Posts tagged: sunset blvd

It’s kind of funny that I love love love the aesthetic of the new Captivity movie, yet I’m kinda not cool with the subject matter. I’m not too comfortable with it being censored either, though.

I know people have been complaining, since before I was born, about violence in movies being okay, while sexuality is censored. But I have to say, why is it that if someone puts their cock in a beautiful woman’s mouth, the movie is probably going to get an X and thus limited distro and thus limited financing and production values? But dismember the same woman slowly and the discussion becomes R or NC-17? Is it really okay to broadcast horrors, the likes of which most people will never ever see in person, to seventeen-year-olds, but healthy sexuality, of a sort most people will experience, takes another year of maturing for audiences to be able to handle it? What kind of a society are we going to have when we show teenagers torture porn like Hostel before we let them see, if you can forgive me for invoking normalcy, normal sex?

Full disclosure: Obviously, you all can’t have missed the advertisements Captivity bought on a number sites I work on, including this one. And, yes, if you went to the premiere party at Los Angeles meat market Privilege, you probably spotted around half a dozen hotties you recognized from BlueBlood.com, along with various other contributors.

It bums me out, on a number of levels, that the premiere party was billed as ground-breakingly outrageous and nasty. This seems to show a simultaneous lack of respect for the performers and desire to profit from them. Although the cigarette smoke-stained off-white interior of Privilege generally plays host to …

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Every once in a while, I like to watch old black and white movies. I’m particularly partial to ones where men speak in clipped strong rhythms and people get murdered. But I’m open-minded and my TiVo recently suggested that I try watching The Wild One.

The Wild One is the classic 50’s flick where Marlon Brando’s Johnny character, when asked what he was rebelling against, famously answered “What’ve you got?” It is difficult to watch the movie in the present day and fully grasp the impact it had at the time. Supposedly many people felt that James Dean was a Marlon Brando wannabe and Brando’s swaggering performance in The Wild One informed the later acting careers of men like Steve McQueen and Jack Nicholson. The rival motorcycle gang, lead by Lee Marvin’s Chino in the movie, is called The Beetles and is believed by many people to have inspired the name of the band The Beatles with an a. I’ve seen mention that Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols had a jacket based on Brando in The Wild One or possibly even the specific jacket used in the film, but I haven’t been able to find confirmation more solid than rumor on this. Regardless, even today, everyone from lesbian drag kings to Leonardo DiCaprio takes inspiration from the seminal role of troubled Johnny Strabler. Heck, I personally even commissioned a Cookie Monster Brando before I ever saw the movie in its entirety, so ingrained is this flick in the American consciousness.

Despite this, watching today, it is difficult to know what mood the movie could have evoked when it came out in the 50’s. The movie was released in America in 1953 and was banned in …

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