Shame, a candid and powerful look at sexual addiction from director Steve McQueen (no, another Steve McQueen) is out in limited release tomorrow, and as we reported last month, it’s going out with the NC-17 rating—no children under 17 admitted, under any circumstances. The rating, many have surmised, is due to the film’s copious male nudity, and that’s how the American ratings system works: all the naked ladies you want, but the erect male member= automatic NC-17.

The rating was initiated by the MPAA back in 1990, and was intended to be an alternative to the porn-stained (if you’ll pardon the pun) X rating; NC-17 movies, like Henry & June (the inaugural film to carry the rating), Bad Lieutenant, The Dreamers, and Lust, Caution would be for adults, by adults. But it quickly became the kiss of death for filmmakers and distributors. Just as with the X rating before it, newspapers and television outlets wouldn’t carry ads for NC-17 films, while larger theatrical chains and home video outlets refused to carry them. Smaller films would take the mark or (as Kids and Happiness did) go out unrated, while the editing process for big releases became something of a con game: if a film was rated NC-17, the distributor would make the trims necessary for an R-rating, enjoy the publicity, and then restore the cut material for the inevitable “unrated” DVD release (frequently carried by the very chains that refused to stock NC-17 films). By the late 1990s, studios wouldn’t even bother with the first step, cranking out unrated versions of raunchy comedies and adult thrillers as a standard step in their home video release plans.

While the politics of who gets an R and who doesn’t are shady at best (check out the terrific documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated), we can’t help but wonder about what would have happened if the NC-17 could have been what its creators wanted it to be. Fox Searchlight’s decision to release Shame with the scarlet letters/numbers has prompted another round of “will the NC-17 finally become respectable?” questions (answer: dubious), but what if that question weren’t necessary, because the NC-17 had never been stigmatized? Had that been the case, we might have seen the uncut movies we’ve assembled after the jump. Read More »

If you flipped to FX last Thursday night, the TV screen probably looked more like TLC’s Toddlers & Tiaras than It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. The episode, appropriately titled, “Frank Reynolds’ Little Beauties,” saw Danny DeVito’s attempts to host a children’s beauty pageant without appearing like a pedophile. As per usual, all hell broke loose and the Paddy’s gang came out on the bottom, but not before Sweet Dee relived her childhood beauty queen dreams. To continue this Always Sunny trend of pageantry reminiscence, we’ve gathered some celebrities with real-life pasts of sashes and crowns. Check ‘em out after the jump.

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Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 film Don’t Look Now is an intense and effective psychological thriller, acclaimed at the time of its release and only more respected with with each passing year. It has also been the topic of a long-standing controversy: a key sex sequence between stars Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie was rumored to be, well, not quite simulated.

At long last, we’ve got a credible source confirming the story: Peter Bart, the Variety editor and film commentator, was a Paramount executive during the film’s production, and claims in his new book, Infamous Players: A Tale of Movies, the Mob, (and Sex), that he visited the set on the day that the scene in question was shot. While watching, he writes, “it was clear to me they were no longer simply acting: they were fucking on camera.” Sutherland has denied the writer’s claim, but if Bart is telling the truth, then Don’t Look Now would presumably mark the first occasion of unsimulated sexual intercourse in a mainstream motion picture. With that belated honor bestowed, let’s take a NSFW look at some of the other boundary-breaking sex scenes of cinema.

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To say that Lydia Millet’s first book of short stories (after six novels) is merely a tome about human and animal relationships would be a blatant understatement — too Cesar’s Way. In Love in Infant Monkeys, the animal and human (er, superhuman, in the case of Madonna in the opening story, “Sexing the Pheasant”) hierarchy is leveled, with each influencing the other’s life, decisions, and emotions. You meet David Hasselhoff’s dog, the elephant that Thomas Edison electrocuted, and a ferocious Komodo dragon that an Indonesian billionaire bought for Sharon Stone.

After the jump, Millet discusses why she saw Noam Chomsky at the dump, which animal humans resemble the most, and what she’d like to do to a baby spider. Read More »