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The 14th and final entry for the Portland festival is Body Beautiful, a collection of shorts themed on bodies and our attitudes towards them:
David is a nice looking, but relatively average guy who meets up with a gym bodybuilder hunk and then proceeds to develop an inferiority complex. A film that explores a number of areas, from body building obsession to the pressure, sometimes within, to "improve" looks (personally, I don't like beefy hunks, but prefer bodies that are simply well defined, like swimmers and ice skaters) and even the destructive aspects of gossip. It was ok, but shied away from actually resolving anything, just raising the issue, so I give it a 6.
This disturbing piece documents people who deliberately gain weight (and I mean fat) for affection. As someone who sits at a computer all day and can't look and food without gaining, the idea of deliberately trying to do it is mind boggling. We see pictures of the main interviewee, and he goes from very good looking, to pudgy to fat in mere months! I don't really know how to rate this: it's hard to watch, but I suppose it's interesting to know that people like that exist, but uggh. I can only give it a 5.
Another of those experimental pieces, it's interesting if you're into them. This one seems to be about disabled bodies, from the perspective of someone with an artificial lower leg. I prefer movies that actually tell a story, so I can only give this a 5 also.
Sexo was in one of the previous collections, one of the experimental styles that actually works as it comments on people's hypocritical attitudes towards pornography. I still liked it the second time around --- an 8.
This was the only film of the entire festival that I would have walked out on. It started out ok, filming and documenting a smoking room at a GLAAD event. But they carried it beyond that into harassment by asking retorical questions they don't really care about the answers to. It's not like anyone really doesn't know that smoking is bad for them. This one just pissed me off (and I'm not even a smoker!). 1 out of 10.
This one documents the culture around big beefy "clone" culture. All well enough, except that they document it as "gay" culture. Maybe in some limited or even not so limited subsets (in some areas, like SF), but certainly not all gays even like beef. 6.
This one made them all worth sitting through: it's all done in the point of view of a guy in a bar looking for "Mr. Right", but being very picky. It's probably the funniest short in the whole festival. 9 out of 10.