Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/06/10/funny-and-true-psa-about-hel.html
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I think a day or two on a porn set would would set a few kids straight on reality.
It’s business.
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The porn I watch doesn’t have beefcake like in the PSA. To check out what I mean, go see John the cab driver in the Fake Taxi series.
Yet another reason to be glad I grew up in the 50s. We got to learn about sex using the real thing, so to speak.
Man, New Zealand, y’all are rocking it so hard right now - thanks for being a beacon of awesomeness to the world. (full disclosure 100% of my NZ coverage is here on Boing Boing, I could be better informed)
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At least I grew up watching VHS tapes about it, and they were feature length movies shot in 16 mm, with a plot and an OST. Not to mention the tricks I had to use to watch them unnoticed…
Anyway they were movies and were watched as them, with a good dose of suspension of disbelief. The sheer quantity of porn and the easiness to get it, and the presence of “amateur” production is a big difference…
Umberto Eco once said that porn goes to great lengths to come over as realistic. His rule of thumb: when you watch a movie, and a person walks or drives from A to B, and you think that takes too long and it’s boring, then it’s porn. That rule of thumb probably no longer applies.
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New Zealand has the best PSAs ever. I can laugh myself to tears just thinking about the Fruit-E Bars PSA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u51OxZF1ltI
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Not quite the point he was making. From Umberto Eco’s Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (Lecture 3) [brackets indicate my notes]:
"I once asked myself how one could scientifically ascertain whether a film was pornographic or not. A moralist would reply that a film is pornographic if it contains explicit and detailed scenes of sexual acts. But in many pornography trials it has been demonstrated that certain works of art contain such scenes for realistic purposes, to describe life as it is, or for ethical reasons (insofar as the sensuality shown is condemned), and that in any case the value of the entire work redeems the obscenity of its parts. Since it’s hard to establish whether an author is truly concerned with realism, or has sincere ethical intentions, or attains aesthetically satisfying results, I decided (after examining many hard-core movies) that an infallible rule does exist.
"When trying to assess a film that contains sexually explicit scenes, you should check to see whether, when a character gets into an elevator or a car, the discourse time [the time it takes do read/view the event] coincides with the story time [the time the event takes in the story]. Flaubert may take one line to say that Frédéric traveled for a long time, and in normal films a character who gets on a plane at Logan Airport in Boston will, in the next scene, land in San Francisco. But in a pornographic film, if someone gets in a car to go ten blocks, the car will journey those ten blocks in real time…
“The reason is pretty simple. A pornographic film is designed to satisfy the audience’s desire for sexually explicit scenes, but it can’t show an hour and a half of uninterrupted sexual acts because that would be tiring for the actors-and ultimately tedious for the audience as well. The sexual acts therefore have to be dispersed throughout the story. But no one has the least intention of spending time and money thinking up a worthwhile story, and the spectators aren’t interested in the story either, because all they’re doing is waiting for the sexy bits. The story is thereby reduced to a series of insignificant everyday actions…”
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Gibert Gottfried recently interviewed Barry Sonnenfeld for his long-running podcast. Barry relates a really, really nasty, disgusting, terrible story from his early cinematography days shooting porn. It’s absolutely gross. But hilarious.
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Oh Fruit-E-Bars are the best! I really like NZ’s home loan programs
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I want to listen to that just to find out if Sonnenfeld ends the story with “The Aristocrats!”
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I haven’t listened to this episode yet, but knowing the podcast, I’m guessing that the fact that they were able to listen to just this kind of story absolutely delighted Gilbert, along with Danny Thomas, Danny Kaye, and Caesar Romero stories…all ick.
He enjoys gross-outs.
I’ve never met a Kiwi I didn’t like. NZ could run the world by charm offensive if it had half a mind to.
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I grew up really twisted learning from scrambled TV porn.
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Doesn’t everybody love slapstick?
Now we know!
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Well, it’s slapstick if the person involved gets up and dusts themselves off. If they lie there moaning and doing a very good job of looking badly injured, which the actress really sells in that spot, it stops being funny and starts being painful.
10 hours and nobody posted this yet?
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