Tag Archive: Masturbation


No future for England’s dreaming

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December 8, 2022

THE LAST OF ENGLAND directed by Derek Jarman (UK, 1988

“It’s a love story with England. It’s not an attack. It’s an attack on those things that I believe personally are things without value.” Derek Jarman in an interview with Chris Lippard

Derek Jarman was a war child; conceived during the period of the London blitz and born on January 31st 1942. It is perhaps no surprise to find that the spectre of WWII dominates his imagination and helped inspire his surreal poetic documentary ‘The Last of England’ made in the Spring of 1987.  

Jarman was in his mid-40s when he completed the film which graphically depicts a post-war and post-apocalyptic urban wasteland.  While making it he was diagnosed as HIV positive. This illness was for him another battle which he waged publicly. He announced his diagnosis to the world rather than be shamed into silence. The full-blown AIDS virus would end his life prematurely six years later.

The contagion may have partly accounted for his rage but it was in him anyway. “Where’s hope? Have they killed it” are rhetorical questions asked in a movie. “Yes” comes the blunt reply. “And tomorrow?” the unseen speaker asks. The answer comes in the form of a quote from graffiti Jarman had seen scrawled on a wall in London’s Euston Road: “Tomorrow is cancelled due to lack of interest”.

This brief exchange is practically the only dialogue in a movie that evolved through improvisation; there was no screenplay. Aside from Jarman’s freeform poems (read by Nigel Terry) , most of the movie plays out without words. The director’s obscure diatribes offer few clues about his intentions.  They are more full of attitude than meaning. The critic David L.Hirst called the end result  “an apocalyptic roar of a movie.”

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SHAME : FOR ADULTS ONLY

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January 29, 2012

SHAME directed by Steve McQueen (UK, 2011)

Shame is a defining film about manhood; as groundbreaking as movies like Taxi Driver, American Gigolo and Blue Velvet.

What each of these films have in common is that they don’t shy away from the darker aspects of humanity and the limitless ambiguities surrounding male sexuality.

If this movie had been made in Hollywood it  would probably have starred someone like Michael Douglas, Charlie Sheen or Russell Brand, all actors who have confessed and/or boasted about being addicted to sex.

With any of these in the leading role of Brandon, the film would have ended as either a vacuous, moralising drama or a titillating American Pie style ‘comedy’.   English director, Steve McQueen takes a more courageous course of treating the subject seriously without feeling the need to judge the characters or tag on a token feel good ending.  This is a film for grown-ups. Continue reading →

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HAPPINESS – NATURAL BORN PERVERTS

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September 6, 2011

I borrowed this movie from my local library not knowing what to expect. It’s probably the best way to see it as it revels in challenging conventional ideas of healthy sex and good family life.

The title is, needless to say, ironic as is the naming one of the three unfulfilled sisters Joy. The movie depicts interwoven dysfunctional lives where true happiness remains elusive.

It is unique in that I can’t think of another movie where three male characters are shown masturbating. The first to come is psychiatrist Bill Maplewood (Dylan Baker) who jerks off to an innocent looking magazine for boys. He is a pedophile whose ‘perfect’ suburban marriage (wholesome wife + three kids) is a sham. Next is Allen (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who is in therapy with Bill because he feels he is world’s most boring man and can only communicate with women by making obscene phone calls while wanking. Finally, Bill’s son Billy, who spends the movie being frustrated at his inability to ejaculate finally does so while spying on a woman in a bikini applying sun cream.

You will gather from this that Happiness is not a movie that will sit well with the Tea Party’s notion of family values. Loneliness would be a more appropriate title, as all of the main characters are unable to find an ideal love match.

Todd Solondz - healthily warped.

My favourite scene is where the fat and frustrated neighbour of Allen (played by Camryn Manheim)  tells how she was raped by the doorman and reacted by killing him and cutting him up. She says all this while tucking into a big bowl of ice cream and maintaining it was a crime of passion; “I am a passionate woman” she insists.

The sad, depraved lives of these characters is made deliberately provocative by having this catalogue of immoral, perverted and criminal behaviour take place is a normal, polite suburban setting.

Director Todd Solondz has the kind of warped Lynchian mind I can relate to ; I’m now keen to watch the sequel to this 1998 movie called Life During Wartime which he made a couple of years back.

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BEN AFFLECK’S TOWN

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September 4, 2011

Apparently, Marvin Gaye masturbated frequently during the recording of What’s Going On so that he was sufficiently drained of carnal desires.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Ben Affleck had a similar strategy between takes, particularly when starring in his own movie. Let’s face it directing yourself in itself requires a certain amount of self-love.

In The Town, Affleck  has permanent designer stubble and gives us a brief glimpse of his impressive abs to show that he’s still a hunk at heart but otherwise he plays the part of Doug in subdued post-coital mode.

His courtship with Claire (Rebecca Hall) is improbably free of clinches or heavy petting. They do have sex eventually but he certainly takes his time about it.

The improbable plot means that he is initially befriending her only to make sure she has no incriminating evidence against him and his gang of thieves. She had been taken as a hostage after a bank raid and later freed.

Affleck’s abs

All the robbers were wearing ghost masks but Jem (Jeremy Renner), one of his hot-headed partners, is spooked that she lives only a few blocks from their hideout.

Doug is a mild-mannered, calming influence and when the truth comes out he assures Claire that he only turned bad because his mother left when he was just a boy and his dad was a bona fide hoodlum.

The on-screen chemistry between Claire and Doug is non-existent which doesn’t help to make this contrived storyline any more credible.

Like his earlier and much more impressive directorial outing Gone Baby Gone, the setting is Affleck’s home town of Boston, Massachusetts. As with that movie he makes use of non-actors to give it a more Wire-like authenticity.

Gone Baby Gone, starring brother Casey, is a great movie because it is so tight and the story is plausible. The Town, adapted from Chuck Hogan’s novel Prince of Thieves, is all over the place because he can’t decide if it wants to be an action thriller, a gritty romance  or a social drama. It winds up in cinematic limbo land.

For all that, it is worth seeing for the fine ensemble performances which includes the late great Pete Postlethwaite in one of his final roles as the menacing crime lord who uses a florist’s shop as a front.

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THE POPE AND CHILD ABUSE

Filed under: Books, Politics — 1 Comment
January 8, 2011

There are some books that should come with health warnings and  The Case of the Pope by Geoffrey Robertson QC is one of them. Reading it will make your blood pressure rise and fuel an uncontrollable  rage towards the Catholic Church in general and the current Pope in particular.

Of course, you may not feel the same way about this.

For example, if you think that ordaining women priests is as serious as sodomising a child you’ll have no problem with the Vatican’s policy towards victims of child abuse. Also you won’t feel so enraged as I did if you consider that molesting minors is a sin on a par with masturbation. You will be able to argue calmly that, after all, both breach the Catholic rule that stipulates the “non use of the sexual faculty” .

So, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that a health warning needs to be directed at readers with hearts, minds and souls, and at those who place common sense above religious dogma.

This would alert those (surely the vast majority)  who believe that abusing a child is not only a sin, but also a criminal act and one which demands not only that the perpetrators be brought to justice but also that  the victims  be properly recompensed.

And if you are hoodwinked by Pope Benedict XVI’s recent public apology on behalf of priests under his charge  then Robertson’s book is essential reading. Continue reading →

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