Never before has a porn movie made sex seem so ridiculous. Up!'s over-the-top irony cuts so deep that it does not merely satirize itself nor does it stop at its genre: Up! makes sex itself seem so absurd that, after seeing this movie, one wonders why anyone's interested in it at all. The many positive sex scenes in the movie are not shot as porn so much as parodies of the notion of sex as bliss (note the quick cut aways and the scene changes (mostly in beautiful natural spots), creating a sense of hours of lapsed time while preventing any build-up of erotic aura). The many negative sex scenes in the movie never grant any empathy to the rapists, never provide any glimpse of pleasure in the rapists, and always include the victimized avenging themselves, thereby rejecting pornographic rape fantasies and demanding that the viewer do so as well (if s/he hasn't done that already) (note: this actually makes the rape scenes easier viewing than, say, the one in Boy's Don't Cry, which - ironically - is probably more exploitative).
Obviously, the movie is not easy to take. Watching it, I was full of wonder but can't say that it was enjoyable or even consistently funny. Compared to Beyond The Valley of the Dolls, this is much more sex-centered and much less of a movie. Once again, though sex-centered, the movie is not really porn in that it makes no attempt to be sexy, instead portraying sex and the culture surrounding it (porn, sexual politics, and Moral Majority-style opposition) as possibly the greatest farce of contemporary Western culture. Highly recommended for people with extremely open minds who are interested in seeing a destruction of auratic sex. For people interested in a good laugh or a good movie, you probably would want to check out something else. For people with any no-go areas, you should probably forget about this movie altogether.
Obviously, the movie is not easy to take. Watching it, I was full of wonder but can't say that it was enjoyable or even consistently funny. Compared to Beyond The Valley of the Dolls, this is much more sex-centered and much less of a movie. Once again, though sex-centered, the movie is not really porn in that it makes no attempt to be sexy, instead portraying sex and the culture surrounding it (porn, sexual politics, and Moral Majority-style opposition) as possibly the greatest farce of contemporary Western culture. Highly recommended for people with extremely open minds who are interested in seeing a destruction of auratic sex. For people interested in a good laugh or a good movie, you probably would want to check out something else. For people with any no-go areas, you should probably forget about this movie altogether.