i have a little neck (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} quelnight) wrote in ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} ohnotheydidnt,@ 2008-07-18 01:36:00 |
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fifty worst sex scenes of all time
50. Crank (2006)
Public sex is hot. Amy Smart is hot. Potential death is hot. Jason Statham is . . . well, Jason Statham is Jason Statham. Bottom line though is that this scene from Crank, in which Jason Statham has public sex with Amy Smart to keep from dying (long story) should by all rights be delectably hot. Well, it ain't. In fact, it's disconcertingly rape-esque and at the very least, kind of embarrassing.
49. Il Fantasma dell'Opera (1998)
When I first got this assignment, I was confused: there's a sex scene in that terrible musical? Really? No wonder it's so popular! Intrigued, I watched — well, fast-forwarded through — the 2004 big screen adaptation starring the not-unattractive Emmy Rossum, but quickly realized the gauzy, candlelit over-the-puffy-shirt groping and kissing I witnessed would only be considered "sex" by the film's target audience of geeky pre-teen girls, aging spinsters and deeply closeted Republican senators. Then I read the fine print and realized I was supposed to be watching the deeply awful Il Fantasma dell'Opera, a 1998 remake of Phantom of the Opera by creepy Italian horror-meister Dario Argento, featuring WAY more buck naked doggy-style sex than the Andrew Lloyd Webber version. As for the reason the scene was picked for this list, I'd say it's a toss-up between (a) Julian Sands' Ed Woodian post-coital dialogue (i.e., "I was abandoned at birth in the river of time and space, where I was nurtured and cared for by creatures who have become my friends...") and (b) the fact the naked chick on all fours is, uh . . . the director's daughter, Asia. In retrospect, it turns out my family's embarrassing home movies could have been, oh, so much worse.
48. Titanic (1997)
"Put your hand on me" is not something you want to hear your partner say as you begin copulation. It reeks of the Antioch rules, and sets the tone for an inhibited, permissions-based non-romp in the sack — or in the Model T, in this case. The car is actually kind of a fun venue, but Jack and Rose are so stilted and formal that when her hand slaps the steamed-up window (their lovemaking is so hot it's raising the air temperature!), you can't possibly believe she'd let herself go like that.
47. Jack Frost (1996)
Now here's something you don't see every day: a naked Shannon Elizabeth getting penetrated by a giant holiday lawn ornament. Or, if you do see it every day, you're probably one of the rabid fans of the killer snowman flick Jack Frost, which Wikipedia tells me is a cult favorite (as opposed to the Michael Keaton warmedy Jack Frost, about a dead father reincarnated as a snowman to spend time with his kid, which, as far as I know, is a favorite of no one). But anyway, the scene in question begins when Ms. Elizabeth's character, unaware her horny boyfriend has been icicled to death, slips naked into a hot bath and . . . well, okay, here's where it gets complicated, see, because prior to becoming a killer snowman, Mr. Frost was just a plain old serial killer, but then he fell in some chemicals that transformed him into a kind of D-List X-man with the ability to melt and freeze at will. See where I'm going with this? No? Well, the first sign of trouble is a phallic floating carrot, and then the next thing you know, the bathwater has transformed into the aforementioned horny (and hilariously fake-looking) snowman, only he's not using the carrot as a nose, and . . . yeah. Exactly. Ew!
46. Poison Ivy (1992)
Poison Ivy is like a Lifetime movie that brazenly thought it was good enough for the big screen. Its deliciously trashy plot follows Ivy (a resurgent Drew Barrymore!), who insinuates her way into the life of awkward teen Sylvie (Roseanne's Sara Gilbert). In the process, she kills Sylvie's mom, injures Sylvie in a car accident, and seduces Sylvie's dad (a non-resurgent Tom Skerritt!). Despite a gushing head wound, Sylvie makes her way home from the hospital to discover her father mounting her teen friend from behind, with a gods-must-be-angry thunderstorm as the backdrop. There are so many awful visions to obsess over: Barrymore's yellow dye job, Skerritt's jowls as he leans over her lithe young body, the pseudo-psychological element of having Sylvie's dead mother appear, then flashing back to Barrymore and her red-lipped, early-‘90's pout. Poison Ivy gives us everything forbidden, but in the process proves that there is an art to capturing a true Lolita moment. And Tom Skerritt banging anyone from behind is not it.
45. Howard the Duck (1986)
Who would've thought that long before the "Spider-Man," "X-Men" and "Blade" trilogies were money-making blips in the brains of studio execs, Marvel Comics' first and far worst stab at multiplex excitement would go down in the annals of all-time Hollywood turkeys? (Well, apparently not series creator Steve Gerber, cowriter-director Willard Huyck or executive producer George Lucas.) '80s staple Lea Thompson takes center stage as Beverly Switzler, leader of Cleveland's all-girl, punk-haired bar band Cherry Bomb, whose unlikely friendship with the three-foot Howard — an anthropomorphic, cigar-chomping mallard from another planet (played by various little actors in a puppeteer-mechanized suit, including "In Bruges" co-star Jordan Prentice) — leads to something misguidedly creepier. While Howard rocks out on Beverly's synthesizer in her apartment one night, she exits the bathroom in panties, a silky top and open nightshirt, then ogles his tail and goads him into managing her band. "I've got to get back to my own kind," he rebukes before eyeing her ass as she crawls into bed: "Although, I have developed a greater appreciation for the female version of the human anatomy." He waddles into bed with her, cringe-worthy innuendos ensue ("You think I might find happiness in the animal kingdom, Ducky?"), they lock bedroom eyes, and then? "Okay, let's go for it, Mr. Macho." Howard gets nervous and the icky tension is broken with just a goodnight kiss, but not before she rubs his chest under his pajamas, and bestiality goes mainstream momentarily as the feathers on his head stand... (gulp!) erect.
44. BloodRayne (2005)
It wasn't Uwe Boll's first sex scene — after all, the Teutonic titan of bad movies had already filmed a nudity-free sexual encounter between Tara Reid and Christian Slater for 2005's "Alone in the Dark." However, one might say the director didn't go full tilt until he did so quite literally with Matthew Davis and Kristanna Loken, who in real life had been rumored at the time to be a little more into co-star Michelle Rodriguez. Perhaps not so incidentally then, Loken is the more butch in her scene with Davis, throwing him up against a metal gate and ripping off the shabby tunic he's wearing before grabbing hold of two of the gate's bars and mounting him. As one astute online critic pointed out at GenerationGamerz.com, Davis never opens his eyes as thrusting commences, though his tongue does find its way around one of Loken's nipples. (Oddly enough, Davis spends the rest of the scene mouth agape and gasping for air.) The least erotic aspect of the scene, besides, of course, the lack of any attraction between Davis and Loken, is the sound effect of the clanging gate that Loken clutches. If nothing else, Boll did achieve one thing — there's no reason for an inevitable porn remake of "Bloodrayne," since 18th century Romania never looked so much like 1980s San Fernando Valley.
43. Kissed (1996)
A thesis film if I ever saw one, Lynne Stopkewich's "Kissed" features Molly Parker as a death-obsessed mortician's assistant named Sandra Larson. Sandra's not shocked by the news that her mortuary mentor and boss has been shagging the chilly clientele, because it's something she's been building up to her entire emo, rodent corpse-rubbing life. Stopkewich saves the big scene until late in the film, when Sandra finally locks herself into the morgue with a handsome slab of man. The young fellow is an accident victim of some sort, but the visual focus is largely on Sandra, who begins a labored ritual by removing her clothes and circling the body as though he were an occult offering. Completely naked by the time she climbs up on the table, the harsh, fluorescent light gives way to an ethereal, heavenly glow that emanates from Sandra as she straddles what's-his-face and rocks him with tastefully ecstatic abandon. Mildly convincing in theory, "Kissed" can't really survive the cacophony of wrong notes in this scene, which underlines the delicacy of the film's narrative tightrope and the probable impossibility of hitting any right notes when filming such a scenario. It was probably better left to the imagination.
42. Hollow Man (2000)
Thanks to 1995's "Showgirls," Paul Verhoeven was already infamous for sleaze when he delivered "Hollow Man," though this invisible man saga's notorious rape sequence is less seedy than simply cheesy. In it, Kevin Bacon's arrogant scientist, having made himself imperceptible, decides that the best way to fully exploit his newfound powers is to wield them for deviant purposes. The initial object of his impure impulses is a beauty (Rhona Mitra) living in the apartment complex across the street, who after arriving home and taking a shower — one of many instances where Verhoeven's camera droolingly lingers on Mitra's exposed bosoms — hears her doorbell ring. Smart enough to know that you don't open a door before checking to see who's there, Mitra looks out the peephole. Too bad her would-be attacker is invisible! When she does peer into the hallway, Bacon sneaks in so he can immaturely toy with her (ooh, he moved her dressing table mirror!), before pouncing on her for some good ol' fashion sexual assault. Hot? No. Perverse? Perhaps. Lame? Definitely, not only for Verhoeven's swooshing cinematography, but also for the fact that the director doesn't even show the dirty deed — unless, that is, you watch the unrated DVD cut. Which, alas, is no better.
41. Novocaine (2001)
For a whole host of reasons, comedians shouldn't do serious sex scenes — would anyone really want to see Scarlett Johansson whisper "Wanna come up to my room?" into Bill Murray's ear at the end of "Lost in Translation"? When Steve Martin drops trou in "Novocaine," the first inclination is to wonder where the funny man with the arrow through his head went. The second is to wince as Martin, playing a dentist, proceeds to perform a different kind of drilling on a drug-addled patient with a black eye (Helena Bonham Carter), who seduces him to score some painkillers. Perhaps director David Atkins knew some might be put off by Martin enfuego, which is why he juxtaposes the scene with the dentist's fiancé (Laura Dern) doing karate, though the resulting jumble of images add to the ick factor more than the dark comedy Atkins was likely aiming for. On the commentary, the director says that he originally intended to leave the two individual scenes intact, but that intercutting them "added more something or other." Indeed, the scene, which ultimately ends with a dissolve into a nature show about hyenas, is something alright, though certainly not funny or sexy. Curiously enough, Martin and Bonham Carter were romantically linked in real life briefly, but no one would've guessed it from their chemistry they display in this film.
40. The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)
Nicholas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth is self-consciously full of sex, and every scene is worse than the last. Early on, there's the one in which a teenage girl grabs Rip Torn's penis and speaks into it like it's a microphone. Then there's the alien sex scene; apparently creatures from David Bowie's home planet make love by jumping on trampolines in translucent bodysuits while being sprayed with milk. The most cringe-worthy tryst of all takes place toward the end of the film, when Bowie's anemic alien is imprisoned by the government and receives a conjugal visit from his aging human lover, Mary-Lou. Both characters are hopeless alcoholics at this point, so they get loaded, get naked, and start horsing around with a gun. At one point the scene blacks out, lit only by gun rounds, as Mary-Lou squeals "It's cold!" The whole scene is hideously uncomfortable, its grotesquerie amplified by actress Candy Clark's obnoxious squeals and bad aging makeup, and by Bowie's coked-out, emaciated body. You will probably sit through the whole scene in order to see David Bowie's penis. But be warned: afterwards, you will think to yourself: "Seeing David Bowie's penis was not worth that."
39. Fair Game (1995)
Hey, let's turn supermodel Cindy Crawford into a movie star! She sure is purty, and if we can get her to take her shirt off, we'll have a box office sensation on our hands! A sound plan, you'd have to agree, but the execution falls well short in Fair Game, one of those generic '90s thrillers featuring lots of exploding fireballs and guys firing guns while jumping sideways into the water and villains who say "What are you gonna do, shoot me?" right before they get shot. Crawford's sexy divorce lawyer is paired with William "at least I'm not Stephen" Baldwin's greasy cop, and the electricity between them could possibly power a small nightlight. Crawford's mannequin-like performance ensured her movie career would be a brief one, but she does take her top off. Granted, we only get a glimpse of side-boobage through a dirty car window, but there's also her let's-fight-no-let's-fuck scene with Baldwin in a grubby freight train car. Mmm, smelly hobo sex — is there anything hotter?
38. Alexander (2004)
"There are many different ways to love, Roxana," Colin Farrell tells Rosario Dawson before showing her one way that definitely does not qualify. This scene is inane on a level that only big-budget Hollywood can produce. You can almost see the committee of producers backseat-directing it: "Okay, Ms. Dawson, you take off your top, then slap him while he makes noises like an irate housecat." The upshot is gigantic breasts and animal-like humping slapped together with extraordinarily bad editing. Skip to the battle massacres if you don't have the stomach for it.
