(no subject)

[which_chick]

Notes on Caligula... This is an uneven film. It's something to see, if only to look at what happens when the people in charge are not sure about what kind of movie they want to make. I'd be okay with it as a spectacle of sins of the flesh. That'd be fine. It'd also make a nice flick about the madness of our man Caligula, who, by all accounts, was a few grapes short of a bunch, though that could be excused in part or in toto by the fact that most of the rest of his familly got killed because they were candidates for the throne. That might make anyone mad. (The actual film didn't show this -- Wikipedia talks about it, though.) It'd make a lovely, Monty-Python-esque carnival of the absurd. It'd also be a fun political mess. Instead, it bounces around like a pinball, veering into one of these bumpers and whipping back to hit another. The overall effect is less than successful. A more certain hand in direction would have done nothing but good for this production.


It was interesting for a couple of things, though. First off, there was an acute fabric shortage in ancient Rome. Nobody had any damn clothes so they all ran around naked all the time. All I can say is good thing they weren't in freaking Siberia. Second, the amount of pubic shaving that takes place on crotches for modern public consumption (like in porn) is pretty darned excessive. People are rather furrier than you might think if you're just going by what you see in modern porn. Third, I do not know who filmed this movie but it was not filmed by anyone who had any business trying to film smut for smut's sake. The camerawork would have been quite acceptable for a documentary on beet farming or something, but for watching people debauch, it was lacking indeed. Debauchery should be more fun to watch than this was. Fourth, this is not a movie for fans of Claudius. He is not sympathetically portrayed in this movie. If you want to cheer for how damn cool Claudius is, you need to be watching I, Claudius. (Note to self: You probably want to read that at some point in your life.)

The general plot of the thing is that our man Caligula gets to be Caesar after his man Macro strangles what's left of Tiberius Caesar (yes, yes, he of the T in James T. Kirk) so that Caligula can be Caesar. Not a patient man, our Caligula. He's a sick fuck, but from what we see of Tiberius, he's not much worse than what came before him. I'd say Rome had been slipping into debauchery for some time before Caligula got there. We're clearly well into the decline and fall, here. Anyway. Caligula is doing his sister Drusilla. This doesn't upset me as much as it probably should. First off, his sister is delightful. If I had a sister that looked like her, I'd do her, too. She's a hottie. Second, I've been watching probably excessive quantities of Utena, so I'm up to speed on the mindset. No biggie. And, y'know, they seem genuinely fond of one another. As Caesar, Caligula eventually marries someone not-his-sister, which is good. His sister dies of something or other, which upsets Caligula quite a bit. (His sister is shown as rather more sane than he is. Not sure if this is true or not, but in the movie, that's how it is.) Anyway, Caligula proceeds to mismanage the country and piss off everyone important until his guards revolt and kill him, his wife, and his daughter. There's not really a lot of plot for the amount of movie you get, so they sort of pad the plot with smut, which would be okay by me if it were INTERESTING smut, which it is not. *sigh*

I watched the uncut version of this film, which contains rather more cock (uncut, natch) than one normally expects from films with extensive dialogue. This is somewhat disconcerting at first but you get used to it after the first ten or fifteen minutes. Probably not a first date film, though.

Comments

[fooliv.livejournal.com]

It's been more than a decade since I've watched Caligula, and I think it was the cut version. The only impression it left on me was some bizarre, enormous contraption featuring a wall of spinning thingimabobs extending across a stadium. I can't even remember what the purpose of the wall of spinning thingimabobs *was*. I seem to remember that the movie was made by a porn magazine publisher, and it showed, badly.

I don't really understand the Cult of the Seventies Porn Film. I fell asleep during a screening of Flesh Gordon at Quest Labs, frex. The plots are generally dull, the women not particularly attractive, and the production lacking. Boogie Nights tried to make the case that the shift from pretentious Seventies film porn to cheap fly-by-night Eighties video porn was a tragedy of Elizabethan proportions, but come on now, really.

Oh, and I rather liked Gaius. Who doesn't love mad emperors known for naming their livestock to high office? He was the one mad emperor of the classic period who seemed to honestly have fun with the position. Tiberius was a grim old buggerer, Domitian was paranoid and joyless, and Nero was a petulant, cowardly mama's boy with artistic pretensions. But Gaius Caesar? He gave megalomania a good name.

Tiberius (http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Suetonius/12Caesars/Tiberius*.html#43) would probably have made a better porn film subject, though.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

You'd know if it weren't the cut version. I am not the sort of person to mention the amount of cock in a film unless this was soemthing truly worth mentioning. :) Pity the person filming it didn't do a better job. *sigh* It could have been a lot more fun to watch than it was.

The bizarre enormous contraption was running the spinning thingamabobs to rip off the heads of people who were buried with just their heads showing, like, for example, our good man Macro who was there getting his head ripped off because he smothered Tiberius to make Caligula happy.

Bob Guccione (who is a porn guy but I don't know which one off the top of my head) was in charge of the project, near as I can recall from the credits.

There's a film called Flesh Gordon? Really? (I am cackling audibly.) In college, I saw an absolutely delightful-in-its-badness porn musical of Cinderella from 1977 which is probably a similar sort of film. This (http://www.badmovieplanet.com/unknownmovies/reviews/rev244.html) is a reasonably honest (and amusing) review of the film in question.

[fooliv.livejournal.com]

Guccione was the publisher of Penthouse, the mag which split the difference between Hefner's Playboy smoking-jacket pretension and Larry Flynt's rutting pig Hustler routine.

Yes, there was a movie called Flesh Gordon. Bob Rector used to make sniggering references to it at PSSFS meetings or just hanging around the old State College Quest Labs, so somebody finally found a copy of it for an evening of viewing. It sucked beyond the telling thereof. Which is kind of weird, because the Seventies Flash Gordon had such a porn-film-without-the-nakedness-and-groinage affect that you'd think it would be a natural fit. The end result was something unutterably dreary; about as titillating as sponge-bath time at the nursing home.