Casual sex seems to be making a comeback at the movies.
Recently Love and Other Drugs showcased the informal liaisons of Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal. “We decided it was going to be two characters that both really couldn’t be intimate,” says Jake, “and so we both went to sex as a way of avoiding things.”
This week in No Strings Attached Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher become the latest Hollywood a-listers to try and keep their relationship strictly physical in this Ivan Reitman comedy.
Other films to ask “What’s love got to do with it?” include 9 Songs, the erotic Michael Winterbottom movie about Matt, an English scientist, and Lisa, an American on vacation in London. They meet, jump into the sack and go to Primal Scream and Franz Ferdinand concerts and soon learn, as Roger Ebert noted in his review, “sex is easy but love is hard.”
Another movie couple learned that lesson, with much happier results in Knocked Up, the 2007 comedy about a one night stand, an unplanned pregnancy and enforced maturity. The Guardian called it “a new genre of romantic comedy in which an unappealing hero gets together with a gorgeous, successful woman.” Star Katherine Heigl had a different take, suggesting the film “paints the women as shrews, as humorless and uptight, and it paints the men as lovable, goofy, fun-loving guys.” In response the film’s director Judd Apatow said “I’m just shocked she [Heigl] used the word shrew. I mean, what is this, the sixteen-hundreds?”
The reviews for Casual Sex?, a 1988 comedy starring Lea Thompson and Victoria Jackson as two women who look for love at an upscale spa—“It was the early eighties,” says Thompson’s character, “and sex was still a good way to meet new people.”—sum up the way many people feel about the sex without commitment. The movie,” wrote Hal Hinson in the Washington Post, “is exactly like the real thing—kinda empty, kinda unfulfilling, and you feel just awful afterward.”
On the other hand James Bond, possibly the screen’s biggest proponent of casual sex, never seemed to have a problem with a quick fling. Not willing to limit himself to earth-bound trysts in Moonraker he even has a rendezvous on a spaceship careening back through earth’s atmosphere. “My God, what is Bond doing?!” asks his boss Sir Frederick Gray. “I think he’s attempting re-entry sir,” replies Q.
Sometimes it seems like Hollywood is obsessed with infidelity, both on screen and off.
Celebrity cheating scandals—Jesse and the porn star, Tiger and, well, everyone—covered the front pages recently, and Zsa Zsa Gabor once famously said, ‘How many husbands have I had? You mean apart from my own?”
Even supposedly happily-ever-after-Tinseltown-couples preemptively guard against unfaithfulness by signing “cheat-proof” prenups. Catherine Zeta-Jones has a legal infidelity clause with Michael Douglas and it’s rumoured that Denise Richards and Charlie Sheen signed one worth more than $4 million.
In this weekend’s The Dilemma — a funny take on infidelity — Vince Vaughn discovers his best friend’s wife is having an affair. There have been adultery comedies before but usually on screen in American films there is a price to be paid for matrimonial betrayal. Ever since the first cheating Hollywood movie, 1915’s Infidelity, movies like The End of the Affair, Body Heat and Derailed have shown the consequences of bed hopping, but one movie stands head and shoulder above the rest as a cautionary tale.
Fatal Attraction begins with Michael Douglas, a married man, who has a fling with Glenn “I’m not gonna be ignored!” Close. When he tries to break off their affair, she becomes a lesson in why not to cheat on your wife.
The film was a sensation in 1987 and its most famous clip, the rabbit boiling on the stove, even inspired a phrase in the Urban Dictionary. According to the website, cook your rabbit “refers to the moment when someone goes over the edge in their obsession with another person.”
Fatal Attraction was a box office bonanza, inspiring a number of imitators including The Crush, Single White Female and a spoof called Fatal Instinct.
More poignant is Same Time Next Year, the story of a 26-year affair. Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn star as an extramarital couple who rendezvous once a year from youth to old age. Based on a stage play by Canadian Bernard Slade, it’s a nice mix of humour — when asked how many kids he has Alda lies, saying two rather than three. “I thought it would make me seem less married,” he says — and emotion.
