{"id":3556,"date":"2011-09-16T15:09:12","date_gmt":"2011-09-16T19:09:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/?p=3556"},"modified":"2011-09-16T15:09:12","modified_gmt":"2011-09-16T19:09:12","slug":"br-meet-monica-velour-2010","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/?p=3556","title":{"rendered":"BR: Meet Monica Velour (2010)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Return to: <\/strong>Home <\/a>\/\u00a0Blu-ray, DVD, Film Reviews<\/a> \/ <\/em>M<\/a><\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Film: Very Good\/ BR Transfer: Excellent\/ DVD Extras: Very Good<\/p>\n

Label: Anchor Bay\/ Region: All \/\u00a0Released: August 16, 2011<\/p>\n

Genre: Comedy \/ Drama<\/p>\n

Synopsis: \u00a0Fresh from his high school graduation, Tobe hits the road to attend a rare performance by his idol – the reclusive porn icon Monica Velour – and begins a friendship he wishes would never end.<\/p>\n

Special Features: Audio commentary with writer \/ director Keith Bearden and actress Kim Cattrall \/ 4 Deleted Scenes \/ Theatrical Trailer<\/p>\n

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Review:<\/p>\n

The cover art and title might give the impression Meet Monica Velour<\/strong> is an ingratiating comedy built around Kim Cattrall\u2019s sexually provocative persona (with shoes getting as much attention as the actress), but Keith Bearden\u2019s feature film debut is a surprisingly sweet, odd tale of a teen named Tobe (Dustin Ingram) with a fractured family who leaps at the chance to see his idol \u2013 legendary porn star Monica Velour (Cattrall) \u2013 perform a striptease in person.<\/p>\n

Instead of being horrified by her aged presence \u2013 older, tired, emotionally wounded, living in a trailer park, and engaged in a bitter custody battle with her crappy ex-husband (Jay Malack) \u2013 he\u2019s even more enthralled that an uber-dork like himself is able to befriend and even help an icon through some serious troubles.<\/p>\n

One could regard Velour<\/strong> as the porn equivalent of The Wrestler<\/a> <\/strong>(2008) \u2013 she\u2019s a similarly down & out talent doing the grunge circuit, trying not to lose her one child \u2013 and Cattrall does the usual master thespian thing of looking like hell to ensure her performance is filled with enough gravitas, but there\u2019s a wryness to her character which plays off Tobe\u2019s own intense dorkiness, and their unlikely friendship works because Tobe, in basic terms, just means well.<\/p>\n

Bearden\u2019s script does wade into melodrama, but those moments are unavoidable when his teen character has to deal with Velour\u2019s rejection and indifference, and wrangle through his own clumsy love life.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also his alcoholic grandfather Pop Pop (Brian Dennehy) who regards him like an idiotic thing he\u2019s stuck with, since Tobe\u2019s parents are long gone; and Claude (Keith David), an artist who buys the family business truck \u2013 a wiener mobile (dubbed the \u201cWeenie Whiz\u201d) \u2013 and imparts sage advice when Tobe\u2019s youth makes it impossible for him to understand how age and bad turns can transform a person into a train wreck. As Velour tries to explain to her young admirer, \u2018sometimes you don\u2019t recognize the face in the mirror, and you wonder what happened.\u2019<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot of honesty in Bearden\u2019s script, and Velour\u2019s life drama isn\u2019t the film\u2019s central focus; Tobe\u2019s growth from child to young adult is the key transformation, and Velour is merely the catalyst who forces Tobe to realize it\u2019s time to move forward, and be a little aware that life can and will yield some emotional disasters.<\/p>\n

For a debut effort, Velour<\/strong> is a very assured film with a generally tight script, and a strong cast of veterans and newcomers perfectly suited for their roles. Ingram\u2019s giant cloud of hair and askew smile is kind of hypnotic, and Cattrall pulls off a serious role without going completely Method, transcending clich\u00e9s and avoiding dangerous tangents into pools of bathos. Dennehy looks like hell, eating pickled eggs dipped in Pepto Bismol, and Elizabeth Wright Shapiro almost steals the strip club scene as hungry hustler named Snickers, searching for some healthy male \u2018nuts.\u2019<\/p>\n

As a low budget production, Velour<\/strong> looks and sounds gorgeous, and Anchor Bay\u2019s Blu-ray flatters Masanobu Takayanagi\u2019s beautifully composed images. Bearden and Takayanagi went for a very specific colour scheme that\u2019s part seventies, with little bits of late fifties pastel blue and turquoise green scattered across the sky, in furniture, and interior d\u00e9cor. The locations are similarly evocative of small parts of Michigan and Illinois where aspects of different time periods have remained untouched, aging into a collage bereft of contemporary styles and technology.<\/p>\n

