Documentary Weekend

While I'm fasting I like to slack off on the weekends, sleeping in late, skipping the gym and generally being a bum. A by product of my lazy Ramadan weekends is a lot of TV, movies and video games to pass the time. Boredom equals hunger. This weekend was no different, Friday night we went out to dinner and came home to watch Inside Deep Throat. Saturday afternoon I sat down to watch BattleGround: 21 Days on the Empire's Edge. Two wildly different documentaries, polar opposites in fact.

BattleGround is a film that follows a former Shiite guerrilla (Frank al-Bayati), that escaped Iraq in 1991, and came back to his home country in 2004. The reunions with family members thought lost are emotional and almost feel too personal. I wanted to give him his space, but those moments work well to blunt pictures of the destruction Iraq has faced. The two sides of the movie put together a good mix of what is going wrong with the US invasion and what still could be in a war torn country. Children playing by tank carcasses riddled with uranium tipped ammunition, followed by scenes of Frank's nephews and nieces meeting him for the first time. Frank's optimism for what he considers a liberated Iraq, shadowed by images of US troops who just don't seem to mesh with the locals is fascinating stuff. The film is an emotional roller coaster that I really enjoyed.

Deep Throat is arguably the most profitable film ever made, not porn film, but film period. I say arguably because the box office gross has been estimated from $100 million all the way to $600 million. Inside Deep Throat is the documentary film that tells the story of said infamous porn film. I find it odd that I have never even heard of the film, it changed the way American's look and porn and jump started the whole industry. I always thought it was the VHS, but that was the technology not the profit model. Deep Throat showed people that porn could make money and lots of it.

The film was financed by the mafia, who ended up taking over it's box office sales once they understood its acclaim. The religious right and republican pursuit to ban the film only add coal to fires of its popularity. Ultimately the actress who stars in the film repents for her sins with the feminist movement, claims she was a victim who was hypnotized and finally tries to cash in by going back into porn. The actor who only got paid $250 to appear in the film was the first artist to ever be tried and convicted for his "art". He end up a homeless drunk, found Jesus and now makes a good life for himself in real estate. Once Nixon left the white house the government's witch hunt ended and none of the people who had anything to do with the film ever made money from it.

A warning, the documentary has nudity, not a ton of it, but they do show one scene that made Deep Throat such a hot topic and it is graphic. If your not to prudish and can stomach a three second fellatio scene the film is a real treat. That last sentence just seems wrong, but I like it. I won't go into my arguement against some of the people in the movie who claim that porn was art back in the 70's , but I will admit that it was not the ultra reality that porn is today.