When Lovett telephones me from his Manhattan production office, I suggest that it takes balls to put all this stuff in a film, even 30 years later. Was he concerned at all, I wondered, about how the James Dobsons and Samuel Alitos of the world would react to this movie and its tales of legendary debauchery? He sighs sadly. "It disturbs me that you have asked that question," he says. "I was a child during the McCarthy period, and I saw what keeping silent did. I do believe in telling the truth about who we are and where we've been. I believe the truth will set you free."

Those who hate gay people, he suggests, aren't likely to hate them less if he conceals the truth about how easy it was to get a blow job on the piers of lower Manhattan in 1975. And of course he's right. It's not as if Phyllis Schlafly doesn't know that gay men have a reputation for sexual libertinage (which has always seemed suspiciously fascinating to activists on the far right), and Lovett is trying to put the raunchy delights of the piers and the trucks and the bars in a larger context. Ultimately, this movie is less about sex per se, he says, than the liberation that came with it.

"It's about the end of repression, and what lifting repression can do to you, and for you," he continues. "I wanted to look at the wonderful things that happened along with that -- the fact that so many gay people began to accept themselves, and came out to the other people in their lives. They began to be able to incorporate their fantasies into their sense of the future, which was very important. You didn't have to be somebody who segmented your personality, who kept your sensual life locked in a little box."

Whether you find yourself shocked or delighted (or both) by all the mustachioed man-flesh on display, "Gay Sex in the 70s" is an often-hilarious tribute to its city and its era, full of pumping disco tunes, scenes from vintage porn films and Fire Island parties, and the none-too-subtle posters that advertised bathhouses and all-night booty-shaking hoedowns. It doesn't shy away from the question of how the party ended, with the arrival of a catastrophe that devastated the gay community and made impossible demands on its newfound sense of identity and unity. Lovett's film should remind all of us that the homosexual experience in America, however you wish to interpret it, is that of a distinct and harshly oppressed minority.

"We have been vilified, we have been attacked in streets, we've had laws made against us," says Lovett. "We are like the Jews in Germany, and I do not make that comparison lightly. We need to talk about who we really are. We can't try to appease the far right, because they can't be appeased. With this film, I get to sit in the theater and hear people laugh. Then they come to me afterwards and say, 'Thank you, I never knew about that,' or 'Thank you -- I had forgotten that you could have sex without fear, without thinking about death.'"

"Gay Sex in the 70s" opens Nov. 4 at the Quad Cinema in New York, Nov. 18 at the Laemmle Theatres in Los Angeles and Jan. 20, 2006, at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, with more cities to follow.

Fast Forward: A world of electronic ghosts; how ballet conquered America; twilight of the Dolls
Kiyoshi Kurosawa is not related, either by genealogy or aesthetics, to the late Akira Kurosawa, but if the elder Kurosawa was the most illustrious Japanese director of his generation, the younger one may be on the verge of assuming that mantle himself. Although fans started picking up on his enigmatic genre films like "Eyes of the Spider" or "Serpent's Path" in the late '90s, this Kurosawa still suffers from brand identification problems and lacks much of a Western audience.

I'm not sure that's likely to change with "Pulse," his influential 2001 horror film that's finally getting a limited U.S. release, but it's a powerful, dreamlike work that conjures a peculiar spell. I could tell you that it's about ghosts using the Internet to invade our world and provoke a suicide epidemic, or that it's a teen drama of anomie and loneliness, or that it ends up as one of those nuclear-war allegories where a shrinking group of survivors tries to keep going in a depopulated world. That's all correct, but doesn't do much to capture the movie's essence.

Like a lot of films in the latest wave of Japanese cinema, "Pulse" moves in wavelike rhythms that will enthrall some viewers and bore others into a deep slumber. It has a plot, sort of, and offers explanations, sort of, for its spectral apparitions. But the ghosts halfway trapped in the walls of crumbling buildings, the murkily frightening images that appear unbidden on computer screens, the doors sealed with red masking tape that you really, really wish the characters wouldn't open -- I feel stupid saying these things are symbolic, or archetypal, or whatever, but it's true.

Kurosawa uses the conventions of genre movies to contain semi-experimental meditations on loneliness and mortality and the fact that the technology that was supposed to liberate us has instead filled us with despair. If he helped launch the wave sometimes unfortunately known as "J-horror," his aesthetic goals are bigger and murkier than that suggests. I'm sure I'll end up catching the Wes Craven-scripted remake Harvey Weinstein's new company has in the works, but the distinctive altered state induced by Kurosawa's "Pulse" is almost certain to get lost in translation. (Opens Nov. 9 at the IFC Center in New York; other cities may follow.)

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