Our Staff Picks column takes you back to a time when video stores reigned supreme and the "Staff Picks" section was the place to find out what films were worthy of one's time. Of course, our version of Staff Picks has a decidedly skintillating angle, as we suss out which films from a particular subgenre are the best to find great nudity. This week, it's one of the most overused tropes in the book, but these four flicks make "It Was All Just a Dream" work thanks to their love of nudity!
It's become a cliche so time worn and overused that it has become the easy way out for many films and television shows that got a bit too ambitious for their own good, but "It Was All Just a Dream" isn't always a sign of bad cinema. One of the most beloved films of all time, The Wizard of Oz, uses it quite well, while surrealist Luis Buñuel put it to wonderful effect with his 1972 film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. It's not always a cop out, even when it feels like it might have been one all along, and today's films demonstrate that it works best when it's supported by the rest of the film.
We have some legendary directors on tap for you, which is certainly a big help when dealing with this plot device that has become a subgenre unto itself. Arguably the trashiest of the four films we're going to talk about has the least director among the four, but even Taylor Hackford's no slouch when it comes to dishing out solid entertainment. Some major celebrities and great actors are along for the ride as well in these films with Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Naomi Watts, Charlize Theron, Sharon Stone, and many more popping up!
So wake yourself up to pay full attention to these films where it turned out, it was all just a dream...
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Once Upon a Time in America (1984)
Serving as a bookend to his own Once Upon a Time in the West, Sergio Leone's final film is an epic look at the rise and fall of a couple of street kids from New York. Robert De Niro stars as Noodles, who opens the film strung out in an opium den before flashing back to his childhood on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the late 1910s. He falls in with a group of thugs but mostly stays connected with one kid named Max, played as an adult by James Woods. The film then tracks their rise through the underworld ranks during Prohibition, culminating in a job gone wrong that leaves all of Noodles' gang, including Max, dead.
Along the ride for this four hour-plus journey is plenty of skin, with Olga Karlatos baring her breast in the opium den in the film's opening, Ann Neville going full frontal in a coffin,and Margherita Pace providing the buns for an underage Jennifer Connelly...
In the end, Noodles tracks down Max, still alive and serving as the US Commerce Secretary, who asks Noodles to kill him. Noodles has considered him dead since he actually thought he was dead, however, so he turns his back on him and wanders into the opium den where we found him at the film's opening. A full-circle fever dream with a man's entire life flashing before his eyes before he dies. Poetic and worth the epic running time.
**Available to Rent or Own via Vudu, Fandango NOW, or Apple TV
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Total Recall (1990)
The mad Dutchman Paul Verhoeven's third American film found him directing the biggest action star in the world, finding the lead for his next film, and setting the gold standard for heady science fiction mixed with cartoonish violence and comical sex. Like so many of Verhoeven's greatest films, Total Recall plays equally well to both the smartest and dumbest person watching it in any given room. Its themes are lofty but its violence is over the top. Its effects are groundbreaking and are often used for sophomoric humor.
Verhoeven is and always has been the thinking man's Michael Bay in that he's a skilled technician who uses his talents in the most adolescent ways. Unlike Bay, however, Verhoeven can hang with the intellectual crowd and his films can be more deeply appreciated upon repeat viewings. I dare you to sit through any Transformers movie more than once. Verhoeven is also a guy who has never made a sequel, despite five of his films having sequels made, without his participation of course.
Total Recallcould be considered the start of act two of Verhoeven's Hollywood run, if thinking of it in terms of a three-act structure. The good times get better, in other words and his rollercoaster ride to the top is about to hit its peak with his next film, Basic Instinct. Speaking of which, Sharon Stone clearly ingrained herself in the director's mind as she beat many high profile names to land the lead in that film. Had she not played Schwarzenegger's wife in this flick, she might not have gotten the biggest break of her life two years later.
Stone basically opens the film by baring her breasts while fooling around in bed with Arnie after he wakes up from another haunting dream about Mars...
There's also the three-boobed woman of Mars, played by Lycia Naff, showing off more of Verhoeven's humor in spending countless dollars for a boob joke...
Of course, the true genius of Verhoeven's film is that he spells it all out for you twenty minutes in when Quaid goes to Rekall and agrees to the secret agent add-on package...
The audience knows, in the back of their mind, that the whole thing is a dream, but you go with it because it's fun and exciting and just as slightly implausible as every other film we've ever seen starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Verhoeven exploits an audience to their own benefit like few other directors out there and even though his fade to white at the end of the film ensures us that it was all just a dream, we can't help but wonder if that Dutch lunatic isn't still somehow messing with us.
