Lucious porn vs art thread

[luscious]

Originally Posted by neo_reloaded

Yes, The Girlfriend experience stars a porn star - but she does not have sex in the film, and the film is directed by Steven Soderbergh, a well respected film director who works on both indie and popular films.

Radley Metzger is well respected also, certainly more respected than Uwe Bowl. (His porn films were often directed under a pseudonym Henry Paris -- IIRC, he is the director of the cinematic masterpiece O__ of Misty Beethoven)

And Romance -- that's a name of a film -- is a mainstream film with a porn actress as its lead and she has real explicit sex in the film. So you are wrong on the facts again.

The point of the work is not sexual arousal - the film explores the psychology of relationships and the world of expensive escorts.

Yes just as 9 Songs explores psychology with real explicit sex in case you didn't realize. But a film need not be cerebral to be legitimate. "Stealth" for example has a joke of a plot but I still enjoy it just for its special effects. I don't see why enjoying a film just for its special effects is somehow more legitimate than enjoying a film just for its eroticism, especialy when eroticism in mainstream films like Exotica is praised and the lack of eroticism (according to most critics) in I Know Who Killed Me is criticized.

But besides that, there are many "porn" films that "explore the psychology of relationships" just as much as 9 Songs. For example, O___ of Misty Beethoven does. There are also many classic French films starring Bridgette Lahayie which are cinematic masterpieces. What you say is absolutely right when it comes to a lot of porn titles but you can't paint them with a broad brush. Many porn titles are cinematic tour de forces.

No one is going to sit there during The Girlfriend Experience and think they're watching a porn, just like no one is going to watch Pirates and think it was made as a serious film and not for sexual gratification.

You keep on narrowing your focus to The Girlfriend Experience which I brought up as one example among many to refute a specific point you raised. Your counter-rebuttal falls flat when you come against the film Romance as I mentioned. And if people did not know the provenance of 9 Songs, I suspect that over 50% of them would think it was a porn film. In fact some critics have labeled it porn. So is it porn or not? The critics disagree (about 9 Songs and also some other films that feature explicit real sex)/

Removing the graphic portions of the sex scenes does not change the reason it was made, nor the audience it is playing to.

By your definition of "audience it is playing to", Bikini Destination Triple Fantasy is porn since that title exists only for one purpose.

And the cinematic classics of "porn" to do not play to the audience you think it does. They play to serious minded people. The sex scenes in O___ of Misty Beethoven comprise maybe less than 10% of the film. The sex scenes in 9 Songs comprise maybe 30-50% of the film and thematically all the drama is centered around them. Yet 9 Songs (at least for most critics) is not porn but O___ of Misty Beethoven is "porn." And .... you may not realize that O___ of Misty Beethoven is often described as not just a good "porn" movie, but a good movie period. If you don't mind this kind of stuff, give it a watch sometime. I am 100% sure you will be pleasantly surprised at what kind of serious cinema it is (not that cinema has to be serious to be legitimate).

You can fact-check or bring up obscure cases all you want, but the point remains that people know pornography when they see it.

"Mainstream" films with real explicit sex are not obscure cases. There's like maybe a hundred of them. Americans don't know about many of them because of the American taboos. In Europe, it's no big deal. Here's just some of them

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...nsimulated_sex

It can be difficult to comprehensively explain, but that does not mean a very obvious distinction doesn't exist.

IMO, the distinction is all about money, prestige and perception. I bet if you showed 9 Songs to people who did not know anything about the film and also showed them O__ of Misty Beethoven, they would have no idea which was "porn" and which wasn't. The reason you have difficulty coherently, comprehensively accounting for the difference is because it is not obvious -- if it were obvious, accounting for the difference would be as easy as it is obvious.