Brilliance Thwarted By Pornography

43 thoughts on “Brilliance Thwarted By Pornography”

1. I agree with Greg Gutfeld and so I’m done with Cruz and have made my decision in favor of Sanders.

   https://twitter.com/greggutfeld/status/697978956004376578Report

2. And they’ve pulled it.

   Well, they got the right actress for that.Report

3. “Ted Cruz Makes Porn Video!!”Report

4. So he prematurely withdrew it before could implant itself in the voters fertile places.Report

   1. Of course. It is important to deny people his…essence.Report

5. Is it too cynical to propose that the Cruz campaign made their casting choices to drum up media coverage when they pulled the ad?Report

   1. I think that is giving him and his staff way too much credit. He might be smart and a great tactician and an unrepentant careerist but very few people are that great at tactics. Most likely it was all coincidentalReport

      1. And the strategist is busy working on Sanders and Bush’s campaigns. For da lulz.Report

6. Not that it will make much difference here or on the rest of the internet and Twitter, but it seems worth noting that the woman in question is not in fact a porn actress, and has never been in a porn movie.Report

   1. “Ted Cruz Forces Woman to Make Porn Video!!”Report

      1. Oh, very well played!Report

   2. Politico article says “soft core porn”

      I am not sufficiently well-versed in the world of pornography to know where one type of porn ends and another type begins.Report

      1. Think of it as being the difference between being James Franco and being Aron Ralston.

         If this woman is a porn star, than so too is Natalie Portman.Report

         1. Don’t know who Aron Ralston is.

            Reading over the descriptions of some of these movies, seems to fall into the category of “smut.” Some more than others.Report

            1. Aron Ralston cut off his arm. James Franco only pretended to.Report

            2. The difference between watching a filmed boxing match and a movie about boxing. Softcore films feature simulated sex and pornographic movies usually feature unsimulated sex. The acting is generally lousy in both.Report

               1. Hardcore can also refer to very fast punk music without melody.Report

            3. It seems to me that the distinction between “porn” and “not-porn” is the motivation of the viewer. Is the viewer watching this film in the hope of seeing a good story, to enjoy the snappy dialogue, to admire the cinematography, or even to experience vicariously the excitement of violence? Or is the motivation more, umm…, transitory? Wasn’t it Burt Reynolds’ character in Boogie Nights whose ambition was to create a film that people would watch through to the end?Report

               1. Plenty of good p0rn (doujinshi mainly) has a damn fine storyline.
                  (for a most trollish and fun time, I suggest School Days).Report

               2. The lines are getting blurred all the time. I wrote about ‘Love’ here recently, but there have been at least a dozen movies in the last decade or so that were aimed at the art house crowd with unsimulated sex scenes in them. Most of them were not particularly arousing, I think on purpose. But most of them were worth watching to the end.Report

                  1. Than you have Nymphomaniac, which confused critics. One person got the point though.Report

               3. I’ve always hewed to the notion that pornography is defined as anything I lose interest in immediately upon climaxing.Report

                  1. That’s as may be, but the dentist would still like for you to leave the waiting room now.Report

                  2. Not until I get my free toothbrush, dammit.Report

                  3. @zac @glyph

                     I love both of these comments soooooo much.Report

               4. There are a number of “porn parodies” – using the “parody” exception to copyright so that they can shoot “Star Trek” with a bald captain named Picard rather than “Sex Trek” with Captain Quirk, Mr. Sperm, and Yeoman Gland (1). Some of them are very good. There’s at least one “Buffy” and two “X-Files” movies that are worth watching – albeit much shorter – with the hardcore scenes edited out. And the “Next Generation” one I alluded to above is better than some actually aired first-season episodes, and most of “Voyager” – in fact, Picard doesn’t actually appear in a sex scene (they use a body double from the waist down), because it’s a real actor. Who took the part anyway.

                  (1) This actually exists. Be very afraid.Report

                  1. There’s a non-porn parody with Captain Jerk and Mr. Snot.

                     “Snot here, Captain.”
                     “What’s not there, Snotty?”Report

                  2. Also, in case I wasn’t clear, the ones I’m primarily thinking of call themselves “parody” strictly as a dodge. They are basically filmed fanfic, and treat the source material as reverently as most of the writers for the actual franchise. More so than pretty much everyone post-Roddenberry who wrote an episode around the Prime Directive, for example…

                     The on-screen talent tends toward the geekier members of the industry, who lobby for a role that fits their appearance when they see that Producer X is taking on Franchise Z.Report

      2. “Comparatively cool“Report

      3. For a pres. candidate who is the conservative christian in the circus, I don’t think that it matters soft or hard.Report

         1. Yeah, the people who might care are unlikely to get hung up on whether the act is actually performed or just very strongly suggested.Report

         2. That’s what she saidReport

         3. Cruz could have said “Let him who is without sin throw the first stone”. Or doesn’t that count as Christian any more?Report

      4. My impression has been that if the viewer can tell the sex acts are real and not simulated, it’s considered hard core. So sex scenes framed from the waist up, etc., would be typical of soft core.Report

         1. It got a bit tougher during the height of Skinemax – the late 90s, which was Ms. Lindsay’s time period. Some directors really liked to push the envelope and use tricks like lighting and camera angles to obscure whether there was actual penetration going on (in direct opposition to hardcore porn, where they do just the opposite to make sure you see it). In some of them, it’s pretty obvious, given the body positions, that there’s no place else to put the equipment, so there must be actual sex going on – but as long as you hide the genitalia (so to speak) you have plausible deniability. Even so, they either tend not to submit the full cut for a rating, only the one that is much more tightly trimmed to guarantee an ‘R’.

            I must confess to a certain fondness for this class of film, and not just for the obvious reason. Some of the actors had real talent (a few of them crossed over into more legit projects). Since they didn’t have to do hardcore, it drew more attractive on-screen people than true porn tends to. The production values were surprisingly good. And the better scripts were self-aware, knowing that they were building it around the adult situations, so they had fun with it. I do have a few of these DVDs in my collection, including a couple of Ms. Lindsay’s works – she’s not the worst actress around, and I can certainly believe that she won an open casting call to basically play herself.Report

            1. “given the body positions, that there’s no place else to put the equipment”

               Things can still be taped and tucked away. But yes, there are certain times when the supposed illusion appears indistinguishable from real (of course, that’s what making movies is all about, and there’s an undeniable publicity benefit to having rumors of “no, it was really real this time!” started about your production.)Report

      5. Softcore is Playboy or Cinemax after midnight (Skinemax). Hardcore is fucking.Report

         1. This man has never seen a Shannon Tweed film in his life!Report

7. Yeah, that woman isn’t a “porn star”.

   Here’s here IMDB link.
   http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0512182/?ref_=nv_sr_1

   THIS is a link to IMDB for a real porn star
   http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2340248/?ref_=tt_ov_st_sm

   These links are SFW.Report

   1. These links are SFW.

      That’s…subjective.Report

      1. They don’t take you to any video or pics of Grey’s actual “work”. You should be safe. It’s IMDBReport

8. If Ms. Lindsay is indeed a born again Christian (now or then or both), the Trump campaign should embrace her and try to hire her as a surrogate. She’s the perfect fit for what Trump’s brand is trying to be in the SEC primaries.Report

   1. A born-again Christian – I hadn’t caught that part.

      But still not acceptable for Cruz I guess, since Evangelical redemption from past sins is for men only, or at least only accessible to women if the past sins aren’t about sex?Report

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