Reseñas (1)
The annually updated official ranking of the best porn movies of all time compiled by AVN magazine doesn’t merely list the timelessly best films in terms of the imaginativeness of the given concept, acting quality or the ambitions of the filmmakers, but also serves rather as a representative overview of the decades and trends within mainstream porn. Therefore, alongside well-known classics and original films from the Golden Age, we can find titles that do not in any way measure up to them and are rather unintentionally amusing. This is the case with the overrated West Side, in which the ambition to make an interracial porn flick along the lines of Romeo and Juliet conceals a generic product from the turn of the millennium. Here we see the characteristic elements of the period, such as the bland visual aspect of early digital cameras, insipid plastic pseudo-beauties, forced spectacular sex, a focus on performance and absurd machismo. All of these elements could be taken as secondary manifestations of the period when the film was made, but there is simply no excuse for the entirely slapdash and embarrassingly formulaic rendering of the plot passages. The opening sequence involving a would-be bombastic shootout at a petrol station, the stupidity of which evokes the legendary petrol-station scene in Zoolander, foreshadows the imbecility of other passages showing both sides of the feuding “families” of white mobsters and black gangsters. In such a context and performed by mostly tragically bad actors, the direct allusions to Romeo and Juliet, including the absurd balcony sequence, come across not only as funny, but also as absolutely desperate.
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