A post this morning at The Awl ruminates on The New York Times‘ apparent love affair with Nora Ephron, writer/director of Julie & Julia. The paper has taken to covering her/the movie about once every other day in the month leading up to the film’s release this week, to the point where Nikki Finke has cried conspiracy. Choire Sicha gives the paper a bit more credit; though he criticizes the Times for having “no idea what lays beyond its own fortress walls,” he sympathises with the media’s attraction to Ephron as a “charming, fun whirlwind” and a “bridge” between New York old money and Hollywood commerce.
This is all very interesting, but it would be easy to read The Awl’s post and make the dangerous inference that since The New York Times is gaga for Julie & Julia, and because The New York Times tends to “exhibit absolutely clearly that they have very little idea anymore what readers are, or even should be, interested in,” ergo, there somehow won’t be much of an appetite for Ephron’s food porn outside “their bubble,” which Sicha accurately assesses Ephron is “deep inside.” But to make such a leap of inference would both give the film too much credit, and Ephron’s extremely commercial instincts not enough. I saw the film at Traverse City over the weekend, and while I personally wish it was, well, better — imagine a movie split between post-WWII France and New York in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that actually treated its twin protagonists as engaged products of their socio-historical surroundings rather than just borderline-sitophiliac ciphers! –– the 500 elderly Midwesterners I saw it with seemed completely satisfied. It may be true that Ephron represents, as Sicha suggests, a link between New York and Hollywood that this city’s newspaper can’t resist, but The Great New York Times Ephron Splooge is probably not as much about either coast as it is about much of the country in between.
One of the most popular sex scenes of all time is the kitchen scene from the 1981 version of The Postman Always Rings Twice. But many people find the more implicit parts of the 1946 version to be sexier. These people include the earlier film’s female lead, Lana Turner, who wrote in her autobiography, “[The makers of the 1981 film] didn’t have to worry about the censors. I’d had to project a rather intense sexual presence, but always with my clothes on. I was amused to read that [NY Times film critic] Vincent Canby considered the remake a pale, rather sexless imitation of my version.”
Yes, a film with neither nudity nor simulated lovemaking can be quite sexy, likely sexier than an explicit remake, for innuendo and other teasing maneuvers around either the Hays Code or the MPAA ratings board’s restrictions are far more tantalizing than any bare and balls-out displays of graphic sex common in movies today. Though many classic implications of sex on the big screen were rather obvious and quick, giving the audience a nudge but hardly a rise (think the Eisensteinian metaphors of a train entering a tunnel in North by Northwest or fireworks exploding in To Catch a Thief), loads of films turned up the heat through the use of careful camerawork, daring dialogue and more subtly suggestive actions. Sometimes such sexy moments of tension and/or playfulness are definite forms of foreplay and serve as lead-ins to actual sex acts, on or off screen. But not always.
Everyone has his or her own ideas of what’s sexy, so feel free to disagree with our choices and/or suggest your own (I can guess what the first suggestion will be). Consider our list simply a starting point for discussion.
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