Sex: The Annabel Chong Story (1999)

Too much of everything

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties. It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

In the same year that Steve Zahn was winning a Special Jury Prize at Sundance for Happy, Texas, this movie was competing for the Grand Jury Prize. I have to admit that I was not expecting a film that discusses triple penetration to be one on my list, but it came highly recommended by someone I trust.This film will give you some very interesting things to see, and I don't mean naked women, even though there is plenty of that. I was intrigued that the mother of this middle-class Chinese girl from Singapore was interviewed. Anyone that knows anything about society in Singapore knows this is 180 degrees from reality. In fact Annabel says: To Singapore, pornography is filth. That's okay. But it's become a national ideology that, just, you know, a value judgment, you know, to do pornography is to be against the collective agreement of what it means to be a Singaporean. F*ck 'em. They can lick my a**.I had to laugh when one porn star (MIchael Coxx) stated that her signature act gave porno a bad name, and a porn star (Ona Zee) trying to pretend that she did "high class" porn.It was a great inside look at the business that killed Beta and will kill Blu Ray.I love fried zucchini, but I will never look at a zucchini the same way again.

I watched this simply because I was intrigued by the write up in the TV Guide which mentioned that Annabel Chong is the porn star who was setting a record for having sex with 251 men in 10 hours . Aren't you also intrigued ? There's two reasons for a prospective audience to watch this . One is that they're equally intrigued as I was and the second reason is that it sounds like really good masturbation fuel . If you're watching for the second reason you'll be bitterly disappointed since there's very little on screen sex but if you're watching for the sensible reason you'll still be as disappointed as the voyeurs . Ms Chong gives a pretentious neo feminist explanation of why she's doing it , something along the lines of " I'm doing this because I'll be striking a blow against chauvanism and by being in control of the situation I'll be showing that it's the men who are sluts " . I don't think Ms Chong has thought through he reasons fully . Either that or she's not a great communicator What is obvious is that Annabel Chong is certainly a very unhappy individual who probably needs to use sex in order to boost her esteem in much the same way as a person with a drink problem uses alcohol to boost their self esteem . Sex and alcohol like so many things in life are metaphysical false economies for the human soul . Luckily we see towards the end of the movie the self destruction that being a porn star can bring but Ms Chong unlike the audience can't see the woods for the trees

Gough Lewis' 'documentary' of Grace Quek aka Annabel Chong's curious route into seemingly willing participant of pornographic films (the most notorious being the 251-man gang bang captured on video) is truly sickening in the level of exploitation going on - both of Chong herself and of the audience who may be drawn to Lewis' film.Chong, a self-hating 'sexology' student, argued that her pornographic rituals stemmed from a need to prove the power of the woman. Or something. Her arguments seemed seriously flawed as she veered from damaged young woman to giggling porn babe. The film is disturbing - even more so when it uses the gang-bang (which took ten hours) as a framing device for the rest of the proceedings.A very weird and unsettling eighty minutes.

Half way into this movie I began asking myself why I should care about Anabel Chong. I've seen several documentaries on the Porn industry and this is certainly not one of the better ones. It reveals little about the industry itself and yet it also fails to deliver anything more than a superficial glimpse into the world of Anabel Chong. Anabel is at once proud and defiant about her gang bang and yet deeply ashamed and embarrassed - to the point where she tearfully begs her mother for forgiveness and lies to her old teachers about her profession. Yet little light is shed on this contradiction.There are several scenes which, in and of themselves, sparkle, but they are lost in a film that has little structure and constantly struggles just to have a point.