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 Studio: Hustler
Director:
Cast: Priva, Lana Violet, Alec Knight, Joey Brass, Lana Violet, Lily Li, Marco Banderas, Mia Lelani, Sean Michaels, Steve Taylor, Tia Ling
Orientation
by Gram Ponante.com contributor Eddie Adams
The next time you don't really feel like going to work, tell them you've come down with a bad case of Asian Fever.
If they get all nosey and up in your shit, explain to them that the symptoms of your mysterious ailment include sexually hostile and deprecatory views of the Far East, shaped by hundreds of years of European imperialism.
If those invasive pricks demand more info, tell them you just can't help these nagging outsider interpretations you're having of Eastern cultures, and the only "cure," it seems, is to watch some propaganda which posits that the Orient is constructed as a negative inversion (i.e. a proverbial vagina to your proverbial cock) of Western culture.
You'll have either just gotten yourself not only fired from your job, but "fired" from the city where you live as well, or a kick ass day off to watch the thirty-sixth installment of Hustler's long-running, culturally-tinged sexual power grab, Asian Fever.
All small talk aside, the girls in the flick are pretty attractive and they don't even seem to mind being co-opted into an awesome orientalist fantasy for the sexual gratification of white, male shut-in colonialists. And if you're quiet enough during Tia Ling's scene, you can actually hear Joseph Conrad sprouting a stiffy from the grave.
Labels: Alec Knight, asian, eddie adams, hustler, Joey Brass, Lana Violet, Lily Li, Marco Banderas, Mia Lelani, Sean Michaels, Steve Taylor, Tia Ling
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 Studio: Metro
Director: David Aaron Clark
Cast: Lana Croft, Kina Kai, Kalyssa Kye, Leilani, Ange Venus, Kitty, Jandi Lin
Portions of this review originally appeared on Fleshbot
"They say this house is haunted. But I know all the ghosts by name. At least the most important ones. Without them, I might end up lonely."
Poor angelic Lana Croft. The Porn Valley McMansion she rattles around is lousy with memories. Luckily for us, they are sexy, sexy memories.
Porn directors who've been around long enough know there are several ways to coax a narrative out of performers unequal to realizing the non-sexual aspects of their vision. David Aaron Clark chooses the millennial version of the silent film dialogue card to telegraph Lana Croft's thoughts as she clatters around the rented Encino home of a Persian dentist in his latest, which he describes as a "hardcore fever dream filled with broken angels and insatiable demonesses."
Croft is haunted by visions of a dead lover and her own sister, whose relationship with a "Korean bitch" sundered the siblings. The sex scenes in No Man's Land: Asian Edition 6 are both flashbacks and hallucinations, but the result is clear: grief and resentment strips us of our divinity, and not even Red Bull can get our wings back.
Croft stubs out her cigarette on the framed photo of her sister (Kina Kai who, like Croft, is Filipina) and the aforementioned Korean (Kalyssa Kye) who broke up their family, and we know that Croft chose to have the photo framed only so she could stub out her cigarette thusly again and again.
Then we meet Leilani, Croft's true love who, tragically, died in a plane crash, just like Col. Henry Blake.
"I've got no quarrel with Mclean Stevenson," said Clark. "But I accept all interpretations of my work."
In the final sequence, Croft reads a manga illustrated by Michael Manning. The pages come to life in a scene with Ange Venus, Jandi Lin, and Krissy as demonesses who complete Croft's transformation. Well, she had a good run.
More space is needed to adequately describe the thought process that governs the committing to film of a fantasy that must be carried out with a limited budget. There is a lot going on in this movie, which is far weightier than one would expect from a high-numbered porn series. We watch as beautiful tableaux are created but wonder if anyone gets it but the director.
It doesn't matter. It's delicious to watch.
"This is how we make fine cheese," Clark said.
Previously: No Man's Land: White Man's Burden
 Labels: ange venus, asian, interviews, kina kai, lana croft, leilani
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 Studio: Madness Pictures
Director: David Aaron Clark
Cast: Mae Yung, Lucy Lee, Sin Nye Lang, Kylie Ray
Portions of this review originally appeared on Fleshbot
"All Oriental women are odalisks," David Aaron Clark quotes Flaubert in the opening of his "Legend of the Oriental Luv Motel". Odalisk is a Turkish word, referring to the girls that weren't yet refined enough to be in the sultan's harem. The French later added their refinements to the word and it has since become synonymous with a lounging, long-ribbed sybarite, but Clark revels in the first meaning.
Clark describes this work, shot over three years from 2002 to 2004, as "horribly artsy and self-conscious", even "grandiose", but his proactive acceptance of the most likely criticism dovetails nicely with the subject of this film, Clark himself, playing a character named Mr. Hentai who rents prostitutes at a Ventura Blvd. motel whose name he can't reveal due to the "dire consequences for myself and others."
It is my impression that in recent years frat and corporate culture has made the taking of prostitutes cool. Clark does not live in that world. His Mr. Hentai is both imperious and submissive; the only power he has over these ladies is what's in his wallet.
And this makes watching this movie both creepy and intriguing, because it gets to one of the many hearts of the sex-for-cash experience; it's not really about the girl.
He seemed okay down at the bar, so I went to his room when he offered to pay. Then he asked me to put on the dress.
