Humans kill. And many derive pleasure from doing it. Maybe it’s just a question of time before you become a murderer. I am Not a Serial Killer explores the morbid curiosity with death and assassination that many teenagers have. John Wayne Cleaver (Max Records), a teenage outcast who lives in a small Minnesota city, impersonates this strange drive. He leads the investigation of a serial killer and invites you to violate the crime scene with him. It is most likely you will follow his invitation. I Am Not a Serial Killer is a clever tale of a profoundly twisted mind, and a likely blockbuster for this winter season.

John likes to spy on his neighbours. He is a hybrid of a Hitchcockian creature and TV detective Dexter. His close friends are an old perv, Crowley (Christopher Lloyd), and a schoolmate who loves violent video games. His mother April (Laura Fraser) works at a funeral home, so he is used to assist her with the autopsy procedures. Some of the most thrilling and ludicrous scenes are set in this morgue room. “Be afraid, be very afraid“, David Cronenberg would say. John also goes out fishing with his therapist, but this is only a trivial detail.

A serial killer has taken a hit on a small town. John is intrigued and decides to follow one of the suspects into a bushy and snowy territory, only to witness of a murder. Violent deaths are commonly associated with winter and cold weather. The film is set roughly between Halloween and Christmas in the Northern hemisphere. For Christians it is a time between the celebration of the deceased (November 2nd) and the birth of the Earth saviour (December 25th). Hence a time between death and hope, passing through the stages of desperation, loneliness and brutal crimes – 9/11 among them. The cinematography of the film reminds the audience of those states of the spirit, etching images of frozen lakes and hazy alleys on our subconscious.

John was diagnosed as a sociopath, and perhaps he has more serious mental health problems. Is it all happening in his mind? Did he really see the serial killer in action? The fast journey into John’s decadent mind is certain to drive you into a frenzy. And you will relish some of the murders, particularly the therapist’s death. (Sorry for the spoiler, but I bet if you ever had a therapist, the thought of killing him has probably crossed your mind.)

Christopher Lloyd delivers a fascinating performance. Though Lloyd is most known by the trilogy Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985, 1989), he never stopped supporting young and creative directors, accepting roles even in debut short films, such as in The Coin by our dirty Fabien Martorell. In Billy O’Brien first feature, he recites ‘The Tyger’, a poem by William Blake that goes straight to the heart of a sociopath’s mind. In fact, Blake inspired other film characters such as the role played by Johnny Depp in Jim Jarmush’s cult movie Dead Man (1995). Blake is an open gate to a complex and terrifying cosmovision.

Some of the symbolisms in the feature – such as freaky Hallowen thrills – have been already exhaustively explored in splatter and horror flicks. Still, stick to the very end of the movie, for a very unexpected twist. You will learn that penetrating someone else’s mind is indeed a very tough job.

I Am not a Serial Killer is out in the UK on Friday, December 9th. Watch the film trailer below:

Some athletes in the history of sport are able to reach fame, but only very few inspire young people both in their home countries and the world. Their names echo in eternity, just like mythological characters or the Roman Age gladiators. Thirty-year-old Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt is beyond doubt one of these people, alongside Michael Jordan and the late Muhammad Ali (he died last June at the age of 74).

The documentary I am Bolt, directed by the British brothers Benjamin and Gabe Turner (they made the football doc The Class of ’92 three years ago) is an intimate portrait of the fastest man alive, with plenty of videos in reality show confessional style (shot by Bolt himself) blended with unconventional film devices. We see Bolt, joking with his fellow Jamaican athletes in hotel rooms, having fun at parties with his friends back in Jamaica. We see beyond the athlete; but we see the young man behind him, his relationship with his friends, family and team. At times, there is an element of informal, gonzo reporting.

The filmmakers follow Bolt’s extraordinary efforts and challenges over the past few years, from the 2008 Beijing Olympics to the 2012 London Olympics, the Germany World Championship all the way down to the 2016 Rio De Janeiro Olympics. It reveals his efforts to reconcile his strict physical regime with a somehow normal life. The journeys back home are essential. A World famous sportsman needs to mingle with his people, listen to dancehall, reggae music and shake his booty. Bolt excels on that front as well, surrounded by a lot of twerking dancers.

