The New Flesh

McConaughey shared the righteous megahunk limelight this past year with Will Smith, who emerged from Independence Day's smoking piles of cash a rediscovered slab o' burnin' love, in a uniform yet. "Where'd he get that swagger?" gasped Laura, an ex-girlfriend I hadn't spoken to in 11 years who was strangely unsurprised that I called. "I could never tolerate that sitcom of his. When did he get so cute?"

But if 1996 was the Year of the New Flesh, few pelts were as closely examined as Liv Tyler's--you look up "fetching" in the dictionary, there's her picture. In Stealing Beauty, Heavy or That Thing You Do!, Tyler walks the line between sexpot and Tess Trueheart. "The big difference between Tyler and someone like Teri Hatcher," declared Rick, "is that with Hatcher, you're going straight for the bare mattress on the floor and a bedside bottle of Dewar's, but with Tyler you'd think about buying her a lobster dinner before flogging her four ways from Sunday."

Such dreamy images of filthy rutting only occurred to women when the discussion turned to Johnathon Schaech, a swarthy, white-toothed, muscle-faced Greek god who seems to look a bit too good for his roles, as in How to Make an American Quilt and That Thing You Do!. "He's too chiseled," said Candy, a New York editor friend. "He looks too much like he belongs on the cover of Playgirl." My friend Robin disagrees: "I'll take him any which way I can, in a mud puddle, on hot coals, in Grand Central Station. I don't care. No jury would convict me. I mean, just look at him." My 17-year-old niece Amy, from whom I never really wanted to hear such raunch, concurred. "I'd let him do things I don't let anybody do. Like--I don't want to say. Anything."

Schaech has had only small roles in small movies, but the cultural radar picked him up nonetheless. Sometimes, all you have to do is saunter through the background of some formula trifle, and you're made. Similarly, Broadway vet Billy Crudup, starring in the Tom Cruise-produced Pre, one of two biopics of '70s athlete Steve Prefontaine, has already attracted a considerable buzz among the hunk-hungry on the sheer strength of supporting bits in Sleepers and Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You. "He's rakish, y'know?" says Shari. "He squints when he smiles, and he's got the highest cheekbones of anyone since Deborah Harry." Derek, a Blockbuster Video customer who spoke to me as he thumbed through Shannon Tweed straight-to-tapers, confirmed my hapless desire for Alyssa Milano in Fear, who, with a pair of tight jeans, an unbeatable come-hither look and a slinky sluttishness, obliterated both Reese Witherspoon and any loitering memory of Who's the Boss. "She looks like Jennifer Tilly but without the cute-ness or the voice," Derek said. "Just the sex." She also has a body that could make you dry-hump a fireplug, which is a point my friend Robin made about Milano's costar in Fear, Mark Wahlberg, whose Calvin Klein ads no one will apparently forget anytime soon. "He's a caveman. You know he's dangerous, but just think of the nooky."

Danger is, of course, relative. Natasha Henstridge, with a sunglasses-required, Helen-of-Troy visage and the body of a Valkyrie, may still carry the lingering fuck-me-and-never-mind-the-horns-growing-out-of-my-back aura of Species, but for many guys that's a navigable issue. "She's an ice goddess," my last-single-friend Frank offered. "I can't really picture making love to her or anyone who's that beautiful and who's half a foot taller than me and who might eat my head like a female praying mantis when she's done. But you know, I'd be willing to take the chance." On seeing Henstridge in Maximum Risk, though, Frank became ambivalent: "She was delicious, but I don't really buy it when women who look like that get into mortal danger--they'd have staff to do it for them."

No ubermensch vibe emanates from lovely Latina Jennifer Lopez, whose warm presence in Money Train salvaged that movie from the memory abyss it otherwise deserved, or from Jada Pin-kett, whose eyes could melt coal into coke, especially in Set It Off. "She's so tiny, but she's so strong," my suave, twice-divorced cousin Lou rhapsodized between sips of Rob Roy. "Seems to me to be a very orgasmic lady, not one of those wilting-on-the-vine, just-want-to-cuddle types."

