It’s Only A Flesh Wound: In Defense of Lars von Trier’s "Antichrist"

If you’re a fan of cinema with a capital 'C,' you’re surely aware of the buzz surrounding “Antichrist,” the latest from Danish enfant terrible Lars von Trier (he of the Dogme 95 manifesto, that phobic and depressive auteur rumored to have driven Bjork to eat her own sweater during the making of “Dancer in the Dark”). The film garnered a Best Actress prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival for its leading lady, Charlotte Gainsbourg, who was upstaged only by her director proclaiming to be the Holy Father himself. Gainsbourg plays “She” to Willem Dafoe’s “He”—they're a couple whose toddler crawls right out an open window while they’re engaged in some hot, slo-mo, B&W-shot sex. Unable to come to terms with her child’s death, She spends an unproductive month drugged out in a hospital before He, a therapist by trade, decides the only cure is to whisk her away to a cabin in the woods called Eden for some intense fear facing. Of course, since this is a von Trier film, things can only get devilishly nasty.

To read the rest of my review visit The House Next Door.

Titus Andronicus: Shakespeare as Torture Porn

“Titus Andronicus” is the first show in the "Grudge Match: DMT Vs. Shakespeare" series ("in which nearly all of the Bard's great works will be ruthlessly mutilated, bent, battered, cut to ribbons and otherwise manhandled," so sayeth the program) from Danse Macabre Theatrics, the good folks whose critically-acclaimed S&M futuristic fantasia “Bitch Macbeth” likewise played to enthusiastic audiences at The Brick Theater in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. If you're not familiar with the Bard's goriest work, which pits the titular Roman general against the queen of the Goths Tamora in a setting in which vengeance reigns king, all the better. Director Frank Cwiklik's multimedia production dispenses with the modern parallel-drawing yawn inducements to do something even more important than simply making Shakespeare relevant to today's world. He's made the Bard's text actually come alive in a riveting and twisting thriller, honoring the playwright through the "mutilation" of his work.

To read the rest visit my Sex Beat column at Carnal San Francisco.

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Art, Madness, and Sex Work: An Interview With Director Karen Gehres

In “Begging Naked” Karen Gehres documents her friend Elise, a painter and sculptor and former Times Square stripper, as she succumbs to mental illness and homelessness. What struck me most about this little gem of a film was that it isn't just another journalistic investigation of a crazy artist, but a beautiful, selfless call to save a friend's life and art, rather than a calling card for the filmmaker. (Even the photo montage of Elise through the years at the end, which also sums up in title cards that most of her creations were salvaged and reside in a Brooklyn warehouse, that she's been living in Central Park since her eviction five years ago—and that she continues to work on her art—is astounding in its compassion and humility.) I spoke with director Gehres a few weeks before the award-winning doc's latest screening at the Women Make Waves Film Festival in Taipei.

To read the interview visit my Sex Beat column at Carnal San Francisco.

Playboy of The Western World

So Roman Polanski finally got busted in Switzerland for fucking an underage female in California decades ago. Which reminds me what a hypocritical sham our politically correct “age of consent” rule really is. Should Polanski have done what he did? Absolutely not. But why is this transgression any more heinous than screwing all the equally mentally immature, just barely legal bombshells he did during his swinging Tinseltown days? In other words, why is his having sex with a barely illegal non-virgin a crime while banging a barely legal virgin (something that many men of Polanski’s stature do every night) met with a wink and a nod? And why do we view adolescent sexuality through a simplistic, cookie cutter lens when in fact consent is not dependent on age at all, but on each individual’s emotional maturity? I say if Polanski is forced to serve prison time then Hugh Hefner – and every other Lolita-loving mogul of his generation – should plead guilty as well.

Justice served.

Banned from The Land Down Under: An Interview with "Matinée" director Jennifer Lyon Bell

I met Amsterdam-based director Jennifer Lyon Bell in person this past February at a Sunday brunch at Monkey Town, a performance space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn where we were both screening our CineKink Film Festival award winners. Her “Matinée” had just garnered a Best Narrative Short prize while “Un Piede di Roman Polanski,” the homage to Roman Polanski's foot fetish I co-directed with Roxanne Kapista, had taken Best Experimental Short. So when I received word last month that “Matinée” had just been banned from the Melbourne Underground Film Festival (yes, the irony of the acronym did not escape me either) by the Australian Film Commission the week before it was set to screen, I knew I had to get in touch with Jennifer and find out the 411 on getting the bum's rush in the land down under.

To read the interview visit my Sex Beat column at Carnal San Francisco.

The Bacchae: Sexless in New York

Summer in NYC is always the sexiest time of year, so to me it made hot and sweaty sense that following on the high heels of Shakespeare in the Park's Anne Hathaway Bard vehicle “Twelfth Night,” arrived “The Bacchae,” the Euripides tragedy directed by The Public Theater's former artistic director Joanne Akalaitis with an original score by her former husband Philip Glass. It starred miscast cutie pie Jonathan Groff (“Spring Awakening,” “Hair”) as the god Dionysus who whips his Theban female worshippers — a.k.a. The Bacchae, which has a better ring to it than Dionysus-heads — into a lustful frenzy. This in turn stokes the ire of the uptight king of Thebes, Pentheus, played by the usually nuanced Anthony Mackie, who instead chose to channel the god of bellowing Al Pacino. With a setup like this it's nearly a given that things take a turn for the worst both onstage and within the Greek drama.

To read the rest visit my Sex Beat column at Carnal San Francisco.