Day Six - Tuesday, August 26

Toybox
Wrik Mead - Canada - 10 min.
English
FFM link
Robot Chicken meets animated photomontages of gay porn, and the penis in particular. I couldn’t even get a sense whether the filmmaker was making a positive or negative statement about it…shrug.

9 to 5 - Days in Porn
Jens Hoffmann - Germany - 114 min.
English, occasional German with English subtitles. Occasional very fleeting sexually explicit sequences (does this sound like a MPAA rating?).
A work in progress, the “director’s cut” as Jens said before the screening, 9 to 5 eschews taking a stance one way or the other on porn, and instead lets the people in the industry speak for themselves. Mostly centered in L.A. with a small segment in Prague (where the Euro porn industry has set itself up because of cheap and plentiful locales as well as performers), this film concentrates solely on the heterosexual porn industry. Reminiscent of Web Dreams, the Showcase reality TV series about the Montreal internet porn industry (since Montreal is the Bangkok of North America by all accounts), and the Showtime (US) reality TV series Family Business, the film follows producers, directors, agents, and mostly female performers going through their daily grind. There’s some great commentary by an industry-specific medical specialist (a doctor who was a former porn star in the 70's), who now works to help performers stay healthy both physically and mentally. As the film points out, at 15 billion dollars a year in sales in the US alone, porn is mainstream culture, despite almost no one admitting to consuming it. We're due up to see another documentary on porn on Friday - Price of Pleasure, one that might have a very opinionated stance.