Saturday, 31 December 2011

EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX (BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK)


LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.
Starring Gene Wilder


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  Oh come on, Willy Wonka has a lasting and tender relationship with a sheep. That’s got to count for something. Essentially a sketch show dragged out to mythic proportions, the cavalcade of sexual whimsy starts with Woody bobbing a stick with a model of his own head stuck to the end, dressed as the fool in a BBC afternoon play circa 1976. It’s a bit rubbish, chastity belt tomfoolery notwithstanding. Luckily there’s another one a few minutes away, and the further on they get the harder they’ll make your tonsils shake. Fellini gets pinioned with a penis in Why Do Some Women Have Trouble Reaching An Orgasm?, whilst the 1950s panel show What’s My Line gets a semen-stuffed update in What Are Sex Perverts?, featuring Regis Philbin asking if a flasher is ‘self-contained’ and an elderly Jewish lady chewing pork directly at the camera. The film builds to a shuddering climax and disappointing pillow-talk cigarette with Are The Findings of Doctors and Clinics Who Do Sexual Research and Experiments Accurate?  and What Happens During Ejaculation? respectively, blowing its wad with the former; the sketch gets increasingly deranged in a brilliant way, perhaps the most absurd and puerile thing that Allen had produced until Curse of the Jade Scorpion, which was stoopid for a whole different set of reasons. There’s nothing profound here, no great dark truth to his cackle like he’d go on to find, but it’s all the more amusing for it. It’s tit jokes and cross dressing and wanking. But a lot of it’s funny, and the last sketch features Burt Reynolds as the systems operator of a man’s libido, living in his head and telling him how to fuck. JUST LIKE EVERY MAN IN REAL LIFE. 

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