Being the first Bruce La Bruce movie I have ever seen, I was quite intrigued to see "Super 8 & 1/2." The movie is overlong, but does have some very amusing bits mixed in with the graphic sex and general weirdness. Bruce is the big star of the movie, but the Wednesday characters are also quite fun, and the cameos by Scott Thompson, Richard Kern, and Vaginal Cream Davis are fun. A must see for anyone familiar with Bruce's writing in Exclaim magazine (though it helps to be open-minded too).
2 Reviews
Vanity, vanity, all is vanity!
jaibo16 December 2008
Warning: Spoilers
Bruce Labruce's second feature is an ironic skit on Fellini, with liberal doses of Andy Warhol, John Waters and various 70s gay porn directors thrown in. Labruce plays Bruce, a washed-up gay porn star whose story is being exploited by an ambitious indie filmmaker called Googie. The film is a collage of Googie and Bruce's old films, Googie's current footage of Bruce and interviews with Bruce's former co-stars and lovers. They're all a pretty vain and hopeless bunch, and as such the film communicates something about contemporary values in a certain sub-set of the population as well as satirising the vanity of mainstream stars (in this respect, it resembles Morrissey's Heat).
The film ranges from entertaining to patience-trying. The most interesting elements are the almost hardcore sex scenes, recreations of Bruce's movies, which hold the frame just above the "action" so that fellatio or f**king is implied but never graphically seen. We do see some erections and a lot of butt, including a great deal of Bruce's.
How well you take the film will depend on your sense of humour, your aesthetic tastes and perhaps your politics or sexuality. I can't say that the film is a deep experience, although the very vapidity of what we are shown is, as I say, a deeply ironic comment on the people it shows us and the wider Western society that created them.
One bit jolly good entertainment, one bit excruciating boredom and two bits a hell of a horny time, mostly because the young guys Bruce films himself having sex with are totally darn hot.
The film ranges from entertaining to patience-trying. The most interesting elements are the almost hardcore sex scenes, recreations of Bruce's movies, which hold the frame just above the "action" so that fellatio or f**king is implied but never graphically seen. We do see some erections and a lot of butt, including a great deal of Bruce's.
How well you take the film will depend on your sense of humour, your aesthetic tastes and perhaps your politics or sexuality. I can't say that the film is a deep experience, although the very vapidity of what we are shown is, as I say, a deeply ironic comment on the people it shows us and the wider Western society that created them.
One bit jolly good entertainment, one bit excruciating boredom and two bits a hell of a horny time, mostly because the young guys Bruce films himself having sex with are totally darn hot.
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