SuicideGirls: The First Tour

This film sets to envisage what society doesn't, Reality, that girls with tattoos, piercing's and odd dye jobs are just as beautiful as models and play boy center fold girl. This Documentary is not about perversion or pornography, simply an artistic view of the beautiful and sexual beings the suicide girls. That and have an extremely good time partying and showing other people what you've got, confidence.

For those into Rock /punk / metal genres this movie is for you, it also for those who are interested in embracing other genres of people, however if you are a little to conservative you'll hate this film, which is great because it isn't created to inspire those who are beige.

If your really into suicide girls, then you'll love the DVD. It features the interviews, photo shoots, and on stage performances. I had been looking forward to the performances, but there was only quite a little bit. The best part of the DVD was the photo shoots. One thing I didn't like about the DVD was that there were only about 10 girls on the DVD when there are virtually 1000's on the website. Not much selection. In response to the other comment written; of course their going to have attitudes, their suicide girls and that's what makes them hot. I love piercings and tattoos...and girls... but i think your money would be better spent on their website membership.

The Suicide Girls have had a website going for quite some time with huge success. The premise for the website is simple – pin-up pictures of girls who look kind of Gothic, with lots of tattoos and piercings. The DVD documents their first tour. What do they do on this tour? Two things – act like absolute bitches and perform strip shows. The shows are very similar to what you would see at an upper class strip joint, except the girls act punk. The drink on stage, spit on the crowd, yell abuse and give everyone the finger. They fight the "traditional model image", so some of them are not so pretty. Some are very attractive (personalities aside) however. You also see some of the porn photo shoots for the website.

It's the interviews that really make this DVD so terrible. The girls are terribly behaved animals. They are extremely self-righteous about the pornography they produce. They claim it includes real women of all shapes and sizes and makes them feel good about being women. There is a notable exclusion of any black women or fat women, however, and it really is porn just the same as playboy or hustler. They brag about how alternative they are and naively believe they do not conform to any sort of image when they clearly do. The interviews are also cut together terribly. The jump cuts used are poorly done and film school students would do a much better job. The stage footage looks like home video footage.

The girls are very nasty, angry, confused beings who you would not want to be friends with. This is made most obvious in a sickening scene in which one girl recounts a sexual experience she had. In this she seduced a shy guy and then preceded to assault him, biting his chest so that he required hospitilisation and stitches. She explains this giggling and excitedly and as if we are to think it is cool. Imagine if this was a man talking about such an assault on a woman...

Some of the music on the DVD is really fantastic. It is the saving grace of the film. One of the extras on the DVD is the Probot video for "Shake Your Blood". This features the hottest of the Suicide Girls and is a great video for a great song. There are some outtakes from the interviews which are dull. There are some clips of the girls playing "practical jokes" – being nasty, horrible people again. There is also a "no talking" feature which allows you to watch the movie without the interviews, which would be better, although if that's your bag, just get a Gothic porno.

I gave this two stars instead of one as it was visually interesting for about 5 minutes and the music was great. The fact that this is seen as "the new face of feminism" is truly disturbing and dangerously incorrect.

I found this tour video to be quite entertaining. The documentary is set very similar to the way skate videos are, with introductions and individual parts for all the girls, ending with a photo shoot for each one. I was pretty unsure of what to think of SuicideGirls before but watching this really made me gain a lot of respect for them. The way they talk about each other and the tour really shows that even if it's unconventional, they're a part of something special that they all connect with. The photo shoots are sexual in nature but to me seem to provide some form of expression for the girls, as crazy as that sounds. You may need to be a little open to enjoy this video but those who do, I'm sure will appreciate it the way I do; as a new form of art.

I watched this paired with the very stylish and mainstream "Kamakazi Girls (Shimotsuma monogatari)." In addition to the similar names, they come from a similar place.

What happens if you are in the sixties, and you know that women's roles are messed up? Well, you start a powerful enlightened social movement to change it, right? On the sides are the crazies, mostly religious nuts screaming that wimmen is wimmen and God made them soft and subservient.

Now flash forward and see where we are. Perhaps there has been no progress made, we've just shifted from one set of stories to another with the same balance of empowerment and constraint. Perhaps there's just something hardwired into us that prevents us ever from wholesale equivalence of souls. Perhaps Muslim women don't want to be "free," because the alternative is no better and has the additional negative of being unfamiliar.

Here's what we have. In "Kamakazi Girls," the two conflicting roles were explicit in the two characters: a supergirlie girl, in frills and flowers, and a tough girl. Now this tough girl is new in the last couple decades. It a feminized male hoodlum stereotype, coming from the Marlin Brando/James dean mode of cool and tough. Cool here means that you don't care what the world thinks or says, you'll stick it in their eye simply on principle.

It means you want to demonstrate your lack of convention. Since we live in a more cinematic age now, you'll do it with appearance in addition to attitude. In fact, the appearance drives the attitude.

But what about the dual self problem? Girls want to be sexy, but what if they also want to be cool? Okay, here's a path: be a suicide girl. You get to alter your appearance on your skin, which helps in both ways because that way you get to be sexy too. In fact, why not combine the two all the way and do very sexually oriented acts while maintaining your tough cool? You get it both ways, skin being the text for both.

This is as sad as burkhas, and just as deterministically constraining, self-constraining.

Like so many exploitation films, the idea behind it is more interesting than the experience itself. Its odd, because if you go to the website, you can find some characters there who successfully weave a story of intelligence and independence. That may be a fiction, but surely there ARE women out there that are sexy, demonstrable and real. But the women we see here are simple losers. Maybe these are the only ones who would go "on tour."

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.