Variety

I understand the feminist perspective in this film, but since it's virtually plotless and entirely too long, it ends up being a snooze fest. Scenes in which nothing happens go on for five minutes or longer. Some of the camera work is good, and it's interesting to see the old trashy Times Square of the 80's. But if this is supposed to be a message film, it's too static and boring to make the audience receptive.

There is no doubt that feminism is what holds this movie together.

Bette Gordon made this movie in the height of the feminist debate over pornography. She doesn't endorse or condemn porn in this movie.

"Variety" depicts a woman who uses porn as a tool of self-exploration.

The movie is also a spoof of film noir. Gordon has fun with the genre by changing the sex of the main character to female. She lets her heroine play the amateur sleuth, which is traditionally a male character.

Unlike many genre movies in which women are terrorized, there is no victim in "Variety." Gordon contends that pornography doesn't necessarily make women victims. It is so refreshing that Gordon never puts her heroine at the site of male violence.

Gordon succeeds in keeping the viewer in suspense till the very end of the movie.

The combination of Kathy Acker as writer and Bette Gordon as director should have signaled a potent brew, but sadly what we get here is a brilliant idea cut down savagely by the film's low-budget budget. Tracing the seedy, crime-ridden porn theater world of Times Square in the early 80s from a what was a post-feminist perspective should have pushed the boundaries of what could be explored in feminist cinema but here the effect is to disengage the viewer from the convoluted action. Every technical aspect from the sound to the acting feels shabby and weak and frankly underwhelming but there is an underground post-Factory (Warhol not WalMart) passion at work that just about saves this oddity. Acker's polemical script presents feminist intervention/investment in the patriarchal world of pornography with some gusto and ambiguity at times but eventually the direction dilutes itself in a haze of revisionist sexual politics, thanks to the inconsequential scripting and unfocused lensing.

I've works at the flagship Krispy Kreme in Time Square, during the graveyard shift in COVID. That will probably be the closest my generation will ever get to a NY of this film. Gritty, but with absence of character! Grindhouse, B-movies, and exploitation films all have their starts to thank for in the theater district of Manhattan. Cinephiles must give flowers to the films that deserve their recognition in encompassing a world so few films would dare harp on, the subject matter of this film has a strict stance on either focusing on the male gaze or completely inverting it, and the film dose the latter. This film shows how 42st was structured chaos, a world which only legit street hounds could survive in. This world exists no longer, and for that reason, as historical guide this film is 10/10!

When adult theaters such as the one profiled in this film were prolific, feminist activists would lead tours of Times Square to bring attention to their cause.

The main character's regular and extensive swimming exercise is a good analogy for the pace of the film. Steady, slow, heavy.

One amusing note, when our heroine follows her mystery man who has just taken a cab, she jumps into another cab, the sax is on the soundtrack, no dialouge, but you can read her lips: "Follow that Cab!"

It's also ironic that she follows him to the Fulton Street Fish Market, which in real life became the focus of an extensive organized crime probe.