For background on another film, I had to pick a Michael Ninn film. I picked two that sounded interesting.
The Ninn approach to porn is from the 70s. He has ideas that are really movie ideas. Then he does them with relatively high production values. Because he trowels in the porn sequences the things sell and no one bothers him. And they do sell because they have that gloss that used to be associated with Playboy and Penthouse. Smut dressed up.
But it interests me because it is dressed in genuinely cinematic clothing, or tries to be.
This movie is built around real facts of a sort. It wasn't the CIA but the Army that experimented with LSD. The story here is a CIA guy who runs an LSD unit. He doses suspected moles and finds them out, killing one. He doses himself to "know what it is like."
The porn hook is that when in a trance, the drugged man imagines sex. Or he has sex and imagines it more grandly and gauzily than it really is, and if he is guilty there's some threatening sex, which oddly here is that a black stud steals his girl!
What makes this marginally interesting is the challenge of showing the drugged state. Its worth genuine consideration. How do you show something that really can't be shown visually? More challenging, how do you conflate the idea of sex out of control (which is intended here) and ultra intense and extra real?
Ninn's not much to write home about compared to how others have done it. But the fact that he's in the game and he tries makes this notable, even important in a way.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.