37. Sliver (1993)
Sliver is as riddled with bad sex as the film’s creation was with difficulties. It was originally saddled with an NC-17 rating, supposedly due to a full-frontal shot of William Baldwin (this ain’t no Forgetting Sarah Marshall). Baldwin’s member may have been cut, but the ludicrous sex raged on. Sharon Stone was riding high from her success with Basic Instinct, but her character Carly Norris landed with a thump in Manhattan’s “sliver” high rise, owned by one Zeke Hawkins (Baldwin). This sex scene might feature the only intro tracking shot that follows a naked Baldwin ass. (Yet.) Zeke and Carly get it on against a giant pillar, conveniently located in his apartment. Like the whole film, this coupling throws itself relentlessly into dangerous sexiness. It’s as if the producers’ one goal is to be more bad-ass than Basic Instinct. Hence we do away with foreplay and believability, and end up with a position that has wrought much discussion amongst the ladies in the office: could one maintain this position for longer than 120 seconds, with no visible handholds, and while wearing those boots? Apparently the Baldwin ass makes it so.
36. The Matrix Reloaded (2003)
Demonstrating passion — or any kind of human emotion, really — has never been Keanu Reeves' strong suit. In this tender love scene between Matrix characters Neo and Trinity, he seems downright anamatronic. Rather than let the audience suffer in brief silence, the Wachowski brothers overcompensate, extending the sex scene by intercutting it with footage of a post-apocalyptic tribal rave. As techno music blasts, the Madame Toussaud-esque lovemaking alternates with shots of sweaty dreadlocks and grinding fishnet-clad torsos. It all ends with a post-orgasmic vision of Trinity plunging to her death, which seems like an appropriate metaphor. To add insult to injury, incredibly hot real-life couple Gina Torres and Laurence Fishburne were somewhere in that grinding crowd. Couldn't the camera have just wandered over to the two of them, and stayed there?
35. Wild Things (1998)
Granted, when Denise Richards and Neve Campbell take their tops off and start making out, you're not likely to find much quibbling from the core audience of "Wild Things." But much like the hangover that one imagines occurring off-screen following the night of the drunken ménage a trois between Richards, Campbell and Matt Dillon, the scene itself leaves a bad aftertaste, which makes it fit right in with the poor taste of director John McNaughton's crude version of an afterschool special crossed with a whodunit. Taken out of context, as it has been on countless celebrity nudity web sites, the threesome becomes the sad and improbable affair of two actresses in their mid-twenties playing high school students succumbing to the charms of their ineffectual high school counselor (Dillon). Dillon sounds more like a football coach as he barks orders to a pouty Richards and a grim Campbell, clutching the backs of their scalps and bringing them towards each other to kiss while slyly sliding his face toward Richards's impressive décolletage. Although the scene could be interpreted as a noble opportunity to bridge the gap between cheerleaders and goth girls in high schools everywhere, it's an opportunity missed since, shortly after the forced same sex smooching, the sandy blonde Richards gets most of Dillon's groping attention while Campbell blithely pours champagne on Richards's breasts. Still, it's nice to know McNaughton has lines he won't cross — he didn't include a shower scene between Dillon and Kevin Bacon. That, apparently, would have been just too gratuitous.
34. Teeth (2007)
As a film about vagina dentata, the mythic condition whereby a woman's nether regions come equipped with razor-sharp fangs, it goes without saying that Mitchell Lichtenstein's "Teeth" would feature at least one instance of coitus that ends very, very badly. And true to expectations, it features a whole host of those incidents, though none quite as corny as its finale, in which abstinent good girl-turned-sexual monster Dawn (Jess Weixler) takes revenge against her misogynistic stepbrother — who pines for his nubile sis — by screwing him to death. Raunchy pseudo-incest that ends with a penis being chomped off by a merciless vagina should be B-movie gold, and one can only imagine the hilarious terror that Roger Corman or Troma's Lloyd Kaufman might have elicited from such a scenario. Director Lichtenstein, on the other hand, so doggedly plays his horror-comedy for predictable, goofy laughs that there's absolutely nothing scary — much less titillating or sexy — about this bloody copulation. Worse still, Dawn's deliberate act of violence isn't even remotely shocking, since this flaccid one-trick pony of an indie has already depicted castration thrice before, when its avenging angel snipped off the members of two would-be boyfriends and the fingers of a probing predatory gynecologist.
33. Savage Grace (2007)
The incestuous stew that is Tom Kalin's "Savage Grace" reaches its high-low point in a well-appointed London home, where Barbara Daly Baekeland finally and fully consummates her relationship with her son Antony on the parlor sofa. Most of the movie follows Barbara's slow quest to replace her disinterested husband's affections with those of her son; for a time they share a lover, even simultaneously at one point. But in London they dispense with the intermediaries in a one of the most uncomfortable sexual sequences in motion picture history. Mommie Dearest plays with the crotch of her son's pants and tosses off what I guess passed for dirty talk amongst the mid-20th century aristocracy ("What fabric are these pants made of? I like the boxers you've chosen.") before climbing on top of her boy and riding him for what feels like an eternity. No amount of prayers to the God of Timely Editing will cut short the squirmy agony, and when Barbara finally finishes, she's upset to learn that poor Tony didn't orgasm, so she beats him off until he does. Kalin seems to be trying very hard — excessively hard — to disturb us. But it's Julianne Moore giving her son a vigorous on-screen hand job. A little goes a long way.
32. Flypaper (1997)
The sole directorial effort of Klaus Hoch, whose credits otherwise consist mainly of work as a gaffer and best boy on TV movies and direct-to-DVD thrillers, "Flypaper" looks at first like another forgettable entry into that genre of "Pulp Fiction"-lite flicks in which the unsavory lives of hard-to-believe characters intersect in whatever ways will best yield humorized violence and would-be risqué sex. And it is, and a sadly nonsensical entry at that, until in its quest to be quirky-shocking the film takes one contortion too far and manages a scene that's truly out-there awful. In one of several storylines, Lucy Liu plays a meth lab worker who's kidnapped by... oh, it doesn't really matter. Suffice to say that she's eventually taken in by a friendly snake farmer (Kirstie Alley ex James Wilder) who woos her into testing out a new anti-venom serum by going at it in an empty pool filled with rattlesnakes. That bite the couple. As they have sex. Liu gets naked, groans and grins like a trooper not yet made famous by "Ally McBeal," but these days it's clear that it's a role she'd rather strike from her resume. As she told papers: "It wasn't a horror movie but it turned out to be one."
31. The Doom Generation (1995)
Three years after critic B. Ruby Rich coined the term New Queer Cinema, movement mainstay Gregg Araki unleashed this pretentiously in-your-face, industrial rock-flavored midnight trash, the middle finger in his Teenage Apocalypse trilogy (as sandwiched between 1993's "Totally Fucked Up" and 1997's "Nowhere"). From its opening shot, as star Rose McGowan dangles a cigarette between her lips and growls an F-bomb into the camera, Araki's film seemingly exists only to shock, but its contrived edginess and cheap sexploitation are even more passé and tame a decade-plus removed. (All it takes to be hailed a daring filmmaker is a bisexual ménage-a-trois, really?) Early on, as McGowan wins her Mr. Skin infamy with a topless bathtub scene in a motel, her mopey teen beau James Duval comes into the bathroom to piss, just staring at her tits. He takes off his pants, his sack dangling in frame as he hops in the tub with her. Meanwhile, twenty-something drifter Johnathon Schaech — still blood-stained from the convenience store clerk he murdered that evening — stands outside the door, leers in and jerks off. Sleazy, yes, but about as erotic as getting your nose busted, which Duval does on the tub a couple beats later. Schaech kicks the door open: "I'm so fucking hungry I could eat my own leg. How 'bout a little foodular action?" Then he licks the cum off his hand with a perverted Cheshire grin. Oh, Gregg Araki, you're soooo subversive.
30. Exit to Eden (1994)
Exit to Eden features a sexual fantasy island camp, Rosie O'Donnell in full-body leather bondage gear, and Dan Akyroyd. So it's no surprise that its sex scenes are more slapstick than stimulating. This one, however, was meant to be the real deal, as Mistress Lisa (Dana Delany) and submissive Elliott (Paul Mercurio) fall in love. Elliott brings his mistress a fresh croissant, a stick of butter, and cinnamon. (“Did you see Last Tango in Paris?” she asks, as he kneels before her. The innocent Aussie says no.) He butters the tip of her croissant — and her pert breast — then sprinkles cinnamon on both, before the lovers enjoy their respective breakfasts. We know Elliott's innocent spice is supposed to break down Lisa's protective, S&M shell, but it defies reason (much like the rest of the plot). We don't quite buy that Mistress Lisa hasn't already experienced any butter-centric lovin', nor does this scene make us want to churn anything. As gorgeous as Delany's breast (and croissants) are, we still lose our appetites.
29. Life Is Sweet (1991)
In what may be director Mike Leigh's finest film, Jane Horrocks plays Nicola, a snarling, self-hating teenager who — in a movie in which everyone else seems to be either working in or trying to break into the food service industry — suffers from bulimia; she keeps a stash of junk food under her bed and binges and purges nightly. Her dysfunctional relationship to food extends to her libido. The only way she can enjoy herself with her long-suffering boyfriend (David Thewlis) is to force him to tie her up and pour chocolate sauce over her breasts, which he licks up dutifully while she continues to snarl at him. Fed up with being used as a sex object by someone making Johnny Rotten faces, Thewlis finally breaks off their relationship, much to his nutritionist's relief.
28. Taking Lives (2004)
This scene wouldn't be so bad if not for the what's-with-the-foot factor. Ethan Hawke breaks some glassware and puts Angelina Jolie on a table. Then she places her foot against the wall for balance, and we're treated two not one, but two asides where the camera swings over to focus on her foot, as if this were an educational video about levers and pulleys and inclined planes.
27. Gigli (2003)
"It's turkey time ... gobble gobble..." purrs Jennifer Lopez to Ben Affleck, in what must be the most unappealing invitation to cunnilingus in the history of cinema. Lopez and Affleck were still "Bennifer" when this notorious clunker was filmed, but their subsequent breakup made the ludicrous movie — about a hitman, the lesbian who falls for him and the mentally disabled boy he takes hostage — a further object of ridicule. The sex scene is the paragon of Gigli's awfulness: it begins with an invitation to turkey time, climaxes with a montage of really boring intercourse (Affleck looks like he's contemplating what to have for dinner after shooting's done), and ends with a post-coital cuddle, during which Ben's character moos like a cow.
26. Nowhere to Run (1993)
Jean-Claude Van Damme's first sex scene comes with all the nuance and subtlety we've come to expect from the star of Blood Sport. Nowhere to Run was supposed to be his first shot at real acting — a slow-moving story, a couple of can't-miss Oscar scenes. Unfortunately, the Muscles from Brussels' plays the sex scene as if he were in a bit of high-class, high-concept pornography. Perhaps we're just misunderstanding this complex auteur.
25. The General's Daughter (1999)
No film has ever tried as hard to have its rape and eat it too as the sleazy military thriller "The General's Daughter," in which John Travolta and Madeleine Stowe play a pair of warrant officers investigating the ugly murder of the pretty Captain Elisabeth Campbell (Leslie Stefanson) who turns out to have had some Major Issues, most of them daddy-related. That bad dad is, as the title suggests, the base commanding general, and it seems that he, for the sake of the sanctity of West Point and his own reputation, forced his daughter to cover up the fact that she was gang raped as a cadet. So sullied, the girl set out "conducting a field investigation in psychological warfare, and the enemy was Daddy," as one character puts it — she banged every officer under her father's command, delving into handcuffs, harnesses and video tape. "The General's Daughter" tsk-tsks at the hypocrisy and closed ranks of the male-dominated military while luxuriating over every kink and curve of its troubled victim, who dies naked, bound and spread-eagled on the ground, and by god if she doesn't stay that way for what feels like a third of the film. It's the flashbacked sexual assault that wins the mix messaging prize, though — taking place during a nighttime exercise, it's filmed in wartime flashes. The attacking trainees, indistinguishable in camo, leap around like monkeys, but the camera's more interested in lingering on Stefanson's bared limbs, toned abs and perky nipples. By the time it's over and the bloodied, traumatized girl is airlifted to the hospital, the ick factor's high enough that I wished I could escape the theater the same way.
24. Anatomy of Hell (2004)
I realize, of course, that titillation was hardly Catherine Breillat's point in making a film that is essentially one long, psyche-bruising sex-o-rama. But the French provocateur really went the extra mile with this one, casting porn star Rocco Siffredi as a gay man repulsed by the female body, and Amira Casar as a suicidal woman determined to get to the bottom (gah) of her own sexuality. Over a series of paid encounters, the woman displays herself to the man, offering herself up as both visual and physical specimen, and varying degree of hotness ensue. Soon enough the couple begin using her vagina as a sort of odds'n'ends drawer, and by the time she's brewing him a glass of tampon tea, only the gravest of perverts among us are still feeling tingly. In the ultimate scene, a garden rake is used to penetrate Casar's character, and Breillat takes the opportunity to tease out some excruciatingly banal symbolism, contorting her heroine into one of the most unfortunate Jesus Christ poses of all time. It's the only sex scene I can think of that's vastly improved with the director's DVD commentary playing over it.
