Movie: Inside Deep Throat (2005)

Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato have the pop culture documentary down to a science. Their work for film (THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE) and TV (SHOWBIZ MOMS & DADS) may not always be insightful, but it’s reliably slick and entertaining thanks to deft editing and clip selection.

Their latest effort, produced by Hollywood powerhouse Brian Grazer, is their best to date because of the potency of the subject matter. The 1972 release of DEEP THROAT (no, I haven’t seen it) was a landmark moment in the sexual revolution that heralded the mainstreaming of pornography. How society got to that point – and how the fallout led to a porn industry separate from the rest of show business and accountable to nothing except profit margins – is a fascinating story. Bailey and Barbato don’t overstate DEEP THROAT’s impact, but use it as a way to explore questions that are more relevant today than at any point since the Reagan era.

In an anatomical sense, the scenes from DEEP THROAT (which account for the documentary’s NC-17 rating) are hugely impressive. But the film looks lousy and doesn’t seem all that funny, even though that was its big selling point. (Well, one of them, anyway.) Bailey and Barbato make terrific use of other clips from the period, like a Dick Cavett-refereed showdown between Hugh Hefner and feminist Susan Brownmiller that reveals how short-sighted both of their arguments are. Two retired New York vice cops offer their own reviews of DEEP THROAT. If there was any justice, they’d have had their own show. Who’d know better than them which porn films were worth seeing?

INSIDE DEEP THROAT uses many songs heard in BOOGIE NIGHTS. Is that the official porn soundtrack now? “Brand New Key” doesn’t even make sense in this context.

Watching Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal opine in this film makes me wonder who’ll be called upon to weigh in on the vital issues of the day in documentaries thirty years from now. We don’t seem to have public intellectuals of that stripe any more. So I’d like to nominate myself for the job. I’m a reasonably clever guy and I clean up nice. It’s either me or somebody from VH-1’s I LOVE THE ‘90s.

Phrases deleted from the first draft of this post because they sounded, well, dirty: bottom line, goes down easy, thumbs up, hard to swallow.

Magazine: Entertainment Weekly, 2/18/05 issue

Owen Gleiberman has a theory on why studio romantic comedies are so unsatisfying while indie versions like SWINGERS and SIDEWAYS work in his negative review of HITCH:

“Dating is all about behavior: the fine tuned verbal and chemical idiosyncrasies that make one person mesh (or not) with another. Most Hollywood love stories are too broad and schematic for that. They’re not about personalities. They’re about situations.”

I think he’s right. I also think the fact that HITCH grossed $45 million this weekend means we can expect more of the same.

Miscellaneous: Links

I haven’t watched a local TV newscast in over fifteen years for many reasons. Here’s one of them – and remember, I live in Seattle. Bill Crider read SIN-A-RAMA so I wouldn’t have to. But I’m gonna do it anyway.