Blow-up

Blow-upⁱ is pure pornography. I don't mean by pornography that there's cunts on displayⁱⁱ nor that the mechanics and mechanisms of copulation find themselves pointedly examined. They very carefully and deliberately aren't, not in the slightest, and yet it is nevertheless pornography because it is boring as all fuck. See ?

We could say that it is ideologically aligned, for a number of reasons. There's a murder mixed into the otherwise terrible scriptⁱⁱⁱ and yet nobody cares enough to call the police. Because whatever, who even cares about the state ? It's irrelevant, uninteresting and unimportant. There's also girlies, who hound the male hero^iv for absolutely no external reason, in the sense that they roundly understand and unhesitatingly apply the principle that the only point of their existence is to hound the male hero. There's even a pair of them whose only social manifestation is to make sure neither is less sexually exposed than the other, so they violently pull each other's pantyhosen off and so on.

We could also say that for they interested in the world of photography before digital cameras, this film presents a treasure trove of archeological value, the hero keeps futzing with all sorts of gear that is period-accurate by virtue of the footage having been filmed in the correct period for such accuracy. There's loads and loads of at-the-time-expensive gear being mistreated by the inept hands of some pretty dumb boy. Old camera porn, if you will.

We could say all sorts of things, but we couldn't ever say Blow-up has any sort of artistic value or dramatic merit. Because it doesn't. It's porn and naught bore, I mean more. If they had any sense they'd have actually re-shot it with a lot more fucking and nudity, in the exact manner Guccione fixed Caligula. Sadly, there's a whole lot of these Antonioni, Cortazar, Vidal, Brass etcetera nobodies ; and very few Gucciones available to fix their inept childplay into actual artwork.

Maybe in the future.

1. 1966, by Michelangelo Antonioni, written with Julio Cortazar, with a bunch of nobodies/models in the Salo fashion of the time. [↩]
2. Well, they accidentally shoot a pubic hairline like... once. [↩]
3. For the transparently obvious reason that the chosen subject matter (the daily comings and goings of a pre-digital fashion photog) is as anti-interesting and dramatically inadherent as pool. So what can they do ?

   Corpse to the rescue, that's how you fix a bad premise. Chinese food, basically, let's make bamboo shoots and other blandness suitable for human consumption through liberal sprinkling of straight vinegar and refined sugar ; and similarily let's rescue painfully boring nonsense by chopping in some "murder" from the can of dehydrated mystery. Just add water and voila! [↩]

4. Some cookie merchant's son / boy soprano. He looks exactly like a men's shirts model, and acts like one too. [↩]