by Jeremy
Spring, 1999

(editors note: this film calls itself an "erotic masterpiece." As would follow, the film is basically about sex, and so is much of this review. If you are offended by such things, please do not read this review!)

Pillow Book sucked a black donkey cock the size of a dachshund.

Starring Vivian Wu, Pillow Book is some dopey white guy's vision of Eastern eroticism. Wu, a beautiful Chinese actress, plays an obsessive Japanese slut with a name too long to remember and write here. The slut is obsessed with finding the perfect lover, a man who is both a calligrapher and a great lay.

How does such a fetish develop, you might ask?

Well, the movie spends the first, I don't know, forever showing us this slut as a little girl being written on (literally) by her father. Her father would paint characters on her face, back, and legs all while recounting the same legend: when God made a human being, he would write its name and sex on it so it wouldn't forget; if God liked his creation he would write his own name on its back. Each time we saw this scene, Dad would repeat this legend with great drama, like we'd never heard it before. So, incestuous implications aside, when slut grows up, all she wants to do is have some stud write on and screw her.

Well, luckily for her, Ewan MacGregor is just the stud for the job. MacGregor is an English guy in Hong Kong who, we're told, speaks a lot of languages and, uh, writes books or something. Who knew?

That's right, they're in Hong Kong. The slut is Japanese, played by a Chinese, who speaks English throughout the whole movie. She speaks a little Mandarin (which she says she learned from her mother, a woman we see throughout the movie as Japanese) and says her own interminable name with what I perceived as a solid Japanese accent, but basically she's just an Asian chick. I think the writer/director (some guy named Peter Weingreen or something) couldn't make up his mind whether he wanted this slut to be Chinese or Japanese. He just wanted an Asian slut. Is it any coincidence that her perfect lover is white? I don't think so.

On the plus side, Wu is completely naked throughout most of the film.

On the negative side, so is Ewan MacGregor.

The two of them simulating sex takes up a good chunk of this 2-hour wretchfest, and in one scene, MacGregor makes out wildly with a completely naked, old, Japanese MAN. Don't ask. There is very little dialogue. There are a lot of close pans of body parts with writing on them. One 10-minute chunk of the film was a slow, up-close look at Wu's chest after MacGregor had written the Lord's Prayer on her titties.

Ooohh, deep.

From now on, I need to just go with my instincts,which always warn me to steer clear from any movie hailing itself an "erotic masterpiece." It's generally always some cheeseball porn wanna-be posing as art.

I will say this, though: Ewan MacGregor has got a decent-sized weiner.