Yeah, but for some reason we’re more puritanical about male nudity than female. Do I wanna see Tom Cruise full frontal in a movie? No. Do I think that movie should be rated diffirently than one with, say Heather Graham in full frontal? No.
For the most part I think nudity in (non-porn) films to be gratuitous - that is, I don’t think it’s necessary for the audience to see the actors’ private parts to carry the message of the film and it is virtually always a distraction (at least, to me). Don’t get me wrong, I often enjoy the gratuitous nudity for its own sake.
I just want to comment on one case I remember where the audience’s view of a naked woman actually carried the impact that was needed. In The Devil’s Advocate, when Al Pacino as Satan offered Charlise Theron to Keanu Reeves, the difficulty of turning down the offer was inescapable (at least for guys). Now that I think of it, when Melanie Griffin showed her breasts to Paul Newman in Nobody’s Fool, it served a similar purpose.
Usually, though, it is just there to put asses in the seats (mine included.)
My favorite challenge I have ever received in the Kevin Bacon game was Harvey Keitel’s penis WITHOUT going through Harvey Keitel. Funny what Beer can do to the imagination!
And my opinion on gratuitous nudity can be summed up by the creator of Dream On: “Some people say we use gratuitous nudity. SURE WE DO! What’s wrong with THAT?!?”
Technically, everything is a movie is gratuitous. Movies are totally artificial worlds. Everything in them is at the whim of the director. All the words, all the sets, all the images, all that the actors do. All can be changed. A different director would produce a film with every element changed, subtly or completely.
So even saying that nudity is non-gratuitous when it is there to “move the plot along, establish character personality or motives, or lend accuracy to the film” as ratty said cogently, is a matter of the director’s whim that could go either way. Obviously, movies went along fine for many, many years before nudity was at all permissible.
I see nudity as just one of a hundred elements of a movie that can work or not work, jar me out of the illusion or enhance the beauty, create a mood or destroy it. You might as well talk about gratuitous accents, gratuitous wigs, or gratuitous stupidity, the last of which bothers me far, far, far more than nudity ever does.
Sorry to nitpick (and be slightly OT) but if you’re talking about the scene I think you’re talking about (i.e., the one towards the end of the movie when Satan lays out his grand plan to Keanu), I believe the actress there was Connie Nielsen not Charlize Theron.
If I’m wrong, correct me.
NDP,
I could be wrong. Guess I’ll have to watch it again. I guess I’ll make the sacrifice in the name of art.