Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Depressive Documentary-Exploitation or expose?, 15 Jul 2006
Annabel Chong is a catch-22. A smart woman, who clearly thinks she is strong enough to embrace her sexuality, by trying to break a sex record, but her fragility always seaps through.
To be fair, there is no problem with the documentary, it is a rigourous and involving one, and like Nick Broomfield, this documentary leaves its harrowing impression long after you finnish watching it. My main problem with this film is that if it tries to highlight a vunerable young woman who has fallen into the clutches of the porn industry-a woman who is subject to extreme exploitation-then why does this documentary so proudly exploit her instablity?
There is a part of my mind that wishes that it had left some of the clips from Chong's porn films out-it is as if they put in for arousal purposes and not to give an undertone of vulgarity, when illustrating a very seedy industry. And even so, the explicit clips seem to be poorly choosen-they do actually, in my mind, conceal Annabel's character from whom she really is-a naive, vunerable, eaily led and somewhat immature young woman.
I know in this day, there is a doubled edged sword in the argument of feminism-frigid, so not to satisfy men, or promiscuity, to be on equal terms with their male counterparts? But Chong does not seem to be at all bothered in the principles of feminism-although she claims to be one, as means of justification for her sex marathon.
By the end of the film, you feel a multitude of emotions. Distress. Poignancy. Imbalance. Chong is obviously a woman who has been subjected through her path of career to exploitation, and hopefully by the end watching this, you will see, she is being exploited here as well. A truely depressing documentary through and through.
|
|
|
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
a sad tale of misplaced intelligence in a shallow world, 15 Mar 2005
This story utterly shocked me. This woman is deep, intelligent and warm. She comes from the East. Brought up in a strict but extremely loving, trusting kind of way. She enters the world of the West hoping to be noticed for her intelligence as a woman. In the West, sure, sex can be discussed openly unlike in the East and yeah, no problem, women are free to discuss it but there is a fine line between sex as an academic subject and sex for entertainment.She naively tries to mix the both and she is not prepared for what she is getting herself in to. Here there is sometimes a kind of aggression towards sex and women that some men find arousing and that has no room for intellectual debate except for it being banned. And it was these images that Anna got caught up in and that I could not get out of my head. The images of Anna in torment and obvious pain as she has sexual contact with 251 men in an attempt to achieve some kind of weird female emanicipation is truly sad yet compelling. Was it not obvious that she was supplied copious amounts of drugs during the whole film?Could she have been having flash backs of her rape during this?It certainly looked like it to me. She showed signs of drug abuse but no-one thought of her mental health or well being. Anna comes from a world that is extremely deep in its understandings of human relationships and consideration of others. She was plunged into a shallow world of drugs, sex and money. She left the porn world whispering instead of shouting and with all the guilt and confusion in the world resting on her shoulders.
|
|
|
22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Brutal, Graphic and Honest, 13 Dec 2000
This is a superb documentary, very informative, at times depressing, but always entertaining.
Showcasing the remarkable short career of pornstar Annabel Chong; Grace Quek (her real name) is a woman of many contradictions and of strong convictions.
The footage is a lot more graphic that I anticipated, though hardly surpising given the subject matter. Highly recommended.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|