The reggae artists Ziggy Marley and Chronixx, both interviewed in the movie, reveal Bolt has inspired the whole of Jamaica. Other interviewees include the legendary footballer Pelé, Neymar and the American tennis player Serena Williams. They talk about the ‘power’ of the lightning Bolt and his impact on the world of sport.

The political element does not prevail in I Am Bolt, unlike in other sports docs such as Maradona by Kusturica (Emir Kusturica, 2008). This movie is instead about an individual achiever: a man from humble beginnings and a small country, without access to sport facilities and networks structures, who managed to become “the greatest of all” in his craft.

The movie follows a natural flow, with no structural devices (such as chapters and titles); the narrative is straightforward and fluid, perhaps akin to the stream of consciousness. I am Bolt is more than entertaining; it is inspiring, sweaty, groovy and intense. It beggars the questions: Where is he going to run now? What’s his next challenge? Just how high can he go?

I Am Bolt showed in selected festivals when this piece was originally published (in 2016). Out on Netflix on Thursday, February 16th (2023).

Disney has been flirting with the idea of a lesbian princess for at least two years, and using the debate as a clever marketing ruse. “We have tried to branch out over the years, when it comes to our female characters,” said Disney executive Ellen Etheridge. “We have come a long way from Sleeping Beauty, and have tried to introduce strong female characters that young children can look up to. We introduced an African-American Princess a few years back, and we are looking to break new ground once more”. Yet no same-sex romance has come to fruition yet, neither in royal nor in pleb format.

Disney’s latest CG animation movie Moana, which came out in the UK this weekend, is being marketed as an audacious film “pushing Disney frontiers”, with the two directors being described as “daredevils” who wish to introduce an LGBTQ princess to the big screen at some point in the near future. The film is hailed as revolutionary because Moana is a strong, dark-skinned female from an exotic lineage of Polynesian leaders. She never accepts the limits imposed on her, in stark contrast to passive, vulnerable and more traditional princesses such as Cinderella. She has been called the most progressive heroine in the Studio’s history of almost a century, with a journalist describing her a “marvelous respite” from the white nationalists who found a foothold in the administration of the pussy-grabbing president-elect of the US.

Even more significantly, Moana is an anti-princess role model. In the film, a tattooed demigod named Maui (voiced by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), refers to her as a princess. The 16-year old heroine (voiced by newcomer Auli’i Cravalho) immediately rebukes him: “I am not a princess. If you wear a dress and you have an animal sidekick, you’re a princess”. She is challenging firmly-established gender rules that until recently seemed irrevocable – at least in Disney’s conservative world.

Demure yet vaguely naughty

The world-famous American philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler argues that gender is performative. There is no identity beyond the the acts and traits that constitute a stable gender identity. For Butler, gender is not a natural expression, but a fabrication instead. In the case of Disney, princesses assert their identity through a number of “feminine” devices. They wear make-up, jewelry and frilly dresses, plus they are scrawny with the right amount of curves, pompous hair and sparkles. They even have similar gazes and posture: head turned toward the side, pointed down, with eyes looking up discreetly towards the viewer, in a demure and yet vaguely naughty and suggestive pose. Thankfully Moana has now come to our rescue, staring at us directly in the face, with her eyes and neck straight!

Princesshood is a surviving relic of a deeply undemocratic and medieval institution called monarchy. No girl can become a princess except through birth or marriage, and these are not a reflection of their personal achievements. No matter how hard you fight, you will never become a princess, except if your “skills” consist of catching a royal spouse. This is not the role model for equality that our girls need, whether gay or straight.

Moana has taught Disney and the world a lesson by shunning the royal title. Let’s hope that the LGBTQ community has learnt it, too. Disney doesn’t need a lesbian princess. It simply needs a lesbian, a powerful and strong one.

You can watch Moana‘s trailer below. The film is out in cinemas across the US now, and it premieres in the UK on Friday, December 2nd.

The picture at the top of the article in from Disney’s princesses Ariel and Jasmine engaging in a passionate Lesbioan kiss, created by Deviant Arts – click here for more information.

