Film Excess - Free Ukraine - Stop Putin - End the war NOW!!: Heavy Petting (1989, documentary)

5/05/2022

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

♥♥♥

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.]

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Film Excess - Free Ukraine - Stop Putin - End the war NOW!!

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5/05/2022

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

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