Heavy Petting (1989, documentary) - 1950s youth sex experiences revisited

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Decent youth fare is made conspicuous by adding anonymity bars on this colorful and humorous poster for Obie Benz and Joshua Waletzky's Heavy Petting

Heavy Petting is a talking heads documentary, which mixes old 1950s footage concerning sex and dating with new interviews with a series of celebrities that elaborate on the subjects.

 

Heavy Petting is written by Pierce Rafferty (The Atomic Cafe (1982, documentary), producer/director) and directed by Obie Benz (Americas in Transition (1982, documentary short)) and Joshua Waletzky (Image Before My Eyes (1981, documentary)).

Several of the interview subjects are good characters with vivid and/or original stories and thoughts to contribute with, and the archive footage is well found. In one of these, disease-carrying promiscuity is identified as the aggressive blonde girl, and it is thought-provoking how it is the woman who is destroyed by sexuality which is deemed premature or promiscuous, and not the men. But Heavy Petting fails to point forwards - or backwards - to especially problematic cultural traits, for instance, and it only implicitly raises the problems of the era it sheds light on. This makes it fairly toothless as innocent celebrity anecdote entertainment first and foremost. A small further qualm is the annoying lack of title cards for the subjects up until the credit roll.

 

Some of Talking Heads frontman David Byrne's testimony from the film can be seen in a clip here

 

Cost: Unknown

Box office: 272k $ (North America only)

= Uncertain

[Heavy Petting was released 7 September (Australia) and runs 74 minutes. The film opened #16 to a 69k $ first weekend in 10 theaters in North America, where it grossed 272k $. It was also released in Australia, Sweden (at a festival) and in the Netherlands. Roger Ebert gave it a 1/4 star review, translating to 3 notches under this one. Benz returned with The History of Rock 'n' Roll (1995, documentary series, 1 episode); Waletzky with Music for the Movies: Bernard Herrmann (1992, documentary). 308 IMDb users have given Heavy Petting a 6.1/10 average rating.]

 

What do you think of Heavy Petting?

This Must Be the Place (2011) - Sorrentino's Nazi-hunting stoner cracker

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The art designer of this poster for Paolo Sorrentino's This Must Be the Place might have gone for the look of one of the album covers of the band The Cure, whose front man Robert Smith, Sean Penn's look in the film is inspired by

QUICK REVIEW:

Retired rock-veteran Cheyenne does nothing at home in Ireland, when his father dies and he sets out to find the old Nazi, who humiliated his old man decades ago in Auschwitz.

Sean Penn (Milk (2008)), Frances McDormand (Fargo (1996)) and other actors do well here in Paolo Sorrentino's (Il Divo/Il Divo: La Spettacolare Vita di Giulio Andreotti (2008)) English-language debut, which gets its title from a classic song by Talking Heads, which David Byrne (Lulu on the Bridge (1998)) performs in the film in its probably most memorable scene.
The structure of the story, written by Sorrentino and Umberto Contarello (The Great Beauty/La Grande Bellezza (2013)), is offbeat, just as the protagonist. Unfortunately its ending was, to me, very unsatisfying.

Related reviews:

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Paolo Sorrentino: The Caiman/Il Caimano (2006) - Moretti's unfunny political comedy - strictly for Italians (actor)

Watch the trailer for the film here

Cost: 28 mil. $
Box office: 11.6 mil. $
= Huge flop
[This Must Be the Place was an Italian majority production with co-producers from Ireland and France. It premiered in 2012 in North America to an incredibly paltry 0.1 mil. $ result (just 1 % of the total gross!) It was a big hit in Sorrentino's native Italy, where it made 6.1 mil. €. He is such a hot ticket in Europe at the moment that the flop didn't hurt his career much: Especially because he followed it up with the Best Foreign Film Oscar winner The Great Beauty (2013).]

What do you think of This Must Be the Place?