She wrote: “So famous people have now repudiated the rape scene in The Last Tango in Paris Maria Schneider denounced years ago, but but you only believed it when one of the rapists finally admitted to the crime. I’m thinking of the technicians who watched in silence the live spectacle of woman being violated. Most of them were probably men, and they never said a word. Instead they left the ‘mad’ Schneider screaming on her own for decades. They are all accomplices. All captured on film and celebrated as a cinema masterpiece. At that moment, they destroyed the life of a 19-year-old girl, who then became ‘the butter woman’ and gets raped every time a man gets aroused or ejaculates to the scene. Forty years being raped. Accomplices. Accomplices. Co-authors.”

The words above came from my friend Tainá Moraes, who shared her frustration and anger about the latest Bertolucci controversy with her friends on Facebook. The Brazilian designer and art history student, mother to one child, felt that the Italian director was an accessory to the rape of Maria Schneider during the filming on the famous/infamous butter sequence with Marlon Brando in his 1971 classic Last Tango in Paris. She also felt that the conspicuous absence of public commotion when Schneider first denounced the events in an interview in 2007 makes us all accomplices of a very heinous crime.

The Italian director confessed that the rape sequence was non-consensual in an interview in 2013 (below), that has now resurfaced. He then tried to play it down by arguing that only the butter element wasn’t disclosed in the film script, but that Schneider was aware of the violence all along. One way or another, there was at least one non-consensual element in the sequence. We must not underestimate its impact on the actress’s subsequent life – regardless of whether this constitutes constitutes rape from a legal perspective or not. The French artist never again filmed another sex scene and she suffered from depression until her untimely death to cancer in 2011, suggesting that the events indeed afflicted the woman for the rest of her life.

I personally don’t hold the view that every single person aroused by the scene and the crew were rapists, and that all viewers were accomplices. I am also not convinced that Brando is a rapist and Bertolucci an accessory to rape because we just don’t have enough evidence about what happened and – since Schneider is now dead – never will. We simply don’t know how much of the violence was non-consensual in order to make a judgement “beyond reasonable doubt”.

Yet I think that Tainá’s words are extremely relevant because they illustrate what likely went through Maria Schneider’s mind for four decades. Even if she wasn’t, Schneider probably felt that she being raped – and she probably harboured this feeling for the rest of her life. It took 35 years for Schneider to open up about what happened that day. It’s a safe assumption that she struggled to talk about the incident, and that it continued to haunt her for the rest of her life, taking its toll on her mental health, career, relationships and pretty much everything else.

Sexual liberation backfired

Cinema is a very powerful weapon. It can raise awareness of a cause, give a group a sense of identity, give unsung artists a voice, speak up for marginalised communities, immortalise people and moments. Sadly, it had precisely the opposite and undesired effect in this case: the success of Last Tango in Paris perpetuated Maria Schneider’s unspoken pain.

Ironically, Last Tango in Paris became a symbol of the sexual liberation movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, which now makes this discussion ever so urgent and pertinent. How could a woman be raped and traumatised at a time when sexual freedoms were encouraged and celebrated? Was the sexual liberation of women merely for the pleasure of men? Can you force sexual liberation on someone? These questions are rhetorical, rest assured. Their answers are bright as daylight.

Bertolucci made at least two very serious mistakes. Firstly, the non-consensual act – regardless of whether it was just the butter or not. Secondly, his initial hesitance in recognising the seriousness of the situation, – dismissing the controversy instead as “ridiculous” – only aggravated it, revealing a sheer insensitivity towards female feelings and vulnerabilities. The director’s attitude undermines the sexual movement of which he became an exponent. After all, there is no sexual liberation without multiple respect. Sexual freedom is not the same as profligacy. Liberty is not libertarianism.

For many people, chess may lack the pop appeal of sports such as football and volleyball and of reality shows on television. Indeed the 1,500-year-old activity may look lethargic and slow, and young people used to a fast-moving pace may find it difficult to relate to the board game. The piece names (king, queen, knight, bishop, rook, horse and pawn) seem to derive from an old-fashioned, far-removed and medieval world. We need a youth embassador in order to change this.

