Amy Hayes

SIZZLING PORN STAR PICTORIAL PLAYBOY MARCH 2002 JENNA JAMESON CHASEY LAIN AMY HAYES AND MORE!
$17.85
MARCH 2002 ISSUE OF PLAYBOY MAGAZINE. THE COVER FEATURES "SIZZLING PORN STAR PICTORIAL" WITH PHOTOS OF JENNA JAMESON, JANINE, CHASEY LAIN, PLUS A PICTORIAL OF AMY HAYES, PLAYBOY INTERVIEW WITH ALLEN IVERSON, AND MORE.

Fast Dates, The Movie
$19.95

Exploring Love
$19.95
I stumbled across this movie while waiting on the phone to cancel my subscription to Real Superpass which I almost never look at. It turned out that somehow I had three subscriptions to Rhapsody and that my Superpass doesn't expire until next year. While the rep was trying to get all this straight, I clicked on this movie because it was prominently displayed and I wanted to see if I could indeed watch a movie for free. At first, I couldn't get the sound to work, but starting it over cured that. Then the video (but not the sound) stopped. Somehow by restarting and moving the cursor, that was fixed. The video was supposed to be "high" something instead of "low", but the clarity was akin to my taking off my glasses while watching TV.
I imagined that the movie would be a romantic comedy. Nope. "Exploring Love" has invented a new genre = extremely low-key, plotless, pseudo-deep mopey dopiness with pretty people in badly shot Miami. The hero, Sean (played by no one I had ever heard of - ditto all the other roles) is a good looking, former model, who with his best friend, Sebastian, a Hispanic of indistinct origin, runs a model agency, Magnet, that seems to have only one other employee. He beds beautiful young women all the time - they practically throw themselves at him. Enough of a fantasy to keep me watching. Nothing explicit or close to it is shown. Sean is approaching 30, and he feels "empty" inside - he wants a relationship. He is estranged from his mother, who is in NYC, and his father who "abandoned" the family when Sean was little; the father had had an affair and the mother hustled Sean off to Australia. Sean hasn't seen the father since then. Sean does not seem to have had any education, but he is into religion, and occasionally talks with God. Things like, "It's up to you, God." Indeed, several characters talk about God, but always very briefly and in so vague a manner that you would be hard put to imagine that they belong to or have ever belonged to any religion. Sean was raised a Catholic, but now he's more into Buddhism - though the only aspect of it we see is many short shots of Sean doing (I think) the lotus position. These meditations never reveal anything to him, but the shots are interspersed through the movie on a regular basis. When he finally speaks of what he believes, talking to yet another young woman with whom he has had sex, one who also is a former Catholic, but is now "into" Kabbalah, Sean expresses the vaguest idea that God is in all religions and it might be better if evil were not in the world. Since they can communicate so well, Sean thinks he is on the road to a relationship, but the viewer who can see that the woman is a crazy liar, knows better. (This girl has been sleeping with one of his two male friends, and - I think - ends up at the end - for the moment with the other.) Sean starts to get interested in a waitress - call her Sandy - someone in the movie is named Sandy - it might as well be her. She is nice, intelligent, SANE (I ought to say something about that in a minute) and loving. She also is the only person in the movie with any goals; she is saving up to open an art gallery - which she does with apparent success. She does stand him up on their first date, for reasons she mumbles so quickly I didn't get them, but Sean tries again and when - inevitably she hurls herself at him, he asks her to "chill" because he wants to get to know her. (Did I mention that she looks like Sandra Bullock only a lot prettier?) A nice relationship develops.
A word to the side about sanity. Several of the girls with whom Sean gets involved exhibit textbook symptoms of mental disorder. Sean does not notice. When the women act out, he has almost no reaction except to tell them that he is sorry that things didn't work out and they will be friends. Voila! Instantly, they are cured. We never see them with him again. All this is connected to the fact that Sean is so low-key that he is passive. He does not initiate much of anything in the film. We may have found an actor less expressive than Keanu Reeves (though I thought that position was already taken by a rubber tree.)
