt Locker

REVIEWED BY CHARLES LONBERGER

Nothing more than a glorified student film, The Hurt Locker adheres unadventurously to long established conventions, without a shred of cinematic imagination.

This production is most successful as an example of product placement (being an advertisement for Big Tobacco and Hyundai). But, beyond that, the direction of Kathryn

Bigelow is unsure of itself and so reliant on genre conventions as to be stylistically pretentious. She pads the film with extreme close-ups juxtaposed against establishing shots, abrupt zooms, POV and a random visual design, mixed in with vulgar small talk. She employs the ragged, hand held, chaotic camerawork of Barry Ackroyd, a technique that historically is meant to convey a sense of authenticity, but ends up in Bigelow’s hands as overused and numbingly obvious. In her clumsy attempt to be allegorical, Bigelow is heavy handed in her use of animals to make commentary on her action. To make matters worse, the editing of Chris Innis and Bob Murawski is completely haphazard.

Further, the “original music” by Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders is employed traditionally to build tension.

The script, credited to Mark Boal, is straightforward, borrowing the countdown narrative mechanism that dates back to High Noon, and paints the American excursion into Iraq as an exercise wherein the liberated wage terrorist war on their liberators. War is depicted as exclusively a male problem; men get drunk and wrestle with each other and are terrified of parenthood. Although Arabic women are portrayed as strong and chase American military trespassers off, and speak their mind to the Occupiers, war, shown to be a form of entertainment for the locals, is depicted as being a drug that men get addicted to, fleeing their spousal responsibilities to reenlist.

Arabic terrorists are treated implicitly heroically, if facelessly. Waiting in ambush, their guns are always drawn. The anti-Iraq war sentiment is betrayed through observations that “If he wasn’t an insurgent before, he sure is now,” following the army’s encounter with an Arab. The U.S. army is further shown to be a hotbed of interracial anxiety. Curiously, for a film so male-centered, sex simply is never addressed, even subliminally, as if men were not concerned with it, an assumption that gives lie to the characterizations.

Which brings us to the acting, which is sincere, if largely indistinguishable, save for dialects. The real stars of this film are the bombs and wires that are dismantled.

All of the above renders The Hurt Locker a tedious exercise, unoriginal, entirely derivative from start to finish and cinematically boring.

It is distributed by Summit Entertainment.

The Ultimate Cuckold

REVIEWED BY CHARLES LONBERGER

At their best, the releases from the Severe Society Films are flippant and witty. And their most recent release, The Ultimate Cuckold, which lampoons the Personal Trainer as a Sex Specialist is – in concept – hilarious, being a satirical take on Jillian Michaels. The concept makes us see Michaels’ “men must cry” and “female empowerment” technique as an assault on the Natural Order of things.

While the release introduces us to Robin Pachino, a non-glamorous, yet very hot MILF, the film fails to realize its parody. And this is entirely due to its execution: the editing borrows from Gonzo and imitates real time, which is inherently non-cinematic and renders large stretches of the production boring. The camerawork of Jimmy Broadway is stagnant and uninvolving, although blame for this must lie with his director Mistress D, whose focus is fatally performance oriented.

The premise of the film (a husband whose change in attitude – and the methodology by which it is achieved - is illustrated in not-to-misunderstand fashion) is undermined by its ambiguity. After all, what we are told is a humiliation is, quite clearly for the enthusiastic “husband” Peter Pressure, a reward in the upside down perspective of this company. Adding to the problem is the merely workmanlike performance of Ms. Amber Rayne as the trainer. Her rage is disembodied.

It is released by Severe Society Films.

FROM THE VAULT:

Blow Up

REVIEWED BY CHARLES LONBERGER

Students of the cinema of Michaelangelo Antonioni make much of the intellectual properties of his oeuvre, but one often overlooked aspect of his work is just how firmly rooted in the field of Documentary it is. In a certain manner of thinking, all Antonioni’s films up to and including Zabriskie Point are, in part, documents of time or social strata (the stock market in Red Desert, the bourgeoisie in L’Aventura and La Notte, etc.).

While 1966’s Blow Up is many things to many people, what it incontrovertibly is is a document that fixes a particular time and place in time, immortalizing the gray beauty of Swinging London and the immediacy of its environs, especially in its particularization of London suburbs.

Visually, Antonioni’s metaphors are very clear, particularly the central one that aligns the extreme abstractions to the point of pointillism of paintings with the pixilated blow ups of the anti-hero photographer. He fixes a moment in time where photography gave privilege to the easy availability of women as models, without ever questioning or establishing just why that is. In 1960’s Swinging London, we are shown, creative males dominate passive women who are all too happy to follow directions and to be objectified by them, or, at least, do not object to it.

In a certain way, this film is a mystery about a mystery, where the search for an answer, rather than the answer itself, is of paramount importance. Thus the riddle is more important than its solution. The implication in the use of the mimes as framing devices for the action, and the antihero’s interaction with them at the beginning and at the end, presents us with the reality of unreality, a world where interpretation (both in looking at a painting and a photograph’s fragment) is more important, ultimately, than what is being interpreted.

Two things bind Antonioni as an artist to the 1950s and 60s culture. Whereas by his final film, Idenfizone di una Donna, Antonioni’s protagonist is isolated from the feminism and lesbianism around him, here the self-centered artist (the photographer) subjects women to his will, something that Antonioni is very comfortable in fictionally creating. Very much of its time, was the way the director employed nudity as a metaphor for sex, when, in fact, they are two separate animals.

Antonioni relied heavily on the cinematography of Carlo di Palma to give his visual imprint, and here it is geometric, zooming in and out on movement. It is inspired by Pop Art sensibilities, and, at the same time, encapsulates them. The art direction of Ashton Gorton is excellent, and creates an Ensorish antique store. The soundtrack is most powerful in its silence, although the moody jazz of Herbie Hancock reminds us that Antonioni just used London as a backdrop for other concerns. Rock, in the form of the Yardbirds, is shown to be self destructive, a world where races and backgrounds interact and that produces lemming-like behavior; things have fleeting, materialistic value (a guitar neck). Thus, the film condemns or ignores the Rock n’ Roll that established the London depicted.

The acting was excellent, if underplayed. David Hemmings, in his first and best starring role, is perverse, self-concerned and quasi cherubic as the photographer. Sarah Miles is enigmatic as a woman whose heterosexual, ambiguous relationships are tempting to view as a metaphor for real life muse Monica Vitti’s Sapphic ones, which involved the director. Elbows akimbo, Vanessa Redgrave was also never better as a woman who, perhaps, entraps a lover to his death, and she “stands well” while coming apart. In minor roles, Jane Birken is winsome, while both she and Gillian Hill are defined by the color of their tights.

Ultimately, Blow Up is more than it is, and endures because it fixes a moment and is a document of its time.

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