DVD REVIEW | Shortbus

★★★★★ | Shortbus

You’ll never look at a splatter painting in the way away again.

If you’ve ever wondered what it would feel like to have your face stuffed into a film’s never regions, then Shortbus is the film for you to see. Stat.

Director John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig And The Angry Inch) bravely circumnavigates the world of sexuality in this stylish, almost uncomplicated observation of sexual dysfunction.

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“Shortbus” is a New York club where the focus is sexual liberation with a heady blend of punters. Transgender people, ageing homosexuals, hot young boys, a straight female sex therapist all looking to get their rocks off – a bit like Piccadilly on a Thursday night but more scintillating.

The creators and actors of Shortbus have genuinely created and sustained characters the viewer can befriend and have some feeling for. You can feel that the actual actors forged a real relationship with each other, which gathering from the DVD’s ‘extras’ they had to, as part of the film development process was having sexual relations with each other.

Shortbus did give me a tingling sensation. Not just because you get to see: self-sucking, a blinding rim job, a 3-way, the national anthem sung into a sizable cock and Mr Cameron-Mitchell himself being sucked off by a supporting actor (no really) but it caused me to think of my own sexuality and my relationship to it.

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Sex is ‘in your face.’ It is about sexual roles. It’s about ‘this moment, now’. Being British, and naturally reserved such talk and this movie is better left after two bottles of Chablis and a handful of bar nuts.

Some fantastic performances and an introduction to one Jay Brannan – who I suggest you get yourself into – socially so to speak. He has a Facebook, twitter, albums and tours his music about regularly.

If you’re sexually revolutionised you might watch this and think, what’s all the fuss about, but worth a punt anyway. You can always pass it off as porn with a story line and real actors.