Perhaps the strangest infidelity movie on our list is Come With Me My Love, a supernatural tale about a man who kills his cheating wife, then commits suicide, only to come back as a ghost 50 years later to haunt his old apartment.
A cleverly edited YouTube video featuring a montage of Nicolas Cage “losing it” in the movies has racked up 1,677,816 views, which is probably more people than saw his recent trilogy of Razzie-worthy work, The Wicker Man, Bangkok Dangerous and Knowing.
The vid is an eyeopening look at Cage’s trademarked brand of extreme acting — a method of over emoting perfected in the 66 movies he’s made since his debut (under his real name, Nicolas Coppola) in 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Citing The Incredible Hulk star Bill Bixby as a major acting influence, he has always been, for better and for worse, one of our most completely fearless (and cuckoo bananas) actors.
This weekend’s Season of the Witch promises an extra helping of full throttle Cage and will likely do some bang-up box office, but the actor who is best known for hits like Adaptation, National Treasure and Leaving Las Vegas, has made many other, lesser known movies that are also worth a look.
One writer called Cage’s work in Vampire’s Kiss “a grand stab at all-out, no-holds-barred comic acting or one of the worst dramatic performances in a film this year” and 21 years after those words were written it’s still hard to judge. The story of a man who may—or may not—be turning into a vampire is best remembered as the movie in which Cage ate a live cockroach, but also features one of his most unhinged performances.
A few years later, somewhere between Honeymoon in Vegas and Guarding Tess, came Red Rock West, a genre busting movie—Ebert said it “exists sneakily between a western and a thriller, between a film noir and a black comedy”—that unfairly barely made it to theatres. Cage hands in some of his best work as a broke but honest drfiter, but only took the role after Kris Kristofferson turned it down.
Existing at the intersection of Vampire’s Kiss and Red Rock West is Wild at Heart, a film that perfectly showcases Cage’s manic energy. As Sailor, a lover boy on the run from hit men hired by his girlfriend’s mother—he’s a one of a kind—an Elvis wannabe with a snakeskin jacket and an attitude. It’s a bravura performance that, like the jacket which he says, “represents a symbol of my individuality,” is a symbol of his artistic individuality.
Dec. 31 is one of the busiest nights of the year in bars and restaurants, which is precisely why I like to stay home. I don’t enjoy the crowds or the inevitable awkward midnight kissing that goes along with New Year’s Eve. But just because I don’t like to whoop it up in public doesn’t mean I don’t celebrate. I prefer to staycation, curling up with the P.M.C. (the Preferred Movie Companion), a bottle of something sparkly and a New Year’s Eve-themed movie.
For a romantic end-of-the-year mood I usually reach for The Apartment and watch Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon fall in love at their office New Year’s Eve party. Or I watch Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant sneak a kiss on Dec. 31, then make a deal to meet six months later on top of the Empire State Building in the soapy An Affair to Remember. But maybe the best mushy NYE scene comes from When Harry Met Sally. On New Year’s Eve (when else?) Harry says to Sally (who else would he say this to?), “I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”
For Harry, New Year’s Eve was the beginning of the rest of his life but for the ill fated passengers on The Poseidon it was just the opposite. We’ve all had disastrous end of the year parties but none match one of my other favorites, The Poseidon Adventure. Right in the middle of their on-board New Year’s party, a wild wave knocks the ship for a loop, sending 10 passengers on a watery New Year’s trek to safety.
There are dozens of movies filed under “Auld Lang Syne” in my collection, like 200 Cigarettes—set during New Year’s Eve, 1981—and Sleepless in Seattle where Tom Hanks has an imaginary conversation with his late wife. ‘”Here’s to us,” he says, while we wipe a tear or two.