Mae Yung (or Young, depending on which of the credits you put your round-eye faith in), admires herself in a mirror. She is wearing a dress the title card tells us she was directed to put on, and her slack look puts us in the frame of mind of hookers, a canvas mostly finished but who require just our input to make them "perfect".
Clark's love of Asian women, the more off-the-boat-seeming the better, often translates into our love for them, too. This first scene is a point of view (POV) scene, so we know Miss Mae is particularly here for Clark's benefit. It is his challenge to make us like his new girlfriend because it's his show - she, for one, doesn't look at all comfortable in the silk dress and high heels he's got her up in.
It does not seem the exchange goes well. The load delivered is not substantive. Then the title card puts Clark's words in her mouth. "I never saw him again. But he took the dress with him."
A pre-boob job Lucy Lee is next, poring over a querulous volume of forgotten lore and absently touching herself in the process.
Clark actually appears in this scene, and it is a triumph. He looks like a portly Cenobite, and he should be the poster-being for all those who claim to be sex-positive, since the meaning of sex positive has lately morphed into late-nite Cinemax. He does not look Porn at all, just a little dangerous, and of a Los Angeles that probably never existed (and it's sad that it didn't).
Clark is saying things to Lee as he fondles her. He is saying something about her smoking, but the sound is so bad the words get lost. It doesn't matter. Their exchange is as real as it gets, and the reality depicted is the satisfaction of commerce.
Finally, bachelorette number 3, Sin Nye Lang, arrives. "What would you like me to do for you today?" she asks.
"You're such a beautiful young woman," Clark says. "But you probably hear that all the time."
"Yes," she says, "but it's never enough."
"It never is enough for your type, is it?" he replies, and this gets a laugh out of her. This is short-lived, as she later plays at his cock with a straight razor.
A bonus scene features Kylie Ray in her first porn outing. The vignette begins outside, so already it is of a different mood than the others. But it is, again, a hooker scenario and Ray is a little more vivacious and accessible than her predecessors.
This movie is a series of scenes shot over several years, no real flow between them, but they do paint a vivid picture of Clark and what he likes, and who he is. It is fair to say there are people like him who don't have the guts to assert themselves, or at least to wear that leather trenchcoat in the Porn Valley heat.
Labels: "david aaron clark", asian, dvd, review
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Dreaming of Snow
 Studio: Ethnicity Films/Metro
Director: David Aaron Clark
Cast: Annie Cruz, Brian Surewood, Cris Taliana, Heidi Ho, Kylie Rey, Mila Yung, Mr. Hentai, Mr. Marcus, Kammy, Sabrine Maui, Sledge Hammer, Sylvio Mata, Tami Lynn, Tyler Knight, Veronica Lynn
Portions of this review originally appeared on Fleshbot
David Aaron Clark, who worked in New York for earlier incarnations of Screw and Genesis magazines and wrote for various smut publications on the west coast before trying his hand at directing adult fare, is a pervert. He is also one of the smartest, most thoughtful men in the porn business, which tortures him.
This combination allows Clark to effectively articulate his fetishes, one of which is Asian women, and present them in a way that makes you say "I get it". His low budget, made-on-a-Mac movies are little works of unaffected, earnest, painstaking art in which beauty, humor, regret, boobies, and creepiness vie for the viewer's attention.
"You just have that tragic look that just translates so well," Clark says to Tami Lynn at the beginning of this compilation. As offstage gonzo director dialogue, that works a hell of a lot better than "Fuck. You've got great tits." While emotion has overwhelmed me to often utter the latter, good porn deserves more of the former.
"I pretty much almost never make a mistake," says Lynn, about to be taken aback by Clark standby Mr. Marcus. Longtime partner in crime Brian Surewood also makes a few appearances.
"Then what are you doing here?" Clark asks. The movie (full title: Dreaming of Snow: The Best of David Aaron Clark's Existential AZN Girl Gonzo) is chock full of unsanitized moments between an older man and the much younger women he photographs, sometimes in his apartment in L.A.'s Koreatown but also in swankier, less-realistic places, like Beverly Hills. Clark is unabashed in his affection for these women, talking to them like he can't believe his luck but also that he will go to Hell for it.
This puts the women at ease, humanizes them. Sometimes it freaks them out.
Conversations with his subjects paint an accurate picture of the parasitic side of the adult industry.
"You have no idea how ambitious I am," Clark is told by Kylie Rey. "I will do just about anything for money."
"I support entrepreneurship 100 percent," Clark responds. He later persuades her to scoop ice cream out of her vagina. She really is ambitious. He asks her if she's a Republican.
In alternating scenes, we see performers having fun or cashing a check.
"Are you looking forward to getting fucked?" Clark asks Heidi Ho, owner of the Best Asian Porn Name Ever (other than Hoochie Maguchi).
"I guess," she says.
"I guess?"
Later Mr. Marcus advises Kammy to throw her arms up in the air and shout "I wanna be a star" as he fucks her. She does. That scene should definitely adorn the promotional material for the Porn Valley Chamber of Commerce.
Through it all - as it is through most of Clark's gonzo movies - his plummy basso profundo resonates offscreen like he's a member of the World's Seamiest Barbershop Quartet.
You might see some contradictions in this site's coverage of what we call the Gonzo Gaze. Some directors batter the talent and assault their audience with their boorish commentary. The impression I'm left with is that, for those directors, the movie is about them. For Clark it's about the performers, even if he's the one getting the blowjob.
Labels: "david aaron clark", asian, directors, dvds
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