Porn Valley Dispatch: Joe Gallant’s “Killing Courtney Luv”

Because my family helped to settle Boston in 1630; because there was a certain "series" this weekend; and because I now live in Porn Valley, it is only natural for me to find New York-brewed adult material inferior to our California variety. But director Joe Gallant (as well as Joanna Angel of Fleshbot
s Faustian compact) makes having sex in New York look fun again with his latest film, "Killing Courtney Luv". Read all the gory details after the jump. - G. Ponante

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Joe Gallant seems to play to his strengths in his second film for VCA, a sort of Taxi Driver knockoff in which an obsessive fan seeks to prove his existence by merging with media bad girl "Courtney Luv."

The cab driver and his friends entangle with Courtney and her entourage in various dingy neighborhoods, basements, and rooftops around New York City. It's sort of like "Annie Hall" if Diane Keaton had been a machine-crafted, gone to seed stripper titan.

Gallant's casts have an undeniably seedy quality. It's not just that I'm conditioned to a certain homogeneity out here, it's that Gallant's girls look a little bit used, like they have day jobs in coffee shops or something.

There are still elements of talking too much in this film, but nowhere near the over-trying exhibited in Gallant's previous release, "UltraVixens NYC". Instead, Gallant justifies his press by filming several public sex scenes with women who look distinctly non-Porn Valley.

This is refreshing. I think the New York porn look might catch on, thanks to Gallant. It must piss people off who remember New York's thriving porn scene in the late 60's and early 70's to hear the Apple's adult output reduced to a niche, but it is great to see city landscapes, the Chrysler building, and a particular NYC squalor in a porn film, as well as girls who might only merit the most debasing of scenes should they try to start a career out here.

Just as people did read the articles in Playboy (or AVN), the presence of dialogue or some attempt at a storyline in otherwise-adult material requires that material to be judged on all its elements. It's not appropriate to just say the dialogue doesn't matter because it's a porn film. The only way the dialogue wouldn't matter is if there was no dialogue.

That is why lines like this are good:

- "So what's your thing?" Harley Raine asks.
- "Booze, broads, and big band music."
- "Awright. Wanna fuck?"

I hope Gallant starts on Pennsylvania next. Those King of Prussia girls are dirty.

· Black Mirror Productions - "Joe Gallant's Sleazy NYC Sex" (blackmirror.com)
· "Killing Courtney Love" (.mpg trailer @ VCA)

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Previously: Porn Valley Dispatch Archive