23. Purple Rain (1984)
According to director Albert Magnoli's audio commentary on the "Purple Rain" DVD, the love scene between frills-fond pop superstar Prince and leading lady Apollonia was shot in G, PG and R-rated versions, the last of which was ultimately used for the film. More preferable, however, would have been to ditch the scene altogether, as it radiates all the heat of sticking one's groin in the freezer. Lasting just over one tortuous minute, this get-together is primarily notable for featuring Prince — decked out in the same puffy shirt Jerry Seinfeld would later mock on his sitcom — stroking Apollonia through her panties, grabbing her bustier-encased breasts, and, after erotically rubbing his face in her long hair, giving her open-mouthed kisses with the type of unnatural deliberateness usually reserved for Cinemax soft-core. If Prince seems mechanical carrying out such staged sensuality, Apollonia is downright wooden, "enjoying" her rock star beau's groping with an absolute minimum of expression save for the unintentionally amusing moment in which her tightly closed eyes suddenly open in a look of sleepy surprise. Mercifully, a fade to blue sky (and dreadful morning-after chit-chat) spares the world the further embarrassment of having to watch these two unsexy, overdressed robots actually bump and grind.
22. Never Talk to Strangers (1995)
When Rebecca De Mornay slaps Antonio Banderas' face and he responds, "What else?," it might as well be code for "anything goes" in this tawdry psychosexual thriller that's far more psycho than it is sexual. For starters, the titular stranger, played by Banderas, has a freestanding cage in his apartment, which no one in the film ever questions, nor should they — after all, it's the perfect setting for De Mornay's police psychiatrist to get it on with someone who the plot suggests could be a potential serial killer. Yet in a bold move for female empowerment, a fully clothed De Mornay is the one in control, taking a wet and naked Banderas, who just emerged from the shower, and forcing him up against the outside fence before biting his ass and dry humping him from behind. (Surely, as one of the film's executive producers, De Mornay thought Gloria Steinem would be proud.) The tables turn when Banderas flips De Mornay inside the cage and she realizes the only way she can reach him is with her tongue through the chain links. Although De Mornay's unreasonably long appendage seems capable of just about anything, Banderas insists on entering the cage himself — which in most films would only be a euphemism.
21. Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971)
Little Mario Van Peebles was 13 years old when his father, Melvin Van Peebles, enlisted him to play the younger version of Sweetback (whom Melvin played as an adult) in his blaxploitation salvo. It might have been a cute casting opportunity, had the scene Mario needed to pull off at the beginning of the film not involved him simulating (please God, simulating) totally, traumatically explicit sex with a prostitute. Mario looks even younger than 13, so when he's pulled into a bedroom by a hooker (he's the "towel boy" at a local whorehouse) who looks like she's seen the far side of 30, the sight of the kid's bare, chicken wing shoulder blades and tiny behind is beyond disturbing. The old whore coaxes him into the act, and apparently he gets the hang of it pretty quickly, as she christens him with his nickname: "You've...gotta...sweet...back!" It's one of the most disturbing things I've seen on film; the combination of the grungy production, the nasty sex, the graphic angle, the wee boy-child and the fact that his father was behind the camera calling the shots makes me glad to know that Van Peebles Sr. contracted gonorrhea from his own, unsimulated sex scene.
20. Damage (1992)
God bless Juliette Binoche and Jeremy Irons. We've never seen a movie where either one of them does less than go for broke. Unfortunately, in Damage , "go for broke" seems to mean "share a nice, romantic . . . seizure." Hey, we're all sex enthusiasts here, but this just looks more spastic than fun.
19. Monster's Ball (2001)
Halle Berry won a Best Actress Oscar for her performance as the heartsick Leticia to Billy Bob Thornton’s equally wounded Hank, and you have to wonder if this raw sex scene didn’t give her the golden edge. Fucking Thornton while repeatedly braying “make me feel good” is better than ten Charlize Theron fatsuits-cum-mullets, any day. Whether you find the grief-filled Southern Gothic plot to be ultimately uplifting, or worthy of a boycott, she justifiably received much praise for her bravery in letting go of the pretty, and making this scene pretty ugly. Here, the two characters learn to feel again via fucking — but what’s good for their souls isn’t a joy to watch. Yes, Berry’s gorgeous breasts, ass, and everything in between receive plenty of screen time, but that’s part of the problem. You know at that moment you’re just watching a beautiful movie star fuck a not-beautiful star. Or, if still enthralled in the plot, you can’t escape the fact that it’s sad, desperate sex on a bad couch in a bad place between two broken people. Artistic shots of a caged bird notwithstanding, this is sex that makes you cringe, for multiple reasons.
18. In the Cut (2003)
In the Cut tried so desperately to be dark, sexy and dangerous that the overall effect is like watching Britney Spears attempt to seduce you: cringe-worthy. Meg Ryan (and her freshly enhanced lips) wanted to break free from their good-girl image by playing repressed English professor Frannie, who witnesses a blowjob, becomes embroiled in some mysterious neighborhood murders, and begins a voyage of sexual awakening. Mark Ruffalo and his freshly enhanced mustache play Detective Malloy, the lead investigator who may or may not be the killer. Here Frannie masturbates face-down in bed, while Malloy (and his 'stache) watch intensely, smoking and leaning in out and out of the dark, sexy shadows. It's as bad as the final sex scene, in which Frannie handcuffs a seated Malloy to a radiator, then rides the hell out of him while he urges her to “fuck herself” over and over. After all the hype of Ryan's sex scenes, the hopes for Jane Campion's feminist sex film, and the silicone lips, the end result is we just want to tell everyone responsible for the film to do exactly as Malloy said.
17. The Life of David Gale (2003)
This boneheaded message movie is simply overflowing with moments that are just plain wrong - so much so that it offers two icky sex scenes for the price of one, both of which are repulsive for reasons other than the prospect of Kevin Spacey flesh on display. Sure, that's reason enough, and the first one — in which Spacey's anti-capital punishment professor David Gale gets jiggy with a student on a bathroom sink — does offer an unwelcome view of Spacey's rear flank in full heave. If he's such a smart fella, he probably should have figured out she was only upset about her grade and planning to frame him for rape. But he's not such a smart fella after all, as we learn when Gale is sitting on death row, giving his last interview to "Mike Wallace with PMS" reporter Bitsey Bloom (Kate Winslet, thankfully spared any Spacey coitus). The details of his plan to be executed by the state of Texas in order to prove a point are too ludicrous to recount in full, but suffice it to say the scheme involves intercourse with a dying Laura Linney, who is later found naked on the kitchen floor, bound and gagged with a plastic bag over her head. Next time, Kevin, just send flowers.
16. 9 Songs (2004)
Director Michael Winterbottom's attempt to extend the boundaries of on-screen eroticism chronicles the affair of glaciologist Matt (Kieran O'Brien) and Lisa (Margo Stilley), an American college student visiting London. The movie, which includes unsimulated scenes of intercourse, oral sex and masturbation, basically consists of seventy minutes of the two leads banging away at each other, alternating with concert footage of such bands as Primal Scream, Franz Ferdinand, and the Dandy Warhols, with our heroes in the audience.
Winterbottom wanted to make a love story about two people whose primary connection to each other was sex (and, apparently, their fervent support of live music), and he wound up proving that even real sex can be boring if you have no reason to care about the people engaged in it, especially if the lighting and editing are overly mannered and rock groups keep popping up as a form of noisy coitus interruptus.
Stilley, a model making her acting debut, is much the livelier of the two (although she really needs to eat a sandwich). After awhile--say, around the time she tells her lover that sometimes, when they kiss, she'd like to bite his lip, "and not in a nice way" — she looks as if she were trying to wake up her co-star, and by the end it's begun to seem as if her character is a little nuts, which may or may not have been intentional. As for O'Brien, he narrates the film while remembering the affair after he's gone to work in the Antarctic, which seems like a waste of plane fare; if he wanted to study big blocks of ice, he could just look in the mirror.
15. Japón (2002)
Mexican auteur Carlos Reygadas' audaciously impressive sophomore drama "Battle in Heaven" and his masterful yet undistributed third feature "Silent Light" are cinematic works of poetry that challenge, enlighten and barely get seen by American audiences; the very inclusion of Reygadas' raw, more blatantly sensationalistic debut feature here is important because (a) "Japón" has the 15th most god-awful sex scene we've ever witnessed, and (b) said sex scene's button-pushing tastelessness is so over-the-top that maybe its artistic value could potentially be argued by someone who only sees it for the first time after reading this. (Is that a recommendation or a dismissal? Yes.) Non-professional actor Alejandro Ferretis plays a craggy, arthritic painter who retreats from Mexico City to the remote canyon town Aya with intentions to kill himself. Welcomed to stay in a barn belonging to the elderly widow Ascen (Magdalena Flores, an amateur who sometimes looks to the director for cues while filming), our nameless protagonist masturbates to thoughts of his incredibly old landlady making out with a nubile swimsuit babe. Then he goes as far as to proposition his host, and the acceptance is explicitly played fully nude: "Lie down, madam," he tells the frail and unattractive woman, then "Now turn around please." Telling her how and where to position herself, an effort made more awkward in that it's improvised, Ferretis finally fucks this ancient broad in a filthy little room, every sagging pound undulating accordingly as she looks entirely uncomfortable to be performing. Naturalistic? Courageous? Or empty provocation? Maybe it's all three, and hey, we don't want to watch it!
14. 8 Mile (2002)
Once upon a time, Brittany Murphy was the loopy, likable, less-pretty but plenty funny sidekick in "Clueless." The distance she's traveled since then, most of it downhill in a distinctive spiraling pattern, has never been better epitomized than in the "love" scene in Curtis Hanson's devoutly gritty and deglamorized Eminem biopic "8 Mile." For the sake of unburnished naturalism, Murphy's aspiring model Alex and Eminem's aspiring Eminem Jimmy "Rabbit" Smith furtively hump in a quiet corner of the automotive factory in which Rabbit works, unaccompanied by any sound other than that of their own heavy breathing. For the sake of unburnished (if oversharing) naturalism, we also learn that when it comes to impromptu acts of intimacy, Alex likes to smooth the way with a little spit. But it's not that palm-licking act of DIY lubrication that makes the scene so, well, gross — it's the stultified, slack-jawed expression on Murphy's face, which makes it clear that even during the duration of a quickie her attention has wandered, perhaps to whether or not she'd set her VCR to tape that night's episode of "Gilmore Girls." A supposedly spur-of-the-moment, passionate knee-trembler comes out looking as memorable and enjoyable as two perfunctory minutes spent pumping gas.
13. Ciao! Manhattan (1972)
The most depressing, exploitative scene in a film that's almost unwatchably demoralizing throughout has got to be the final surrender of Edie Sedgwick to the dopey drifter who picks her up on a freeway at the beginning of "Ciao! Manhattan." "Butch" (Wesley Hayes) brings "Susan" (Sedgwick) to her home, an empty swimming pool on her family's California estate, and she's a tragic sight: her upper crust diction has melted into a halting, methy drawl; two hard, painful baseballs are perched on her ribcage where her breasts used to be; and her famous grace has given way (when she can get off the floor at all) to a lolling, herky-jerky sway. Susan muses toplessly about her years in New York while Butch pretends to be interested and waits for the sex scene to arrive. When the two finally do begin making out, just the sight of Hayes's greasy face latched to Sedgwick's miraculously lovely profile is enough to get your gorge up. Worse is her lethargic, near-comatose affect in a series of invasive close-ups; you don't know if she's about to vomit (which would have been my choice) or pass out. The necrophiliac vibe of the scene is uncomfortably close to the story she tells earlier of entering the apartment of a famous photographer in New York for a drink and waking up to a rape in progress. Directly after this unholy consummation, Susan is taken to a psychiatric hospital for shock treatments, but not before she's molested by a doctor played, in a morbidly appropriate choice, by none other than French tickler Roger Vadim.
