Everybody's Doing It...or Are They?

Wild at Heart

The truth is, Nic Cage and Laura Dern screw so often in this movie that you can get sore and sticky just watching them. I won't tire you with the story line, or with comments about Diane Ladd's over-the-top performance, or with details regarding the medley of bit players who try to steal the whole shebang. My friends and I all feel that Laura Dern is a fantastic actress, more than able to fake multiple orgasms. Since Cage is the one she'd have to have been fucking, we just pray she wasn't Method acting.

Last Tango in Paris

Ouch! The movie that did more for the dairy industry than a million milk commercials ever could.

Marlon Brando is looking for an apartment in Paris. The sexy Maria Schneider is looking at the same flat, and instead of flipping a coin, they screw standing up. (My friend Molly and I watched this and didn't think it could be real: Molly observed, "His, uh, member would have to be 18 inches long.")

Brando's wife has just committed suicide. Schneider's boyfriend is a filmmaker. Brando gets the apartment, but Schneider comes over to talk--and get laid. He won't tell her his name or let her tell him hers: the ultimate zipless fuck.

Were any of this film's sex scenes real? Well, Molly and I absolutely thought that Schneider's look of pain in the much-discussed butter scene was convincing. Besides that, there's not much else to say. It's kind of boring to watch this movie now, but some of it is endearing, like when Schneider rubs Brando's zipper and asks, "What's this for?" "That's your happiness," Brando replies with a smile, "and my happ-penis." They sure don't write dialogue like they used to.

Tattoo

You probably haven't seen this film, and I'm not really recommending it. You may just want to fast-forward to the very end, which was certainly what Nancy wanted us to do. "What's the point in watching the whole thing," she kvetched, "when all we want to see is the finale?" Disgusted, she left the room. "Call me in for the last half hour," she told us. Anyway, in this movie, Bruce Dern is at his most deranged, which is saying something. He plays a heavily tattooed tattooist who has a crush on a model, Maud Adams, who must actually be a model 'cause she's certainly no actress. When he's asked to paint her body for a photo shoot, he does a beautiful job. He expects her to see what a genius he is, but when the shoot is over, she goes into the shower and washes his vision down the drain. She asks him out to dinner and, at the restaurant, he shows his charm by first shoving, then threatening to kill her ex-boyfriend. My kind of guy. Later, he invites her to his apartment in Hoboken for a Japanese dinner. She likes him and wants to fuck. He goes bananas and tells her never to say "fuck" in front of him again. (He thinks it's crude.) She leaves. He goes to a peep show and talks dirty to the girl behind the glass.

When he calls, she asks him not to call again. So Bruce does the unexpected, which in some circumstances is a very nice quality, but not here, because he kidnaps her. Worse, he takes her to his family's house on the beach in order to start tattooing her entire body against her will. Only then, he tells her, after she has "the mark," will he have sex with her.

So, finally, she's ready and he lays her on the floor to do it. (We called Nancy back in.) Unfortunately, by then, there's something kind of comical about the two of them. They're head-to-toe in these bright tattoos, and it's like watching all the Disney characters at an orgy. The torment on Dern's face made us believe that this was real, but, then, we really couldn't have cared less.

Those were the films I viewed with my girlfriends. But then I remembered one more I'd seen:

Betty Blue

One day, my Aunt Tillie and I were tooling around Miami Beach, trying to think of something we could do to get away from the heat. We saw a marquee that said Betty Blue. "Sounds interesting," she said. We went in.

In the first two minutes of the movie, Betty and her boyfriend Zorg went at it like no one's business. I didn't breathe or move my head. When it was over (they had simultaneous and powerful orgasms), Tillie turned to me and said, "Hmmmm. What's this movie about?" I shrugged and asked if she wanted to leave. She didn't want to. I love her for that.

Later on, when Zorg had his head between Betty's legs and was definitely licking his way to heaven, Tillie turned to me and said, "Have you ever let a boy do that to you?" "Ssshh," I answered, turning beet-red in the dark. "I'll tell ya later." For three hours after the movie ended, she made me give her a detailed list of what parts of my anatomy had been involved in various sexual acts. Sometimes she laughed, other times she just shook her head in wonder. "I was born too early," was her only lament.

Oh, those wild Frenchmen . . . Zorg even had little drops of saliva on his lips when he brought his head up from between Betty's legs. I'd bet my firstborn that this is the real deal.

Martha Frankel interviewed Spike Lee for our November issue.

Pages: 1 2 3 4