Reviews

You wouldn't know it from reading the package, but this is the sequel to _Loose Ends 5 - The New Generation_ (1988). You will need to see that one first or you will find Raven Touchstone's premise about A.S.S. agent Barbii infiltrating an underground anal sex community a bit confusing.

_Loose Ends 5_ features more lingering shots of Barbii's tender young flesh. _A.S.S._ is more action-oriented, as if director Bruce Seven was making time to raise the hundred million dollars it would take to portray this dystopian future society. However, since the sequel was actually shot later that afternoon, he made do by printing out some signs using an Apple IIe and a dot-matrix printer, both of which appear in key plot points.

Barbii, in a lacy white teddiette with white stockings, delivers this memorable line to Randy West in her ingenuous little voice: "You sound like a boyfriend -- I've never had a boyfriend before". Spoogeable bits of dialogue like this one are why porn once had writers.

Musically this is not all terrible. Arrangements are in a spare, energetic dance club style (I'm sure there's a name for it, but I wouldn't know) well-suited for giant venues. It's better than many of these (occasionally awful) songs deserve, and only "Toxic" (a terrific single) is diminished by this treatment.

To break up the potential monotony there's a dull wraparound story that will have the viewer wishing for the monotony to return.

The stage show surrounds Britney with excellent dancers, which has the unfortunate effect of making Brit look like a well-rehearsed non-dancer going through the motions but not really caring about what she's doing. Brit and dancers act out little vignettes during the music, Brit emerging from a disco speaker, sitting on a cute motorcycle, in a cute car, and so forth.

Brit does a duet with a videotape of will.i.am where he says he's the (going from memory) "big fat bass" and Brit says she's the tweeter. Must be a metaphor. I'm bored.

No musicians are depicted, and the only pretense of this being a live musical performance is the head-worn wireless microphone. I'm told at least one song was sung live at each concert - if any such performance was captured here, it was re-dubbed later because Britney's lip-syncing is unconvincing throughout the show.

Almost any healthy young woman given a couple months' rehearsal could do about as well. Britney comes off entirely blank, the performance failing to project any personality. It's as if no audience arrived, but her tyrannical manager/father made her do the show anyway, and she didn't know it was being recorded.

Aside from liking a couple of her songs, I have few preconceptions watching this, and found her uninteresting as a singer, performer, sex object or campy failure. It's hard to ignore this because she's the focus of the show, making the spectacle seem especially empty.

If you need a comparison, Kylie Minogue - whose music is as occasionally interesting to me as Ms. Spears' - pulls all this off quite well in the two videos I've seen by her, "KylieX2008" and "Showgirl: The Homecoming Tour". Her shows have the same lip-synced minimal pretense of live music, with tons of dancing and flashy staging and costuming and sensational if meaningless imagery, yet the exuberant Minogue is totally on top of it, whereas Spears looks drained and lost.