The Pillow Book (1997)

  Don't let that poster fool you.  This is not "richly sensual" nor is it a romance movie so, ladies, step along.  Much like Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down, I thought this movie was going to be hot.  It's not.  There's a lot of nudity but it's all male and since it isn't a porno, it's sad floppy penises.  Nobody wants to see that.

This woman (Vivian Wu) likes being written on.  Specifically, she likes calligraphy to be painted on her naked body.  Now I can get behind that.  Partly because I've had that done and it's fantastic and partly because I think people should be free with their kinks.  As long as it's not hurting anybody, I say go for it.  Anyway, she gets tired of trying to find that perfect mix of sex skills and penmanship and begins looking for people she can write on.  That being accomplished and really enjoying the way her finished project looks, she starts searching for a publisher who will make a book out of the photographs she's taken of naked men she has written all over.  She turns to her father's publisher (Yoshi Oida) but he only publishes people he's fucking.  So she does what any well-adjusted sane person would do and seduces his young lover (Ewan McGregor) so that she can get her book published.  This actually works until she gets jealous of her boyfriend spending so much time with his boyfriend and breaks up with him by painting other dudes.  Again behaving like a rational person, he commits suicide in her apartment.  She paints a book on him and has him buried.  The publisher has him dug up, skinned, and made into a book that he frequently rubs all over himself.  Because that's what normal people would do.  She is super-pissed about the corpse desecration and starts sending the publisher young men with books painted on them in the hopes that he will suddenly give up a lifetime of douchebaggery and give her back her dead boyfriend's skin.

I can't even begin to describe the levels of weirdness this movie blows through.  It took a fairly sexy concept and slingshot it into Do NOT Want.  On top of that, the editing was insane.  Half the movie is picture-in-picture the size of a postage stamp, it's in a mix of Japanese, English, and French, and the cinematography is crap.  The whole thing was a huge fucking mess.