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Deceptive cover art on videos and DVDs. Aussie actresses. The erratic careers of some directors. NC-17 films. Would-be trilogies that wind up a chapter short. Coming-of-age tales. Dame Helen Mirren using the word "naughty" to describe me. The ramblings are coming fast, cheap, and out of control this week, so buckle up and pace your breathing. Otherwise, you'll most likely be left winded. I'll start with the last part first.

Seeing Mirren in the audience at the Oscars, looking hotter at 64 than she did five years ago, ten years ago, 20 years ago (you get the picture) allows me to trot out one of my personal anecdotal chestnuts. Twelve years and several lifetimes ago, I was copy editor, listings editor and writer/reviewer for a cable listings magazine with one of its two offices located in Portland. The dream gig lasted but a year as TV Guide, which was making its way into the large digest format, eventually bought us out. However, it was great fun to be in my early twenties and interviewing everyone from David Byrne to Jon Stewart, Regis Philbin to Paul Sorvino over the phone, all of them kindly enough to put up with my haphazard interviewing style and occasional breathless idol worship. I interviewed Mirren in connection with her made-for-cable movie The Passion of Ayn Rand (for which she eventually won an Emmy). I mentioned that I loved her in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (alternate viewing suggestion #1 this week) and that I had viewed it on its initial video release in 1990 at the ripe old age of 14.

"You were much too young to see that then. You naughty little boy," she teased and the wink in her voice was not hard to miss.

"Oh, but it's okay," I sputtered in reply, "My parents watched it with me."

Earlier this week at the public library, I fortuitously came across Age of Consent (alternate viewing choice #2) on the shelf, one of the many of hundreds of films I grew up reading the capsule review of in Leonard Maltin's Movie and Video Guide and wondering when it would become available on home video so I could see it. Directed by British filmmaker Michael Powell - his last full-length feature - in 1969, it's a portrait of an aging artist (James Mason) who takes flight to a remote Australian island to recharge his dormant talent and winds up with an unlikely muse, a young tomboyish lass more at home catching crab and fish with her bare hands than posing on the sand or in the surf.

Mirren, in her film debut, plays the young lady and it's mind-blowing to see her ("from the Royal Shakespeare Company" as her closing credit informs us) so young and yet so already confident and cocky, bold and emblazoned and holding her own in her scenes with Mason. Age of Consent is best when it is idyllic and erotic, frothy and sexy. However, there are terrible moments of comic relief, one unexpectedly bizarre death that you will cheer, and a curiously underwhelming ending, though it leads to a vividly perfect freeze-framed final shot. Age of Consent works best when considering Mason's artist as a stand-in for Powell and how his career was all but obliterated in the wake of his 1960 psychosexual thriller, Peeping Tom (a film which I with great fervor do not recommend at all).

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