Can't Hold Back Much Longer...

Four years is a long time to wait to get some satisfaction. In October, I'm finally getting me some. I can't. fucking. wait.

Back in 2001, I saw Hedwig and the Angry Inch and it affected me in a way no film had for a long time. The film was like a love letter to outsiders everywhere, looking into our hearts and telling all us misfits, losers, and strange rock and rollers, "You know you're doing all right/So hold on to each other/You gotta hold on tonight."

Well, I've been holding on. And I've been desperate to see what the next creation of Hedwig's inspired conceiver, writer, director and actor John Cameron Mitchell was going to be.

Somewhere around 2002, a friend who knew of my obsession with this sent me a link to a very sparse website called thesexfilmproject.com (the link is now deactivated). It was an open invitation from John Cameron Mitchell for real people to audition for his next film, which would be a story about real people, with real sex lives--but he didn't want the sex to be simulated. He wanted to capture all the beauty and grittiness and mess and joy and awkwardness and that comes with human beings loving and lusting and being and experiencing real sexuality. Not antiseptic, sans-members-and-moisture, aesthetically approved Hollywood sex. Not silicone enhanced, prosthetic wearing, emotionally disconnected porn sex. The real thing.

It was a daring prospect, really. Such a thing has probably never been shown on film before. I was sure if JCM was doing it, it was going to be genius. I was dying to see it, and it was only in auditions. I wanted it NOW.

And so began the long wait. There was some buzz early on, some mention of the audition process in the press, but then in the past couple of years, it all faded away. I heard nothing.

Just last week, in fact, I found myself wondering as I listened to the brilliant Hedwig cover CD, Wig in a Box, whatever had happened to the Sex Film Project? I wondered if it had turned out to just be too damn hard to accomplish, and if he'd given up. It made me sad; I'd so wanted it to happen, to see this kind of film unfold in front of me.

And now--here it is. It's coming on October 6. And I'm pretty damn sure I'm going to be, as well.

It's been re-titled Shortbus. Just look at these trailers (content is different in all three):

NSFW trailer (more visual than thematic):



Safer for work trailer and teaser (more thematic):




Film description:

SHORTBUS explores the lives of several emotionally challenged characters as they navigate the comic and tragic intersections between love and sex in and around a modern-day underground salon. A sex therapist who has never had an orgasm, a dominatrix who is unable to connect, a gay couple who are deciding whether to open up their relationship, and the people who weave in and out of their lives, all converge on a weekly gathering called Shortbus: a mad nexus of art, music, politics and polysexual carnality. Set in a post-9/11, Bush-exhausted New York City, SHORTBUS tells its story with sexual frankness, suggesting new ways to reconcile questions of the mind, pleasures of the flesh and imperatives of the heart.

"Art, music, politics and polysexual carnality." "It's everything you need to get through the next two years of George Bush." I so want to be there. Now if I can just hold out until October.

I hope it's all it seems to be. Knowing the source, I'm guessing it will be. People don't wait five years to have their next creative orgasm unless they're sure it's going to be really good when it does happen.