December 29, 2006

"La Dolce Vita" by Lucas Entertainment - My Thoughts

The long-awaited gay porn version of "La Dolce Vita" has finally arrived, and I decided to give it special attention. Not only did I sit down to watch it myself, but I also watched Fellini's version - twice - to really get into the spirit of the experience. Plus, I went a step further to coerce a friend who reviews Hollywood and Indie films to write about it as well. He just happens to be a big Fellini fan, so I asked him to do a side by side comparison of the two versions. Before we get into Jay Blodgett's review, here's my two cents.

When I think of current gay porn movies with the highest production values and biggest budgets, I generally think of movies from Titan, Hot House, COLT, and Raging Stallion. As awe-inspiring as the lighting, set design, and cinematography goes, the themes of the movies movies from out top studios tend to go deep into the fetish arena. Pain, torture, dungeons, sex-as-punishment, dirty warehouses, and edgey sex acts that border on "stunts" are the chosen niches of our top studios. That's their chosen markets and it obviously pays off for them. But when was the last time a big budget gay porn movie had guys in tailored designer suits, or sex scenes in a bed? Lucas's "La Dolce Vita" was a breath of fresh air, if for no other reason, it took place in locations other than a disembodied Ninth Circle of Hell fetish playground. And the clothes were great, too.

Yes, I am over-generalizing. Titan makes pretty outdoor movies. Raging Stallion brought us the beautiful "Arabesque". Movies from Bel Ami, Lucas Kazan, and Kristen Bjorn are travelogues to exotic locales full of exotic men. I'd just like to see more of it. And don't get me wrong, "La Dolce Vita" is not all vanilla either. Despite the white collared shirts, one of the standouts of this movie is the amount of ass-licking, fingering, puckered buttholes - a lot of it. And there is the big orgy scene at the end that takes place at a dirty sex club.

As with Falcon's big movie of the year, "Velvet Mafia", my favorite aspect of both movies was that they both broke new ground in promotion. The ingenuity by both companies in building the hype-machines for their respective products is unprecedented in gay porn. My biggest criticism of "La Dolce Vita" is that the DVD extras should have included an option to view only the sex scenes. Without that option, consumers may not want to sit through the extended dialogue portions a second time.

I also appreciated that they took the time to rehearse their lines and do enough re-takes to get the dialogue right. In a year that also brought us John Cameron Mitchell's crossover film, "Shortbus", Lucas's "
La Dolce Vita" made the same crossover from mainstream-to-porn from the opposite direction. Cheesy sex comedies and erotic thrillers have always been the bread-and-butter of drive-ins and multiplexes, but they've always had to conform to certain standards of decency. Now that the cherry has been broken, it will be interesting to see how decency standards in mainstream films open up, while regulations clamp down tighter on the porn industry.

My final thought on "La Dolce Vita" comes from my role as judge of the GayVN Awards. This will be my sixth year judging, and I can say confidently that Savannah Samson's role is by far, the strongest contender for Best Non-Sexual Performance in my entire tenure. In the past, pickin's were so slim in this category, that one year the award went to someone who never spoke and was only seen for about 10 seconds! Lucas is expecting a lot of nominations and awards for this movie, but Best Non-Sexual Performance is a shoe-in.

Posted by lavenderlounge at 12:02 PM

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