The New Flesh

In the meantime, restless apemen like my neighbor Mario will wait patiently for Robin Tunney and Rachel True (both from The Craft) to grow up, although his nights are truly set on the impending adulthood of Clueless (and TV's Clueless) star Stacey Dash: "Have you ever seen anyone so beautiful? I don't even want to foul her with sex, I just want to look at her for a year." (Interestingly, he holds no such passion for the perhaps overexposed teardrop beauty of Clueless star Alicia Silverstone.) My superhip queer girlfriend Jill offered up a shamefaced yen for still-too-young Claire Danes: "She seems to be the most likely to have a nervous breakdown during sex; I love that."

My niece Amy has been carefully watching the ascension and maturation of newcomers like Skeet Ulrich, Jared Leto, Tobey Maguire and Scott Wolf, having become addicted years ago to teen idol mags where news of hunky youngsters appears long before the real world catches on. The pubertal buzz is high and loud on these striplings, but only time will tell if they blossom into authentic adult vulva-throbs.

Leto, still coasting on his heartthrob rap from My So-Called Life, will or won't break out in Disney's Prefontaine. Candy, my editor friend, characterizes Leto this way: "He's like that cool, rebellious kid in high school who smoked cigarettes and always looked like he'd just rolled out of bed: he's very hot." My niece instantly knew and had nothing but nice things to say about Skeet Ulrich from The Craft and Boys ("Very cool"), although everyone else I asked had fun repeating his name aloud with a question mark after it until it began to sound like Icelandic for "Got a light?"

Frank the Wonder Bachelor, despite (or because of) his entomological visions of Natasha Henstridge, could not be stopped once he'd started on the subject of Catherine Keener, the gorgeous, hilarious, cat-eyed fumble-bunny from Johnny Suede, Living in Oblivion and Walking and Talking. "She's so beautiful and distinctive-looking, she doesn't seem to know she's beautiful, and she's so unself-conscious she's never afraid of looking like an ass. She's funny, too. And she's got great, sheeny hair, or did before she dyed it blonde in all of those magazine shots last year."

Bashful clumsiness is undoubtedly sexy-- remember Raquel Welch's one moment of attractive humanity in The Three Musketeers?--and Frank backs it up with Olivia d'Abo in Kicking and Screaming, a terrific movie no one saw, in which the opalescent d'Abo effortlessly stole hearts as a raucously unstable grad student. Frank also has a long-running yen for the indomitable Parker Posey, whom I adore but have always thought looks like lone Skye after a five-day gin bender. My friend Jill has her own take on Posey: "She's cute, and she has this frightening quality that she'd say something truly horrifying and inappropriate at the sexiest moment, and still be charming about it." Frank's got Posey pegged: "She's got attitude enough to bench-press a car."

Striving as always to be gender-fair, I asked my female acquaintances to tell me who the funny young hunks are, since I know women find humor a sexual flashpoint. My wife stumped for Liev Schreiber, the smooth, cutely irresponsible ex-boyfriend in Walking and Talking. "He's sexy in a Jewish sort of way--it's nice to know there's a tall, beautiful, well-built actor you can easily imagine 13 years old at his bar mitzvah." Josh Brolin, the bi cop in Flirting With Disaster, also got a vote from my neighbor Ingrid, who's a grandmother: "He licked an armpit-- ain't nothing he won't do, honey." But when it came down to maximum vaginal thrum, my wife couldn't get around her swoony ardor for Gil Bellows, the boyish, antiglam studmuffin from Miami Rhapsody, The Shawshank Redemption and Love and a .45. "I'd lick his armpits," she tells me without a wisp of shame crossing her face.

Speaking of lick-worthy body-parts, I'll tell you: I've got a jones for Tea Leoni so nasty I'd sell the gold out of my mother's mouth for one sniff of her inner thigh. I first glimpsed her as that radiant prostitute wistfully watching the youngish Kevin Costner play with his first set of guns in Wyatt Earp--I was so stunned I actually sat through the rest of the movie, which is little more than three hours of dust up your nose. Leoni did time as the damsel in Bad Boys, which I otherwise remember as distinctly as learning to walk, but I really went mad for her as the klutzy adoption-service counselor in Flirting With Disaster, where she carpet bombed the popular notion that model-types in high heels are graceful--she tottered and stumbled adorably, and with legs so long they could wrap around your head twice. Not many women on earth are more beautiful than Leoni, but what left my pants tight was her intelligence and wit. Flirting With Disaster was last year's best comedy (if you're not counting The Island of Dr. Moreau), and Leoni was the funniest thing in it and the sexiest blip on my radar all year.

Who could keep up with all this tenderloin? Oh, I'm sure that as we speak a new cast of steam-inspiring tyros is wiggling into the otherworldly glare of hypehood and audience aphrodisia. If you're determined to keep up with the zeitgeist, you've got your work cut out. As for me, let me just say this one last thing: I don't know how much a sniff of your inner thigh will cost me, Tea Leoni, but I'm ready to remortgage the house, pay the price and die a happy man. Call me.

_________________________________________

Michael Atkinson interviewed Gary Dourdan for the December issue of Movieline.

Pages: 1 2 3