There’s others like Sunset Blvd. and Bridget Jones’s Diary, but perhaps the greatest New Year’s Eve scene happens in The Godfather, Part 2. At a New Year’s Eve party in Havana, at the stroke of midnight, Michael Corleone grabs his brother Fredo, gives him a kiss, and says, “I know it was you Fredo. You broke my heart.” Terrified, Fredo disappears, which gives new meaning to “may old acquaintance be forgot…”
These days, malls are festooned in Christmas decorations by October and Starbucks has their Yuletide mugs out before the leaves have even turned. Last year, a new version of A Christmas Carol opened in early November and on TV, A Christmas Story played for 24 solid hours on Dec. 25. It’s easy to get Christmased-out long before the big day rolls around. There’s too much tinsel, too many in-your-face Santas, but for movie fans it is possible to get a taste of the holidays without having to watch James Stewart contemplate suicide.
Here’s some Christmas movies for people who don’t like Christmas movies.
Creepy Christmas
There are dozens of Christmas horror films with names like Silent Night, Deadly Night, but they are still too Christmassy for this list. I’m thinking more along the lines of American Psycho—who can forget Wall Street serial killer Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) wearing reindeer antlers?—or the Christmas Eve viral outbreak that ravages the planet in I Am Legend.
Noël Noir
Lots of action / crime movies use Christmas as a setting, so much so that Die Hard and its sequel, both set on Christmas Eve, are regularly played as part of TV Christmas marathons. Others you may have forgotten are Lethal Weapon—Jingle Bell Rock plays during the opening credits—Goodfellas—The Ronettes sing Frosty the Snowman during a Christmas party, and later Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) gives his wife a wad of bills as a Christmas present—and L.A. Confidential, which opens on “Bloody” Christmas, 1951 when dozens of policemen beat seven incarcerated Latino men.
You Sleigh Me—Kringle’s Comedy
Looking for holiday laughs? According to Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, in Heaven it is Christmas every day, complete with dancers dressed as sexy Santas. In Trading Places we first see Dan Ackroyd, drunk, dressed as Santa on a bus, eating crusted food stuck in his beard. Even more alarming is Ferdinand the duck’s exclamation that “Christmas is carnage” in the movie Babe.
Mistletoe Melodrama
Let’s face it, Christmas brings up a whole gamut of emotions, not just love and goodwill, and that’s precisely why Yuletide scenes are so effective in dramas. Far From Heaven, the Todd Haynes film about family secrets uses a drunken Christmas party to unveil some hard truths and, of course, without the Christmas scene in Citizen Kane there’d be no Rosebud mystery.
Non-Chritsmassy Christmas Movie Quotes:
From Life of Brian
“We are three wise men.”
“Well, what are you doing creeping around a cow shed at two o’clock in the morning? That doesn’t sound very wise to me.”
From American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman
“Hey Hamilton, have a holly jolly Christmas. Is Allen still handling the Fisher account?”
From Babe’s Ferdinand the duck
“Christmas is carnage!”
From L.A. Confidential’s Sid Hudgens (Danny Devito)
“It’s Christmas Eve in the City of Angels and while decent citizens sleep the sleep of the righteous, hopheads prowl for marijuana, not knowing that a man is coming to stop them! Celebrity crimestopper Jack Vincennes, scourge of grasshoppers and dopefiends everywhere!”
From Driving Miss Daisy’s Daisy Werthan (Jessica Tandy)
“If I had a nose like Florene’s, I wouldn’t go around wishing anybody a Merry Christmas!”
When English boxer Bruno Frank said “Boxing is just show business with blood,” he was on to something. Ever since 1937’s Kid Galahad entertained depression era audiences, there has been a steady flow of films set inside the square circle. For generations, audiences have flocked to the intersection of showbiz and blood — the movie theatre — to see films like Gentleman Jim, Million Dollar Baby and, of course, Rocky.
This weekend, Mark Wahlberg adds to that list when he stars as pugilist Micky Ward in The Fighter, joining a long line of actors who have strapped on gloves to play real life boxers.
