“Wild Things”
Chances are some of you probably think the lesbian/pool/make-out scene in John McNaughton‘s maybe-satirical erotic comedy thriller “Wild Things” is pretty hot given that it’s two chicks playing tonsil hockey in a pool all wet and wild. But it is really the frattiest of fratboy sex scenes, and borderline repulsive for several reasons. For one, since the two actors (Denise Richards and Neve Campbell) can’t act for shit, it’s in no way believable and therefore isn’t sexy — Campbell kisses as if Richards tastes like an ashtray full of beer and buttholes, and her wincing face makes the scene all the more grotesque (the fact that Campbell out-acts Richards at being horrible is another feat therein). And Denise Richards is all shallow, empty “hotness” with pretty obviously fake boobs. The scene is the height of manufactured hotness, a cheap male fantasy that is so artificial that it’s just superficially sexy at best (tone wise, the scuzzy movie is just this side of “Showgirls,” which doesn’t help). The same goes for the three-way sex scene in the film with Matt Dillon later on, which makes us totally queasy every time because of Campbell’s face, which looks like she’s going to hurl whenever her hands go near Richards’ rubbery Barbie chest. We’re all for on-screen sapphism, but for more effective results try “Bound,” “Henry And June,” “Mulholland Drive” and many many more.
“Damage”
Louis Malle‘s penultimate film sounds good and hot on paper. It stars Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche as a pair that breaks their vows to have a torrid love affair with one another. Malle, Binoche, Irons, adulterous lovers. What’s not to lust? The problem is that every sex scene is like a SNL parody sketch of two lovers that want each other so bad they’ll break the imagined glass between them to fuck. Imagine serious thesps Binoche and Irons butt naked and licking, pawing and whimpering like wild oversexed hyenas in heat and you’ll get an idea of how overwrought and overdone each sex scene is. I had the ignominy of watching this movie with my Dad when I was a teenager (these were the days you went to the video store and picked up a VHS without knowing much more than the actors that starred) and as much as there were painful, uncomfortable silences, they were often broken by loud laughs of recognition that we were watching some of the most absurd and silly sex scenes we had ever seen.
“Munich”
Steven Spielberg‘s brilliant “Munich” is nothing if not ballsy. From the opening sequence recounting the hostage scenario at the Munich Olympic Games to the revenge plot hatched by the Israel government to seek out those that were responsible and systematically eliminate them, the film is Spielberg at his most fearless and virtuosic. Except, at a key juncture, when it all goes to shit. It’s towards the end of the film when we’re watching our main spy (Eric Bana) have sex with his lovely wife (Ayelet Zurer), and while he’s on top of her, thrusting away, he has violent flashbacks to the Munich hostage situation. This is weird for a number of reasons: one, when you fantasize while having sex with your wife, aren’t you supposed to think about…well, anything but the Munich Olympic Games? Two, why would he be having sweaty sex flashbacks to an event that he was never actually at? We get it: the trauma of the mission has infected every part of his life, leaving him to drown in a swampy, morally gray soup. But Jesus. Spielberg shot and edited the scene with the kind of no-holds-barred approach he applied to the rest of the movie, which means glistening beads of sweat dripping off Bana’s body in slow motion, but it tips the movie into dangerously silly territory, and both times we saw it theatrically it elicited nervous giggles from the paying audience. Sometimes bold moves result in equally bold miscalculations.
Thoughts? You must have your own favorites, and we assume you can’t always agree with us. — Oliver Lyttelton, Drew Taylor, Rodrigo Perez