12. The Specialist (1994)
After spending the first hour of this dreadful thriller cooing "sexy" assassination plans to each other over the phone ("I heard that you...control your explosions." "I never thought blood could be so...sticky."), stars Sharon Stone and Sylvester Stallone finally meet face to face (and, in record time, crotch to crotch). Unfortunately, both stars seem far more excited by their own physiques than each other's, and so their fateful pairing becomes two hardbodies preening for the cameras like some sort of weird human approximation of peacock mating rituals. And the typically exhibitionistic Stone, who doesn't wear a single bra in the entire picture (as if making her own private sequel to "Basic Instinct," where she famously wore no panties), is surprisingly overshadowed by Stallone; their slo-motion clinch in a steamy shower is basically just one rigorous exploration of Stallone's ass after another. Even in the rare moment Sly attempts to express a little interest in his co-star, it backfires thanks to some untimely editing: as the scene begins, Stallone cradles Stone's head in his hands and grumbles "Let me see that beautiful face," whereupon director Luis Llosa cuts to a wide shot of the two in profile, with Stallone blatantly staring at Stone's boobs for a solid three seconds. Don't worry Sly. Yours are still bigger.
11. Munich (2005)
Steven Spielberg's semi-fictionalized aftermath to the 1972 Olympic Games tragedy, in which Palestinian terrorists calling themselves Black September took 11 Israeli athletes hostage before murdering them all, is obviously every bit as earnest as "Schindler's List." Yet there's a literally climactic sex scene between Mossad agent-turned-counterterrorist assassin Avner (Eric Bana) and his wife that's unintentionally hilarious — or at the very least, silly — when it means to be cathartic. Wracked with guilt over the eye-for-an-eye vengeance he hath wrought, Avner stares blankly at the ceiling while lying in bed. His wife strokes his face, but he's lost in thought. Cue traumatic flashback fantasy: a Black September baddie in camo face paint gets out of a helicopter, then we're back to our hero, getting on top of his lover as unsubtle Israeli singing swells on the soundtrack. He's distant as he pumps away, still remembering the massacre, which cuts back just as Avner whips his sweaty, backlit mane back in slow-motion with "Flashdance" bravado. The ridiculous zenith of this extreme parallel editing may have theoretically worked in Tony Kushner and Eric Roth's screenplay, but it's a mood-wrecker in practice: Timed just as the hostages are shot and blown up in his vision, Avner has a big ol' crying, drooling, impassioned orgasm (a bit too reminiscent of when Bana's Dr. Banner transformed into the Hulk), an intended moment of moral complexity made clunkily simplistic and laughable. If something positive can be taken away from this, it's that Spielberg has at least honed his perfect Ron Howard parody.
10. Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
If you've ever been to an orgy, you know it can be a fun yet awkward, ridiculous affair. In fact, the awkward ridiculousness is exactly what makes it fun, which is why this particular orgy is no fun at all. It looks as if it were choreographed by Larry Flynt — all nuance and spontaneity has been carefully extracted and destroyed, each pair or threesome is either thrusting mechanically or rubbing each other in slow, congruous circles. It's enough to drive even Tom Cruise to antidepressants, L. Rob Hubbard be damned.
9. Body of Evidence (1993)
This sex scene has two parts: the dumb part, and the invisible part. The dumb part features Madonna, with the theatrical precision we've come to know her for, tying up and then pouring hot wax on Willem Defoe while making a sexy face. Defoe gamely acts like he's in pain — but not too much pain — as this cliché of an S&M scenario unfolds. Then the camera moves behind a scrim, and we see mostly darkness for a minute and a half, while Madonna breathes like a woman in the throes of mild amusement.
8. Killing Me Softly (2002)
If she'd actually asphyxiated, this scene might have had legs. As it stands, Heather Graham sounds like an asthma attack and looks like a tree the morning after Halloween. It's a true "what the hell were they thinking" gem, the kind only contained within movies in which "a woman faces deadly consequences for abandoning her loving relationship with her boyfriend to pursue exciting sexual scenarios with a mysterious celebrity mountaineer" (via IMDb).
7. Miami Vice (2006)
It starts off so well . . . jetting fast across the open blue Caribbean in a high-powered drug dealer speedboat, blasting that Moby song featuring Patti LaBelle that all the drug dealers like, a quick round of Mojitos at a cool harbor bar in Havana, a little dancing and then...sad, gloomy sex. Why the conjunctivitis-y teardrop, Gong Li? Is it because Colin Farrell is so very, very greezy? Is his icky stubble giving you razor burn? Is it that terrible song on the soundtrack? What happened to Moby? Or maybe it's just that normally you're really hot and this sex scene is about as boring as — well, that sex scene between Jamie Foxx and Naomie Harris a little earlier in the movie, which at least had the benefit of some actor-ly chemistry. But don't worry, Gong Li. You've only got about another hour to go before the end of the movie. Hoo-boy . . . on the other hand, cry me a river.
6. Color of Night (1994)
"Erotic thrillers" are usually neither erotic nor thrilling, and despite being awarded the prestigious Maxim magazine award for the Hottest Sex Scene ever committed to celluloid, Color of Night is a prime example. Here we have Bruce Willis as a psychologist who develops color blindness after the suicide of a client and the murder of a colleague, whose therapy group Willis proceeds to take over. He is distracted from his attempts at solving the crime by Jane March, a hottie half his age who he meets in a fender bender and with whom he is soon flopping around in a swimming pool. (Those of you wanting a glimpse of the full Willis may want to use your freeze-frame function here; George Costanza's "shrinkage" argument may or may not come to mind.) She later cooks him a meal wearing an apron and nothing else; then they take a bath together and Willis runs his remote-control tank over her naked body. (No, that's not a metaphor for something really dirty — I mean an actual remote-control tank.) For good measure, March also makes out with nympho patient Lesley Ann Warren before the big twist in which March is revealed as little Ricky, the sexually confused young man in Willis's group. If any of this gets you excited, please seek immediate help.
5. Myra Breckinridge (1970)
"I shall ball you Rusty. It's very simple," says transsexual Myra Breckinridge (Raquel Welch) as she bends over her unsuspecting student on an operating table. As her pre-op counterpart Myron (film critic Rex Reed) giddily looks on in an empty movie theater — uncannily predicting the conditions under which anyone saw the disastrous "Myra" back in 1970 — Welch straps on a dildo and rapes Rusty whilst wearing a red, white and blue bathing suit. God bless America. There's a lot going on in this unforgettable scene, including cutaways to everything from Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe headshots to Welch dressed in a flowery dress while yelling "Hooray for Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck! Uncle Sam, here I come!" What isn't going on is anything resembling a point, something that probably irked novelist Gore Vidal when he went on record not only disowning this big screen adaptation of one of his best-selling novels, but calling it one of the worst movies ever made to boot. On her commentary track on the "Myra" DVD, Welch concedes that the scene, so funny in Vidal's original book, is a good deal less comical (and a good deal stranger) on the screen. "I guess it's like a big joke on the American culture," she shrugs. "I thought we were going to do this whole thing more figuratively." If only, Ms. Welch, if only.
4. Ma Mère (2004)
What with the sweaty in-public sodomy and whipping of a hooded slave to within an inch of his life, it's hard to single out just one abysmal sex scene in Christophe Honoré's, wannabe shocking "Ma Mére," an adaptation of Georges Bataille's infamous novella in which a whorish widowed mother (Isabelle Huppert) turns her devout son (Louis Garrel) into a deviant headcase by introducing him to the Canary Islands' world of Eurotrash sluts. Still, despite this French erotica's numerous scenes of limp carnality, the pièce-de-repugnance is unquestionably its climax, which features Garrel's screwy boarding school teen — still reeling from the fact that his mom just killed herself with an exacto knife while she gave him a handjob — pulling the pud while staring at her corpse in a morgue as "Happy Together" plays on the soundtrack. Because, you know, he loves that incestuous skank of a maternal role model! Ending in a laughably abrupt cut-to-white, Garrel's self-gratification is intended to be a desperate, orgasmic primal scream of Oedipal love/confusion. In reality, though, it's merely a fitting bit of pretentious psychosexual ludicrousness to cap off a film that strives to be the pinnacle of pretentious psychosexual ludicrousness, an aim that's clear from the moment Louis finds his newly dead dad's porn stash and, as would any mourning son, proceeds to ejaculate and urinate on it (in that order).
3. "Irréversible" (2002)
Is it that Gaspar Noé wants us to see the loathsome side of the human condition, or does he truly just hate us all? The notorious French provocateur's follow-up to 1998's "I Stand Alone" (itself a grueling experience with a memorably confrontational finale: an onscreen countdown warning audiences that they have only 30 seconds to leave the cinema) doesn't dare us to watch, but to walk out. Structured in backwards chronology à la "Memento," with literally dizzying camerawork — and featuring, in its disgustingly violent first half hour, a low, nearly inaudible background frequency that's known to cause nausea and vertigo — "Irréversible" is an audacious battering of the senses, especially near its midpoint. Alex (the beautiful Monica Bellucci) has just stormed out of a party after fighting with her boyfriend Marcus (Vincent Cassel, Bellucci's real-life husband), or so the following reverse-order scene depicts. Accepting a streetwalker's advice to take the scary, red-lit underpass, Alex is assaulted by a man who's lost interest in the tranny hooker he's been beating up. Threatened with a knife and thrown to the ground, Alex is anally raped and then beaten into a coma during the next nine straight minutes, the unflinching camera mostly static as she screams into her attacker's hand. (The scene was repeated for six takes, and it should be noted that the rapist's hard-on was a CGI effect.) Of course, nobody is equivocating rape with consensual sex, but considering the droves of crying women this writer saw exiting the theater, it's safe to include here since Noé is clearly fucking us.
2. Showgirls (1995)
The crown jewel of Paul Verhoeven's salute to Vegas sleaze features Elizabeth Berkley's Nomi and Kyle MacLachlan's Zack locking lips and various other appendages for two and a half minutes of pure anti-eroticism. Set in the tackiest backyard ever (the pool is line with palm trees and... neon palm trees), the scene features Nomi going for a skinny dip, marveling at Zack's mildly disturbing water-puking dolphin statues and then jumping him for a brief but intensely violent lovemaking session. Berkley's in flagrante flailings are so wild, in fact, you'd have to be a seizure fetishist to get off on them. To MacLachlan's credit, he can barely keep the "What the fuck is this crazy chick doing?" look off his face as she repeatedly throttles him in the chest with water. Not to insult Ms. Berkley's sex life, but either she's been doing it wrong, or the rest of the human race is. Verhoeven's underwear ripping, finger sucking, ice pick nuzzling love scenes have always teetered right on the edge of parody; "Showgirls" was the one that went right off the deep end, so to speak.
1. Last Tango in Paris (1972)
Taken totally out of context, no scene in "Last Tango in Paris" has the concentrated terribleness of Elizabeth Berkley's waterlogged whiplashings or Matt Dillon's teenager three-way or Lea Thompson's zoophilic flirtation. Then again, none of those films was ever hailed by an ecstatic Pauline Kael as "the most powerful erotic movie ever made... it may turn out to be the most liberating movie ever made," and credited with having "altered the face of an art form." None of their scenes were described by Roger Ebert as "not sex at all (and a million miles from intercourse)... just a physical function of the soul's desperation."
36 years after "Last Tango in Paris" premiered at the closing night of the 1972 New York Film Festival, the uproar and taboo-smashing and obscenity trials that were once part and parcel of any analysis of the film have long faded, and Bernardo Bertolucci's lugubrious drama about a grieving man and a young bride-to-be anonymously fucking their way through sorrow and ennui looks rather rough in the morning light, embarrassing maybe, self-important certainly, like a one night stand that seems like an ever worse idea as more memories of the evening trickle back through the next day's hangover. And so what better way to crown this listy ode to bad sex on screen than with "Last Tango in Paris"'s legendary sodomy sequence, in which Marlon Brando's Paul method-mutters to Maria Schneider's Jeanne to "get the butter," only to use it to enable some forced anal sex on the floor while his partner cries her way through a litany about families?
The scene wasn't in the original script — last year Schneider told the Daily Mail that it was Brando's idea, and that "I was crying real tears. I felt humiliated and, to be honest, I felt a little raped... Thankfully, there was just one take." That context aside, arguments of misogyny aside, general repellence and dairy product misuse aside, the scene stands out for its tiresome pretentiousness, Paul's dreary railing against the world's hypocrisies like a mush-mouthed expat Holden Caulfield without the excuse of callowness or appeal of emotional believability. I don't begrudge Kael her grand gestures (I do begrudge her the scale of excitement that could once greet an arthouse feature), but I wasn't at that 1972 screening, and I can't believe that today "Last Tango in Paris" isn't esteemed more for its place in cultural history than its lasting artistic value. Certainly whatever it may have done to change the visage of cinema isn't detectable in the average sex scene in theaters right now, and thank the lord for that. The thought of every moment of on-screen intimacy arriving joined at the hip — or wherever else you'd prefer — with freshman college-level Freudism could convince anyone to start cooking with olive oil instead.
source: http://www.ifc.com/film/film-news/2
50. Crank (2006)
Public sex is hot. Amy Smart is hot. Potential death is hot. Jason Statham is . . . well, Jason Statham is Jason Statham. Bottom line though is that this scene from Crank, in which Jason Statham has public sex with Amy Smart to keep from dying (long story) should by all rights be delectably hot. Well, it ain't. In fact, it's disconcertingly rape-esque and at the very least, kind of embarrassing.
