Two programs of short films produced for German television, each running 84 minutes. Of the first, J.R. Jones writes, “Two episodes on this program are largely comic. In Porn.com (2002), writer-director Bob Rafelson (Five Easy Pieces) plays a fictionalized version of himself—a once promising filmmaker whose career has petered out. Attending a retrospective of his work in Berlin, he agrees to direct a low-budget porn feature about Hitler, a hopelessly stale gag that’s partly redeemed by Rafelson’s stone-faced performance. Justin Leonard Stauber directed the highly annoying Did You Ever … (2002), in which an attractive young woman, driving through the California desert in her convertible, picks up a handsome hitchhiker and the two play cute for a while before sharing a roll in the sand.” (A third short, Dito Tsintsadze’s An Erotic Tale, wasn’t available for preview.) And of the second program, Hank Sartin writes, “Bernd Heiber’s Nr. 23 (2003, in German with subtitles) exploits a classic erotic premise (a gorgeous woman alone in a house, a hunky young man seeking shelter from the storm); deliberately coy about showing the male organ, it also gets you thinking about which body parts are considered ‘erotic’ and which ‘obscene.’ Jos Stelling’s The Gallery (2003), a wordless comedy about a businessman in a mall and his grandiose sexual fantasies, is witty but runs out of steam. The dud of this program is Amos Kollek’s Music, a cliched confusion of reality and daydream.”