Claude\u2019s barnyard studio is also filled with old iconography \u2013 a retro leather couch, a Bob\u2019s Big Boy statue, a chicken wire seat (!) \u2013 and Tobe\u2019s hotel is literally frozen in 1967 (and apparently was exactly the way the filmmakers found it).<\/p>\n

The Blu-ray\u2019s extras include four deleted scenes removed to keep the film\u2019s pacing brisk, and bring in the titular character early into the drama. None really add much, and the two dreams Tobe has of himself and the young Monica Velour are amusing, but unnecessary, and a little jarring because actress Jamie Tisdale (With the Angels<\/strong>) doesn\u2019t sport the same accent Cattrall uses in all her scenes.<\/p>\n

The first dream, a short-short spoof of the Raquel Welch One Million Years B.C.<\/strong> (1966) is hysterical, whereas the second may have been dropped due to Tisdale standing on camera in her stark birthday suit \u2013 a no-no that might have pushed the film into the NC-17 realm disliked by producers and advertisers.<\/p>\n

Bearden and Cattrall\u2019s disc commentary is very lively, with plenty of production minutia, background info on the characters, and Bearden\u2019s reflections on his first feature after making the award-winning shorts Train<\/strong> Town<\/strong> (2007), and The Raftman\u2019s Razor<\/a> <\/strong>(2005).<\/p>\n

(Raftman’s Razor<\/strong> certainly shares Velour<\/strong>\u2019s central theme of youth coming of age, although in the short film, Bearden uses two boys\u2019 fascination with an existentialist comic book hero \u2013 the Raftman is a guy drifting in the ocean in a rudderless, oarless dinghy, spouting philosophical bon mots when he\u2019s not shaving \u2013 to show how their oddness in fringe graphic literature helps them comprehend greater questions of life, and perhaps preparing them for more personal, individual life quests in the coming years.)<\/p>\n

Bearden, not unlike P. T. Anderson (maker of the epic porn drama Boogie Nights<\/strong>), is clearly a fan of the adult genre, and has empathy for the weird career performers chose, and a fascination for their lives when age, drugs, and hard times hit after their peak years ended. The film\u2019s title was originally Miss January, 1978<\/strong>, but that more appropriate title was scuttled when Playboy objected to their copyrighted header being used in association with a film about\u2026 porn. (Apparently Playboy and \/ or Hugh Hefner<\/a> [M<\/a>] feel their roots are in erotica?)<\/p>\n

Velour<\/strong> is set in the present era, but Bearden\u2019s story is really working in a mythic world where there are no such things as fan conventions or vanity sites. The conceit is that Monica Velour is living in a pre-internet era, because in reality, while down on her luck, her only option wouldn\u2019t have been to work in a peeler bar: she could\u2019ve attended porn conventions, established a commercial website, and exploited her image as a once-reigning porn queen.<\/p>\n

The assumption viewers have to make is Velour is so out of touch with her past life \u2013 partially due to her ex-husband\u2019s insistence she destroy every piece of memorabilia – that her thinking is on practical venues to earn immediate cash, and because she\u2019s been forced to purge her past from her consciousness, marketing herself to a tech-savvy fan base is an impossible leap to make.<\/p>\n

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\u00a9 2011 Mark R. Hasan<\/p>\n

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External References<\/em>:<\/p>\n

IMDB <\/a>— Website <\/a>— Online Interviews: \u00a0Bearden <\/a>\/ Cattrall <\/a>\/ Ingram <\/a>— Composer Filmography<\/a><\/p>\n

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Return to<\/strong>:\u00a0Home <\/a>\/\u00a0Blu-ray, DVD, Film Reviews<\/a> <\/em>\/\u00a0M<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Return to: Home \/\u00a0Blu-ray, DVD, Film Reviews \/ M . Film: Very Good\/ BR Transfer: Excellent\/ DVD Extras: Very Good Label: Anchor Bay\/ Region: All \/\u00a0Released: August 16, 2011 Genre: Comedy \/ Drama Synopsis: \u00a0Fresh from his high school graduation, Tobe hits the road to attend a rare performance by his idol – the reclusive […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[18],"tags":[727,726,724,725,730,729,275,728],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8nuyW-Vm","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3556"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3556"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3556\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3560,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3556\/revisions\/3560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}