 |  SuicideGirls: The First TourDirector: Mike Marshall Rating: MA15+ 103 mins Epitaph/Shock It's not an easy thing to describe the SuicideGirls. First, let's start with the website. While its creators describe it as the new millennium's successor to Playboy, the site seems to be little more than a collection of indie/punk/goth girls who like to blog and put up nude photos and videos of themselves. I'm probably underselling it here, because they must be doing something right: the site gets over a million unique visitors a month, and 53% of its subscribers are female. It's spawned a clothing line, a book, a LA radio show, and a live burlesque tour, which is the subject of this DVD. The film is basically structured as a series of sequential profiles on the members of the SuicideGirls tour. Each girl has a short interview, followed by some footage of their burlesque live act. One of the girls, Reagan, admits that it's not even about the dancing, because they "suck at dancing." It's not even meant to be that erotic really, as the taped up nipples will attest. Not that there isn't plenty of nudity. The section after the live shows consists of a video/photo shoot of the girl in question, shot digitally at high quality, with plenty of shots panning up, down, and side to side while the girl poses. There's a variety of themes, mostly centred on Americana themes, like burger shops and milkshakes, or a garage. My favourite one was of Reagan, brightly coloured with pink hair, on rollerskates, in a laundry. It's probably the best usage of !!!'s Me and Guiliani Down By The Schoolyard I've ever seen. While I'm on the subject, the soundtrack is fantastic, with contributions from Mike Doughty, Ima Robot, Sparta, Probot, and many other indie acts. I'm in two minds about this DVD. As SuicideGirl Stormy puts it, "A lot of people come to our shows and they have no idea what they are coming to watch. But I think they walk away satisfied." I was satisfied. But it's hard to know exactly what the point was. Director Mike Marshall seems to be stuck in between making a film that shows a little more about the girl's motivations and the story behind SuicideGirls, or a softcore film. The video and production quality are good, but that's because the good footage has actually been staged; the girls have re-performed their live act without an audience, and this good footage is only occasionally mixed in with footage from the tour. I don't think I even heard any audio of the audience at any point. Most disappointingly, the DVD fails to do what its title implies. I hardly got any sense of what the live show was really like, or what really happened on the tour, nude cab hailing and midnight skinny dips notwithstanding.  | |
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