At the age of just 13, Norwegian Magnus Carlsen decided that he wanted to become World Chess Champion, and it took him just 10 years to achieve it. He became the highest-ranking title-holder and the youngest person ever to do so in 2013. The also Norwegian and very young documentary filmmaker Benjamin Ree (he’s only 27 years of age, a year older than Magnus) captures the Champion’s saga from his infancy to his crowning in Chennai, three years ago.

Magnus’s parents realised that their child had an unusually mathematical mind and so they taught him chess at the age of six. The boy was very clumsy with other children, unable to jump a very low-set bar. Yet he would stare at a Lego train for six hours trying to work out how to finish it, and refusing to eat until he achieved his objective. His determination and analytical skills were outstanding, in contrast to his physical and social skills. His parents registered some key moments of his upbringing on camera, as did other filmmakers as Magnus started his climb to fame. Benjamin combined more than 500 hours of footage into one 78-minute doc.

Ree said: “Chess is regarded as the touchstone of intellect, the ultimate battle of the minds. During the last 15 years Magnus Carlsen has become the highest ranked player of all time. I found it immensely fascinating that no one I talked to understood how Magnus Carlsen had become so good – not even himself!”

The film also includes numerous interviews with a grown-up Magnus as he prepares for the most important match of his life, against the then World Chess Champion Viswanathan Anand, 20 years his senior. The event took place in Anand’s own turf, in Chennai. The young Norwegian is an introvert, but still articulate enough to discuss his feeling in plain and good English. The film explains that Magnus’s unusual approach consists mostly of intuition, suggesting that intuition is a subconcious phenomenon with a scientific explanation.

Magnus is a celebration of an individual achiever, and a very factual register of a prodigy’s path to glory. It is almost certain to please those who already knew Magnus and chess fans altogether. Yet, it is unlikely to recruit any new chess enthusiasts, as it doesn’t go very deep into the singular and fascinating qualities of the board game. The film finishes off by claiming that Magnus has inspired hordes of young people, but somne questions remain unanswered. A young champion’s work isn’t confined to the competition arena; he must also engage with his followers, sponsor initiatives and become a youth ambassador. Has Magnus done that? We simply don’t know.

Magnus is out on digital, VoD, DVD and Blu-ray on December 12th. DMovies is giving away with DVDs and Blu-rays, a courtesy of Arrow Films – just e-mail us at info@dirtymovies.org and answer the following question: “In which year did Magnus Carlsen become World Chess Champion?” (UK only, sorry!)

Don’t forget to watch the film trailer below:

Bigotry is a horrific octopus swimming in the deep waters of the English Channel, and now its arms have reached the shore. Likewise octopuses, bigoted people are extraordinarily adept at camouflage. The sea currents of 2016 have allowed them to show their mantle, their salivary glands, their gonads, their kidneys, their anal opening, and their ink sac. But unlike octopuses bigots don’t have three hearts. They have only one, and it is full of hate.

The last effect of bigotry comes in the shape of a brand new law. The Digital Economy Bill 2016-17 threatens “unconventional sex”. It all started as an excuse to implement age checks on pornographic web sites. The Bill has now cleared the House of Commons and will be soon under consideration in the House of Lords. This law could have a massive impact on artistic freedom. After all, how do you define unconventional sex? There is a lot of room for interpretation and misinterpretation.

The Digital Economy Bill empowers censors. Sites won’t just be fined, but they will be blocked right away. Internet has become an extension of what TV was some decades ago: it brings about mindset and cultural changes. If it’s not on TV, it doesn’t exist. Nowadays if something is not online, it’s almost as if it didn’t exist. So if unconventional sex is not online, then it doesn’t exist!

The octopus and the BBFC

The British vice squad aka British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) will block the filthy and unconventional websites. Traditionally, film and video releases in Britain are amongst the most tightly-regulated in the Western world. With only a few exceptions, every commercially-released film both in cinemas and on video is vetted by the BBFC, which was founded in 1912 as the British Board of Film Censors. I wonder why they dropped the “censor” in favour of the more friendly “classification” – octopus camouflage?

The BBFC applies age-restrictive classifications and, in some cases, recommends cutting or altering the film in order to conform to their guidelines. On their website it is possible to access some case studies with plenty of background information. They are also available to clarify their decisions on the telephone. Some films and BBFC decisions were discussed in the news media, what works were complained about, and which ratings were praised. A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1972) and Freaks (Top Browning, 1932) are remarkable examples of films under the knife. The latter is one of the 10 top dirtiest films of all times – read more about it here.

