Shared without comment for your… edification?
Hardcore porn on Netflix Streaming
Lets be honest. Youve never heard of most of the movies available to stream on-demand through Netflix. Many are ranked by users between the one and two star range. But, where these films lack in such things as say, plot, they often makeup for their cinematic shortcomings with explicit nudity. The below list of streaming Netflix films containing hardcore sex was compiled in part from titles cross listed on MrSkin.com under the category, “real explicit sex.” While I have seen many of these titles, for the others Ive had to take faith in the fact that Mr. Skin categorized these films alongside the hardcore sex tapes of Kim Kardashian, Kendra Wilkinson, Montana Fishburne, and Tila Tequila. (via Daily Loaf.)
Okay, I lied. Commenting now. The movies cited include 9 1/2 Weeks, 9 Songs, Caligula, Inside Deep Throat and Last Tango in Paris, at least some of which you’ve probably heard of. And they are not just available through Netflix. You can also watch many of the films on demand through Amazon Prime.
Of those, 9 Songs (2004) is the most recent and possibly the most interesting, at least at this point.
Caligula (1979) was fun when it came out because it was sort of the Claytons of dirty movies: the porn you’re having when you’re not having porn. Lots of sex, but a gloss of culture (which was maybe just the gloss of money) that made it seem somehow less disreputable, lent to it in large part by a cast that included Helen Mirren, Peter O’Toole, and Malcolm McDowell. Plus history and costumes, which always lend a touch of gravitas. (Witness Downton Abbey.)
And both Last Tango in Paris and 9 1/2 Weeks were more or less sensations when they came out—because they were what Caligula only pretended to be: serious movies (or attempts) that nonetheless featured what was supposed to be serious sex. But looking back at those two now that the sensation has faded, it’s clear they weren’t very good movies, and the sex wasn’t all that great either. I think they’re basically unwatchable, whereas Caligula at least has the virtue of being campy and silly, cheesy, and that has a certain pleasure to it, whereas the seriousness of the other two now just seems dreadfully pretentious, stultifying. And then there’s the misogyny.
9 Songs is also trying to be a serious movie with serious sex in it. But—and this is a big difference—the sex is pretty good.
Though we might need to think about what constitutes “pretty good sex” in this context. Genuine hardcore porn is very focused stuff, in more ways than one. The camera angles, depth of field, lighting, even the cutting are all directed at maximizing scopophilia and sexual arousal. And you’re never in any doubt about what is going where at any given time (though in group scenes you may occasionally loose track of exactly whose whats are involved). And you’re never in doubt about when the action has reached its… climax. It is designed to have a direct appeal to our nether regions, and I find that directness appealing in its own way.
The sex in 9 Songs is not that. It is not hardcore sex, whatever the Daily Loaf might think. It’s sex. Sex as you (hopefully) know it, assuming you haven’t been utterly conditioned by porn. It’s a little vaguer. The people are focused, internally and on each other, but the scene, the details are more blurry. It’s not brightly light and in sharply focused close-up. And the camera spends much less time in what I think of as gynecological intensity mode. It is real sex, both in the sense that the actors are genuinely doing the things they seem to be doing on the screen, and in the sense that it is sex as people outside of movies (cishet people, in Western society) often/generally experience and enact it. At least when they are that age.
Here’s what Roger Ebert had to say about the sex in his fairly positive and very smart review:
“The sex scenes betray the phoniness of commercial pornography; when the Adult Film Awards give a prize for Best Acting, they’re ridiculed, but after seeing this film you’ll have to admit the hard-core performers are acting, all right; “9 Songs” observes the way real people play and touch and try things out, and make little comments and have surprised reactions.”
What Mark Kermode found most interesting about the film was that director Michael Winterbottom had made “the least titillating, most explicit movie around.” He found the movie irritating, but still appreciated what Winterbottom was doing with the sex. But he hated the people.
As for it being a serious movie, a movie that is serious about being a movie and actually tries to think through what that means… Well, it was made by Michael Winterbottom who I find to be one of the more interesting directors currently making movies. His movies aren’t always good, but they are always interesting, even if on no other level than as attempts to interrogate productively what it means to be a popular film, and how popular films might be other than they are, or tend to be (i.e., everything from Transformers: The Dark of the Moon to The Master). His filmography includes Welcome to Sarajevo, Wonderland, 24 Hour Party People, and Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story. He’s an intelligent and interested filmmaker, interested in what it means to make films, who thinks about what popular narrative cinema is and might be, and about how to push against the medium and its structures and expectations in (hopefully) productive and engaging ways.
9 Songs doesn’t always work. Both the narrative and the characters feel a bit too sketchy, and that’s pretty fatal. Kermode’s irritation with, even hatred of, the two main characters is not, sadly, a wildly idiosyncratic response. But I think it gets an A for effort, or at least a B, for giving us such good sex—that is, such real sex—in something approaching a mainstream English-language film, and doing that within a film that tries to play productively with both the visual and narrative qualities of mainstream film. (It also has a very good soundtrack.) It’s not an art film, and it’s not pornography. It’s something kind of new. Possibly the beginning of something.
For more…
- The Story of a Love Affair, in the Language of the Body – New York Times.\
- 9 Songs :: rogerebert.com
- Mark Kermode – 9 songs – YouTube
- Michael Winterbottom – Wikipedia
- 9 songs – Unrated Full Uncut Version – Amazon
- Caligula (Unrated Edition) – Amazon
- Last Tango in Paris (Uncut Version) – Amazon
- 9 1/2 Weeks (Original Uncut Version) – Amazon
- Pure Nude Yoga: Zen Garden Goddess – Amazon – not hardcore, but still…
zerode - a sensibility 