Today in Porn Swag: Two Cups, “9 1/2 Weeks”

There are a bunch of ways cops profile the poor. One way involves porn swag t-shirts bearing movie titles, a starlet’s picture, or some Ed Hardy-style take on a porn company’s logo. When you wear a t-shirt like this, a cop (and everyone else) says, “This guy pays for sex.”

Not that it is bad to pay for sex or wrong to offer it in exchange for money. But if prostitution happens to be illegal in your town, everyone knows from your “Pirates 2: Stagnetti’s Revenge” t-shirt that you’ve got some hookers on speed-dial, boast of your postings on The Erotic Review, and are conversant on issues particular to the hobbyist community.

Other than people who pay for sex, the other group that wears porn swag t-shirts are disaster relief victims.

When I get a box from a porn company containing a t-shirt with the movie title on it, I like to think of all the kids helped by UNICEF decked out in donated Wicked’s “2040” gear. Because I send all my porn t-shirts to UNICEF.

Anyway, I was very happy to receive Adam & Eve’s promo package for David Lord’s better-than-the-source=material “9 1/2 Weeks – An Erotic XXX Parody.” It consisted of the movie on DVD as well as two solid tumblers capable of containing drinks. Useful!

I encourage useful promotional materials. in 2003 I received a thermos and picnic set from the studio Metro. I used them before I lost them. I got a heavy cartridge box as part of Wicked’s “Coming Home” campaign that I used to store teabags in. At porn conventions, my ID badge is often held on a lanyard donated by the affiliate company Pussycash that I am mortified to my skin to have around my neck. What’s worse is that African kids have no use for lanyards because they carry stuff on their heads.

My review of “9 1/2 Weeks – An Erotic XXX Parody” (originally posted on Gamelink’s Naked Truth) is below. I enjoyed it. It may have had something to do with the fact that overflow guests at my Christmas party are going to have some special nog conveyances.

Studio: Adam & Eve
Director: David Lord
Starring: Summer Brielle, Capri Cavanni, James Deen, Nikki Delano, Tyler Nixon, Eva Karera, David Lord, James Bartholet, Tommy Gunn

Adrian Lyne made some iconic movies in the 1980s and 1990s. Films like “Fatal Attraction” and “Indecent Proposal” were not only guilty fun, but also asked some serious (albeit titillating) questions about our relationships. Lyne also took a crack at a “Lolita” adaptation and made one of my favorite horror movies, 1991’s “Jacob’s Ladder.”

But Lyne is most famous for the 1986 Mickey Rourke/Kim Basinger film “Nine 1/2 Weeks,” about a broody Wall Street insider and his 76-day wad of a relationship with an art gallery assistant. It’s dark (lighting-wise), in love with itself, and unsexy in a way that makes you think none of the people involved in the making of the film had ever had sex, which is impossible but that is how contrived it was. It reverberates to this day in other bondage-lite, psychosexual affairs where the pursuing male liberates a jittery woman from her sexual rut by way of tying her up and telling her what to do. It sparked a dangerous “Well this is what women really want” glut that can be seen in crap like “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

“Nine 1/2 Weeks” was co-written by “Red Shoe Diaries” producer Zalman King, which explains the movie’s influence on the regrettable strain of Porn Valley films for the next couple of decades: over-serious, underlit pageants of talking-doll-fucking. To my knowledge, Wicked Pictures doesn’t make that kind of movie anymore.

Regardless, “Nine 1/2 Weeks” was a cultural touchstone, maybe because of Joe Cocker’s great version of “You Can Leave Your Hat On” that served as a music video within the movie (MTV was only a few years old then) and the high-concept simplicity of its theme: Most relationships spend their sexual fuel in that amount of time. Whether you believe that or not, that was a concept made for the coke-addled 80s.

Why has it taken this long, then, to make a porn version? “Nine 1/2 Weeks” was ripe for a porn adaptation precisely because it was just the type of flick that porn could improve (indeed, both of the movie’s sequels were pornier and went straight to video). Just look at 80’s-skinny Kim Basinger in this photo — the world needs someone a facial cumshot wouldn’t decapitate or otherwise injure.

That is why I found Adam & Eve’s “9 1/2 Weeks – An Erotic XXX Parody” such a pleasure.

I’ll tell you up front: I feel about Adrian Lyne’s “Nine And 1/2 Weeks” the way Alec Baldwin feels about Kim Basinger. But the things that made the 1986 “Nine And 1/2 Weeks” a plodding, unsexy disappointment all work to the advantage of David Lord‘s faithful porn adaptation; whereas the forgettable sex in the 80s version was treated as risque, forbidden and — worse than those — trendy, the Chinese-character tattoos, inflated boobs, and shaved pussies of the fantasy realm of millennial Porn Valley make sense: finally, everyone agrees it’s ridiculous. We can settle in, then, and appreciate the natural light playing off pneumatic miracles of science like Summer Brielle and Capri Cavanni, set against the beautifully overcast Los Angeles, itself a great improvement over Lyne’s sullen and cokey 80s New York.

Summe Brielle (Kim) is made up to look like Kim Basinger. In fact, the makeup is piled on so thick it appears that she is at least two inches closer to the camera. This is how I remember Kim Basinger, too. I remember thinking: Please Just Stop Talking, Kim Basinger: You Don’t Look Well. When broody James Deen (Mickey — get it? Their characters have the same first names as the stars of the original) comes into her art gallery (the paintings are on the floor, stacked against the wall), he gives her the scarf that she’d been haggling over the day before.

“What do you want from me?” she says.

“Everything,” he replies. “You. Utterly. Completely. Without hesitation.”

