Doc Watch: Ego Strokes

 

ORGASM INC.: THE STORY OF OneTASTE (B-minus) - What should have been a slam dunk -- a documentary about yet another sex cult -- feels more like a wasted opportunity. Filmmakers pull their punches and are surprisingly chaste in their presentation of the group OneTaste, in which shlubby men were trained to stroke women to marathon orgasms. (Not to be confused with "Orgasm Inc.," a 2009 documentary about a Viagra-like pill for women.)

Three newcomers tell the story of a new-age grifter, Nicole Daedone, who -- a bit like Keith Reniere in Nexium -- convinced a bunch of vulnerable people to join her San Francisco sex club. A former sex worker, she spouted a Wikipedia-level melange of philosophical aphorisms and sought to cultivate tech bros and C-list celebrities. 

While the filmmakers use video of some of the actual sessions -- women spreading wide in front of groups of gawkers -- they go out of their way to bowdlerize the activities. Nipples and genitalia are blurred, as are the faces of those who apparently didn't sign releases. In a documentary about explicit sex, you can't show upper-body nudity? On Netflix? 

Not that I tuned in for the tits, mind you. It's just an odd choice -- to run video after video of women getting stroked off but presenting it like a rerun of an R-rated movie on some commercial antenna-TV station for old folks. In addition, the story gets repetitive, and the chosen talking heads -- mostly disgruntled former employees -- are not very riveting. Throw in some pointless re-enactments, and you've got a disappointing take on what could have been a fascinating hour or hour and a half.

BONUS TRACK: FAST-FORWARD THEATER

OVER YOUR CITIES GRASS WILL GROW (2010) (C) - This is about as dull as documentaries get, though it's at least a notch or two above watching grass grow. We do get to witness some avant-garde techniques of German industrial artist Anselm Kiefer, who moved to the south of France in the '90s to take over 35 acres that once housed a silk factory in order to transform it into a massive landscape art installation of tunnels and rugged structures.

Sophie Fiennes, who before and after this project hung out with Slavoj Zizek for two entertaining documentaries, tests the viewer's patience with painfully long takes of roaming camera shots of the tunnels and buildings. In fact, the first 18 minutes or so features no dialogue or narration -- rather, we get snail-pace camera glides (providing no context), often accompanied by harsh Hitchcockian music. It's a disorienting start.

In fact, you won't miss out if you watch much of this on fast-forward. The visuals will speed up to a normal pace, and you won't be annoyed by the music. But don't skip past some of the scenes depicting Kiefer's methods of creation. In one scene he uses a big wide brush to slap streaks of paint Pollock-like onto a massive canvas lying flat, which then gets covered in dirt and then raised to shake off the dust. But then get the remote ready again midway through during a tedious extended conversation with Kiefer.

At other times, Kiefer and his staff break huge panes of glass (I was never quite sure the point of that exercise) or use cranes to stack repurposed slabs of concrete on top of each other. Throughout, I couldn't get over the incredible indulgences at work here and the wild expenditure of resources to salve the ego of a gruff artist, rather than to, say, build affordable housing. It's difficult to celebrate (or criticize) someone for pursuing such an obscure obsession. It might be possible if this weren't so visually dull. I knocked this out in about half its run time.