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Avg. Rating: 4
Culturally and socially significant event barely documented
Marketed as a documentary, this is in point of fact merely non-fictional entertainment a 'documentary', according to its historical definition it is not. That established we can move forward and evaluate this film as such.
Deep Throat defines a peculiar episode in America's popular culture and begs to be dissected against a backdrop of political, cultural, moral, social and artistic appropriation and significance. Unfortunately this film comes nowhere near to completing or even tackling such a noble task. Instead it simply sets out to provide a brief chronology of the film and it's main players and then seeks to paint a very superficial and somewhat biased wash over the film and it's subsequent oppression and persecution under Federal Law.
In all honesty, before they loaded the camera with film, I doubt the filmmakers had established a coherent brief or rationale they intended to pursue. Neither does it appear that they had a defined set of objectives, goals and truths they wished to explore. There is therefore, subsequently, an enormous sense of lack of cohesion and ultimately a clear absence of a defining central thesis to this work, something which ultimately has a very negative impact on the quality of the film.
Rather like the assassination of JFK, Deep Throat (the film) leaves us with more questions than answers. Questions that over time blur, fade and become all the more difficult to answer. As people pass away and memories fade - as fiction morphs into popular fact, so the ultimate Truth becomes even harder to distinguish. Sadly this film really does very little to address those questions and truths, and indeed really only serves to take us further away from discovery and ultimate closure.
If one does a little research one can find a lot more pieces of the puzzle than were presented in this quite shallow and mediocre piece of entertainment. This lacking is indeed rather questionable, in terms of the underlying motives for presenting or misrepresenting the Truth can only be guessed at. Let us hope that the reasons were not malicious and merely the bi-product of an inadequate and inexperienced film-maker out of their depth.
To summate. What we have here is not really a documentary per se. Certainly not of the pre Michael Moore kind, the REAL kind. What we have instead is a 'truthiness' documentary, something Moore, Spurlock et al. have all become so famous for; documentaries for the T.V. fed generations. Sadly the functions that these kinds of films essentially perform, is to weaken both the ultimate Truth and the subject in question, being supposedly 'documented'. Another fake coin tossed in a fountain, that no-one can distinguish from the real ones and that no-one wants to make the effort to get in, get wet and retrieve. Ultimately, what this film represents is a wasted chance.
Good Movie Review
I did not fully read the product before I purchased it. I thought this was going to show the entire original deep throat movie in addition to some inside scoop. (IT DOES NOT SHOW THE ENTIRE MOVIE). It's a good review though. Worth the money.
Inside Deep Throat
Its the story behind the making of Deep Throat the movie. It covers the actors, producers and the mob, who currently own and control the movie and the amount of money they made from it. It includes coverage of government intervention in an attempt to censor the movie and prosecute the actors and producers, leaving the mob alone, on what they think people should not be allowed to see. The movie is on the investigative news style digging up facts and embellishing them to make their point. It was a good movie on those involved and its history.
I remember it all...
Among it's other social accomplishments, "Deep Throat" is the one that finally admitted that women enjoy sex as much as men. Certainly, the film is not well made, and is essentially a parody of itself. Some of the one-liners have become legend (Mind if I smoke while...). What's interesting about this documentary is the effect it had on 1st amendment rights and censorship. Released in 1972, I saw it in '75 in a screening at UW~Madison, complete with self-righteous protestors, lotsa cops, etc. The print was lousy, but no one cared. We were watching history! By today's standards, the whole fuss seems silly, but the amazing uproar that followed the initial showings are well documented. Harry Reems almost went to prison. Especially sad is the effect it had on Ms. Lovelace's children, especially her daughter. Not to blab anything away, in case you don't already know, this doc is worth watching, if for no other reason than to see how much (if at all) we've advanced as a society regarding control over our viewing habits. If certain "artists" can get away using feces and blood and body parts in their paintings, I find no fault with "Deep Throat", which, to me, approaches art more than that. Certainly, it was only harmless fun.
A wasted opportunity
The subject of Deep Throat should be perfect documentary material. Above and beyond the sexual angle, there's a story here about the cultural wars in America that were and still are tearing that country apart. Yet Inside Deep Throat is such a poorly made documentary that only the vaguest hints of any of this shine through. Instead we are treated with stale cliches about how Deep Throat practically invented oral sex and gee-aren't-Americans-ignorant-in-their sexual-repression type soundbites. Stylistically, it's yet another pretentious modern outing with meaningless images appearing throughout in soft focus in a quasi-MTV style which I found thoroughly distracting and totally out of touch with the era it was supposed to be portraying.
To see a succesful modern take on where America was at politically and spiritually in the 60's/70's, I'd recommend a documentary called The Weather Underground instead. It is about the revolutionary Weathermen organisation and it's a film that really places you in that time and gives an ultra-realistic idea of what it must have been like to have been there, the mark of a true period documentary. None of this is present in Inside Deep Throat which is bland, pedestrian and ultimately predictable and utterly lacking in imagination.
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