Did that line work in the original? No. No real woman would fall for it, even in the 80s. But it seems downright gallant and wholesome when James Deen says it.

“But,” he adds, “I’ll settle for dinner first.”

The way the porn version has already shaved time off the original (leaving more room for actual penetrative sex!) is that where once we saw Mickey Rourke buying the scarf, now James Deen simply refers to the purchase already having happened. And we don’t watch the new couple eating dinner, we just cut to Brielle saying “Dinner was amazing!” and Deen preparing the bed for the dessert fuck.

“What makes you think I’m just going to sleep with you,” she says. “Do I seem cheap and easy to you?” (Yes, actually — he got you here with a scarf.)

“Nobody’s touched you for a while,” Deen says, “made you feel like the woman you are.”

“What makes you think you know how I feel?” she says.

“A hunch.”

This is a great exchange, and Lord takes his time with the actors. It’s lit so well, and Brielle looks so good, and she has just said “What makes you think you know how I feel?” with such feeling, that you want to see her naked.

This charming bit of business would have been perfect had this not been a porn film. In order to satisfy the 5-sex scene requirement, however, a little scene has been tacked on to the beginning (that morning) where Brielle asks her roommate, Capri Cavanni, to sympathy-fuck Brielle’s ex, Tyler Nixon.

“He’s a really good lover,” Brielle says, and Cavanni should know, because she just heard the two of them having sex.

The very next goddamn day, when Brielle interrupts Cavanni and Nixon in bed together (“It’s OK,” Brielle says. “Your parents will love him — mine did”) Nixon fucks Cavanni the same way Deen fucked Brielle.

What I’m getting at is that porn always paints itself in this corner; you can’t chop up this movie and sell each individual scene in a compilation if Nixon’s style of fucking is much different from Deen’s. But in the world of this movie we now have no idea whatsoever why Brielle left Nixon. The only difference between Nixon and Deen is that one bought a scarf, pretends to like art, and puts blindfolds on girls (which he soon has them take off). Their penises seem to be the same size (by the way, I’m glad this movie was not called “Nine And 1/2 Inches”). They both pull out to come on their mates’ abdomens. The very Porno Industrial Complex sorta requires them to be the same guy, to the detriment of any story you’re trying to tell.

And another thing: Deen knows the woman Brielle is by her belly piercing. Everybody does. A woman like Brielle pulls off her clothes to reveal hardware like that and all the disbelief you’d suspend about her somehow being innocent goes right out the window. Yes, I’m saying it: If you’ve got huge fake boobs and a belly ring, you’ve got no right to act appalled when your boyfriend brings home a hooker for a threeway.

Later, Brielle masturbates according to the watch Deen gave her, just like in the original. She’s just way more convincing than Kim Basinger. She does the “You Can Leave Your Hat On” dance for Deen (except this production couldn’t afford roof access for the climax) (and perhaps they should have called it “You Can Leave Your Condom On” because, you know…) and they share an abbreviated version of the food fetish scene.

Deen masterfully leads Brielle through his various kinks, which seem tame by any modern porn standards. He convinces her to dress as a man and accompany him to a strip club (where we watch director David Lord getting blown by a stripper, and we are happy for him. It’s appropriate. Far more appropriate than what Spielberg got up to on the set of “Schindler’s List,” anyway).

But here’s an odd thing. In the original, the couple is mistaken for gay lovers and called “Faggots!” by some punks. In the porn version they’re harassed by a limo driver but there are no lifestyle slurs. Sometimes porn shows us a better version of the world than we live in.

In a movie that is otherwise a much sexier clean lift from the original, one fun surprise is when Deen takes his special lady to a porn shoot. Deen has arranged with director Barrett Blade to let Brielle direct a porn scene. At first she’s nervous, but then she really gets into it. Deen knows everybody!

So detailed is this porn tribute that Lord’s version also incorporates the original’s B story, in which Basinger/Brielle’s character convinces a reclusive artist to surface for a retrospective. I think the original idea was to present the conflict between 80s superficiality and the artist’s integrity. In Lord’s version it seems like a massive inside joke.

“I’m sorry,” says JAMES BARTHOLET, OF ALL PEOPLE, turning down Brielle’s request, “I’m just not that vain.” He then voices a concern uttered by exactly two people in the cast but not borne out by any of her behavior: “Something’s changed in you. It’s like some outside influence has caused you to unravel.”

OK, if you say so. But indeed Deen’s kinks finally rub her the wrong way, when he invites hooker Nikki Delano to their motel room. Delano is, by this point in the movie, a breath of fresh air. “She’s feisty!” Delano says of Brielle, who has gone prudish and fled the room.

That every sex scene is similar, from the “dangerous” sex of James Deen’s mystery man to the ex boyfriend to the porn shoot to the hooker, should tell you a little bit about the priorities of this movie: all the sex is great and the girls turn the right way and we see just enough minutes of the angles we love best. What “9 1/2 Weeks – An Erotic XXX Parody” is trying to do is approximate the original enough so that the viewer can slide into a familiar narrative with predictable places to jerk off.

Brielle then runs down the hall and does something tremendously unrealistic considering what she just turned down, and the movie ends similarly to the original.

If you have never seen Adrian Lyne’s version, don’t. You don’t need to see it. Plus, he’s got “Flashdance” money and doesn’t need you. See David Lord’s “9 1/2 Weeks – An Erotic XXX Parody” because it’s just about the exact same plot and chronology, but the payoff is way better, and you can get to home Basinger off Summer Brielle.

· Buy “9 1/2 Weeks – An Erotic XXX Parody” here

· Previously on Porn Valley Observed: Today in porn swag—late-nite double anal; Today in porn swag—Self-portrait with Lisa Ann
· See also: Adam And Eve