Destricted (2006)

My only real interest in checking this out was for the contributions from Larry Clark and Gaspar Noé - two film-makers responsible for past work I hold in rather high regard. "Destricted" is a collection of 'arthouse'-porno shorts that's supposedly meant to 'blur that line' between 'art' and smut. For the most part, it's about as pretentious as it sounds. I guess I'll just give a brief run-down on each film. Note - the U.S. version I have is different (and slightly longer...) than the UK release, which contains a few films swapped from my version.

First up is "Hoist" - directed by Matthew Barney of the "Cremaster" series. You got a three-and-a-half minute close-up of a twitching, unclipped cock gradually getting hard. Cut to a work crew uprooting a tree. Then, the guy whose dick we saw earlier (listed in the credits as Blooming Greenman...) is inside some machinery with a radish up his ass, rubbing his dick on jizz-covered mechanisms until he's erect.

Next one is called "House Call". This one just looks like someone stuck a camera in front of a TV playing a '70s porno and set it to eerie music...

This is followed by "Cooking" which, like the previous film, was the work of a one-time film-maker. A chick blows a guy with a crystal dick until it turns into some kind of gelatinous mush. She then pisses into a bunch of glass vases. Afterwards, he fucks her with a new crystal dick, which she ends up pulling off and smashing. She then feeds him his crystal dick shards and her piss. Then he shits onto a plate and she eats it. It ends with her graphically shitting out a new crystal dick and it's happily ever after...

Up next is "Green Pink Caviar". A woman licks various colors and consistencies of liquid and slime off of glass as the camera is positioned under it. And this goes on for 8-minutes.

Followed up by "Scratch This" - another vintage porn exerpt that someone tampered with and tried to pass off as an 'art film'. This one shows an all girl three-way, only each frame of their faces and holes has been scratched out...

On to Larry Clark's segment, titled "Impaled". Clark holds a casting call for male porn actors. He interviews a bunch of innocuous dullards who talk about their sex lives before settling on some scrawny skater wuss who wants to pop his anal cherry with a chick. Out of the vacuous porn girls he gets to choose from, he picks an insatiably horny 40-year old and they shoot their scene.

Next is a very short animated film by Cecily Brown which features painted images of sex and 'money shots'.

Lastly, is Gaspar Noé's "We Fuck Alone" - easily the best and most harrowing of the set. The film alternates focus between a young man and woman in their separate bedrooms getting off to the same porno. She's using a teddy bear, while he uses a blow-up doll. He seems to be having a much harder time gaining any satisfaction from his masturbatory aid as he finds different positions for the doll and eventually starts 'degrading' it with a gun. A jarring strobe effect is used throughout the whole thing...

All of these films sucked except for the last two - with Noé's being the stand-out piece. But even THAT went on a bit too long, I thought. Clark's addition (the only one with any dialog...) was a disappointment and incredibly dull. The others were just pompous attempts at unarousing 'artistic/shock' material or just lazy reworkings of retro-porn. I feel like "Destricted" was a missed opportunity that could've benefited from the involvement of better film-makers.