Skip to main content

Life Imitating Art

I didn't care much for Paul Schrader's erotic drama The Canyons, but I did enjoy the performance of adult film star James Deen as Christian. He's this charismatic and charming guy who has it all - a career financing indie pictures, a lovely girlfriend (Lindsay Lohan, also doing good work in this movie), and a sex life that most men only dream of having. And yet, as we go further into he story, we discover that it's all a mask to hide his controlling, abusive and borderline sado-masochistic tendencies. It's a surprising and solid piece of acting as this seemingly suave guy slowly being unraveled until we encounter the real Christian. In a scary twist of irony, the performance by Deen now rings all too true with his character's unraveling, as the famed porn actor has now been accused of sexual assault and rape this past few weeks.




Other adult performers have since spoken up in response to Stoya's harrowing story of abuse at the hands of Deen, from Joanna Angel, another former flame of Deen's, to various other colleagues and partners, opening up to abuse suffered by him. What was a really good piece of acting is now a deeply disturbing look into a man who we thought was charismatic and charming and it turns out that he's an abusive, controlling scumbag with sado-masochistic tendencies, no sense of professional and personal boundaries or restraint.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What We Talk About When We Talk About Great Movies: The 10 Best Films of 2014 - Part II

And here's (finally) part two of my list of the best from last year, along with the full list at the bottom. 5. The Wind Rises  - The worst thing I can honestly say about this gorgeous animated feature is that, at 126 minutes, it wasn't long enough. I could get lost in Hayao Miyazaki's final effort for hours and not get bored. The writer-director-animator is a master of whisking us away to new worlds of his own creation, but how fitting that his last masterwork is where we're rooted into the past as Miyazaki tells the story of real-life Jiro Horikoshi as he lives out his dreams of building airplanes, despite them being used for the Imperial Army back in World War II. Every last frame of this film - from Jiro's dreams with fellow designer Giovanni Caproni and his brief romance with Nahoko, to showing the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1932 and his journey to Nazi Germany several years later - is painstakingly beautiful and artfully crafted to within an inch of his...
1 comment
Read more

Mr. Brown Verses Bland, Weepy Teen Melodrama

Todd in the Shadows once said that he defined the worst hit song of the calendar year as a song being the absence of good. At the time, I didn't really understood what he meant when he chose "Tonight Tonight", by Hot Chelle Rae in 2011 and "Roar", by Katy Perry in 2013. Last night, I finally understood what he meant. Because, I, too, have seen a movie that's the absence of good. Todd meant that a song could make you angry, the beat could drive you insane, the lyrics could be insulting and simply lazy, but, in his eyes, those two aforementioned songs had nothing  going for them. Nothing lyrically, nothing catchy, nothing offensive, nothing that could make you feel insulted, angry or simply seeing red, because there's literally nothing  about it that can make you feel anything. That movie belongs to Bland, Weepy Teen Melodrama , the  latest attempt to suck money out of teen girls ....I mean, young adult novel by Second Rate Nicholas Sparks that became ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Cowardice

I was looking forward to watching the James Franco/Seth Rogen comedy The Interview  on Christmas Day, even more so than Angelina Jolie's WWII drama Unbroken , or Rob Marshall's Into the Woods . I like what the writing and directing duo of Rogen and his pal Evan Goldberg have done with comedies like Superbad , Pineapple Express and their debut feature, This Is the End . In light of Sony being hacked (which now appears to be North Korea's doing) and threats of attacking theaters that carry the comedy, three things happened today: 1.) Every major theater chain - AMC, Regal, Cinemark, Arclight, etc, had decided to pull out from showing The Interview  on its scheduled release date. 2.)  This prompted Sony Pictures to basically cancel the release date of the film amid threats of blowing up theaters. 3.)  Both Sony and the theater chains basically caved into the demands of cyber terrorism from North Korea. Are you fucking kidding me? We just caved into terr...
2 comments
Read more