In Resurrecting the Champ, a sportswriter thinks a homeless man (Samuel L. Jackson) might actually be a down-on-his-luck boxing legend. Loosely based on the story of Bob Satterfield, a fighter ranked in Ring magazine’s list of 100 greatest punchers of all time, it takes some liberties with the real story but makes up for inaccuracies with a great performance from Jackson.
Another flawed boxing movie saved by its performances is The Great White Hope, based on Jack Johnson, a boxer nicknamed the “Galveston Giant.” For some reason the names were changed for the movie, but the story of Johnson’s struggle with racism is brought to vivid life in a towering performance by James Earl Jones, who originated the part on Broadway. A 2005 documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson revisited the story, correcting many of the mistakes of the original film.
Somebody Up There Likes Me stars Paul Newman (replacing James Dean who died before filming) as world middleweight champion Rocky Graziano. The fighter is portrayed as a tough kid from New York’s “Lower East Side, where both sides of the tracks were wrong” whose violent and callous ways are changed by the love of a good woman.
As mushy as the love story is — it inspired Sylvester Stallone when he was writing the Adrian storyline in Rocky — the fight scenes are brutally authentic.
Probably the greatest boxing bio is Raging Bull, the story of Jake “Come on, hit me. Harder. Harder” LaMotta, which earned Robert De Niro a Best Actor Oscar. But Cinderella Man, the inspiring true story of James J. Braddock and Gentleman Jim (which sees Errol Flynn playing Jim Corbett, the first heavyweight champion of the world under the new Marquis of Queensberry) is also worth a look.
Once upon a time, Disney had a corner on the kids’ action-adventure market. Sunday at six was reserved for Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color and for a couple of hours once a week movies like Race from Witch Mountain, Kidnapped and Treasure Island mixed plucky kids, mild action, exotic locations and lots of adventure.
The genre hasn’t gone away — new movies like this weekend’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader still give kids a thrill ride — but I get a nostalgic kick out of older, simpler action-adventure flicks.
Though it wasn’t a Disney film, The Goonies breathes the same air as Walt’s kids’ classics. The adventure begins when a group of kids calling themselves The Goonies find “One-Eyed” Willy’s treasure map. Sprinkle in some crazy inventions, a baddie played by Throw Mama from the Train star Anne Ramsey, a title track by Cyndi Lauper and Spielberg-esque storytelling, and you have one of the best loved kids’ romps from the 1980s.
Speaking of Spielberg, without his ET, we wouldn’t have had Flight of the Navigator. After ET’s successful mix of kids and aliens, a whole slew of movies tried to cash in on that formula. The story of a 12-year-old boy who disappears, only to return eight years later without having aged a day at all, Intelligence — a glib navigational computer — and a cameo by Sarah Jessica Parker as a NASA orderly with punk rock pink hair.
SJP’s pink hair stood out like a sore thumb in that movie, but two early ’80s kids’ fantasy-adventure films feature wild creatures and magical lands.
In The NeverEnding Story, a young hero must save his country, Fantasia, from something worse than an evil king. He must stop a creeping wave of nothingness. It may be the most existential kids’ movie ever, but woven into the fabric of the story are cool characters like the Rockbiter and Gmork the evil wolf.
Perhaps the best, although most underrated kids’ fantasy film, is 1982’s The Dark Crystal. Directed by Muppet master Jim Henson, the film sees a Gelfling setting off to find the missing piece of a magical crystal, in order to restore to his world. A minor hit when it was released, this masterful kid’s movie is finally getting a much deserved sequel, The Power of the Dark Crystal, scheduled for release in 2011.
Ballet is inherently dramatic, so it is no wonder the movies have frequently looked to pointed shoes and bun heads for inspiration. The first ballet moves captured on film were likely in the turn-of-the-last-century animated films of Alexander Shiryaev, whose crude but beautiful films used drawings and puppets as an early form of dance notation.
