Coming to DVD and VOD today, Tuesday, March 31: THE DICKUMENTARY
Sofian Khan’s exploration of the penis made its debut at Atlanta earlier this month. In addition to DVD, the film comes to VOD platforms including iTunes, Amazon Instant, Google Play, Playstation, Xbox, and cable providers.
Taking a broadly educational but light approach, Khan’s film offers a biological, historical, and cultural appreciation of the penis. A visit to Iceland’s Phallological Museum affords the opportunity to consider variations in penis size and function within the animal kingdom, while academics and historians reflect on the prevalence of phallic imagery in Egyptian and Greek myth. Penis-focused celebrations in India and Japan dovetail with other modern day but suspect instances of penis worship, such as a strange fringe group of Quebec men who honor each other’s members in their leader’s basement temple. Circumcision has its own chapter, including the recounting of recent attempts by “intactivists” to ban the practice in San Francisco and Cologne which ran into trouble when charges of both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia were suggested as motivations. While its survey approach offers only a brief gloss on its various topics, and the narration is occasionally grating, Khan at least keeps proceedings moving at a fairly brisk pace for this barely hour-plus doc.
what (not) to doc 