**Available to Stream Free for Members via Netflix, or to Rent or Own via Amazon Video or Fandango NOW
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The Devil's Advocate (1997)
**Portions of the following text are excerpted from Anatomy of a Nude Scene: The Devil's Advocate
While no one who has actually sat through the film beginning to end could consider 1997's The Devil's Advocate to be a masterpiece, it's certainly a movie with a lot of charms. For a fairly big budget studio film, it has a lot of stuff in it one would be hard-pressed to find in a similarly budgeted studio film in the year 2020. Directed by Taylor Hackford—that lucky son of a bitch married to my boo Helen Mirren—the film is trashy, but with a high gloss Hollywood finish that eludes many of the other films mentioned in the above paragraph. The film is loosely based on the 1990 novel of the same by longtime V.C. Andrews ghostwriter Andrew Neiderman, which was pitched as being "about a law firm in New York that represents only guilty people, and never loses."
If you've somehow never seen The Devil's Advocate, the film centers around idealistic young defense attorney Kevin Lomax (Keanu Reeves), who is given an offer to come work for one of the most prominent law practices in New York City run by John Milton (Al Pacino). Milton sees a lot of promise in Lomax, who is a fast riser through the company, working his way up to Milton's right hand man much to the chagrin of more senior lawyers like Eddie Barzoon (a pre-"the troubles" Jeffrey Jones). As it turns out, Milton is actually the devil and Lomax is his long-lost son,with Milton pulling strings to ensure that everything will go according to plan and Lomax will eventually father the antichrist.
Two relatively unknown actresses—at the time anyway—were cast in the two most prominent female roles, with South African beauty Charlize Theron (in her fourth feature film role) taking on the role of Lomax's wife Mary Ann and Dutch delight Connie Nielsen (in her first American film) playing law office temptress Christabella. Throughout the film's second act, Mary Ann begins a journey toward insanity as she is manipulated from afar by Milton, who is planning to hook his son up with Christabella, who is actually his half-sister and whom Milton plans to be the mother of the antichrist. It's all stupidly complicated when written out like this, but it makes at least a little more sense in the context of the film.
The first inkling we get that this is where things are headed comes just past the one hour mark in the needlessly long two hour and twenty four minute flick. Lomax returns home from a long day at the office to be greeted by his horned-up wife. As the two get down to business, Mary Ann begins to morph into Christabella, with Reeves landing the rather notable distinction of shooting one sex scene with two different actresses—no wonder he turned down Speed 2...
In the film's closing moments, Keanu shoots himself in the head only to be zoomed all the way back to the beginning of the movie. Everything we've seen for the last two hours has been a fever dream had by Reeves' character in the bathroom before a crucial moment in his early law career. It gives him the chance to redo the biggest mistake he made on the road that was going to lead him to the devil's doorstep, giving the "it was all just a dream" a somewhat clever spin. It's not great, but it's better than one might expect from a smutty film tailor made for Cinemax starring an Oscar winner in full ham mode.
**Available to Stream Free for Members via HBO Max, or to Rent or Own via Amazon Video or Fandango NOW
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Mulholland Dr.(2001)
**Portions of the following text are excerpted from Anatomy of a Nude Scene: Mulholland Dr.
David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. is essentially two films in one, the first being a much more wide-eyed and optimistic version of a classic tale of trying to make it in Hollywood, while the second is a much more cold and cynical version of that exact same story. While Lynch himself will never deign to explaining his films, it's obvious even after only one viewing that the first hour and forty-five minutes of Mulholland Dr. is a dream sequence. The most interesting thing for our purposes, however, is that each section of the film has its own lesbian sex scene between the two stars, Naomi Watts and Laura Harring, and each carries its own metaphorical and psychological baggage.
Just as the film's dream sequence is coming to a close at the hour and thirty nine minute mark, Watts and Harring close the journeys of their fictional characters—Betty and Rita, respectively—by coming together for two minutes and four seconds of steamy sapphic action. The first lesbian scene is substantially more chaste than the second, just a lot of kissing and touching out of an eighth grade male's lesbian fantasy. Artfully and sexily done, but still sort of staged and performed like a Penthouse Forum letter come to life...
Their second encounter comes less than twenty minutes later during a flashback/forward as Watts and Harring—now Diane and Camilla, respectively—canoodle on the couch while topless, though it ends abruptly when Camilla tells Diane that they "shouldn't do this any more" and Watts gives her the crazy eyes for days...
So what's the deal with these lesbian scenes? What do they mean? I can't tell you that, I can only tell you what I think they mean and I think they're the denouement and inciting incidents of the film, just occurring in places where those things don't normally occur. The second scene finds Camilla breaking things off with Diane, the thing that sets the events of the film in motion. The first lesbian scene resolves it by giving them—or rather their idealized versions, Betty and Rita—the fantasy sex scene they were deprived of earlier, in Diane's mind anyway.
Or maybe it's something completely different, that's the beauty of Lynch's open ended-ness and why it's so great he's never gone on the record with a definitive version of events. It would take all the fun out of the film.
**Available to Rent via Amazon Video, VUDU, or Fandango NOW
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