Michael Sicinski’s review published on Letterboxd :
Shine Louise Houston is an exceptional director.
Granted, as pornography goes, the Crash Pad has no storyline or overarching structure. The room is a literal container for disconnected sexual set-pieces which are presented, one after another, in modular fashion. (The keys to the Crash Pad, which are supposedly passed along, imply a kind of round-robin communitarianism that fits with the queer ethos that permeates the work. But like everything else it's just an implied idea, nothing strictly enforced.)
But the striking, truly revelatory aspect of Crash Pad, and Houston's directorial style, is in the framing and composition. It may seem silly or obvious, but until watching Crash Pad, I never recognized the extent to which most pornographers find vaginas visually unappetizing, as though they really were the "absence" posited by psychoanalytic theory.
Shine Louise Houston makes porn that displays a visual love, an aesthetic and erotic adoration for women's bodies, vaginas in particular, and it is both exciting as art and hot as fuck as porn. She will frame a pussy, thigh, and the curvature of an ass, for example, with a tightness and flair that you don't recognize at first. But as the shot persists, you notice just how sloppy and inattentive most porn really is. Houston's shots have a quality positioned somewhere betweeen classical beauty and modernist abstraction, like the rounded flesh of Niki de Saint-Phalle or the pure curvature of line one finds in Henry Moore.
I recall a threesome in Crash Pad that culminated with a long shot at the women, down the length of the bed, with the middle woman's pelvis symmetrically framed by two black dildos, each leaning at opposing 45-degree angles. These sorts of things don't just happen. Houston understands that part of the fun of sex (and perhaps queer sex in particular) is not far removed from the pleasure of art -- the being present with beauty and passion, the sense of losing oneself in another.
Put another way, Crash Pad understands that the camera has a role in porn, and that role can manifest in different ways. It can be an objective recorder, a distant gaze . . . or it can be a tactile participant. The latter makes for better, sexier, less exploitative porn. Houston is a major talent making work we need.
http://nitroflare.com/view/E57A24E29A39553/The_Crash_Pad.avi
Language(s):English
Subtitles:none
