Sasha was present at Good For Her’s Toronto screening of Champion and she fell in love with the newest work from Shine Louise Houston. She writes the Love Bites column of EYEWEEKLY and had some lovely things to say:
Champion, directed by Shine Louise Houston, tells the story of a mixed martial arts fighter named Jessie — played by stinking-hot real life MMA fighter Syd Blakovich — and her trials in and out of the ring. ( Watch the trailer here.) I know I said just last week that buying porn for Valentine’s Day is courting disaster. Yeah, I’m gonna need to take that back in light of this new information.
Firstly, the lighting, sets, music (taiko drumming, a brilliant choice to build fight and sex scenes) and direction are all top-notch, art-house quality. Houston has succeeded in capturing on film the sex you think you’re having when you’re fucking but which — if you’ve ever videotaped yourself and were mortified by the static lumbering combined with fits of frantic jackhammering — seems to have eluded your own lens. (For all you film geeks out there, she shoots on a Panasonic DVX100b at 24p with a 35mm lens adaptor. I don’t know what that means but the results are gorgeous.)
She lingers, with superb editing, on sex scenes that do not dilly-dally themselves. Feverishly hardcore and deeply intimate all at once, the real kissing and passionate oral sex are so arousing and so delightfully greedy compared to the usual faux-lez, slack-jawed tongue rolling, bogus moaning and baby-voiced reprimands.
Every moment of Champion bursts with lust: well-tended butch hands yanking on long, pretty hair, pale flesh all red-hot from slaps, swift, hard penetration and, good lord, finally some decently turned out femmes — no tattered feather boas or god-awful clompy heels. And hey, does your boyfriend suck at digital and oral sex? Are you all like, “Bitch, where’d you learn to handle a pussy, at Butterfly School?” The lad needs to see this movie, trust me. The final scene lacks the same charged charisma as the others but virtually no fast-forwarding, not once.
Thank you, thank you, thank YOU Shine Louise, for making what is hands-down the best pornographic film I have ever seen. Thank you for improving queer female and trans porn by more leaps and bounds than words can adequately express. And thank you most of all for making a movie that I got so out-of-sorts watching at the Toronto premiere that I had to take not one, not two, but three people home to deal with the situation. (One of you left your copy at my house, by the way.) I don’t care who you are or what you like to fuck, it doesn’t seem possible that you won’t find this film utterly captivating. Champion is available locally at Good For Her.