Indie Sex: Taboos

Indie Sex: Taboos (2007)

*** (out of 4)

Documentary taking a look at Hollywood and various sexual taboos. The director would go onto make three more of these documentaries and she certainly handled and researched the material a lot better then. This film here has a lot of good information but at the same time there's a lot of films overlooked. The other documentaries in this series did a great job at covering Hollywood, foreign films and underground films but this one here pretty much just looks at Hollywood. There's mention of Luis Bunuel in terms of sexuality influences America but that's about it. There are countless foreign movies that tried real sex in films yet this documentary basically covers later day films that did it and called them ground breaking. Naturally Last Tango in Paris gets some discussion as well as the recent Shortbus. If you're new to this type of thing then I'm sure you'll learn a lot here but there's a lot more out there to learn and not all the information here is too accurate.

I was so enthused when I first heard that IFC was doing a four part series on the history of sex in the cinema that I couldn't wait to see it. What a monumental disappointment! The series fails on so many levels that I only ended up screening two of the episodes ( the last two)...they were enough to send me screaming into the night. If this subject is truly of interest to you and you have a fairly large frame of reference, you too will be maddened by the wrongheadedness and general lack of knowledge put forth by the so-called critics on Indie Sex. Imagine HBO's Real Sex combined with the intellectual complexities of one VH1"s "100 Best..." series... the shows are an hour long and I found myself constantly checking the clock. Landmark films and landmark scenes either are completely missing or go begging for coherent analysis. Perhaps this is best viewed as an essay on the state of film criticism in the new century (deader than the 8 track tape). I think Jami Bernard of the times ( a legit critic) had the shows highpoint when she said that she had a problem with the oral sex scene in "Brown Bunny" because she "really didn't like Vincent Gallo's character" and she didn't want him to be getting that act performed on him. Very professional indeed! Yeah, he was yucky!

Here we have the example of trying to do too much in too little time. Giving examples of films exposing sexual taboos should take longer than one hour. I think the film should have concentrated on directors with a larger body of work. Don Roos and Miguel Arteta each have one movie discussed and I wouldn't consider either one very shocking. At least John Waters and David Cronenberg got segments, but again "Blue Velvet" didn't really deserve a segment; I think the same could be said for Atom Egoyan's films. I guess my real problem was with who was omitted. When I think of perversion in the cinema, Peter Greenaway, Nicholas Roeg, Ken Russell and Russ Meyer immediately come to mind. With the exception of Meyer, maybe the others are considered too mainstream but some of those directors' movies make these so-called indie taboo films seem pretty tame (excluding Waters, Cronenberg and "Blue Velvet"). A so-so documentary. OK for the novice viewer.