Arnold Zwicky's Blog

(About gay porn as a genre, therefore matter-of-fact discussion of men’s bodies and mansex, though not in particularly graphic terms; the explicit stuff, with penises, is in a 9/21 posting “Costume fantasy porn” on AZBlogX. But probably not suitable for kids or the sexually modest; you can use the cast photo in #1 below as a gauge.)

Text from the Queer Me Now site on 8/18/19, about “Dominic Pacifico’s [2019] Sands Of Time Starring Taylor Reign, Casey Everett, Julian Grey & Zario Travezz”:

(#1) (l-to-r) Grey, Everett, Reign, Travezz, in scraps of shredded white cloth, in the desert sands of post-apocalyptic 2049: affectless in a barren land

In the year 2049, the earth scorched by the sun and the land bleached with chemicals, there were few people left scavenging the land. The souls that remain were young homosexual men, who were lost with sexual urge and confusion. This small band of beautiful men became a tribe family, with their leader Julian Grey forcing them to work in exchange for, food, shelter and sexual intimacy. A young wanderer [Everett] is found dying of dehydration and is taken back to the camp, and the epic journey begins as the lost boys make their way into the Sands Of Time.

Well, yes, it’s profoundly silly. A cheap sexual fantasy plot presented with owlish earnestness, draped in the costume trappings of a punk-inspired high-fashion show.

Critical notes from my XBlog piece, which has a photo of the cast, in their elegant rags, displaying their dicks:

Costumed gay porn — centurions, Vikings, American Indians, vampires in capes, that sort of thing — is hard to pull off. Cowboys, firemen, garage mechanics, all relatively easy, but significant fantasy not so much: the costumes are awkward, and often come with unaccustomed accessories, and the lines are typically written in some stilted other-worldly style. And all of this competes with the crucial dick action. Disaster is often just a giggle or guffaw away.

DP’s latest backback extravaganza has all of these problems, plus it’s a space fantasy set in an apocalyptic future. I have to confess that I took in the faces and torsos in the ragged sheeting and broke out in laughter. And then noticed the forlorn dicks, looking like they were just pasted on, though I know they’re really hot in action, and sighed sadly: what a senseless waste.

So I think the ad is exceptionally silly, a kind of gem of faltering artistic ambition. Brief clips suggest that things are better when the guys are in motion, especially the two black actors, who have a suitably smoldering presence.

Even there, the men’s emotions are drastically muted, as if they’ve been zombified by life in the trackless desert sands.

There’s more to cavil about. To start with, for guys who’ve been lost in a landscape of post-apocalyptic devastation, this crew is stunningly, unnaturally, neat and clean. Their (mostly white) rags are ripped a bit around the edges, but they are spotless, and they drape beautifully. And then the lads seem to have found a pharmacy to ransack for its medical supplies — things like elastic leg braces.

The row of impassive faces catches your attention and holds it while you take in their unlikely costumes. Then, if you’re looking at the DP ad (on my XBlog), you eventually look down and discover that they have substantial penises depending from their waists — sexual organs even less expressive than their faces. You scan the entire panoptic vision. And, probably, break out in laughter.

In this land there is no groin-quickening promise of ejaculations to come.

Well, I haven’t been willing to pay to watch the thing, so that I don’t know if there’s some kind of actual plot to go along with the premise; gay porn movies are often just a buffet of sexual episodes united only by a setting, but the more ambitious ones are voyages of personal discovery for their central character or complex love stories — or, very commonly, both. To serve its ejaculation-triggering function, a general-purpose gay porn movie will necessarily be episodic, organized into masturbation-length scenes, building to one climax after another, varying the type of the action and the characteristics of the participants as much as possible, to hit on something that will work for everyone.

In addition, there are genre conventions that are in part designed to celebrate dicks, cum, and asses as objects of gay desire as much as possible (external ejaculation, onto the partner’s face or body, for instance) and are in part simply matters of formulas that have become conventional (pissing as a lead-in to sex, even in movies without any watersports focus). Frequently, the two kinds of convention work together: rimming as a prelude to fucking long ago became a regular step in the course of mansex in film (while remaining a fairly uncommon act in real life), no doubt because it affords a opportunity for the camera to focus lovingly on men’s assholes.

But within this highly constrained format, there’s room for crew and cast to exercise skill in writing, set design, casting, camera-work, direction, and acting, so that even on generally very tight budgets the genre can achieve moments that are admirable and pleasurable beyond their simple capacity for getting queer guys off. (Boys in the Sand came to fame as an art house movie, and is still shown today as such.). I remind you that the world of Christian hymnody is packed with tons of awkward tunes and embarrassing texts, usually poorly performed — but all to celebrate the glory of Jesus Christ. And that the tv sitcom genre, despite the enormous budgets involved, is mostly appalling trash — but all to provide laughter for millions.

It looks like DP’s Sands of Time is mostly a pretentious misfire, but some of it — the racial dynamics, for instance — no doubt works well enough for some viewers. Meanwhile, it gives me an opening for mockery. (Nice to see that Grey’s death’s-head mask survived the apocalypse; you never can tell what you might need to have at hand when the world you know comes to an end. And is Travezz wearing a colander as a jockstrap — in case he needs to take a leak?)

This entry was posted on October 20, 2019 at 1:45 pm and is filed under Clothing, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.