Captured Beauty

From: Sean Matthews 
Newsgroups: rec.arts.movies.erotica
Subject: [Soft] Review of New Blake Tape
Date: Fri, 5 Jul 1996 17:32:12 +0200 (MET DST)


I just saw a (the?) new Andrew Blake tape last night, which, at least
here in Germany, is called `Captured Beauty'.  I'd just been bored to
death by 'From Dusk 'till Dawn' (I don't expect to see a crasser movie
this year) and, wandering past a video library and noticing that they
had a copy on the shelves, decided that Andy might make an interesting
contrast.

There are several things that were interesting about this tape, even
before I got it out of the library: First, the box informs me that
`Andrew Blake' is now a coporate trademark as well as a director.
Second, and culturally interesting, my library has three copies of
this tape (unlike the usual single copies of porn tapes circulated
between branches), which it files in the mainstream section of the
library rather than with the other porn, beside a row of copies of
Waterworld. And this is in spite of a cover illustration of a woman's
pubis with a silver chain dangling from the labia.  The idea,
presumably, is that nice decent, respectable people who might want to
watch a porn vid, but wouldn't be seen dead wandering through the porn
section, will thus be able to borrow it without socially compromising
themselves.  And clearly they do, a lot, since unlike Waterworld the
Blake tapes are always out on loan.

But then nice, decent, respectable people actually seem to have pretty
exotic tastes in private. Check out the catalogue of a nice, decent,
respectable sex shop like Good Vibrations, and you find that much, if
not most, of the canonical politically correct (literate that is, not
MacKinnon friendly) pornography/erotica these days is about serious
B&D; e.g. The Story of O, Sara Adamson's Marketplace books, or Anne
Rice's Beauty Books (through which 900-odd pages the Labrador
puppy-like heroine happily gambols on all fours, in between set pieces
where she tied down, beaten, and sexually assaulted by men, women and
even the occasional cat). The point is that B&D may be a niche
market in video, but it is probably the mainstream in print.

Anyway, Andy has clearly noticed this, and decided that there was a
market opening for an upmarket B&D tape---a lesbian one, after all,
girls are his thing.  This could be fine by me: beautiful women in
fetish gear, doing interesting things to each other is exactly to my
taste, and the abstract cool atmosphere that Blake cultivates can be
effective (cf., e.g., the Sub/Dom scene with Zara Whites and Jeanne
Fine in House of Dreams). The problem is that yes we have the
beautiful women, Dahlia Grey (a.k.a. Jami Dion, and possessed of
something approximating a real body) among them, but they never get
around to doing anything interesting.  They dress up in interesting
clothes, and sort of swat at each other with stylised flails and the
occasional riding crop, but never even kiss on the mouth or the
breast, never mind go down on each other or even touch each other much
between the legs, in spite of suggestive crotch shots that imply that
that this sort of thing is about to happen. The most explicit thing
that happens is when one girl once vaguely pulls on the chain attached
to a ring in another girl's labia.  Dahlia is tickled once, very
briefly, on the clitoris, and a couple of times one of the other girls
cops a feel of her breasts, but that's about it. The most sensual
thing that happens is when a Dom runs a riding crop along the labia of
her Sub a couple of times.  I was constantly hoping that some Dom
would bend a Sub over and stick a butt plug or a dildo into her or
something, or even just run fingers or a tongue over her pussy. No
chance.

Now the rules say that esp. in the 'states you can't mix heavy B&D
with real sex without risking serious trouble, but there isn't any
heavy B&D here. In fact there isn't really any B&D at all, just pretty
girls in latex and chains playing with each other.  But then neither
I, nor, I imagine, many others, except for real (sic.) perverts, would
want it: B&D belongs in books---*reading* about the sort of things
that happen to Beauty are fun because you are told about it from a
perspective inside her head, and you *know* that she is really having
fun, and that she is not really seriously hurt or seriously
frightened; seeing it in a film, where you don't have that
perspective, is different, and would get rapidly nasty.  But for
precisely that reason there is no reason why we can't have real sex
here.  An even slightly more explicit version of this tape could be
really sexy, in a medium-core sort of way; even a bit of kissing and
touching would have improved it enormously.

Oh well, opportunity missed. I suspect that this is a bit tame even
for Blake's intended audience (Penthouse is more explicit these days),
and he'll have to go back to making something a bit more aggressive if
he wants to keep making real money. I hope he does, because his
version of nice pornography for respectable middle class people at
least in theory could be much better than the sort of crassness of
Michael Ninn. At least Blake, unlike Ninn, has some idea of a
genuinely arrestingly sexy visual image (Dahlia gets very attractively
dribbled over with something like blackcurrant juice in this one, but
unfortunately the obvious part two, of someone licking it off her
afterwards, didn't happen: we just get part one again, which is
boring) even if his sex, when he actually puts it in, is cool. But
then he's not competing with Bruce Seven.

Sean

P.S., It is well known that Blake `trained as an fine art painter'
whatever that means, and it is fun to pick up the occasional reference
to mainstream erotic art that he sticks in. I don't know if it simply
ripping off, or self-conscious quotation, or a mixture of both: for
instance in (The Art of) Desire it was Yves Klein's body paintings,
this time he has an Allen Jones table, of course with a real girl
instead of a dummy.

P.P.S., Anyone know if Dahlia Gray ever done an explicit or even a
semi-explicit g/g scene in a magazine or on a video, and if so, where.

P.P.P.S., Anyone know if there is a harder core version of this tape
anywhere?