05 Dec 2006

The Filth And The Fury

With more and more celebrities being silly enough to agree to be filmed having sex, celebrity sites such as Paparazzi Filth are likely to become more common. The most recent such celebrity is probably Imogen Thomas, the undeniably stunning British Big Brother contestant who did very well in the most recent series of that show, and has subsequently gone on to become something of a star on the 'lad's mag' circuit.

But are such sites quite as relevant and worthy of fuss as they seem to be?

The way Thomas shrugged off the emergence of this tape after her exit from the asylum that is the Big Brother house is pretty much indicative of the general apathy that seems to accompany many such occurrences these days. The frenzy over the possibility of a Kevin Federline - Britney Spears tape is immense, to be sure, but then anything to do with the delicious Miss Spears is.

In truth, much of the stuff that is contained on the site is stuff I'd seen before. I used to be something of a glutton for the photo shoots and videos of attractive female celebrities, so I constantly found myself flicking through the site mumbling to myself, "Seen it. Seen it. Seen it." I didn't really see a great deal that I hadn't seen before elsewhere, aside from the aforementioned Imogen Thomas video.

The majority of Paparazzi Filth isn't actually the sex videos of the rich and famous, but rather their raunchier photo shoots and movie scenes. Which sort of begs the question of why people would pay what is rather a lot of money to susbcribe to such a site. I found much of its content via the wonder of Google and switching off the safe search function. I'm pretty sure if I looked hard enough that I would find those Paris Hilton, Pamela Anderson, Gena Lee Nolin etc. videos knocking around somewhere for free.

When you bear in mind the way Paris Hilton twisted around the revelation of her video to heighten public knowledge of her and, as some suggest, even profited from it, and the lack of horror that Thomas showed towards her starring role in a dirty home video released for mass consumption, will public interest wane in such things? I get the impression that part of the appeal in such videos is knowing that the celebrities involved are squirming at the thought of them existing. Such recent apathy from those caught with their knickers down will probably rub off on the public.

It seems to me that the main selling point of Paparazzi Filth and its ilk are simply convenience. In my formative years, I had a HUGE thing for the French actress Emmanuelle Beart. In fact, I still do. How could you not?! Having heard that La Belle Noiseuse, a film which she notoriously spent much of the four and half hour running time nude in, I stayed awake until 5am in the morning just to catch this opportunity. And bloody hell that was a boring damn film. It would have been altogether better being able to stick the internet on and within a couple of minutes find the particular scenes myself, cutting out the endless scenes of nothing happening at all.

So, even if you really don't care about the chance to see Britney chomping on K-Fed's todger, don't completely dismiss such sites. It might save you four hours of your life that you might otherwise never get back.

Posted by Steve 17:09:00