Below is a remarkable career-defining case study on censorship. The actions of the BBFC had a huge impact on Crash (David Cronenberg, 1997) and the director’s subsequent films.

The octopus vs the filmmaker: Crash of Titans

Crash (1996) is the most audacious film made by Cronenberg. It was based on a J. G. Ballard’s eponymous book from the 1970s, a kind of punk text where the author stated his intention to invent a new form of pornography. Crash is a radical film that helped to established Cronenberg as a voice of the contra-sexuality. But in Britain he encountered fierce resistance from censors.

Crash deals with a fundamental issue: the relation between flesh and machine. Some of their characters have suffered car accidents and had their bodies modified. They have prosthetic limbs, or other technological elements give their bodies a new status. Scars here become erogenous zones. Rosanna Arquette’s character is a heroine: she is disabled and still fully sexual. Most importantly, she enjoys sex.

Cronenberg believes the BBFC was harsh on the film because he used mostly famous Hollywood actors. Westminster Council took the unprecedented step of threatening to ban it unless specific cuts were made, notably a sex scene involving a disabled woman. Tabloids like Daily Mail used words like “sex with cripples” on their review. After a long delay, the BBFC passed it uncut in March 1997, but it received a 18A classification. After which Westminster duly banned the film, with other local authorities following suit. The distributors were enabled to open the film in the West End. It was subsequently passed uncut for video and DVD release and screened on British TV in 2002.

It is also possible that censors were strict because the film depicted women enjoying themselves. British censors have bizarre notions of what is obscene. Facial ejaculation and male ejaculation are fine, but female ejaculation and fisting are banned. Although BBFC organised a special screening for disabled people and they loved it, censors suggested Cronenberg would have to add a voice-over because “some people got nervous”.

David Cronenberg declared during an interview to Serge Grünberg: “And what is pathetic about that are the attempts to find the reasons for censoring. I remember seeing this guy named John Bull like the symbolic character for Britain. This guy was on the council for Westminster, obviously not a very educated man, but he was talking about ‘road rage’. He was sure people would see this movie and then they would commit more road rage: they would jump out of their cars and beat each other. And then he went on to admit that he kind of liked the movie”.

These psychotic censors

In terms of budget, Crash was almost an independent film because Cronenberg’s previous movie, M. Butterfly (1993) flopped. So the implications of censorship on Cronenberg’s career were immediate. The filmmaker stated he never forgot being censored in Britain. “Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with illusion”, he explains. People didn’t go to see his movies in the UK. The box office taking for his following movie, eXistenZ, with the English actor Jude Law, was just £90,564 (data on the weekend gross May 23rd 1999). This is compared to £3.384,948 earnings for the Matrix (Lana Wachwski, Lilly Wachowski) in just one weekend in Britain, and in the same year.

Both eXistenZ and Matrix portray virtual reality, but in Cronenberg when a character goes from reality to virtual reality there is no difference, whilst in Matrix this process is heavily emphasised. Miramax, that distributed the film, wanted Cronenberg to change these scenes, and again he refused. Cronenberg again challenged censorship in this movie in a scene in which he creates another body orifice. There is a moment when somebody puts a tongue into this new orifice and somebody else puts a finger.

In Crash, sex is a political act. A revolutionary and libertarian flag for freedom and pleasure. Cronenberg subverts the sexual episteme. The clash – or crash – is the liberation of energy and the libido.

What’s next?

If the Digital Economy Bill passes it will become even more difficult to show more audacious films online. An amendment to the 2003 Communications Act two years ago has already ensured strict censorship for DVD and VoD. And if the prudish crusade goes on, soon it could become impossible to make and to show films like Crash. Creative artists will have to practise increased self-censorship, and they could become less engaged with their original script ideas. It becomes an act of self-sabotage, as they could abandon their projects. An artist can never be castrated. Such censorship is an illegitimate appropriation of carnal expression.

The picture at the top of the article is Kathleen Turner on a promotional poster of John Water’s 1994 classic ‘Serial Mum’