Cut Out & Keep

Has porn entered mainstream cinema for good? asks Mark Kermode in the Guardian. His answer could almost be a cndb for frustrated cineastes. I'll be printing out copies and hand them round the pub at the weekend...

Over the past few years, Cannes has developed a reputation for championing porno chic, much of it thoroughly meretricious. Back in the late 1990s, I got thrown out of a screening of Lars von Trier's imbecilic The Idiots for heckling a fatuous, hard-core sex scene which was provoking cries of 'Bravo' from the boorish cognoscenti. Last year, the equally empty-headed Mexican movie, Battle in Heaven, received a standing ovation for no reason that I could discern other than the fact that it started and ended with a blowjob.