A Perfectly Cromulent Blog

"Ever seen a grown man naked?"

Cross-posted from Blog 9, so sue me...

Sure you have. We're all pretty much adults here, well-versed in human anatomy and all 17 volumes of "Truly Tasteless Jokes," right? In that case, I wish y'all had been in last night's screening of Eastern Promises, the new movie from David Cronenberg.

My review will be up at Film Threat tomorrow, but in a nutshell, Viggo Mortensen plays an up and coming Russian mobster who becomes acquainted with midwife Naomi Watts, who is trying to decipher the diary of a Russian girl who died in childbirth.

None of that is important for purposes of this entry. I'm more concerned with the climactic fight scene, in which Viggo takes on two hitmen in a bathhouse...while naked. It's a daring performance for our beloved Aragorn, especially when you consider the amount of full frontal we get. Given the number of chuckles in the audience during that sequence, however, you'd think these people had never seen male genitalia.

Male frontal nudity is still pretty rare in the movies, but not so isolated we should feel the need to titter behind our palms like 3rd graders revery time it shows up on screen. So while you're avoiding work by reading this, I thought I'd take a look at some of the more memorable instances of movie meat:

The Deer Hunter - My parents can be credited for allowing me to watch more than my fair share of R-rated movies as a youngster (or at least not noticing me hiding under the couch). The down side being, I only really recall those scenes most likely to scar me for life. To wit, I remember Christopher Walken's big send-off ("Di di mao!"), and Robert De Niro nakedly running down the streets of his hometown, the first scene of its kind I can recall seeing in a movie. In a blow to the Jack Thompsons of the world, I managed to avoid committing either act during my tempestuous youth.

Life of Brian - I was either in 8th or 9th grade when some friends and I went to see this. Sure, the scene where Brian (Graham Chapman) throws open his window and exposes himself to the assembled masses of Judea was played for laughs, but it also had the unintentional side effect of making all us junior high guys in the audience at Texas A&M's Memorial Student Center stare uncomfortably at our shoes for the next ten minutes.

Bad Lieutenant/The Piano - Harvey Keitel, bless his heart, never shied away from treating audiences to uncomfortably protracted shots of his junk. He gets bonus points for baring all in critically acclaimed films, making the instances "meaningful" instead of merely "gratuitous."

Trainspotting/Velvet Goldmine/Young Adam - And then came Ewan McGregor, the one mainstream actor who makes Keitel look positively bashful. McGregor's scenes tended to be naturalistic and/or sensitive, compared to Keitel, who usually stuck with menacing and/or menacing. Thankfully, he restrained himself in the Star Wars prequels.

Though it would've given "Look at the size of that thing" new and exciting context.

The Crying Game - I freely admit, I didn't see it coming. I saw this on a date, and she found it endlessly hilarious that I remained oblivious to Jaye Davidson's pronounced Adam's apple and man-hands until the famous "Boy howdy" scene. Director Neil Jordan took a pretty decent political story and threw us a groovy curveball to boot, and I still haven't forgiven him for ruining my chances of scoring that night.

The Silence of the Lambs - "The tuck," as performed by Jame "Buffalo Bill" Gumb, provoked equal measures of horror and fascination in male audience members (hur hur) across the nation. Until they got the chance to go home and try it themselves, that is. Come on, show of hands, which of you guys went home and gave it a go in front of the mirror? That's what I thought.

Freaks.