49. Il Fantasma dell'Opera (1998)
When I first got this assignment, I was confused: there's a sex scene in that terrible musical? Really? No wonder it's so popular! Intrigued, I watched — well, fast-forwarded through — the 2004 big screen adaptation starring the not-unattractive Emmy Rossum, but quickly realized the gauzy, candlelit over-the-puffy-shirt groping and kissing I witnessed would only be considered "sex" by the film's target audience of geeky pre-teen girls, aging spinsters and deeply closeted Republican senators. Then I read the fine print and realized I was supposed to be watching the deeply awful Il Fantasma dell'Opera, a 1998 remake of Phantom of the Opera by creepy Italian horror-meister Dario Argento, featuring WAY more buck naked doggy-style sex than the Andrew Lloyd Webber version. As for the reason the scene was picked for this list, I'd say it's a toss-up between (a) Julian Sands' Ed Woodian post-coital dialogue (i.e., "I was abandoned at birth in the river of time and space, where I was nurtured and cared for by creatures who have become my friends...") and (b) the fact the naked chick on all fours is, uh . . . the director's daughter, Asia. In retrospect, it turns out my family's embarrassing home movies could have been, oh, so much worse.
48. Titanic (1997)
"Put your hand on me" is not something you want to hear your partner say as you begin copulation. It reeks of the Antioch rules, and sets the tone for an inhibited, permissions-based non-romp in the sack — or in the Model T, in this case. The car is actually kind of a fun venue, but Jack and Rose are so stilted and formal that when her hand slaps the steamed-up window (their lovemaking is so hot it's raising the air temperature!), you can't possibly believe she'd let herself go like that.
47. Jack Frost (1996)
Now here's something you don't see every day: a naked Shannon Elizabeth getting penetrated by a giant holiday lawn ornament. Or, if you do see it every day, you're probably one of the rabid fans of the killer snowman flick Jack Frost, which Wikipedia tells me is a cult favorite (as opposed to the Michael Keaton warmedy Jack Frost, about a dead father reincarnated as a snowman to spend time with his kid, which, as far as I know, is a favorite of no one). But anyway, the scene in question begins when Ms. Elizabeth's character, unaware her horny boyfriend has been icicled to death, slips naked into a hot bath and . . . well, okay, here's where it gets complicated, see, because prior to becoming a killer snowman, Mr. Frost was just a plain old serial killer, but then he fell in some chemicals that transformed him into a kind of D-List X-man with the ability to melt and freeze at will. See where I'm going with this? No? Well, the first sign of trouble is a phallic floating carrot, and then the next thing you know, the bathwater has transformed into the aforementioned horny (and hilariously fake-looking) snowman, only he's not using the carrot as a nose, and . . . yeah. Exactly. Ew!
46. Poison Ivy (1992)
Poison Ivy is like a Lifetime movie that brazenly thought it was good enough for the big screen. Its deliciously trashy plot follows Ivy (a resurgent Drew Barrymore!), who insinuates her way into the life of awkward teen Sylvie (Roseanne's Sara Gilbert). In the process, she kills Sylvie's mom, injures Sylvie in a car accident, and seduces Sylvie's dad (a non-resurgent Tom Skerritt!). Despite a gushing head wound, Sylvie makes her way home from the hospital to discover her father mounting her teen friend from behind, with a gods-must-be-angry thunderstorm as the backdrop. There are so many awful visions to obsess over: Barrymore's yellow dye job, Skerritt's jowls as he leans over her lithe young body, the pseudo-psychological element of having Sylvie's dead mother appear, then flashing back to Barrymore and her red-lipped, early-‘90's pout. Poison Ivy gives us everything forbidden, but in the process proves that there is an art to capturing a true Lolita moment. And Tom Skerritt banging anyone from behind is not it.
45. Howard the Duck (1986)
Who would've thought that long before the "Spider-Man," "X-Men" and "Blade" trilogies were money-making blips in the brains of studio execs, Marvel Comics' first and far worst stab at multiplex excitement would go down in the annals of all-time Hollywood turkeys? (Well, apparently not series creator Steve Gerber, cowriter-director Willard Huyck or executive producer George Lucas.) '80s staple Lea Thompson takes center stage as Beverly Switzler, leader of Cleveland's all-girl, punk-haired bar band Cherry Bomb, whose unlikely friendship with the three-foot Howard — an anthropomorphic, cigar-chomping mallard from another planet (played by various little actors in a puppeteer-mechanized suit, including "In Bruges" co-star Jordan Prentice) — leads to something misguidedly creepier. While Howard rocks out on Beverly's synthesizer in her apartment one night, she exits the bathroom in panties, a silky top and open nightshirt, then ogles his tail and goads him into managing her band. "I've got to get back to my own kind," he rebukes before eyeing her ass as she crawls into bed: "Although, I have developed a greater appreciation for the female version of the human anatomy." He waddles into bed with her, cringe-worthy innuendos ensue ("You think I might find happiness in the animal kingdom, Ducky?"), they lock bedroom eyes, and then? "Okay, let's go for it, Mr. Macho." Howard gets nervous and the icky tension is broken with just a goodnight kiss, but not before she rubs his chest under his pajamas, and bestiality goes mainstream momentarily as the feathers on his head stand... (gulp!) erect.
44. BloodRayne (2005)
It wasn't Uwe Boll's first sex scene — after all, the Teutonic titan of bad movies had already filmed a nudity-free sexual encounter between Tara Reid and Christian Slater for 2005's "Alone in the Dark." However, one might say the director didn't go full tilt until he did so quite literally with Matthew Davis and Kristanna Loken, who in real life had been rumored at the time to be a little more into co-star Michelle Rodriguez. Perhaps not so incidentally then, Loken is the more butch in her scene with Davis, throwing him up against a metal gate and ripping off the shabby tunic he's wearing before grabbing hold of two of the gate's bars and mounting him. As one astute online critic pointed out at GenerationGamerz.com, Davis never opens his eyes as thrusting commences, though his tongue does find its way around one of Loken's nipples. (Oddly enough, Davis spends the rest of the scene mouth agape and gasping for air.) The least erotic aspect of the scene, besides, of course, the lack of any attraction between Davis and Loken, is the sound effect of the clanging gate that Loken clutches. If nothing else, Boll did achieve one thing — there's no reason for an inevitable porn remake of "Bloodrayne," since 18th century Romania never looked so much like 1980s San Fernando Valley.
43. Kissed (1996)
A thesis film if I ever saw one, Lynne Stopkewich's "Kissed" features Molly Parker as a death-obsessed mortician's assistant named Sandra Larson. Sandra's not shocked by the news that her mortuary mentor and boss has been shagging the chilly clientele, because it's something she's been building up to her entire emo, rodent corpse-rubbing life. Stopkewich saves the big scene until late in the film, when Sandra finally locks herself into the morgue with a handsome slab of man. The young fellow is an accident victim of some sort, but the visual focus is largely on Sandra, who begins a labored ritual by removing her clothes and circling the body as though he were an occult offering. Completely naked by the time she climbs up on the table, the harsh, fluorescent light gives way to an ethereal, heavenly glow that emanates from Sandra as she straddles what's-his-face and rocks him with tastefully ecstatic abandon. Mildly convincing in theory, "Kissed" can't really survive the cacophony of wrong notes in this scene, which underlines the delicacy of the film's narrative tightrope and the probable impossibility of hitting any right notes when filming such a scenario. It was probably better left to the imagination.
42. Hollow Man (2000)
Thanks to 1995's "Showgirls," Paul Verhoeven was already infamous for sleaze when he delivered "Hollow Man," though this invisible man saga's notorious rape sequence is less seedy than simply cheesy. In it, Kevin Bacon's arrogant scientist, having made himself imperceptible, decides that the best way to fully exploit his newfound powers is to wield them for deviant purposes. The initial object of his impure impulses is a beauty (Rhona Mitra) living in the apartment complex across the street, who after arriving home and taking a shower — one of many instances where Verhoeven's camera droolingly lingers on Mitra's exposed bosoms — hears her doorbell ring. Smart enough to know that you don't open a door before checking to see who's there, Mitra looks out the peephole. Too bad her would-be attacker is invisible! When she does peer into the hallway, Bacon sneaks in so he can immaturely toy with her (ooh, he moved her dressing table mirror!), before pouncing on her for some good ol' fashion sexual assault. Hot? No. Perverse? Perhaps. Lame? Definitely, not only for Verhoeven's swooshing cinematography, but also for the fact that the director doesn't even show the dirty deed — unless, that is, you watch the unrated DVD cut. Which, alas, is no better.
41. Novocaine (2001)
For a whole host of reasons, comedians shouldn't do serious sex scenes — would anyone really want to see Scarlett Johansson whisper "Wanna come up to my room?" into Bill Murray's ear at the end of "Lost in Translation"? When Steve Martin drops trou in "Novocaine," the first inclination is to wonder where the funny man with the arrow through his head went. The second is to wince as Martin, playing a dentist, proceeds to perform a different kind of drilling on a drug-addled patient with a black eye (Helena Bonham Carter), who seduces him to score some painkillers. Perhaps director David Atkins knew some might be put off by Martin enfuego, which is why he juxtaposes the scene with the dentist's fiancé (Laura Dern) doing karate, though the resulting jumble of images add to the ick factor more than the dark comedy Atkins was likely aiming for. On the commentary, the director says that he originally intended to leave the two individual scenes intact, but that intercutting them "added more something or other." Indeed, the scene, which ultimately ends with a dissolve into a nature show about hyenas, is something alright, though certainly not funny or sexy. Curiously enough, Martin and Bonham Carter were romantically linked in real life briefly, but no one would've guessed it from their chemistry they display in this film.
40. The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)
Nicholas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth is self-consciously full of sex, and every scene is worse than the last. Early on, there's the one in which a teenage girl grabs Rip Torn's penis and speaks into it like it's a microphone. Then there's the alien sex scene; apparently creatures from David Bowie's home planet make love by jumping on trampolines in translucent bodysuits while being sprayed with milk. The most cringe-worthy tryst of all takes place toward the end of the film, when Bowie's anemic alien is imprisoned by the government and receives a conjugal visit from his aging human lover, Mary-Lou. Both characters are hopeless alcoholics at this point, so they get loaded, get naked, and start horsing around with a gun. At one point the scene blacks out, lit only by gun rounds, as Mary-Lou squeals "It's cold!" The whole scene is hideously uncomfortable, its grotesquerie amplified by actress Candy Clark's obnoxious squeals and bad aging makeup, and by Bowie's coked-out, emaciated body. You will probably sit through the whole scene in order to see David Bowie's penis. But be warned: afterwards, you will think to yourself: "Seeing David Bowie's penis was not worth that."
39. Fair Game (1995)
Hey, let's turn supermodel Cindy Crawford into a movie star! She sure is purty, and if we can get her to take her shirt off, we'll have a box office sensation on our hands! A sound plan, you'd have to agree, but the execution falls well short in Fair Game, one of those generic '90s thrillers featuring lots of exploding fireballs and guys firing guns while jumping sideways into the water and villains who say "What are you gonna do, shoot me?" right before they get shot. Crawford's sexy divorce lawyer is paired with William "at least I'm not Stephen" Baldwin's greasy cop, and the electricity between them could possibly power a small nightlight. Crawford's mannequin-like performance ensured her movie career would be a brief one, but she does take her top off. Granted, we only get a glimpse of side-boobage through a dirty car window, but there's also her let's-fight-no-let's-fuck scene with Baldwin in a grubby freight train car. Mmm, smelly hobo sex — is there anything hotter?
38. Alexander (2004)
"There are many different ways to love, Roxana," Colin Farrell tells Rosario Dawson before showing her one way that definitely does not qualify. This scene is inane on a level that only big-budget Hollywood can produce. You can almost see the committee of producers backseat-directing it: "Okay, Ms. Dawson, you take off your top, then slap him while he makes noises like an irate housecat." The upshot is gigantic breasts and animal-like humping slapped together with extraordinarily bad editing. Skip to the battle massacres if you don't have the stomach for it.
