1. The Strange Library, by Haruki Murakami. "A charming, surreal story." "It had me enthralled." "A wry metaphysical play."
It's a 5000 word novella about a little boy held prisoner by an old man who intends to eat his brains.
And a beautiful girl. Who kisses him. And helps him escape.
Same-sex relations are always destructive, heterosexual romance is salvation, got it.
2. A Brief History of Manga. A tiny book, about 1/10th the size I expected, with a few words of text and a lot of photos on each page. Altogether maybe 5,000 words.
And the photos: naked women. Bare breasts on nearly every page. Leafing through it, I felt like I needed a shower.
I threw them both in the trash.
And a Netflix movie arrived in its red package:
A teenage boy named Bobby (Ty Simpkins) steals his parents' porn magazine in order to masturbate to photos of porn star Misty Mountains. Suddenly a car crashes all the way through his house. He runs out to see the porn star in the flesh, dying. Naked. Bare boobs. We never see Bobby again.
Meanwhile, failed cop-turned-private dick Holland March (Ryan Gosling) -- is that the name of a gay villain out of a 1960s thriller, or what? - is hired by Misty's aunt, who swears that she's still alive. He begins searching. One of his leads is a girl named Amelia.
Meanwhile hired muscle Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe) beats up a guy who has been having an affair with a little girl. Then another little girl, who I thought was the same one but turns out to be Amelia, hires him to beat up a guy who is stalking her. Guess what? It turns out to be Holland March!
Healy approaches March, the guy he just beat up, and suggests that they work together to try to find Misty.
Wait -- what about Amelia?
Did I mention that they meet at Holland's daughter's birthday party? 13-year old girls everywhere, piling around, eating, bowling, grabbing at Holland to take photographs.
I'm getting weirded out. What's with the young girls in every scene?
It's burnt out, so they convince a little boy on a bike (Lance Valentine Butler) to take them to see...I don't remember what. I got distracted when the little boy offered to show them his dick for $20.
Out of nowhere.
That's even worse than the screensful of 13-year old girls. I like looking at dicks, but...WTF?
Is it supposed to represent the decadence of 1970s L.A.?
Turns out that Amelia/Misty and Dean were making a half-porno, half-air pollution documentary financed by Sid Shattuck.
Meanwhile, Holland's daughter Holly (that's right, Holly Holland) starts investigating on her own, and gets into trouble with...
That was enough. I went to bed, leaving Bob up to watch the rest, and Wikipedia to summarize the plot: There's a big porno racket going on, and Amelia, as the daughter of a high-ranking government official, was threatening to blow the whistle on it, so Shattuck has hired a hit man (Matt Bomer) to kill her. Detroit car companies are involved, and Chet plays some role. I don't know what Misty's mountains had to do with it.
But you have to wade through a lot of scenes involving little girls to get there.
See also: Michael in the Boys' Room with Cole or Dylan Sprouse; Beefcake and Heterosexism in my Netflix Recommendations
I guess it's supposed to represent the decadence of straight porn. (Hell, growing up, I was told repeatedly that the women of porn were kidnapped and trafficked. Which does, interestingly enough, mean my parents would've probably had less issue with gay porn. Keep in mind that the only porn I had growing up was a porn ad I'd stolen while retrieving the mail. Interestingly enough, it catered to straight, gay, bisexual, and bizarre interests. By "bizarre" I mean three-inch nipples.)
ReplyDeleteI should've warned you about manga. There is some male nudity, but usually not attractive types. (Typically it's boys specifically because they're NOT yet sexual beings. It's often used to indicate poverty or a rural background: Goku swims naked because the only human he's seen before Bulma is his late grandfather, Gohan. A pariah is naked all the time in a biography of the Buddha because the rest of India doesn't see him as human.)
But even that doesn't indicate everything. Tar-chan (full of hetero clichés: Jane used to be hot, but is now a fat harridan, while Tar-chan still is a bodybuilder type and extremely naïve, and oh, there's another woman, but Tar-chan doesn't even notice she likes him, even as she and Jane shoot daggers at each other) is a feral child (even if he's an adult outside of flashbacks) whose loincloth doesn't stay on for various dick jokes. But that's still comedy, not really sexy.
Actual sexy male nudity in manga? Rare, limited to porn. Though I must emphasize that straight porn gets more panic in Japan, because of that one manga ka in the 80s who killed four girls, had sex with them, and ate them, in that order. (So, yeah, the Aristocrats.) Gay porn is seen as a fringe subculture in Japan, even as it's being mainstreamed here. But straight manga porn? Tied to serial killers, while having a broader audience.
Despite this, many manga ka drew porn before going legit.
I have no idea what size female nipples usually are. Is 3 inches unusually large?
DeleteThe nipple itself? Not the diameter of the areola? Yeah.
DeleteDon't know, don't care. Visualizing those things is not one of my top priorities.
DeleteThink of 18-inch dicks then. Also bizarre.
DeleteI still fap to the memory of the guy in the gay phone sex ad.
I looked up the director, Shane Black. He wrote the screenplays for "Lethal Weapon," "The Last Action Hero," "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," and that sort of thing.
ReplyDelete