Sean decides that to break through whatever is holding him back emotionally he must make amends (though he has done nothing wrong - the movie may have gotten the concept mixed up) with his estranged father. He does - twice - and , if there was a break through, I missed it. Sean does manage to sound whiney in his big dramatic scene in which he asks his father if he left the family because he did not love them. (The father says no - what else could he say?) Nothing changes.
Sean's partner,Sebastian, early on has a scene in which he is moody because he is thinking about the sister who died 5 years prior (apparently at the hands of drug dealers - it was hard to hear.) Now, he has "no one." Then the movie forgets about this for about an hour.
Suddenly, he disappears for a few days, comes back and begs Sean to loan him $10,000 he owes "not to banks". Sean, who basically gives in to everything, says ok, but Sebastian is found the next morning on a couch in the ofice with coke all over the table (a wasteful wastrel). Shortly, thereafter, Sebastian comes out of a club with one of Sean's old (and crazier) exes. A mean looking guy in a van shoots him once as the van cruises by. This is a neat trick because the girl is standing between the van and Sebastian, who ends up in a hospital with Sean sleeping in a chair by his side. When Sebastian's eyelids flutter open, so do Sean's - can you see where this is going? Sebastian has taken up with drugs because he feels alone and empty, with no one in whom he can trust. (Sean apparently not counting.)
There are no police, nurses or doctors. The whole topic simply drops out of the movie, though, if I were a drug dealer, I would maintain interest.
Now the interesting part (not really.) Sean starts to have questions of what it might be like to be with a guy - say in a threesome. This is about half way through the movie and after about thirty years of his never having had any such thoughts, but he sees a gay couple at the restaurant where he and Sebastian go and where Sandy waitresses. Sean is disgusted and thinks it is wrong, but Sebastian believes in live and let live. A while later, on a beach, they tell each other that they love each other, but purely in a manly way. Later, they are watching a futbol game on TV, and Sean starts up a series of "Did you mean...? No. Did you mean...? No - pause - if I had, would you have been interested?" questions. Of course, they did and of course they would. Hand touches hand. Next thing, in the morning they are in bed together. Sean is so confused. He really has "feelings about" Sandy, but he tells Sebastian "I'm crazy about you man!", the most emotion in the movie. They talk about what to do - would Sebastian be like Sean's mistress? Nothing is clarified.
Finally, it is Sean's thirtieth birthday party. He is there with Sandy and Sebastian is with one of Sean's exes. The father is with his girlfriend - etc. There is toasting. Sean wanders outside alone and sits down by the waves. He thinks something like, "It's hard to figure out love."
End of movie.
OK - the real questions here are why did I bother to watch Exploring Love in the first place and why have I written so much about it? First, I am the kind of person who can get interested in almost anything. Second, I do not know and have never known any people like those in the film - it was like seeing a new species - I wanted to know how and about what they thought. The film either shows me that they don't much think or, more likely, the film makers didn't.
So why have I written this tome? I am compulsive, but it seems to me that - after all - somehow - the film is interesting. It's like Bergman done by children who have been exposed to pop psych. It's a kind of cultural artifact - maybe, on some level, it does hold meaning for some people, at least assuring them that they are not alone in their confusion. Despite all my derision, I found myself strangely touched by the film. It's bad; it's shallow; it's cheaply done; it doesn't make much sense, but I have found myself looking at waves and alone in my confusion. This film tried to do something serious, I think - it failed utterly - but how can you not love those who try?
(One footnote. One of the Amazon Tag suggestions - indeed, the first - is "lesbian romantic comedy" - this is not at all a lesbian film, it really is not romantic, and there is no humor in it.)

Laws of Deception
$14.99
A burned-out hit man falls in love with his next assignment. Now he faces the decision to kill her.This product is manufactured on demand using DVD-R recordable media. Amazon.com's standard return policy will apply.