Let’s talk about a couple of the GayVN award categories, and how we would have made different selections.
First, Best Picture – although it seemed inevitable that To the Last Man was simply awaits a coronation of treasures, we would give the same award to fellow nominee Skin Deep, from Kristen Bjorn’s Sarava Productions. The men! The sex! The sheer intensity! Skin Deep is absolutely dynamite.
In our review we close with the following note: “Skin Deep may not pack the grand, film making punch of other movies released in 2008. Despite this, the sheer level of sex, passion and artistic beauty make this an instant classic and arguably the best sex film of the entire year. If Cecil B. DeMille has filmed porn, his name would have been Kristen Bjorn.”
We are not in complete disagreement with the GayVN’s award choices. Their award for Best Actor – Foreign Release was well chosen: Ralph Woods in the highly enjoyable Bel Ami movie French Kiss.
The award for Best Foreign Release went to the stunningly sensual Italians and Other Strangers.
Let’s finish on another award where we part ways. It is interesting because this award was one of the reasons Michael Lucas made his famous interruption regarding Brent Corrigan. GayVN awarded best twink film to the Corrigan directed movie Just the Sex.
Similar to the situation with the Best Picture award, we found the film to be pretty good, but keep looking. Corrigan is always hot to watch. But we would have given the Best Twink Film award to the spunky Tight Ass Twinks from Citiboyz. Great cast. Interesting location shooting. Hot action.
I will admit up front that one motivation behind my movie review of To the Last Man was because the film won Best Picture at last week’s GayVN Awards. The award raised the movie directly in our sights, and I took careful aim.
Let me be clear on things. I consider myself on friendly terms with the Raging Stallion producers, we’ve met several times, and I’ve visited their studio. In fact, several years ago the studio was one of the very first ones to answer my email plea’s for screener materials , so that I could start talking about movies on my brand new review website. Our website features dozens on Raging Stallion movies which we honestly depict as extremely enjoyable.
Especially in this business, it is easy to rubber stamp the movies and web productions that are fueled by an expensive marketing campaign. This is why many fans of gay porn ultimately do not believe the all-hype websites and blogs. For these reasons, I decided to be brutally honest in my review of To the Last Man.
Read the review to see why. It contains some good moments, but I don’t think it was the best movie of the entire year, nor was it the best western themed film of the year.
In the critic business, I have discovered that criticizing porn is like talking about food. While someone may love Italian food, the next person will find spaghetti to be heavy and bland, yet they will love Chinese noodles. There’s no logical determination to which is universally better. It is all just a matter of taste.
I’m proud to present my honest review of this production, and hope sincerely that everyone reading will take it with a grain of salt.
Want some help with the movies everyone’s talking about right now?
Check out the 2007 Layman’s Guide to the GAYVN’s. This online guide is the only place where fans can find complete and useful information on the films nominated, including the winners, all visually organized displaying boxcovers, model and scene photos coupled with additional interesting analysis from our website’s original movie reviews.
The url for the guide is http://www.friskyfans.org/news/2007gayvns/
2007 is the third year FriskyFans.org has published a Layman’s Guide to the GAYVN Awards. FriskyFans.org is not affiliated with the GAYVN Awards, its sponsors, nor does FriskyFans.org participate in the judging process.
