Shortbus (DVD)

It's surprising how many people register discomfort with sex in the cinema. Next time you're bored in a big Hollywood picture and a sex scene starts, take a look at the number of people who start to giggle, cough, talk, fiddle with their mobiles or simply look the other way. It's as if people cease to be viewers and start to perform, acting out a (perhaps part-subconscious) drama of insecurity and anxiety in response to the spectacle of sex onscreen. It's not as if they're seeing anything they haven't seen before (especially these days, with all-pervasive internet porn), oh no. What they're responding to is the confusion of witnessing (what is culturally coded as) an ...

‘Shortbus’ is the latest movie to proclaim to be the ‘most sexually explicit film to go on general release’, the dust cover proudly confirming that boast. Its another one of those arty low budget jobs that has sneaked the ‘money shot’ pass the censor by claiming ‘Art House’ status under the new liberal British censorship rules, guaranteed to shift a an extra hundred thousand copies off the back of if the producer succeeds. I think you can visualize the pubescent boys and unemployed men shuffling out of Blockbusters with one tucked under their arm in a brown paper bag with no illusions why they are renting it. Oh, and lets not forget those renters who want to see it for ’ ...

Just where to start with a movie like Shortbus, in the words of Maria "To start at the very beginning, is a very good place to start" but with Shortbus it's difficult to tell where to begin. Probably the best place to start is with a warning, 9 Songs and Intimacy came out upon world markets with warnings about being the most sexually explicit movies ever released, Shortbus was released without anyone even batting an eyelid and from a sexual point of view it's the most graphic "legal" movie I have ever seen; as the movie progresses you will see a variety of sexual orientations climax in a variety of ways. Shortbus's director John Cameron ...