The cadre of my wife's friends I surveyed were salivating en masse over radically different objects of desire-- the new Brits. Roberta busily sighed over Ben Chaplin, the demure love boat from The Truth About Cats & Dogs: "A little too heavy on the eyebrows, but he's got a very sexy mouth, nice and full-lipped. And long lashes--he's got the best bedroom eyes. And he's so polite." Julie went big for Emma's Jeremy Northam, who, according to her, has such a decent, sensible persona that his preposterous shot at villainy-- in The Net--was the last straw in that movie's losing battle with believability. "Remember the scene in _Emma _when they're shooting arrows? He made indignant irritation sexy. He's so moral--no, scrupulous. As in, not that he wouldn't do you within an inch of your life, but that he would do it right."

My wife maintained that Brits--however cute and debonair--were inherently unsexy because you couldn't, for the most part, imagine them being any good in bed. "We're just suckers for accents," she reasoned. But what about Daniel Day-Lewis? "Only in The Last of the Mohicans, and he wasn't playing an Englishman." What about Cary Grant? "He's not English," she claimed. "He comes from Cary Grant Land."

Nevertheless, Diane's tongue wagged over horny Shropshire brute Rufus Sewell, who played Emma Thompson's sexually frustrated suitor in Carrington and the agrarian he-man in Cold Comfort Farm. "He played animals in both movies, but he's built like a brick shit-house, and he's got a lovely grin. And curly hair--why don't more movie stars have curly hair?" Then there's Ewan McGregor, a toilet-spelunking junkie in Trainspotting but a supercool Scot boy-toy for my sister Donna, who doesn't remember much about movies but remembers McGregor's fun-loving rogue in Shallow Grave. "He was cute, quick and sly, and had beautiful blue eyes. You couldn't trust a word he'd say, but who'd care? With that accent--he could say, 'Pass the fookin' budder' and I'd be putty."

As far as Brits go, I personally might vote here for Surviving Picasso's Natasha McElhone. My friend Howie, though, is packing some serious lumber for Catherine McCormack, the Irish Spring brunette from Braveheart and Loaded, the latter film being a justifiably ignored Brit indie Howie bothered to see only because he'd read that McCormack had a seminude scene, which tells you plenty about Howie, if not us all. My dentist, Dr. Turkel (who, as it happens, is a close cousin to Joe Turkel, the bartender in The Shining), claims to be peri-odontally heartsick over Kate Winslet. It wasn't Sense and Sensibility, but Jude that did it. "She was adorable before, and sure, a very talented girl, but I wouldn't call her sexy, not like Hedy Lamarr was sexy. But in that Jude movie, she was very sexy, very funny and terribly sad. You could imagine her schtupping, for one thing, just like a person. She broke my heart in that movie."

New imported flesh is everywhere. Virginie Ledoyen ( A Single Girl ) and Judith Godreche ( Ridicule ) are two typically heartstopping French newcomers perfectly capable of putting a man into a hormonal coma. Chiseled Frenchman Vincent Perez has already crossed over, albeit under a ton of makeup, in The Crow: City of Angels, a fate bound to befall Olivier Martinez, whose world-class beauty made The Horseman on the Roof costar Juliette Binoche look like Juliette Lewis. Anybody who's been paying any attention at all to the unstoppable flux of Hong Kong movies, from John Woo's pre-emigration oeuvre to the recent New Line-released Jackie Chan fluffernutters, is well familiar with some of the most ravishing and seductive movie stars in the world, including Maggie Cheung, Anita Mui, Brigitte Lin and Michelle Khan. Some of them are already taking American meetings, and we can only hope that when Hong Kong gets officially handed back to China this year, the whole HK film industry will move here and inspire Hollywood to do something hotter than The Joy Luck Club II.

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