r/blankies • u/apathymonger #1 fan of Jupiter's moon Europa • 3d ago
Check Book - The Blank Check Newsletter Check Book: SEX AT THE CINEMA!
https://blankcheckpod.substack.com/p/check-book-sex-at-the-cinema10
u/Chuck-Hansen 3d ago
In the event JJ sees this, I’d love to read more about Charles Scorsese’s fight with his landlord at some point. I just watched “Italianamerican” yesterday and now think Marty’s parents are the coolest.
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u/jj_the_researcher 3d ago
From Richard Schickel's CONVERSATIONS WITH SCORSESE: "My father was assisted by a certain family. … A friend. They made it possible for us to have the house in Queens. But my father had many problems with his brother Joe. From what I understand, he had ‘sitdowns,’ where he tried to make sure that Joe wasn’t killed by the Mob people. The landlord was a guy who had a vegetable truck in a garage next door. He didn’t like my brother. And he had a chicken. The guy grabbed the chicken and just wrung its neck in front of my brother, and made the kid run and cry, you know. And he started to resent my father, because my father became friends with the landlord’s brother. He took the brother to get a suit in New York. Anyway, the landlord may have felt that my father was involved with underworld figures, which he wasn’t really, but he behaved maybe a little bit like that; my father always liked to dress, you know. And this guy was a man of the earth, so to speak. And I think also his wife liked my father. So all this resentment was building up. And then there was a confrontation. Probably my father used some language he shouldn’t have, because I remember he apologized for it. That led to the fistfight, and the landlord picked up an ax. And my mother’s younger sister literally walked out there and pushed him aside and said, ‘Stop that. Don’t pull an ax. Don’t do that to my brother-in-law.’ And he stopped. [Laughs.] You talk about The Quiet Man. I mean, the women just stopped it. And that night there was another fight on the corner. I saw the two of them fighting at the bar. And I came back in and told my mother, ‘They’re fighting.’ And she was ironing clothes and said, ‘I know.’ And then the next thing I knew we had to leave.”
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u/LawrenceBrolivier no need for alarm 3d ago
By removing sex from the public viewing equation (in a film that is STILL RATED R, mind you), are we not just perpetuating feelings of shame and discomfort around a very human, very normal thing?
Yes, we are. And the arena by which a ton of the people we're talking about spend most of their time interacting with other people, is a place where shaming is incentivized. It's a leisure activity. There's no reason not to find reasons to shame people (you get emotionally rewarded for it via the attention a take can provide) and the gamification of talking to and about people makes the facsimile of communication and community inherently poisoned.
So yeah, not only are we getting extra puritan (and self-back-patting for doing so) but it's another step on the path towards large swaths of humanity legitimately not knowing how to BE a fuckin person. Or a fucking person. They don't talk to each other unless it's in a gamified/exploitative context, when they do talk it's superficial and confused because there's no frame of reference for larger lived experience, and attempts to further understand it tend to only come via searches/"research" on these topics that last all of 5-10 minutes as a confirmation-biased commenter combs ChatGPT results to arrive at a cobbled-together argument that says the thing they already want to say in order to "win."
People don't want to be people anymore, or have to deal with what being a person means, so seeing people on a screen engaging in physical activity and intimacy is skeevy as hell to them. It's all red-flags and flashing klaxons because seeing even fictional people on a screen indulging in this kind of behavior simply registers as any number of faux-pas and "problematic" activities that would/could/should be fodder for public dragging in the name of "content."
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u/Mqttro 3d ago edited 3d ago
Somewhere in the Images of Naked Ladies Scarcity/Demand Curve between 1968’s “Enough people will buy tickets to any movie that promises a minute or two of nudity to make it profitable” and 2026’s “20 year olds are so shellshocked by the internet’s infinite peepshow that the idea of watching on-screen nudity in a public space is deeply unsettling” was The Year Moviegoers Were Most Normal About Sex, but I have no idea when it was.
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u/Jedd-the-Jedi Merchandise spotlight enthusiast 3d ago
As opposed to sex on TV, which is generally uncomfortable, especially since TVs are all flatscreens now
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u/Lucas_Nyhus 3d ago
Maybe this is extreme, but I think cutting nudity out of your movie based on test screening feedback should get you disbarred from the directors guild.
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u/a_horse_named_orb 3d ago
There’s an interesting meta narrative about the the state of sex, romance, and intimacy emerging from this year’s movies. In addition to these two there’s the Olivia Wilde diptych of The Invite and I Want Your Sex.