Everyone is saying sex scenes aren’t needed. I present my evidence that sex scenes are needed: Office Space
The sex scene shows that Peter is paranoid and deeply uncomfortable with the fact that his girlfriend, Joanna had sex with his boss. A fact that Peter heard as a rumour from a horny co-worker. Lumbergh would never talk about their sex life at work as that would inappropriate as a manager.
The scene also shows how Peter see Lumbergh as a person. It also sets up for the conflict between Peter and Joanna as Peter acts on his nightmare like a child.
Granted the scene is extremely soft core and played for laughs. However, I think the movie would be a little weaker if Peter had gone to to the office the next day and told everyone about the nightmare without showing it. Yes, you could cut out the scene as the party scene sets everything up for the future conflict. The sex scene shows how deeply uncomfortable Peter is with the situation. It’s truly a scene that does “Show, Don’t Tell”.
I think they mean scenes that are in earnest. The one in office space is used to intentionally make us uncomfortable, just as Peter is. So it works great here for us to connect more with the main character. But yeah I basically agree. They can work when used with intent.
Copyright is NOT use it or lose it. Franchising licensing contracts might occasionally have such terms but that’s not the primary reason, these companies just don’t like risk
I’m gen x and find that this transition started happening earlier. Once online smut was accessible in early 90’s, what little sex shown on the silver screen became less sought after and just became something we had to sit through awkwardly with family.
Y’all need to go fuck some more. Films like La La Land are really missing something without a sex scene, the chemistry feels really fake and the relationship isn’t believable.
Sex is normal. Sex is good. Sex in films is necessary to convey intensity which a pan from bed shot can never achieve.
Great example: Terminator. Without this scene the whole franchise fails. The film doesn’t have the gravitas when John does die without it. And it’s a highly charged emotional reaction to the harrowing events they have both just been through.
sex isnt necessary for an intense relationship, and if your romantic pairing requires the characters literally porking onscreen to be believable or to read as having any chemistry you did a shit job writing it
99% of sex on film is casual sex and to claim that “casual sex” is normal and good is not straightforward to me.
For example most of the time with a macho male protagonist, they will show him using women for sex like disposable condoms. Another worrying trend on the rise is plot lines that basically glorify cheating.
I am not bothered by the sex or the nudity per se, but Hollywood loves to glorify characters with very problematic characters.
The Hayes code sucked, but the way directors needed to be creative to get around it was great. Modern directors could learn a lot about making romantic relationships smolder and using innuendo instead of adding cheap sex.
That show wasn’t popular with Gen Z though. How do I know this? Gen Z doesn’t watch HBO (they can’t afford yet another streaming service and they’re too lazy to pirate anything that isn’t anime because it’s too inconvenient).
I would say HBO’s core demographic is probably about 25 to 54, but ‘Euphoria’s’ target is probably 12 to 29,” Edgerton said. “HBO shows are this sort of high-end, exclusive programming, but they’re going to have to appeal to more viewers than they ever did before, and they’ve done a pretty good job so far.”
I just hate the wet noises that accompany it. Same thing with kissing scenes where they have a shotgun mic basically inside their mouths. It drives my sensory issues up a wall.
As much as I like the Marvel movies, or rather did, the problem is that they were never a series of movies, and it could be argued that they should not be taken seriously as pieces of Cinema at least as far as movies are concerned. Because they are not movies, it’s more of a continuous show where all the episodes are very long and very expensive. None of them can truly be considered a self-contained experience. Which is a problem the comic book industry faces all the time as they need to continuously find ways to keep things recognizable yet continuously moving in new directions, there isn’t a chance to actually sit down and tell and develop a single story like there is for manga
That’s oddly about the time I started to become disenchanted with most contemporary cinema. Both parents worked in the Industry, dad was a voting member of the Academy for many years. The Oscars were–no exaggeration–the Holiest night on our family calendar. I even got to attend in person once. (The one where Benigni climbed up on the furniture–'99.)
Then THE ARTIST won best picture (2011). 🤦♂️
I stopped watching the Oscars completely about 5 years ago. The only enthusiasm I can muster anymore is new films by old masters (PTA, Scorsese, Tarantino, etc.)
Different times. When I was growing up, a sex scene in a movie might be one of very few opportunities where you got to see a pair of boobs, unless you could get someone to buy you a porno magazine or VHS tape. These days, there are probably millions of options in this area, instantly accessible. And Hollywood-produced nude/sex scenes are all going to be fake and cringy in comparison.
I’d personally prefer that if they aren’t allowed to show it they not bother. All this does is make watching with family uncomfortable or possibly if your aware of the scene beforehand prevent watching it with family at all.
Assuming i’m not trying to watch it with family I prefer my content uncensored, like they can say fuck if they want to or fuck if they want or actually be seen nude after a shower instead being censored in some form.
Even when I am watching things with family i’d prefer they just not did things they’d have to censor than taint it with censorship.
Gen Z have an inability to engage with challenging adult material. They have been groomed by Marvel to just watch children’s material for their entire lives.
Sex is normal and healthy. Not every scene in everything serves to advance plot, scenes can flesh out character relationships and scenes can just be plain fun to watch.