Since then, the movies have been dancing with the stars. Everyone from legendary performers like Mikhail Baryshnikov to gifted amateurs like Natalie Portman, who plays a beautiful but troubled ballerina in this weekend’s dark drama Black Swan, have done a cinematic grand jeté or two.
The most classic ballet movie has to be The Red Shoes, the 1948 classic which interweaves on and off stage action to tell the story of a ballerina pulled between two men—a composer who loves her and an impresario who wants to make her a star. The British Film Institute labeled it one of “the best British films ever” and the movie inspired Kate Bush’s song and album of the same name.
The Red Shoes was nominated for four Oscars and took home a pair, which is two more than our next ballet film, even though it was nominated for eleven. The Turning Point (which ties The Color Purple for most nominations with no wins) starred Shirley MacLaine and Anne Bancroft as lifelong rivals; one who left the ballet to become a wife and mother, the other who stayed and became a star. Audrey Hepburn, Doris Day and Grace Kelly were all offered the lead roles, but turned them down. After seeing the movie, Hepburn regretted her decision. “That was the one film,” she said, “that got away from me.”
There are dozens of Hollywood ballet movies. It’s almost tutu much (you had to know that pun was coming); White Nights, Center Stage (with Avatar’s Zoe Saldana), Billy Elliot, The Company (made with the cooperation of the Joffrey Ballet) and even the South Korean horror film, Wishing Stairs, feature stories about fictional ballet dancers, but there are many interesting ballet documentaries as well.
The history of the Ballet Russe of Monte Carlo is touchingly and lovingly told in Ballets Russes, an intimate documentary focused on the founders of modern ballet and also fascinating is La Danse – Le ballet de l’Opéra de Paris, director Frederick Wiseman’s fly-on-the-wall look at the production of seven ballets by the Paris Opera Ballet.
Usually they sound like one long breathless sentence that seems scarier than the disease the drugs are meant to prevent.
A new film, Love and Other Drugs, starring Jake Gylennhaal and Anne Hathaway as a pharmaceutical salesman and the girl he loves respectively, however, forgoes the disclaimer. In fact, in what almost seems like a 90-minute ad for Viagra, it appears that the drug’s—Vitamin V, Jake calls it—only side effect is that it works too well.
It is the rare movie that uses a real brand name drug as a plot device. Even though the odd movie like Prozac Nation dares to name names, often filmmakers use fictitious drugs to advance their stories (and avoid lawsuits from notoriously litigious Big Pharma), but even in fantasy, side effects abound.
Brain Candy, the 1996 Kids in the Hall comedy, created a cure for depression called GLeeMONEX that “makes you feel like it’s 72°F in your head all the time.” Unfortunately the pill’s patients also turn into comatose zombies.
David Cronenberg devised Ephemerol, a tranquilizer used as a morning sickness remedy for his film Scanners. Side effects? Telekinetic and telepathic abilities. Later, in Naked Lunch, Cronenberg featured the more recreational drug Bug Powder, a yellow dust formally used by exterminators, informally by people looking to find a “literary high.”
In Repo! The Genetic Opera, Paris Hilton’s character Amber Sweet was addicted to a powerful blue, glowing opiate extracted from dead bodies called Zydrate. I’ll do wild things to “your soul for one more hit of that glow,” she sings. An alternative cinematic painkiller is Novril, the pills that kept James Caan sedated in Misery.
Filmmakers don’t just fictionalize pharmaceuticals, however. Plenty of recreational drugs get the Hollywood treatment. Remember Space Coke from Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie? One snort was enough to send both Cheech and Chong literally into outer space.
A Clockwork Orange was chock-a-block with fake drugs; everything from Drencrom to the synthetic mescaline Synthemesc to Vellocet, which produced ultra-violent tendencies and sudden outbursts of Singing in the Rain.
Perhaps the strangest recreational drug from the movies is Alien Nation’s Jabroka. Aliens find it highly addictive and grow to monstrous proportions when they take it, but to humans it tastes like dish soap and has no effect.
