It may not have been as momentous as Stravinsky's The Rites of Spring (as Pauline Kael notoriously claimed at the time), but Bernardo Bertolucci's seminal film was a watershed how sex was depicted on film. It's a man-on-man sex scene in everything but name. (Or maybe there was: Reed spent his time in between takes off to the side, as he put it, "trying to get a semi on so that it would look more purposeful and stop all my girlfriends saying ‘why bother' and deserting me.") Seen today, the homoeroticism is undeniable regardless of the scene's supposedly plantonic male-bonding intentions. It's also the stuff of acting lore: Both actors kept trying to back out of doing the scene, until one night they got drunk together and went for a joint pee, during which they were able to check each other out and realize there was nothing to feel self-conscious about. Lawrence's novel was one of the outré director's more somber, "respectable" films – save for the naked wrestling match between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed, considered by many to be mainstream cinema's first instance of full-frontal male nudity. Ken Russell's majestic adaptation of D.H. Image Credit: Courtesy of Everett Collection The curiosity and the contrversy helped garner it a broader audience. No one talked about the interview footage of Martin Luther King Jr., or footage of actual Vietnam War protesting, or the cheeky subversiveness of the movie's antiauthoritarian humor. (Although the few scenes in which actors Lena Nyman and Borje Ahlstedt show off some hairy nether regions certainly helped distinguished this Swedish import from the usual foreign-film fare.) No, what put this story of a radical student having an affair with a married man in boiling hot water was the sequence in which Nyman plants a kiss on her costar's penis in full view that was enough to brew up a shitstorm that woud end up breaking down censorship barriers and ultimately help usher in an age of cinematic permissiveness. It wasn't just the pubic hair on display that got Vilgot Sjoman's political screed-cum-melodrama seized at customs when it was brought here in 1969, put at the center of an obscenity case tried by the Supreme Court and considered one of the more notorious films of its day. Read this NSFW list with someone you love. But the 3o films here all share one thing in common: They all come as close to being pornographic as mainstream films will allow. Some have been imported in as prestige foreign films, and others have been produced and distributed by Hollywood studios. They are designed to play in multiplexes and art houses. These films are cast with A-list movie stars and directed by world-class filmmakers. Rather, it’s the latest in a long line of films that have pushed the envelope in terms of what can be shown in “mainstream” films and not be considered the sort of movie that requires you to give your credit card to a Web site in order to watch. (LeBeouf even sent in a homemade pornographic videotape for his audition.)ĭespite the abundance of explicit sex on display, however, Von Trier’s film is not pornography. Though some stunt, er, parts were employed, you are basically watching actors like Charlotte Gainsbourg and Shia LeBeouf engage in the sort of unsimulated activities you associate with porn stars. 2 doesn’t arrive until April 4th, though you’ll be able to catch both chapters on video-on-demand starting on March 20th.) Never one to shy from provocation - he’s more likely to sprint towards it - the Danish director’s chronicle of one woman’s sexual awakening is littered with spankings, fellatio, a ménage à trois or two, sodomy, masturbation and good old-fashioned humping. Arriving on a wave of high anticipation, hype and bag-headed public appearances, the first “volume” of Lars Von Trier’s two-part, five-hour magnum opus Nymphomaniac will start rolling into theaters on March 21st.
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