Movie Details
| Title: | American Stag | |
| Director: | Benjamin Meade | |
| Year: | 2006 | |
| Genre: | Documentary | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 10.25.06 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (1)
- James Ellroy Presents Bazaar Bizarre
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 10.25.06 | Alamo Lake Creek | This Screening is part of event: Austin Film Festival 2006 This documentary about stag films got off to a somewhat controversial note when filmmaker Ben Meade told his story of submitting to South by Southwest and getting rejected. They cited his film as pornography, which made him wonder if they'd even bothered to watch it. After sxsw offered to take another look at the film, Meade decided to go to the press instead, insisting that the festival did not watch the films that filmmakers paid money to submit. So this didn't play at south by. Instead, AFF asked to play it so he flew out here on his own dime to support the festival. And while I wouldn't call the film itself pornography, it's definitely ABOUT porn and offers plenty of chances to see some vintage full-frontal female bodies. He seems to draw the line at the male member, always cutting right before her hand takes it out of his pants or it enters the frame or whatever, but large portions of the film are these clips from stag films... so I'm not so sure the whole sxsw thing had a clear right and wrong to it, but hey... if they can play a doc on the word "fuck" then they can play a doc on stag films, right? The fact that Fuck was better than this might also have something to do with it. Anyway, in addition to the numerous clips (obtained over a year thanks to ebay and craigslist according to the director and his wife), Meade also interviews several experts in the field (including Film Threat's Chris Gore) and a few professional personalities like Adam Corolla, Tommy Chong, and Melvin Van Peebles. They cover the baseline facts of the genre (1700 of them made, died when porn theaters and video started) and talk about several celebs who supposedly appear (Babra Streisand, Marylin Monroe, Jayne Masnfield, Joan Crawfod) and Meade does an admirable job in showing the film in question, making a little game out of it whether you think that's actually her or not. Overall, the movie is marginally interesting if you're a pervert like me. Apparently this was just picked up by Bravo, and that fits. This would make a decent diversion on TV some night for sure. The director though... something was odd about him. He came out and started giving us lessons on how to make independant film or something... telling us to pick subjects that would be interesting to other people like getting screwed out of car insurance money, and to always support film festivals because lots of times those are the only places to see these movies in a theater. Where all that stuff came from I'm not sure. I think he maybe thought he was somewhere else... like his panel got cancelled or something. It was a little odd to me. Oh well. |
