The big reveal in Angels & Insects was surprising less for the cuckolding, than for who was doing it, and his relationship to the wife. It was a… ballsy scene, though. Props to Douglas Henshaw and all actors (and especially the male actors!) who do full-frontal shots.
I think there was a brief snippet of Emma Thompson getting shagged, doggy-style, in Carrington, and I don’t think it featured real nudity. The sex scene wasn’t a complete surprise, though… these were the Bloomsbury bohemians, after all. (I’ll have to give that one another viewing.)
The characters in **Howard’s End ** certainly could’ve benefitted from more affairs, but that’s largely the point of the story.
To cite another Merchant/Ivory/Jhabvala film, A Room With a View, although it was telegraphed by an earlier conversation, when Rupert Graves says to Julian Sands [paraphrasing] “very nice to meet you; care to have a bathe?,” I must confess that some of the specifics of the scene to follow were a delightful surprise.
And then there’s the libertine character (the character who had been discovered by Fellini) in **Under a Tuscan Sun ** – almost everything she does is shocking, at least to Diane Lane’s recovering divorcee.
This is a bit of a hijack, but I thought of one scene that was shocking because there wasn’t enough nudity: one of the what-the-hell-was-that bits in Kubrick’s The Shining, in which Danny hallucinates some sort of encounter between, IIRC, a dude in a tux and someone in a furry outfit in one of the hotel rooms. (NB: I’ve only seen this movie in edited-for-content form on basic cable, so there may have been more to this scene in the original theatrical release.) I didn’t really understand what that was about until I saw the “furries subculture” episode of the original CSI, many years later (and it was shocking to the CSI team, too).
As soon as I saw the thread title, I thought “Harvey Keitel” but stroking off in “Bad Leiutenant”… The fact that I (unknowingly) saw both that and The Piano in the same weekend still remains one of my darker moments…
Brad Pitt and Julia Ormond in Legends of the Fall.
The scene itself wasn’t exactly unexpected - they’d been working towards it for half the movie. But, in the middle of this tender love scene, to suddenly cut to a shot of…
Brad doin’ her doggy style!
…was so unexpected that I laughed out loud. It was just surreal. :D:D:D
I’m glad you got a surprise out of it, I knew about the scene long before I saw Swordfish on cable, because the amount of money Berry was paid to flash her breasts was part of the promotional hoopla surrounding the release of the film.
In the same way, Julie Andrews’ breast exposure in S.O.B. was part of the promotional hoopla surrounding that film. Come to think of it, I’m surprised no one has mentioned it.
I wasn’t prepared for the puppet sex scene and I knew what I was watching. It just went on and on and on and got more and more hentai-like. I figure it was a parody lampooning the general vanilla-ness and modesty of the “raunchy R-rated sex scenes” to be found in most action adventure movies. That, or the South Park guys just wanted to see how far they could push the envelope.
That’s just what I was thinking about when I started the thread, something that creates one of those WTF moments, as in, “What the fuck was THAT all about?”
Interesting choice. In this case, it wasn’t surprising that we saw the character nude – but what was revealed was surprising. Or would have been, if it had been possible to see the goddamn movie without people spoiling it for me first.
In Short Cuts, the married couple played by Matthew Modine and Julianne Moore are having a major argument while preparing for guests to show up. She spills wine on her skirt and takes it off for a quick rinse-and-iron. She isn’t wearing panties (natural redhead, by the way), and continues to iron bottomless while they continue their fight. You could call it gratuitous, but it seemed to me like a good way of showing the intimacy that married people can have, even when they’re both mad as hell.
I was rather surprised by the scene of people having orgasms in the movie Amelie. Rewatching it on YouTube (you can find anything there, can’t you?), I suppose it’s not that graphic, but it was a shock at the time.
A bit of surprise nudity in one I watched this weekend, The Last King of Scotland. I fully expected and was not surprised by the bits of T&A during the sex scenes, but I was a bit surprised at the scene in which the (male) Scottish doctor does some full frontal in front of Idi Amin.
That’s what I came here to mention. Not that it was much unexpected given the character, but lord doesn’t Harvey Keitel seem to have a thing for full frontal nuduity?
You’re right. I’m against movie censorship in principle, but I know a lot of people who would really enjoy Amelie were it not for that very brief scene. Seems gratuitous, given the tone and content of the rest of the movie. So I don’t recommend it to some (older, conservative folks and younger teens).
