Valentine’s Day sucks. That’s not an original sentiment, but it bears repeating.
Like everything else in our super advertised, heavily marketed consumer culture, the day has been taken over by large corporations that want you to spend money unnecessarily on bogus products to prove, loudly, the love that you spend the other 364 days of the year proving quietly.
That reminds me: Gotta check my dinner reservations and make sure I got a table at my wife's favorite restaurant.
And for those of us who need a little help in the eros department, here are five movies that can goose your romance and five movies guaranteed to produce a flaccid penis on February 14.
Least sexy movies
Basic Instinct
There are people out there who think Basic Instinct is one of the sexiest movies ever. Those people are insane. What’s sexy? Watchin’ hot bonin’ that culminates with a ridiculously violent icepick stabbing? When Michael Douglas’ character rapes Jeanne Tripplehorn’s character? The interrogation/flashing scene? Basic Instinct is so over the top it feels like parody, but it clearly thinks it’s superhot.
Fifty Shades of Grey
This is a guess because the movie just began shooting. When it hits the multiplexes, I'll look at it with the most non-gimlet eye I can. But the novel feels like an unedited tract by a dumb high school sophomore. Here's a piece of text I swear I'm not making up: "I feel the color in my cheeks rising again. I must be the color of The Communist Manifesto." That line was written, presumably, without irony.
Manhattan
Or really, and every Woody Allen movie when he's older and dating a woman young enough to be his granddaughter.
Resurfaced rumors of child molestation aside, the Allen-Mariel Hemingway
stuff is just creepy. Creepy. Hemingway literally looks like a child
(she was 17 during filming) and Allen was about 43. So, gah. GAH. It's
just awkward and, for this critic, it becomes impossible to focus on the
rest of the story.
The Notebook
Like Basic Instinct, some
people find this movie irresistibly sexy, probably because of the rain
make out scene. But those same people always overlook one important
fact: The two main characters (as youths played by Rachel McAdams and
Ryan Gosling, and as olds played James Garner and Gena Rowlands) are
complete and total selfish assholes. Rowlands went from A Woman Under the Influence to this. Barf. What would John Cassavetes think of his son Nick's movie?
Showgirls
Maybe it's cheating to throw a second Paul Verhoeven-directed movie on this list (Basic Instinct is also his, and both were written by Joe Eszterhas). Plus, every critic ever has ridiculed Showgirls. But
here's the reason it keeps making articles like this one: The moment
when Kyle MacLachlan, in the swimming pool, comes toward Elizabeth
Berkley, arms outstretched, dumb grin on his face, and then they have
crazy water sex where Berkley flails like a wounded animal. (I just had to take a break writing because I was laughing so hard.)
Best sexy movies
Before Sunset
Anyone who saw this movie's sequel, Before Midnight, may be surprised at Before Sunset's inclusion
here, but it offers the pre-children, pre-domestic life,
pre-relationship thrill of rekindling lost romance. Try to keep your
pulse from quickening when Julie Delpy's Celine tells Ethan Hawke's
Jesse, "Baby, you're gonna miss that plane."
The Big Easy
Sure,
there's murder and foul play and police corruption. There's also sex
with your clothes on, and Dennis Quaid (before he became terrible) and Ellen Barkin make it
work, partly because their affair is sort of illicit, and partly because
a lot is left to the imagination. (See also: Barkin in Sea of Love.)
Out of Sight
This
early George Clooney-starrer didn't burn up the box office but it may
burn up your libido. The tale of an escaped convict (Clooney's Jack
Foley) and the federal marshal tracking him (Jennifer Lopez's Karen
Sisco), the always gorgeous Clooney has rarely been sexier and Lopez has
never given another good performance before or since. Maybe being
trapped in that car trunk was the key, or maybe it was pretending they
were other people in the bar scene. Whatever the case, their chemistry
is palpable, made all the more real by the story's life-or-death stakes.
Secretary
Here's
a BDSM movie for even the non-BDSM practitioner (or reader, or viewer).
The dominant boss (James Spader) and sub secretary (Maggie Gyllenhaal)
have a relationship that's treated with an appropriate amount of
seriousness and raised eyebrows by director Steven Shainberg. None of it
would work without Erin Cressida Wilson's sharp screenplay.
Shakespeare in Love
Gwyneth Paltrow? Barf. Elizabethan costumes? Be still, my beating heart. Ben
Affleck with an English accent? I’m kidding, right? Nope: When Paltrow
and Joseph Fiennes (as William Shakespeare) first get together, there’s
an intimacy captured that feels real, timeless, and hopelessly romantic.
Enjoy your champagne and strawberries, kids.
Santa Fe Reporter