As Murray Hamilton said in Jaws, “Fellas – let’s be reasonable.”
The Pirates premiere at the Egyptian, while great fun, was not remotely close to a Hollywood premiere, aside from the spotlight truck rental and the fact that the event happened to be in Hollywood.
The crowing from other pornbloggeurs about how the industry has suddenly gained legitimacy due to an event that required handstamping is premature.
No one seems to know the name of the slightly older, slightly chunkier, ponytailed (former?) (Internet?) porn star who kept finding an excuse to walk back and forth across the red carpet for the unsnapping cameras, but do you think that would happen at a Hollywood premiere? A hard-jawed and severe Vassar grad with a clipboard would be immediately deployed to hamstring such a person.
When I first applied for a job at one of the adult industry’s trade publications, I was given a bunch of DVDs to review. I gave many unfavorable reviews to films that really deserved them. My presumptive boss said that I should not judge porn by mainstream standards. “Some of these movies got five stars from us,” he said.
This was important and educational for me. It taught me to view porn on its own terms, such as they are, and, if anything, that I should keep my expectations in check.
After all, Pirates was an excellent porn movie, with sex that required two upended large popcorn containers to conceal my excitement. Still, a mainstream movie would not allow certain things that Pirates got away with, like Carmen Luvana’s inconsistent wedding ring usage, her tendency to pronounce “Caribbean” as “Carabian”, the title sequence being superimposed over a map of India, and, I don’t know, why non-pirate girls would have stripper tattoos.
The last mainstream film I saw premiered at the Egyptian, Reign of Fire, was awful. In fact, my friend still refers to it as Reign of Shit. (He also refers to John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness as In the Mouth of Shit.) But the effects were believable.
It is only when something is hyped to be something it isn’t that I get a little itchy. I remember AVN’s review of its own awards show that described the event as “an evening of elegance and glamour,” for example. It made me laugh so hard that I shot cocaine out of my nose.
“it took two upended large popcorn containers to conceal my excitement.”
with that and the fact that i can get free coke out of your nose you may be man of the year