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Meryl Streep and Robert Redford in Out of Africa

I've had it with the commonly held tenet that Meryl Streep is immune to sexual electrostatics. I think she leaks sexy warmth like a dam made of Peg-Board. When everyone else is thinking, What an accent, I'm thinking, I'd give a toe just to smell her. Granted, she has had bad luck with co-stars, but what about Kurt Russell in Silkwood? Kevin Kline in Sophie's Choice? And when she's standing next to an impossibly young and golden Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter, they're so perfect for each other you don't even need to see the sex scene, it's right there in their rumpled grins. But most of all, I'd cite Out of Africa, an eruption of old-fashioned, hyper-romantic fireworks, complete with exotic locale, Big Blond Hunter and a late-night rut in a safari tent that sticks to you like mosquito netting. Who would've guessed that Streep and Robert Redford, of all people, would mesh so beautifully?

The movie's packed like a Tokyo subway with poetic foreplay scenes mat are all like that galvanizing moment during a date when you know you're on for the whole night. Redford languorously washes Streep's hair by a river while reciting Coleridge; they shoot matching lions together, he slowly wipes a drop of blood from her bitten lip: they waltz around the campfire, all alone on the savanna...She'd have to be a year-old corpse not to screw his blue eyes brown. Later, they're undressing in the tent. "If you said anything now," she pants after a kiss she seems to have had a dream in the middle of, "I'll believe it." In bed following an orgasmic plane ride above the clouds, he whispers, "Don't move," and she says, "I want to move,' and he says, "Don't move," Zoiks.

Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek in Desperado

A berserk, guacamole-soaked taco salad of a movie, true, but check out Antonio, all leopard-like body and sexy glower, bouncing waves of humidity off Salma, the most scrumptious señorita ever to run a border-town bookstore. It's clear that these two would sniff each other out in a perfume factory, and it helps that they're easily the two most god-awful gorgeous people in Mexico. They're so beautiful it seems like they hardly have a choice--they're like captain of the football team and head cheerleader of Chihuahua High. Neither would settle for less.

The movie's so literally hot and sweaty all you can think about is messy afternoon sex with a Corona on the windowsill. But sexual chemistry often has little to do with the horizontal hula per se; for us, because we're not having the sex in question, the stretch of highway between banter and foreplay throws off a lot more sparks. Eventually Banderas and Hayek do get down to the dirty work at the crossroads, but not before she chirps sarcasms at his desperate action-hero shtick and picks bullets out of his shoulder with a grin on her face. When the sex does come along, though, they're really sweating. You never see sex sweat in movies. As far as I'm concerned, if you don't work up a sweat, you suck in bed. Still, you'd think that once they'd found each other, they'd leave this toothless, roachy no-man's land behind in a cloud of dust. To hell with the pointless vendetta, let's go to California, find a clean hotel room and play some night baseball.

John Travolta and Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction

John Travolta and Uma Thurman only occupy a quarter of this movie together, but it's such dreamy, cool shit they do with each other that it must be mentioned. They speak fluent Quentinese, of course, and you can see their synapses start to sizzle when they realize they're getting each other's jokes and understanding each other's retro-hip lingo. They do nothing but chat, but lucky for them it's the best written chat anyone's heard for eons.

From their note-it-and-use-it-later-at-a-party diner patter ("Don't you hate that?" "Hate what?" "Uncomfortable silences") to the triumphant Twist Contest boogie and later dalliances (Thurman's pie-eyed dance to that Urge Overkill cover of the old Neil Diamond song is a killer), these two get off on each other so well you know that if Thurman hadn't OD'd on Travolta's smack, they probably would've had sex, Travolta would've been whacked by monster hubby Ving Rhames and the movie would've been a lot shorter. Come to think of it, it would've been The Nicole Simpson Story.

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