Sensory Overload

Let's get the names straight at least.

Kole Kerr is the writer of this, and the fellow that appears at the beginning to suggest that our hero go to an experimental company to enhance his life (as with "Open your Eyes," "Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," "Old Boy" and "The Game.")

Louis Moire is the cinematographer/director, who apparently cannot afford a video camera that does optical zoom, so when he zooms digitally, you get pixilation. Max Candy is the producer and presumably the creative mind, formerly a somewhat accomplished erotic photographer after the mold of Suze Randall.

Moire Candy is the production company backed by Michael Ninn, he who invented the artcore genre, and who apparently wants to get out of mass directing (after 100 films). He obviously wants to take advantage of the lower costs of Prague, where Candy is based, and he says that he believes they have the moxie to continue the intelligent, artistic notions he's developed.

This is their first project under the NinnWorks distribution. The really cool NinnWorks logo is missing from the beginning of this, a TeeVee being crushed in an industrial machine.

Bottom line: if this is indicative of what Candy can produce, Moire Candy Will have to rely on the cheap production costs, because it has none of the appeal of Ninn's more adventurous, intelligent and cinematic projects.

I'm interested in all this because film is going through a revolution right now, in what it is and how it connects with us. Sex in film was separated out in the thirties by the code, and again in the seventies — by evangelical forces that are still with us. So we have two parallel industries: porn and other film. They are about the same size. Both are being reinvented in several ways right now. Ninn is — or was — the single interesting connection between the two. If he has passed his torch to Candy, then Candy had better scour the world for better writers. Its not just the fate of one man that's at stake here, nor the pleasure of a few solo fantasizers. Okay, I leave my soapbox.

The story here is that some dejected fellow signs up with a company to change his life. They capture him and put him in a cell where he is "overloaded" one sense at a time by somehow looking through a window, experiencing sex acts related to that sense. The staging is set up for cheap production. We see him in his white cell looking offscreen. And we separately see the vignettes which feature different players.

Apart from all the other opportunities missed here, I'll just mention one. Sex surely is a multisensual experience. Film is an experience of sight and sound. The challenge is how to convey the smell and taste of sex, those remarkable elements that get dropped in all the other (tens of millions? of) videos of insertions and sounds of thrusts. If they could have done that cinematically, this would have been a hit.

What do we get? Imagine the least clever thing you can. Smell is sex with incense burning. Taste is a girl with sliced bananas on her tummy.

Oh. Its a matter of taste for sure. But the best looking girl is by no surprise Louis Moire's wife, Keana Moire, a Czech girl, very slight. She plays the secretary of the "company" and participates in the group scene at the end with another girl. I understand she played "the photographer" in the first Candy/Moire collaboration under the Black Label distribution.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.