By Rolling Stone. Though some stunt, er, parts were employed, you are basically watching actors like Charlotte Gainsbourg and Shia LeBeouf engage in the sort of unsimulated activities you associate with porn stars. LeBeouf even sent in a homemade pornographic videotape for his audition.
Whatever Happened to NC Movies? These films are cast with A-list movie stars and directed by world-class filmmakers. They are designed to play in multiplexes and art houses. Some have been imported in as prestige foreign films, and others have been produced and distributed by Hollywood studios. But the 3o films here all share one thing in common: They all come as close to being pornographic as mainstream films will allow. Read this NSFW list with someone you love. It wasn't just the pubic hair on display that got Vilgot Sjoman's political screed-cum-melodrama seized at customs when it was brought here in , put at the center of an obscenity case tried by the Supreme Court and considered one of the more notorious films of its day.
Although the few scenes in which actors Lena Nyman and Borje Ahlstedt show off some hairy nether regions certainly helped distinguished this Swedish import from the usual foreign-film fare. No, what put this story of a radical student having an affair with a married man in boiling hot water was the sequence in which Nyman plants a kiss on her costar's penis in full view; that was enough to brew up a shitstorm that woud end up breaking down censorship barriers and ultimately help usher in an age of cinematic permissiveness.
No one talked about the interview footage of Martin Luther King Jr. They focused on the genital smooch. The curiosity and the contrversy helped garner it a broader audience. And the rest is history. Cinematographer-turned-director Haskell Wexler's mix of narrative and nonfiction including actual riot footage shot during the '68 Democratic Convention in Chicago is fueled by the tension of watching performers interact with real situations.
One scene in particular, however, struck the MPAA board as a little too real for their tastes: A naked-as-jaybirds romp between future Tarantino favorite Robert Forster and Marianna Hill, with the two of them ending up literally between the sheets. The almost documentary-like feel of their tryst earned Wexler's movie an X, though he'd claim that the rating was more reflective of the political rage he portrayed onscreen.
