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Top Ten Best Movie Sex Scenes
Yes, parents, “explicit” films can damage your teenage children, although not in the way the right-wing demagogues would have you think. At this very moment, your virgin offspring are down in the basement, watching Jude Law and Nicole Kidman undulate naked over each other like the stars of Fosse, thinking if they can’t do that in the sack, no one is ever going to love them, and hell, if they can’t look like that, no one is even going to lie about it in order to get some action. (And by the way, that abstinence only sex ed program they’re forced to take at school? That ain’t helpin’, neither.) Therefore, I consider it my duty as a film pundit and citizen to command you to march down those stairs, turn off the TV, and explain to your kids that real sex does not look like that, and show them one, two, three, or all of the following real(er) selections instead. And if you can, move to a school district where they at least do the condom-on-a-banana thing, for god’s sake.
1. Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Amy Heckerling, 1982): Stacy (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and Damone (Robert Romanus) get it on for a good ten seconds or so in the poolhouse while her parents are away for the weekend. (Weren’t they always, back in the day?) A grimly funny, and accurate, depiction of the split-second orgasmic seizure that seems to befit the teenage male’s first time, and while the subsequent trip to the abortion clinic is played for obvious shock value and then forgotten about, give director Heckerling and screenwriter Cameron Crowe credit for having gone there lo these twenty-five years hence.
2. The Ice Storm (Ang Lee, 1997): More awkward sex, this time courtesy of full-blown adults Joan Allen and Jamey Sheridan, who end up coupling in the car for another decidedly un-erotic ten seconds or so after a disastrous swinging ‘70s era key party. The standard autoerotic (heh) trappings of activating the horn and the windshield wipers are there, but in the masterful hands of Ang Lee, they escape the pitfall of cheap laughs and serve to heighten the scene’s bleak discomfort.
3. Skin Deep (Blake Edwards, 1989): What’s not to love about this notorious extended montage of adultery, alcoholism, and glow-in-the-dark condoms, especially since it features the late John Ritter in a phallic swordfight? If nothing else, you can use this as an opportunity to hammer home to your kids the importance of keeping it covered, not to mention the advantages of monogamy.
4. The Tall Guy (Mel Allen, 1990): Gymnastic sex, yes, but so exaggeratedly hysterical that it doesn’t matter a damn. Lovable goofball Jeff Goldblum and the perennially lovely Emma Thompson spend an enviable afternoon rolling around naked over stale Weetabix cubes and non-hypoallergenic eiderdown comforters with the strains of “The Barber of Seville” piping joyfully in the background. Goldblum’s punch line a scene later, upon encountering a hooker—“Fancy a fuck, big boy?” “No thanks, I just had one” is the perfect, yes, climax.
5. 10 (Blake Edwards, 1979): Beautiful people are not, prima facie, innately great in bed, as evidenced by Bo Derek and Dudley Moore’s clumsy, yet adorable coupling to Ravel’s Bolero in yet another twisted rom-com from Edwards. Now if someone would see fit to stage a handsome man/plain Jane combination of a similar ilk, I’d be a happy woman indeed, but nobody cares what I want. Meh.
6. Damage (Louis Malle, 1993): Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche engaged in a torrid, desperate affair out of neither love, nor desire, but some strange external compulsion that leads to a raw, unglamorous scene featuring Irons’ thrusting and Rupert Graves’ devastatingly blank _expression as he sees his father screwing his fiancé. Because it’s a Louis Malle film, one can always rent it on the pretext of the filmmaking, which is excellent with or without the sinewy Mr. Irons’ naked loins.
7. Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977): Lots of laugh-out-loud neurotic lovemaking sessions here, but my personal favorite is the one between Allen and his second wife (Janet Margolin), wherein the two lovebirds are grappling and groping their way to a seismic orgasm, until a passing ambulance sends Margolin running for the aspirin, and not to mix with Coke, if you get my drift. Yes, it’s a dated stereotype, but in Allen’s hands, the sexually uptight Jewish intellectual motif still gets a big laugh.
8. Bananas (Woody Allen, 1971): Allen and real-life second wife Louise Lasser consummate their marriage as Howard Cosell gives a play-by-play. That’s pretty much all you need to know about that, and it’s just as absurd, slapsticky, and hilarious as you’d expect from Allen’s broader early works.
9. Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex (Woody Allen, 1972): Where to start with this one? Gene Wilder has an extramarital affair with a sheep; Allen and Louise Lasser as an Italian couple who can achieve orgasm only in public (with the impeccable line “Gino, be careful of my hymen”); Allen chases a gigantic tit with an oversize butterfly net. The best scene, though, is its final one, depicting just what goes on inside both male brains during dinner, foreplay, and fucking. Allen is piss-your-pants hilarious as a jittery sperm chanting the lesson of sperm training school—“Fertilize an egg or die trying”—and Burt Reynolds, in a true feat of Method acting, as the head of Command Central. (Ouch. Sorry—couldn’t resist. I’m sure he’s very smart.)
10. An American Werewolf in London (John Landis, 1981): Okay, I lied—this scene features two beautiful people having impossibly gymnastic sex. But hey, sometimes that’s not such a bad thing, especially if the beautiful people in question are Jenny Agutter and David Naughton (swoon!), the song on the soundtrack is Van Morrison’s “Moondance,” and there’s a brief but unmistakable shot of Naughton about to go down on Agutter, which, in my not-at-all-humble opinion, is the kind of information young men would do well to absorb.
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