We have an entire generation of people who are basing all of their knowledge of sex with porn. This leads them to believe that all intimacy is shameful and pornographic. It’s leading to a revival of puritanical conservative values in a generation who brands themselves as progressive despite having a habit of wanting everything they personally are challenged by to be censored. Whether that be views on social media, famous individuals they disagree with or even the art we consume.
Do yourself a favour and watch some high class cinema that has good sex scenes. Watch some David Lynch instead of Iron Man or Hunger Games.
I grew up during the time when sex scenes on HBO and Cinemax were the closest thing to porn on tv. I can’t think of a worse sex scene than The Specialist, with Sly Stallone. It was silly and unnecessary. I even found it weird as a teen. That says a lot. There were many scenes like this in many films.
You can include sex without dramatizing / showcasing it. I don’t blame young people for finding these old tropes to be a digression. See my other comment about sex in The Sopranos to confirm that I’m not anti-sex in media.
It’s far lamer to shoehorn in a long sex scene that doesn’t make sense. See sex in Sopranos, as I mentioned. It’s not overdone. It happens and we move on.
To me they just sound exactly like the conservatives in days gone past, outraged at the prospect of sexual content. Media is better when people let creatives do their thing and people stop worrying about every damn thing being done “correctly” I.e following their formula or prescription.
With the amount of choice we have now, why anybody chooses to watch things they don’t want to consume to then complain about it online is absolutely beyond me.
What a load of elitist bullshit. Being progressive does not mean one likes watching random people having sex, especially if it doesn’t fit the tone of the move/show and especially especially if it’s horribly directed, as they usually are.
It used to be the bible bashing conservatives who complained about sex and violence on television. Now it’s the young people who pride themselves on being progressives, when in reality they lose their shit when anybody says or does anything they don’t personally agree with in much the same way. They aren’t progressive, they’re extremely intolerant and want to push their opinions on everyone else. I can’t wait for culture to inevitably swing back round in backlash and for people to stop giving a fuck like in the 90s.
This is exactly the problem right here. We have a generation of people that think sex is just about getting themselves off and nothing deeper or more meaningful than that. Just a bodily function with one purpose, disposable and void of meaning.
Your comment is typical of a subset of progressives that have no acceptance for people who do not share the same values as them. Dare I say, that is not very progressive of you? What is wrong with having “puritanical conservative values” when it comes to relationships? Must one forcibly engage in orgies with strangers to be a “proper” progressive?
I just don’t think defining yourself in opposition to everything makes you a progressive. I’m clearly on the libertarian end of the axis here. I’m not the one advocating for art to only be done in a specific way that caters to my personal sensibilities and weirdness over sex.
Fuck that noise, I just don’t think we need smooching, sex and all that shit in every goddamn movie. Shit’s not needed, breaks the flow and is basically there only because everyone else does that. Fuck that noise. And no, these scenes do fuck all in most movies to fleshing out character, quite often they actually make it more shallow by being either uncharacteristic or feeling shoed in, dammit.
And if anything, from what I see around people are hella more open about sex. Thanks to overabundance of porn and all, sex became normalized. At least a lot more than when I was a child.
Being from a generation that was exposed to porn early doesn’t make you more open with sex. It makes you have a warped relationship with sex, to the point where you find smooching disgusting.
It’s really not in every goddamn movie for starters and when it is it’s extremely toned down: no penetration, no vulva, no boners.
The biggest movies of this year had basically no sex bar Oppenheimer. Barbie, Guardians of the Galaxy, Avatar. Culture is already tame as hell and antiseptic compared to the past I literally don’t even understand where the criticism is coming from.
I have a standing wager with my friends that there has never been a filmed or written sex scene that needed to be included in the media. Talk about it, allude to it, show the ramifications of it, but there has never been one that needed to be there. Sex scenes are there to sell TnA, not to move the plot forward.
For an example of a close call. In A History of Violence, Viggo rapes his wife. This is about as close as you could come to a needed scene because it shows a wild character development, but if you were to cut the scene out entirely, you’d still get all of the character development that he gets from the scene, anyway, rendering it useless.
This seems unlikely considering the massive number of popular teen romance shows happening, such as Heartstopper. It's just that any sex scenes need to have actual depth behind them when they happen, not just random sex out of nowhere.
Yeah I wouldn’t even agree with the depth, it’s not like all the braindead yet-another-american-high-school-dramas with no substance ever went anywhere, no plot, no nothing, just the same regurgitated melodrama and idiocy dressed for yet another generation. Even shows that would be actually great apparently need to have some bullshit drama and gratuitous sex in it for absolutely no reason at all.
I’d be a sucker for meaningful queer sex and romance that actually looks and feels as it does in real life. I just rarely even really relate to the on-screen happenings for most.
Or, hell, even some good and sensual BDSM type play would be probably very welcome. I don’t know if I’ve seen any of that yet.
There’s some BDSM dom/sub kinda stuff in Billions. At least in the first few season, tapered off in the later seasons because of story developments. But it even had a place in the story since the character was a public figure and didn’t want it to be public knowledge.
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