37. Sliver (1993)
Sliver is as riddled with bad sex as the film’s creation was with difficulties. It was originally saddled with an NC-17 rating, supposedly due to a full-frontal shot of William Baldwin (this ain’t no Forgetting Sarah Marshall). Baldwin’s member may have been cut, but the ludicrous sex raged on. Sharon Stone was riding high from her success with Basic Instinct, but her character Carly Norris landed with a thump in Manhattan’s “sliver” high rise, owned by one Zeke Hawkins (Baldwin). This sex scene might feature the only intro tracking shot that follows a naked Baldwin ass. (Yet.) Zeke and Carly get it on against a giant pillar, conveniently located in his apartment. Like the whole film, this coupling throws itself relentlessly into dangerous sexiness. It’s as if the producers’ one goal is to be more bad-ass than Basic Instinct. Hence we do away with foreplay and believability, and end up with a position that has wrought much discussion amongst the ladies in the office: could one maintain this position for longer than 120 seconds, with no visible handholds, and while wearing those boots? Apparently the Baldwin ass makes it so.
36. The Matrix Reloaded (2003)
Demonstrating passion — or any kind of human emotion, really — has never been Keanu Reeves' strong suit. In this tender love scene between Matrix characters Neo and Trinity, he seems downright anamatronic. Rather than let the audience suffer in brief silence, the Wachowski brothers overcompensate, extending the sex scene by intercutting it with footage of a post-apocalyptic tribal rave. As techno music blasts, the Madame Toussaud-esque lovemaking alternates with shots of sweaty dreadlocks and grinding fishnet-clad torsos. It all ends with a post-orgasmic vision of Trinity plunging to her death, which seems like an appropriate metaphor. To add insult to injury, incredibly hot real-life couple Gina Torres and Laurence Fishburne were somewhere in that grinding crowd. Couldn't the camera have just wandered over to the two of them, and stayed there?
35. Wild Things (1998)
Granted, when Denise Richards and Neve Campbell take their tops off and start making out, you're not likely to find much quibbling from the core audience of "Wild Things." But much like the hangover that one imagines occurring off-screen following the night of the drunken ménage a trois between Richards, Campbell and Matt Dillon, the scene itself leaves a bad aftertaste, which makes it fit right in with the poor taste of director John McNaughton's crude version of an afterschool special crossed with a whodunit. Taken out of context, as it has been on countless celebrity nudity web sites, the threesome becomes the sad and improbable affair of two actresses in their mid-twenties playing high school students succumbing to the charms of their ineffectual high school counselor (Dillon). Dillon sounds more like a football coach as he barks orders to a pouty Richards and a grim Campbell, clutching the backs of their scalps and bringing them towards each other to kiss while slyly sliding his face toward Richards's impressive décolletage. Although the scene could be interpreted as a noble opportunity to bridge the gap between cheerleaders and goth girls in high schools everywhere, it's an opportunity missed since, shortly after the forced same sex smooching, the sandy blonde Richards gets most of Dillon's groping attention while Campbell blithely pours champagne on Richards's breasts. Still, it's nice to know McNaughton has lines he won't cross — he didn't include a shower scene between Dillon and Kevin Bacon. That, apparently, would have been just too gratuitous.
34. Teeth (2007)
As a film about vagina dentata, the mythic condition whereby a woman's nether regions come equipped with razor-sharp fangs, it goes without saying that Mitchell Lichtenstein's "Teeth" would feature at least one instance of coitus that ends very, very badly. And true to expectations, it features a whole host of those incidents, though none quite as corny as its finale, in which abstinent good girl-turned-sexual monster Dawn (Jess Weixler) takes revenge against her misogynistic stepbrother — who pines for his nubile sis — by screwing him to death. Raunchy pseudo-incest that ends with a penis being chomped off by a merciless vagina should be B-movie gold, and one can only imagine the hilarious terror that Roger Corman or Troma's Lloyd Kaufman might have elicited from such a scenario. Director Lichtenstein, on the other hand, so doggedly plays his horror-comedy for predictable, goofy laughs that there's absolutely nothing scary — much less titillating or sexy — about this bloody copulation. Worse still, Dawn's deliberate act of violence isn't even remotely shocking, since this flaccid one-trick pony of an indie has already depicted castration thrice before, when its avenging angel snipped off the members of two would-be boyfriends and the fingers of a probing predatory gynecologist.
33. Savage Grace (2007)
The incestuous stew that is Tom Kalin's "Savage Grace" reaches its high-low point in a well-appointed London home, where Barbara Daly Baekeland finally and fully consummates her relationship with her son Antony on the parlor sofa. Most of the movie follows Barbara's slow quest to replace her disinterested husband's affections with those of her son; for a time they share a lover, even simultaneously at one point. But in London they dispense with the intermediaries in a one of the most uncomfortable sexual sequences in motion picture history. Mommie Dearest plays with the crotch of her son's pants and tosses off what I guess passed for dirty talk amongst the mid-20th century aristocracy ("What fabric are these pants made of? I like the boxers you've chosen.") before climbing on top of her boy and riding him for what feels like an eternity. No amount of prayers to the God of Timely Editing will cut short the squirmy agony, and when Barbara finally finishes, she's upset to learn that poor Tony didn't orgasm, so she beats him off until he does. Kalin seems to be trying very hard — excessively hard — to disturb us. But it's Julianne Moore giving her son a vigorous on-screen hand job. A little goes a long way.
32. Flypaper (1997)
The sole directorial effort of Klaus Hoch, whose credits otherwise consist mainly of work as a gaffer and best boy on TV movies and direct-to-DVD thrillers, "Flypaper" looks at first like another forgettable entry into that genre of "Pulp Fiction"-lite flicks in which the unsavory lives of hard-to-believe characters intersect in whatever ways will best yield humorized violence and would-be risqué sex. And it is, and a sadly nonsensical entry at that, until in its quest to be quirky-shocking the film takes one contortion too far and manages a scene that's truly out-there awful. In one of several storylines, Lucy Liu plays a meth lab worker who's kidnapped by... oh, it doesn't really matter. Suffice to say that she's eventually taken in by a friendly snake farmer (Kirstie Alley ex James Wilder) who woos her into testing out a new anti-venom serum by going at it in an empty pool filled with rattlesnakes. That bite the couple. As they have sex. Liu gets naked, groans and grins like a trooper not yet made famous by "Ally McBeal," but these days it's clear that it's a role she'd rather strike from her resume. As she told papers: "It wasn't a horror movie but it turned out to be one."
31. The Doom Generation (1995)
Three years after critic B. Ruby Rich coined the term New Queer Cinema, movement mainstay Gregg Araki unleashed this pretentiously in-your-face, industrial rock-flavored midnight trash, the middle finger in his Teenage Apocalypse trilogy (as sandwiched between 1993's "Totally Fucked Up" and 1997's "Nowhere"). From its opening shot, as star Rose McGowan dangles a cigarette between her lips and growls an F-bomb into the camera, Araki's film seemingly exists only to shock, but its contrived edginess and cheap sexploitation are even more passé and tame a decade-plus removed. (All it takes to be hailed a daring filmmaker is a bisexual ménage-a-trois, really?) Early on, as McGowan wins her Mr. Skin infamy with a topless bathtub scene in a motel, her mopey teen beau James Duval comes into the bathroom to piss, just staring at her tits. He takes off his pants, his sack dangling in frame as he hops in the tub with her. Meanwhile, twenty-something drifter Johnathon Schaech — still blood-stained from the convenience store clerk he murdered that evening — stands outside the door, leers in and jerks off. Sleazy, yes, but about as erotic as getting your nose busted, which Duval does on the tub a couple beats later. Schaech kicks the door open: "I'm so fucking hungry I could eat my own leg. How 'bout a little foodular action?" Then he licks the cum off his hand with a perverted Cheshire grin. Oh, Gregg Araki, you're soooo subversive.
30. Exit to Eden (1994)
Exit to Eden features a sexual fantasy island camp, Rosie O'Donnell in full-body leather bondage gear, and Dan Akyroyd. So it's no surprise that its sex scenes are more slapstick than stimulating. This one, however, was meant to be the real deal, as Mistress Lisa (Dana Delany) and submissive Elliott (Paul Mercurio) fall in love. Elliott brings his mistress a fresh croissant, a stick of butter, and cinnamon. (“Did you see Last Tango in Paris?” she asks, as he kneels before her. The innocent Aussie says no.) He butters the tip of her croissant — and her pert breast — then sprinkles cinnamon on both, before the lovers enjoy their respective breakfasts. We know Elliott's innocent spice is supposed to break down Lisa's protective, S&M shell, but it defies reason (much like the rest of the plot). We don't quite buy that Mistress Lisa hasn't already experienced any butter-centric lovin', nor does this scene make us want to churn anything. As gorgeous as Delany's breast (and croissants) are, we still lose our appetites.
29. Life Is Sweet (1991)
In what may be director Mike Leigh's finest film, Jane Horrocks plays Nicola, a snarling, self-hating teenager who — in a movie in which everyone else seems to be either working in or trying to break into the food service industry — suffers from bulimia; she keeps a stash of junk food under her bed and binges and purges nightly. Her dysfunctional relationship to food extends to her libido. The only way she can enjoy herself with her long-suffering boyfriend (David Thewlis) is to force him to tie her up and pour chocolate sauce over her breasts, which he licks up dutifully while she continues to snarl at him. Fed up with being used as a sex object by someone making Johnny Rotten faces, Thewlis finally breaks off their relationship, much to his nutritionist's relief.
28. Taking Lives (2004)
This scene wouldn't be so bad if not for the what's-with-the-foot factor. Ethan Hawke breaks some glassware and puts Angelina Jolie on a table. Then she places her foot against the wall for balance, and we're treated two not one, but two asides where the camera swings over to focus on her foot, as if this were an educational video about levers and pulleys and inclined planes.
27. Gigli (2003)
"It's turkey time ... gobble gobble..." purrs Jennifer Lopez to Ben Affleck, in what must be the most unappealing invitation to cunnilingus in the history of cinema. Lopez and Affleck were still "Bennifer" when this notorious clunker was filmed, but their subsequent breakup made the ludicrous movie — about a hitman, the lesbian who falls for him and the mentally disabled boy he takes hostage — a further object of ridicule. The sex scene is the paragon of Gigli's awfulness: it begins with an invitation to turkey time, climaxes with a montage of really boring intercourse (Affleck looks like he's contemplating what to have for dinner after shooting's done), and ends with a post-coital cuddle, during which Ben's character moos like a cow.
26. Nowhere to Run (1993)
Jean-Claude Van Damme's first sex scene comes with all the nuance and subtlety we've come to expect from the star of Blood Sport. Nowhere to Run was supposed to be his first shot at real acting — a slow-moving story, a couple of can't-miss Oscar scenes. Unfortunately, the Muscles from Brussels' plays the sex scene as if he were in a bit of high-class, high-concept pornography. Perhaps we're just misunderstanding this complex auteur.
25. The General's Daughter (1999)
No film has ever tried as hard to have its rape and eat it too as the sleazy military thriller "The General's Daughter," in which John Travolta and Madeleine Stowe play a pair of warrant officers investigating the ugly murder of the pretty Captain Elisabeth Campbell (Leslie Stefanson) who turns out to have had some Major Issues, most of them daddy-related. That bad dad is, as the title suggests, the base commanding general, and it seems that he, for the sake of the sanctity of West Point and his own reputation, forced his daughter to cover up the fact that she was gang raped as a cadet. So sullied, the girl set out "conducting a field investigation in psychological warfare, and the enemy was Daddy," as one character puts it — she banged every officer under her father's command, delving into handcuffs, harnesses and video tape. "The General's Daughter" tsk-tsks at the hypocrisy and closed ranks of the male-dominated military while luxuriating over every kink and curve of its troubled victim, who dies naked, bound and spread-eagled on the ground, and by god if she doesn't stay that way for what feels like a third of the film. It's the flashbacked sexual assault that wins the mix messaging prize, though — taking place during a nighttime exercise, it's filmed in wartime flashes. The attacking trainees, indistinguishable in camo, leap around like monkeys, but the camera's more interested in lingering on Stefanson's bared limbs, toned abs and perky nipples. By the time it's over and the bloodied, traumatized girl is airlifted to the hospital, the ick factor's high enough that I wished I could escape the theater the same way.
24. Anatomy of Hell (2004)
I realize, of course, that titillation was hardly Catherine Breillat's point in making a film that is essentially one long, psyche-bruising sex-o-rama. But the French provocateur really went the extra mile with this one, casting porn star Rocco Siffredi as a gay man repulsed by the female body, and Amira Casar as a suicidal woman determined to get to the bottom (gah) of her own sexuality. Over a series of paid encounters, the woman displays herself to the man, offering herself up as both visual and physical specimen, and varying degree of hotness ensue. Soon enough the couple begin using her vagina as a sort of odds'n'ends drawer, and by the time she's brewing him a glass of tampon tea, only the gravest of perverts among us are still feeling tingly. In the ultimate scene, a garden rake is used to penetrate Casar's character, and Breillat takes the opportunity to tease out some excruciatingly banal symbolism, contorting her heroine into one of the most unfortunate Jesus Christ poses of all time. It's the only sex scene I can think of that's vastly improved with the director's DVD commentary playing over it.
