Marriage 2.0 (2015) Reviews

• Ambitious study of relationships (XXX included) filled with b.s.

  lor_2016-01-29

  I was prepared to be bowled over by a rare incursion into Adult Entertainment from (sort of) the mainstream in "Marriage 2.0" but director Paul Deeb and perhaps the main instigator writer-producer Magnus Sullivan have taken a big step backwards. Result is a heavy-handed, difficult-to-watch pretentious exercise, that is neither erotic nor instructive. I am a big fan, often against the tide of popularity, of those many '60s and '70s films dealing with counter-culture and alternative life-style -having seen many at the time and catching up with the more obscure titles resurrected by Something Weird and other adventurous video labels. "Marriage 2.0" pretends to be about recent trends in "open relationships", referring to and giving tons of air time to author Chris Ryan on the subject, but all that New Age stuff was covered far better 40 and 50 years ago on screen. Overwritten screenplay, much of which is buried under annoying droning music from the director, keeps pontificating thru Chris on the outdated notion of traditional marriage, condemning it in our culture with various accusations comparing it to slavery, with the man as dominant. The script, however sets up a false dialectic between this position and heroine India Summer's quest and questioning to make her long-term relationship with Ryan Driller work, despite the deadly aspects of Driller's over-stress on the "open" part. He's into the trendy polyamorous bag, hanging out sexually with 28-year-old free spirit Dylan Ryan who lives on a boat in a fashionable marina in this Frisco & environs set sex drama. Apart from the over-abundance of Ryans on board, the film is fatally confused in terms of content, including numerous XXX sex scenes, replete with those magically appearing and disappearing condoms supported by p.c. filmmakers, but keeping explicit images on screen so brief as to constitute more tease than porn content. Clearly Magnus & Deeb don't want to be accused of cranking out another porn video, yet that is what this Adam & Eve Pictures release is, just a poor one. Making matters worse Deeb adopts an editing style I once was intrigued with (back in 1973) when created by Lindsay Anderson for his brilliant "O Lucky Man!". Suffering from ADD, the editing usually does not linger on a shot for long, instead fading or cutting to black frames to separate shots, the way Lindsay did 43 years ago as one of his many Brechtian distanciation devices. It was experimental back then, just annoying now, and serves to cancel out any incipient eroticism in a scene. A visit by the principals to Frisco's Victoria Theatre has Deeb's short BDSM movie "Mistress" playing, and I see that his background is in that field. To that end he has cast in major roles Dylan Ryan and Sadie Lune, leading actresses in BDSM lesbian cinema, notably the two Madison Young features riffing on "50 Shades", released by Filly Films. An endless S&M scene in which dom Christian Wilde torments Dylan (and she loves it!) moves the film right smack into that genre and off-target from its proclaimed theme. This casting ploy led me down the wrong path, as the accidental but frequent interaction between fellow joggers India and Dylan who are actually adversaries regarding "ownership" (my dumb term) of Driller was such a glaring plot device I kept expecting the two women to hook up as lesbian lovers and drop the Driller like a hot potato. That would have been my fade-out happy ending, but no such luck. Instead India goes through a series of flip-flops, under the influence of both Chris who she is profiling along with his lady Cacilda Jetha in a documentary film she's sort of directing about alternative life-styles, as well as Lune who is a model of the new openness, living with light-skinned Black stud Mickey Mod, but hosting vast orgies (one takes up a lot of the feature's running time, interminably halting the plot development during the middle reels) and also presented in a black & white sensual fantasy sequence as part of a 4-person mixed combo sex relationship. It was interesting to see Lune stretch, as she is heterosexual/bi-sexual and not into S&M in this feature, after being dominatrix of the year in Young's exaggerated and exhausting BDSM lesbian films. Less interesting is Lune's (and others') ridiculous water buffalo shrieks of ecstasy when having orgasms, Lune's coming from simple masturbation. These deafening interruptions exceed even those of Teri Weigel, notorious porn queen of annoying vocal excess. Deeb's use of this fake stuff, along with some crappy porn-speak, is way out of date and casts doubt on the seriousness of the entire enterprise. Wimpy ending is punctuated by terrible dialog, as Driller reconciles with India and looks to an "open" future with such priceless drivel as: "I don't know where we're going, but we're going somewhere interesting and we're going there together". I can tolerate, even revel in that sort of nonsense watching a 1970 movie, but in 2015/2016 it's barf time.

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• Marriage 2.0 = Porn 2.0

  themwntl2019-04-28

  Adam and Eve produced this trash, disguised as a "relationship" film. One of the "stars" is Nina Hartley, a porn star from the classic era who has been in thousands of these "movies". She's graduated from "barely legal" to Granny GILF, Of course the porn is book ended by tedious chatter that the "actors" deliver with all the skill one would expect. They probably fantasize about being in a real movie while the sex scene lurches on, and who can blame them, stuck in an endless porn loop, when they went to Hollywood to be movie stars....

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• Vanilla porn with predictable ending...

  steven_torrey2017-12-09

  I found the uncut x-rate version on XHamster. The movie had high production value, given it is cinéma-vérité. For those who like location in their films, San Francisco and environs was featured. Though how one gets from Sausalito to Market Street in minutes is anyone's guess. It is not your typical porn movie, even like "Behind the Green Door" or anything Nina Hartley is in. What surprises me so often about porn is how vanilla it is; unless you search specifically for swingers, group sex, public nudity, what you get mostly on porn sites is what amounts to mostly male/female alone in front of a camera. This is no different. But worse. There is a scene of imaginary sex in an almost empty movie theatre; this scenario happens in porn films lots of times and the theatre is usually full. Somehow, here in the mostly empty theatre it fell into ludicrous. The trouble with porn is that most of the time is sex imaginaire. In real sex clubs, the managers have the pious rectitude of nuns. And trust me, there is no one with more pious sanctimony than Carol Queen. In a real sex club, there is no touching of other people, male masturbation is oftentimes verboten; strangers do NOT interrupt scenes, or cause distraction by talking, etc. That isn't to say if one asks nicely, there is no telling what can happen. And that sex imaginaire is all too often very real; there are (on occasion) women who enjoy the bukake moment. But the participants are acquaintances and not total strangers to the scene. Sex then for these people becomes recreational activity. And the whole point of the sex club is to provide an environment where sexual activity becomes recreational activity. But couples don't visit the sex club without a set of per-conceived expectations. That there may be more men then one expected, that the noise level may be higher than expected, the the ambiance may not be conducive for male performance. And most important, the couple already accept sexual activity as recreational so jealousy doesn't rare its ugly head. And here the movie sort of failed; jealousy did raise its ugly it and with the expected consequences. The actors were all rather fetching, even Nina Hartley getting it on at the age of 59 (?) with her boy-toy and giving a comedic moment as her sexual shenanigans are being phoned into her daughter, played by the lovely India Summer. And of course, that is one more thing to find challenging about the movie--people too attractive, as though the fat and slovenly don't have sex. But who can blame the producers for choosing an attractive cast for their movie about sex? The film also had some sort of message about condoms, which always seems to be a bizarre sort of message in porn given need for the "money shot." While, I didn't think the movie was great, neither would I dismiss it. As a porn film, it will become a favored porn classic in due time.

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