Two super controversial films released on the same day nearly a decade ago, a big budget misfire, and two mostly forgotten dramas all share an early December release date and plenty of skin! Here's the skinny on five titles released on December 2 in Movie Nudity History!
2011: Shame
One of the last real attempts to make at least a marginally mainstream NC-17 film was director Steve McQueen's sophomore feature, Shame, released on this day nine years ago. While the critical community and lucky few folks who managed to catch it in its limited theatrical run were mostly focused on the size of star Michael Fassbender's penis, many of them missed what was a truly bleak and nihilistic film about sex addiction. Real deal, hardcore, life ruining sex addiction, not the fun David Duchovny/Michael Douglas/Tiger Woods variety of sex addiction. One with real life consequences.
Fassbender's Brandon is a man with a sex addiction that is already past the point of potential danger. There's real danger looming in his future, particularly once his equally self-destructive sister (Carey Mulligan) shows up and accelerates his spiral. She surprises him, showing up when he's at work, leaving him to come home to the sound of her in the shower blaring Chic's "I Want Your Love." The bonus is that we get Mulligan's one and only full frontal scene on film...
Mulligan then sings the world's slowest and longest cover of "New York, New York" in the history of film, another equally cynical dig at the splendor of her character's arrival in her brother's home city. Brandon, by the way, continues having sex with any woman he can enlist to his cause, including Amy Hargreaves, Nicole Beharie, and a cheeky menage with Deedee Luxe and Calamity Chang...
The film didn't bring Fassbender the Oscar nomination many (rightly) felt he deserved, but he and McQueen's next film together, 12 Years a Slave, would net them both nominations.
****
2011: Sleeping Beauty
An equally upsetting and sexually explicit film released on this same day nine years ago is this Australian indie loosely based on a Japanese novella, a Gabriel Garcia Marquez book, and director Julia Leigh's own dreams. In a role that Mia Wasikowska was supposed to play before choosing to make a different movie instead, Emily Browning makes her nude debut in this haunting look at a young woman working odd jobs who gets a mysterious offer. She will be paid a lot of money to strip naked, take a sleeping pill, and allow a man to lay nude next to her. The man is allowed to hold and caress her, but is not allowed to have sex with her.
In one of her early jobs, Browning's character works as a lingerie model/caterer, her nipples peeking out of her corset, alongside Mirrah Foulkes, whose lingerie leaves her breasts completely exposed...
Emily Browning really gives her all in this performance that kicked open the door to more nudity throughout her career since. It's interesting that she starred in this film and Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch in the same year. I'll leave you to decide which film proved its point more conclusively...
****
2005: Æon Flux
Do you guys remember how before Wonder Woman came out, everyone was whispering about how a female-directed big budget franchise starter had never succeeded in Hollywood? A big part of that stigma existing in the first place was because of poor Karyn Kusama, who was basically set up to fail by Paramount when they handed her the keys to their franchise-to-be Æon Flux. Hot off her writing/directing debut Girlfight in 2000, Kusama was a hotly pursued director and agreed to make the film with a budget of $62 million and the full confidence of Paramount studio chief Sherry Lansing.
When Lansing left the studio during the production of the film, the new brass began to undermine Kusama, questioning why she had been given such an enormous budget for only her second film. Control of the film was wrested away from her and the flick released 15 years ago today is your classic studio chop job. Charlize Theron stepped into the title role of this adaptation of the beloved(?) early 90s animation that originated with MTV's Liquid Television, though initially Kusama had hoped to make the film with her Girlfight star Gina Rodriguez. Unfortunately a series of personal and professional setbacks had left her reputation shot, and Theron could get the film made with its full budget.
She's a telepathic super warrior that's part of an underground rebellion against a fascistic government that arose following a deadly plague, yadda, yadda, yadda. Same sort of Resident Evil-esque thing we've seen a hundred times before and since, particularly once clones become involved. At least this PG-13 romp allowed us some quick flashes of Charlize's breasts...
It's sad that Kusama's original vision has never been reinstated, especially in the age of internet petitions and the like. There's probably just not enough interest to be generated from the property itself, and even if her cut is great, it's not like they're going to suddenly relaunch the franchise. Stranger things have certainly happened, though. Stay tuned.
****
1994: Cobb
While no one was looking for a sympathetic biopic about one of the most awful men to have ever played the game of baseball as well as he did, but Ty Cobb's story is undeniably cinematic. Once you throw Tommy Lee Jones into the lead role, hot off his Oscar win for The Fugitive, and it's tough not to get swept up in the whole thing, though the film doesn't really attempt to garner sympathy for its title character. Throw Ron Shelton, director of Bull Durham, behind the camera and you might think there was something great in the works.
Unfortunately, the great film didn't manifest itself, though it's damn enjoyable to watch Jones play a man whose not just cantankerous, but dangerously so. It's as though he's warming up to play Two Face the following year in Batman Forever... This is his Triple A tryout, so to speak. Most of the film's problems lie in its attempts to distance itself from the Cobb's terrible deeds, on and off the field. Shelton chose the device of setting it through the eyes of Detroit sportswriter Al Stump (Robert Wuhl), asking him to be the audience surrogate, since he was Cobb's biographer in real life. Baseball fans should seek it out, however, as there's some really good stuff buried in the film's bloated 128 minute running time.
Among the really good stuff is a flashback featuring a fully nude Rhoda Griffis, as Cobb's mother, who teamed up with her lover to murder Cobb's father when he came home and caught the two en flagrante delicto...
Later in the film, Sweet brings a Vegas cigarette girl named Ramona (Lolita Davidovich) back to his hotel room, but Cobb bursts in and absconds with the woman, later beating her up. Moral of the film, Ty Cobb: not a good person...
****
1981: Whose Life is it Anyway?
Based on both a 1972 TV movie and 1978 stage play of the same name, this Richard Dreyfuss vehicle came during the actor's own admitted period of heaviest drug use in his career. Just a few months after this film's release, Dreyfuss would get arrested for possession of cocaine after blacking out and driving his car into a tree. In fact, this would be his last film for five years, save a shelved romantic comedy titled The Buddy System that got released in 1983. Director John Badham, hot off directing Saturday Night Fever and the Frank Langella-starring Dracula, was at the helm and the film tackled a hot button issue of euthanasia.
Dreyfuss plays a sculptor left paralyzed from the neck down after a car accident—oooo, prescient—who hires an ambitious lawyer played by Bob Balaban to advocate for his legal right to die by physician assisted suicide. It's worth checking out to see John Cassavetes as the crooked head of the hospital who opposes euthanasia and a young Christine Lahti, in only her second film role, as a doctor sympathetic to Dreyfuss' plight.
The highlight of the film, however, is nude ballerina Janet Eilber, whose fantasy dream ballet thirty minutes in clearly gets Dreyfuss' blood pumping...
****
