DESTRICTED

DESTRICTED That it's taken Destricted nearly five years since its debut at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival to turn up in theaters is doubly unsurprising: First, it's full of hard-core sex, and second, its sex is almost exclusively situated in the sort of non-narrative context whose destiny in today's distribution climate is the gallery, not the theater. Of the eight shorts, only Larry Clark's Impaled makes use of any mainstream narrative structure. Using direct interviews, Clark's piece first chronicles the porn-related desires of a group of young men who have responded to a call for potential stars, then uses one as the lens through which to examine the professional actresses auditioning to join him in the video. Though Clark can't help but climax with an honest-to-goodness porn shoot (youngster Daniel and his handpicked lady, 40-something veteran Nancy Vee, have the sexual equivalent of a bad blind date), what comes before it is a surprisingly levelheaded account of sexual education in the age of Internet porn told through a series of starkly honest interviews. Among the rest, only Marilyn Minter's Green Pink Caviar (at its best a literalized take on Brakhage's late masterpiece Love Song) and Gaspar Noé's We Fuck Alone (a formal link between Irreversible and Enter the Void) are worth mentioning (though Matthew Barney's Hoist, which is unclever even by his standards, begins with a sound-image gag that is Destricted's best joke). (Phil Coldiron) (Sunset 5, Thurs.-Sat. nights only)