23. Purple Rain (1984)
According to director Albert Magnoli's audio commentary on the "Purple Rain" DVD, the love scene between frills-fond pop superstar Prince and leading lady Apollonia was shot in G, PG and R-rated versions, the last of which was ultimately used for the film. More preferable, however, would have been to ditch the scene altogether, as it radiates all the heat of sticking one's groin in the freezer. Lasting just over one tortuous minute, this get-together is primarily notable for featuring Prince — decked out in the same puffy shirt Jerry Seinfeld would later mock on his sitcom — stroking Apollonia through her panties, grabbing her bustier-encased breasts, and, after erotically rubbing his face in her long hair, giving her open-mouthed kisses with the type of unnatural deliberateness usually reserved for Cinemax soft-core. If Prince seems mechanical carrying out such staged sensuality, Apollonia is downright wooden, "enjoying" her rock star beau's groping with an absolute minimum of expression save for the unintentionally amusing moment in which her tightly closed eyes suddenly open in a look of sleepy surprise. Mercifully, a fade to blue sky (and dreadful morning-after chit-chat) spares the world the further embarrassment of having to watch these two unsexy, overdressed robots actually bump and grind.
22. Never Talk to Strangers (1995)
When Rebecca De Mornay slaps Antonio Banderas' face and he responds, "What else?," it might as well be code for "anything goes" in this tawdry psychosexual thriller that's far more psycho than it is sexual. For starters, the titular stranger, played by Banderas, has a freestanding cage in his apartment, which no one in the film ever questions, nor should they — after all, it's the perfect setting for De Mornay's police psychiatrist to get it on with someone who the plot suggests could be a potential serial killer. Yet in a bold move for female empowerment, a fully clothed De Mornay is the one in control, taking a wet and naked Banderas, who just emerged from the shower, and forcing him up against the outside fence before biting his ass and dry humping him from behind. (Surely, as one of the film's executive producers, De Mornay thought Gloria Steinem would be proud.) The tables turn when Banderas flips De Mornay inside the cage and she realizes the only way she can reach him is with her tongue through the chain links. Although De Mornay's unreasonably long appendage seems capable of just about anything, Banderas insists on entering the cage himself — which in most films would only be a euphemism.
21. Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971)
Little Mario Van Peebles was 13 years old when his father, Melvin Van Peebles, enlisted him to play the younger version of Sweetback (whom Melvin played as an adult) in his blaxploitation salvo. It might have been a cute casting opportunity, had the scene Mario needed to pull off at the beginning of the film not involved him simulating (please God, simulating) totally, traumatically explicit sex with a prostitute. Mario looks even younger than 13, so when he's pulled into a bedroom by a hooker (he's the "towel boy" at a local whorehouse) who looks like she's seen the far side of 30, the sight of the kid's bare, chicken wing shoulder blades and tiny behind is beyond disturbing. The old whore coaxes him into the act, and apparently he gets the hang of it pretty quickly, as she christens him with his nickname: "You've...gotta...sweet...back!" It's one of the most disturbing things I've seen on film; the combination of the grungy production, the nasty sex, the graphic angle, the wee boy-child and the fact that his father was behind the camera calling the shots makes me glad to know that Van Peebles Sr. contracted gonorrhea from his own, unsimulated sex scene.
20. Damage (1992)
God bless Juliette Binoche and Jeremy Irons. We've never seen a movie where either one of them does less than go for broke. Unfortunately, in Damage , "go for broke" seems to mean "share a nice, romantic . . . seizure." Hey, we're all sex enthusiasts here, but this just looks more spastic than fun.
19. Monster's Ball (2001)
Halle Berry won a Best Actress Oscar for her performance as the heartsick Leticia to Billy Bob Thornton’s equally wounded Hank, and you have to wonder if this raw sex scene didn’t give her the golden edge. Fucking Thornton while repeatedly braying “make me feel good” is better than ten Charlize Theron fatsuits-cum-mullets, any day. Whether you find the grief-filled Southern Gothic plot to be ultimately uplifting, or worthy of a boycott, she justifiably received much praise for her bravery in letting go of the pretty, and making this scene pretty ugly. Here, the two characters learn to feel again via fucking — but what’s good for their souls isn’t a joy to watch. Yes, Berry’s gorgeous breasts, ass, and everything in between receive plenty of screen time, but that’s part of the problem. You know at that moment you’re just watching a beautiful movie star fuck a not-beautiful star. Or, if still enthralled in the plot, you can’t escape the fact that it’s sad, desperate sex on a bad couch in a bad place between two broken people. Artistic shots of a caged bird notwithstanding, this is sex that makes you cringe, for multiple reasons.
18. In the Cut (2003)
In the Cut tried so desperately to be dark, sexy and dangerous that the overall effect is like watching Britney Spears attempt to seduce you: cringe-worthy. Meg Ryan (and her freshly enhanced lips) wanted to break free from their good-girl image by playing repressed English professor Frannie, who witnesses a blowjob, becomes embroiled in some mysterious neighborhood murders, and begins a voyage of sexual awakening. Mark Ruffalo and his freshly enhanced mustache play Detective Malloy, the lead investigator who may or may not be the killer. Here Frannie masturbates face-down in bed, while Malloy (and his 'stache) watch intensely, smoking and leaning in out and out of the dark, sexy shadows. It's as bad as the final sex scene, in which Frannie handcuffs a seated Malloy to a radiator, then rides the hell out of him while he urges her to “fuck herself” over and over. After all the hype of Ryan's sex scenes, the hopes for Jane Campion's feminist sex film, and the silicone lips, the end result is we just want to tell everyone responsible for the film to do exactly as Malloy said.
17. The Life of David Gale (2003)
This boneheaded message movie is simply overflowing with moments that are just plain wrong - so much so that it offers two icky sex scenes for the price of one, both of which are repulsive for reasons other than the prospect of Kevin Spacey flesh on display. Sure, that's reason enough, and the first one — in which Spacey's anti-capital punishment professor David Gale gets jiggy with a student on a bathroom sink — does offer an unwelcome view of Spacey's rear flank in full heave. If he's such a smart fella, he probably should have figured out she was only upset about her grade and planning to frame him for rape. But he's not such a smart fella after all, as we learn when Gale is sitting on death row, giving his last interview to "Mike Wallace with PMS" reporter Bitsey Bloom (Kate Winslet, thankfully spared any Spacey coitus). The details of his plan to be executed by the state of Texas in order to prove a point are too ludicrous to recount in full, but suffice it to say the scheme involves intercourse with a dying Laura Linney, who is later found naked on the kitchen floor, bound and gagged with a plastic bag over her head. Next time, Kevin, just send flowers.
16. 9 Songs (2004)
Director Michael Winterbottom's attempt to extend the boundaries of on-screen eroticism chronicles the affair of glaciologist Matt (Kieran O'Brien) and Lisa (Margo Stilley), an American college student visiting London. The movie, which includes unsimulated scenes of intercourse, oral sex and masturbation, basically consists of seventy minutes of the two leads banging away at each other, alternating with concert footage of such bands as Primal Scream, Franz Ferdinand, and the Dandy Warhols, with our heroes in the audience.
Winterbottom wanted to make a love story about two people whose primary connection to each other was sex (and, apparently, their fervent support of live music), and he wound up proving that even real sex can be boring if you have no reason to care about the people engaged in it, especially if the lighting and editing are overly mannered and rock groups keep popping up as a form of noisy coitus interruptus.
Stilley, a model making her acting debut, is much the livelier of the two (although she really needs to eat a sandwich). After awhile--say, around the time she tells her lover that sometimes, when they kiss, she'd like to bite his lip, "and not in a nice way" — she looks as if she were trying to wake up her co-star, and by the end it's begun to seem as if her character is a little nuts, which may or may not have been intentional. As for O'Brien, he narrates the film while remembering the affair after he's gone to work in the Antarctic, which seems like a waste of plane fare; if he wanted to study big blocks of ice, he could just look in the mirror.
15. Japón (2002)
Mexican auteur Carlos Reygadas' audaciously impressive sophomore drama "Battle in Heaven" and his masterful yet undistributed third feature "Silent Light" are cinematic works of poetry that challenge, enlighten and barely get seen by American audiences; the very inclusion of Reygadas' raw, more blatantly sensationalistic debut feature here is important because (a) "Japón" has the 15th most god-awful sex scene we've ever witnessed, and (b) said sex scene's button-pushing tastelessness is so over-the-top that maybe its artistic value could potentially be argued by someone who only sees it for the first time after reading this. (Is that a recommendation or a dismissal? Yes.) Non-professional actor Alejandro Ferretis plays a craggy, arthritic painter who retreats from Mexico City to the remote canyon town Aya with intentions to kill himself. Welcomed to stay in a barn belonging to the elderly widow Ascen (Magdalena Flores, an amateur who sometimes looks to the director for cues while filming), our nameless protagonist masturbates to thoughts of his incredibly old landlady making out with a nubile swimsuit babe. Then he goes as far as to proposition his host, and the acceptance is explicitly played fully nude: "Lie down, madam," he tells the frail and unattractive woman, then "Now turn around please." Telling her how and where to position herself, an effort made more awkward in that it's improvised, Ferretis finally fucks this ancient broad in a filthy little room, every sagging pound undulating accordingly as she looks entirely uncomfortable to be performing. Naturalistic? Courageous? Or empty provocation? Maybe it's all three, and hey, we don't want to watch it!
14. 8 Mile (2002)
Once upon a time, Brittany Murphy was the loopy, likable, less-pretty but plenty funny sidekick in "Clueless." The distance she's traveled since then, most of it downhill in a distinctive spiraling pattern, has never been better epitomized than in the "love" scene in Curtis Hanson's devoutly gritty and deglamorized Eminem biopic "8 Mile." For the sake of unburnished naturalism, Murphy's aspiring model Alex and Eminem's aspiring Eminem Jimmy "Rabbit" Smith furtively hump in a quiet corner of the automotive factory in which Rabbit works, unaccompanied by any sound other than that of their own heavy breathing. For the sake of unburnished (if oversharing) naturalism, we also learn that when it comes to impromptu acts of intimacy, Alex likes to smooth the way with a little spit. But it's not that palm-licking act of DIY lubrication that makes the scene so, well, gross — it's the stultified, slack-jawed expression on Murphy's face, which makes it clear that even during the duration of a quickie her attention has wandered, perhaps to whether or not she'd set her VCR to tape that night's episode of "Gilmore Girls." A supposedly spur-of-the-moment, passionate knee-trembler comes out looking as memorable and enjoyable as two perfunctory minutes spent pumping gas.
13. Ciao! Manhattan (1972)
The most depressing, exploitative scene in a film that's almost unwatchably demoralizing throughout has got to be the final surrender of Edie Sedgwick to the dopey drifter who picks her up on a freeway at the beginning of "Ciao! Manhattan." "Butch" (Wesley Hayes) brings "Susan" (Sedgwick) to her home, an empty swimming pool on her family's California estate, and she's a tragic sight: her upper crust diction has melted into a halting, methy drawl; two hard, painful baseballs are perched on her ribcage where her breasts used to be; and her famous grace has given way (when she can get off the floor at all) to a lolling, herky-jerky sway. Susan muses toplessly about her years in New York while Butch pretends to be interested and waits for the sex scene to arrive. When the two finally do begin making out, just the sight of Hayes's greasy face latched to Sedgwick's miraculously lovely profile is enough to get your gorge up. Worse is her lethargic, near-comatose affect in a series of invasive close-ups; you don't know if she's about to vomit (which would have been my choice) or pass out. The necrophiliac vibe of the scene is uncomfortably close to the story she tells earlier of entering the apartment of a famous photographer in New York for a drink and waking up to a rape in progress. Directly after this unholy consummation, Susan is taken to a psychiatric hospital for shock treatments, but not before she's molested by a doctor played, in a morbidly appropriate choice, by none other than French tickler Roger Vadim.
12. The Specialist (1994)
After spending the first hour of this dreadful thriller cooing "sexy" assassination plans to each other over the phone ("I heard that you...control your explosions." "I never thought blood could be so...sticky."), stars Sharon Stone and Sylvester Stallone finally meet face to face (and, in record time, crotch to crotch). Unfortunately, both stars seem far more excited by their own physiques than each other's, and so their fateful pairing becomes two hardbodies preening for the cameras like some sort of weird human approximation of peacock mating rituals. And the typically exhibitionistic Stone, who doesn't wear a single bra in the entire picture (as if making her own private sequel to "Basic Instinct," where she famously wore no panties), is surprisingly overshadowed by Stallone; their slo-motion clinch in a steamy shower is basically just one rigorous exploration of Stallone's ass after another. Even in the rare moment Sly attempts to express a little interest in his co-star, it backfires thanks to some untimely editing: as the scene begins, Stallone cradles Stone's head in his hands and grumbles "Let me see that beautiful face," whereupon director Luis Llosa cuts to a wide shot of the two in profile, with Stallone blatantly staring at Stone's boobs for a solid three seconds. Don't worry Sly. Yours are still bigger.
11. Munich (2005)
Steven Spielberg's semi-fictionalized aftermath to the 1972 Olympic Games tragedy, in which Palestinian terrorists calling themselves Black September took 11 Israeli athletes hostage before murdering them all, is obviously every bit as earnest as "Schindler's List." Yet there's a literally climactic sex scene between Mossad agent-turned-counterterrorist assassin Avner (Eric Bana) and his wife that's unintentionally hilarious — or at the very least, silly — when it means to be cathartic. Wracked with guilt over the eye-for-an-eye vengeance he hath wrought, Avner stares blankly at the ceiling while lying in bed. His wife strokes his face, but he's lost in thought. Cue traumatic flashback fantasy: a Black September baddie in camo face paint gets out of a helicopter, then we're back to our hero, getting on top of his lover as unsubtle Israeli singing swells on the soundtrack. He's distant as he pumps away, still remembering the massacre, which cuts back just as Avner whips his sweaty, backlit mane back in slow-motion with "Flashdance" bravado. The ridiculous zenith of this extreme parallel editing may have theoretically worked in Tony Kushner and Eric Roth's screenplay, but it's a mood-wrecker in practice: Timed just as the hostages are shot and blown up in his vision, Avner has a big ol' crying, drooling, impassioned orgasm (a bit too reminiscent of when Bana's Dr. Banner transformed into the Hulk), an intended moment of moral complexity made clunkily simplistic and laughable. If something positive can be taken away from this, it's that Spielberg has at least honed his perfect Ron Howard parody.
10. Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
If you've ever been to an orgy, you know it can be a fun yet awkward, ridiculous affair. In fact, the awkward ridiculousness is exactly what makes it fun, which is why this particular orgy is no fun at all. It looks as if it were choreographed by Larry Flynt — all nuance and spontaneity has been carefully extracted and destroyed, each pair or threesome is either thrusting mechanically or rubbing each other in slow, congruous circles. It's enough to drive even Tom Cruise to antidepressants, L. Rob Hubbard be damned.
9. Body of Evidence (1993)
This sex scene has two parts: the dumb part, and the invisible part. The dumb part features Madonna, with the theatrical precision we've come to know her for, tying up and then pouring hot wax on Willem Defoe while making a sexy face. Defoe gamely acts like he's in pain — but not too much pain — as this cliché of an S&M scenario unfolds. Then the camera moves behind a scrim, and we see mostly darkness for a minute and a half, while Madonna breathes like a woman in the throes of mild amusement.
8. Killing Me Softly (2002)
If she'd actually asphyxiated, this scene might have had legs. As it stands, Heather Graham sounds like an asthma attack and looks like a tree the morning after Halloween. It's a true "what the hell were they thinking" gem, the kind only contained within movies in which "a woman faces deadly consequences for abandoning her loving relationship with her boyfriend to pursue exciting sexual scenarios with a mysterious celebrity mountaineer" (via IMDb).
7. Miami Vice (2006)
It starts off so well . . . jetting fast across the open blue Caribbean in a high-powered drug dealer speedboat, blasting that Moby song featuring Patti LaBelle that all the drug dealers like, a quick round of Mojitos at a cool harbor bar in Havana, a little dancing and then...sad, gloomy sex. Why the conjunctivitis-y teardrop, Gong Li? Is it because Colin Farrell is so very, very greezy? Is his icky stubble giving you razor burn? Is it that terrible song on the soundtrack? What happened to Moby? Or maybe it's just that normally you're really hot and this sex scene is about as boring as — well, that sex scene between Jamie Foxx and Naomie Harris a little earlier in the movie, which at least had the benefit of some actor-ly chemistry. But don't worry, Gong Li. You've only got about another hour to go before the end of the movie. Hoo-boy . . . on the other hand, cry me a river.
6. Color of Night (1994)
"Erotic thrillers" are usually neither erotic nor thrilling, and despite being awarded the prestigious Maxim magazine award for the Hottest Sex Scene ever committed to celluloid, Color of Night is a prime example. Here we have Bruce Willis as a psychologist who develops color blindness after the suicide of a client and the murder of a colleague, whose therapy group Willis proceeds to take over. He is distracted from his attempts at solving the crime by Jane March, a hottie half his age who he meets in a fender bender and with whom he is soon flopping around in a swimming pool. (Those of you wanting a glimpse of the full Willis may want to use your freeze-frame function here; George Costanza's "shrinkage" argument may or may not come to mind.) She later cooks him a meal wearing an apron and nothing else; then they take a bath together and Willis runs his remote-control tank over her naked body. (No, that's not a metaphor for something really dirty — I mean an actual remote-control tank.) For good measure, March also makes out with nympho patient Lesley Ann Warren before the big twist in which March is revealed as little Ricky, the sexually confused young man in Willis's group. If any of this gets you excited, please seek immediate help.
5. Myra Breckinridge (1970)
"I shall ball you Rusty. It's very simple," says transsexual Myra Breckinridge (Raquel Welch) as she bends over her unsuspecting student on an operating table. As her pre-op counterpart Myron (film critic Rex Reed) giddily looks on in an empty movie theater — uncannily predicting the conditions under which anyone saw the disastrous "Myra" back in 1970 — Welch straps on a dildo and rapes Rusty whilst wearing a red, white and blue bathing suit. God bless America. There's a lot going on in this unforgettable scene, including cutaways to everything from Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe headshots to Welch dressed in a flowery dress while yelling "Hooray for Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck! Uncle Sam, here I come!" What isn't going on is anything resembling a point, something that probably irked novelist Gore Vidal when he went on record not only disowning this big screen adaptation of one of his best-selling novels, but calling it one of the worst movies ever made to boot. On her commentary track on the "Myra" DVD, Welch concedes that the scene, so funny in Vidal's original book, is a good deal less comical (and a good deal stranger) on the screen. "I guess it's like a big joke on the American culture," she shrugs. "I thought we were going to do this whole thing more figuratively." If only, Ms. Welch, if only.
4. Ma Mère (2004)
What with the sweaty in-public sodomy and whipping of a hooded slave to within an inch of his life, it's hard to single out just one abysmal sex scene in Christophe Honoré's, wannabe shocking "Ma Mére," an adaptation of Georges Bataille's infamous novella in which a whorish widowed mother (Isabelle Huppert) turns her devout son (Louis Garrel) into a deviant headcase by introducing him to the Canary Islands' world of Eurotrash sluts. Still, despite this French erotica's numerous scenes of limp carnality, the pièce-de-repugnance is unquestionably its climax, which features Garrel's screwy boarding school teen — still reeling from the fact that his mom just killed herself with an exacto knife while she gave him a handjob — pulling the pud while staring at her corpse in a morgue as "Happy Together" plays on the soundtrack. Because, you know, he loves that incestuous skank of a maternal role model! Ending in a laughably abrupt cut-to-white, Garrel's self-gratification is intended to be a desperate, orgasmic primal scream of Oedipal love/confusion. In reality, though, it's merely a fitting bit of pretentious psychosexual ludicrousness to cap off a film that strives to be the pinnacle of pretentious psychosexual ludicrousness, an aim that's clear from the moment Louis finds his newly dead dad's porn stash and, as would any mourning son, proceeds to ejaculate and urinate on it (in that order).
3. "Irréversible" (2002)
Is it that Gaspar Noé wants us to see the loathsome side of the human condition, or does he truly just hate us all? The notorious French provocateur's follow-up to 1998's "I Stand Alone" (itself a grueling experience with a memorably confrontational finale: an onscreen countdown warning audiences that they have only 30 seconds to leave the cinema) doesn't dare us to watch, but to walk out. Structured in backwards chronology à la "Memento," with literally dizzying camerawork — and featuring, in its disgustingly violent first half hour, a low, nearly inaudible background frequency that's known to cause nausea and vertigo — "Irréversible" is an audacious battering of the senses, especially near its midpoint. Alex (the beautiful Monica Bellucci) has just stormed out of a party after fighting with her boyfriend Marcus (Vincent Cassel, Bellucci's real-life husband), or so the following reverse-order scene depicts. Accepting a streetwalker's advice to take the scary, red-lit underpass, Alex is assaulted by a man who's lost interest in the tranny hooker he's been beating up. Threatened with a knife and thrown to the ground, Alex is anally raped and then beaten into a coma during the next nine straight minutes, the unflinching camera mostly static as she screams into her attacker's hand. (The scene was repeated for six takes, and it should be noted that the rapist's hard-on was a CGI effect.) Of course, nobody is equivocating rape with consensual sex, but considering the droves of crying women this writer saw exiting the theater, it's safe to include here since Noé is clearly fucking us.
2. Showgirls (1995)
The crown jewel of Paul Verhoeven's salute to Vegas sleaze features Elizabeth Berkley's Nomi and Kyle MacLachlan's Zack locking lips and various other appendages for two and a half minutes of pure anti-eroticism. Set in the tackiest backyard ever (the pool is line with palm trees and... neon palm trees), the scene features Nomi going for a skinny dip, marveling at Zack's mildly disturbing water-puking dolphin statues and then jumping him for a brief but intensely violent lovemaking session. Berkley's in flagrante flailings are so wild, in fact, you'd have to be a seizure fetishist to get off on them. To MacLachlan's credit, he can barely keep the "What the fuck is this crazy chick doing?" look off his face as she repeatedly throttles him in the chest with water. Not to insult Ms. Berkley's sex life, but either she's been doing it wrong, or the rest of the human race is. Verhoeven's underwear ripping, finger sucking, ice pick nuzzling love scenes have always teetered right on the edge of parody; "Showgirls" was the one that went right off the deep end, so to speak.
1. Last Tango in Paris (1972)
Taken totally out of context, no scene in "Last Tango in Paris" has the concentrated terribleness of Elizabeth Berkley's waterlogged whiplashings or Matt Dillon's teenager three-way or Lea Thompson's zoophilic flirtation. Then again, none of those films was ever hailed by an ecstatic Pauline Kael as "the most powerful erotic movie ever made... it may turn out to be the most liberating movie ever made," and credited with having "altered the face of an art form." None of their scenes were described by Roger Ebert as "not sex at all (and a million miles from intercourse)... just a physical function of the soul's desperation."
36 years after "Last Tango in Paris" premiered at the closing night of the 1972 New York Film Festival, the uproar and taboo-smashing and obscenity trials that were once part and parcel of any analysis of the film have long faded, and Bernardo Bertolucci's lugubrious drama about a grieving man and a young bride-to-be anonymously fucking their way through sorrow and ennui looks rather rough in the morning light, embarrassing maybe, self-important certainly, like a one night stand that seems like an ever worse idea as more memories of the evening trickle back through the next day's hangover. And so what better way to crown this listy ode to bad sex on screen than with "Last Tango in Paris"'s legendary sodomy sequence, in which Marlon Brando's Paul method-mutters to Maria Schneider's Jeanne to "get the butter," only to use it to enable some forced anal sex on the floor while his partner cries her way through a litany about families?
The scene wasn't in the original script — last year Schneider told the Daily Mail that it was Brando's idea, and that "I was crying real tears. I felt humiliated and, to be honest, I felt a little raped... Thankfully, there was just one take." That context aside, arguments of misogyny aside, general repellence and dairy product misuse aside, the scene stands out for its tiresome pretentiousness, Paul's dreary railing against the world's hypocrisies like a mush-mouthed expat Holden Caulfield without the excuse of callowness or appeal of emotional believability. I don't begrudge Kael her grand gestures (I do begrudge her the scale of excitement that could once greet an arthouse feature), but I wasn't at that 1972 screening, and I can't believe that today "Last Tango in Paris" isn't esteemed more for its place in cultural history than its lasting artistic value. Certainly whatever it may have done to change the visage of cinema isn't detectable in the average sex scene in theaters right now, and thank the lord for that. The thought of every moment of on-screen intimacy arriving joined at the hip — or wherever else you'd prefer — with freshman college-level Freudism could convince anyone to start cooking with olive oil instead.
source: http://www.ifc.com/film/film-news/2
