What you can fellate and what you can't fellate

I watched Spring Breakers for the third time last night.

Informally, I believe this is the soonest after its release date I've seen a movie three times since I saw Pulp Fiction four times in the theater. That would be -- gasp -- 20 years ago now.

It's not the soonest I've seen a movie for the third time after the first time I saw it -- that would be Ruby Sparks, which I saw for the third time in just under 14 months back in February. My Spring Breakers viewing last night would make the third time in just over 14 months, dating back to its theatrical run. However, Ruby Sparks actually came out about five months before I saw it, so there's a slight (through probably meaningless) distinction there.

Either way, it confirms something I already knew -- I really like this movie.

And whenever you rewatch movies you really like, you are bound to come at them from slightly new angles, and to think about slightly new things.

There will be some spoilers from here on out -- not only about Spring Breakers, but also about Killer Joe -- so beware.

If you understood the previous spoiler alert -- and the title of this post -- you know where I'm going with this. Yes, I focused on the scene where Vanessa Hudgens and Ashley Benson force-feed James Franco the barrels of two guns.

At first it seems as though Franco is an unwitting victim to this incident of sexualized humiliation, and I feel pretty sure that Vanessa and Ashley were kind of playing it by ear on their actual intentions with him -- after all, there's a room full of money and guns at their finger tips, and we've already seen what they're willing to do for money. But then Franco kind of empowers himself in the scenario by actively beginning to fellate one of the barrels -- wrapping his lips around it and sucking it dry, as it were. Then the girls crack a smile and the tension is defused. Moments later, Alien tells the girls (I had to look up their actual character names, which are Candy and Brit) that they are his soul mates.

The movie got an R rating, despite this rather graphic scene.

Not all movies that feature a scene of enforced simulated fellatio are quite so lucky. Take William Friedkin's Killer Joe. Another scuzzy modern classic featuring white trash "gangster life," so to speak, Killer Joe has a lot to recommend it -- a captivating lead performance by Matthew McConaughey, terrific supporting performances and a hilarious sense of black humor. It also has a gonzo final scene, which includes -- famously -- a scene where McConaughey forces Gina Gershon to give a blow job to a chicken drumstick.

NC-17 on that one. The appeal of the rating was rejected, so instead of getting rid of the scene that everyone would be talking about, they just released it that way.

The initial instinct would be to make some comment about how the MPAA always cares more about sex than violence when issuing ratings, which was a main contention of Kirby Dick's film This Film Is Not Yet Rated. It's no surprise, this perspective would argue, that the scene with the gun caused them less objection. Then you might surmise that the chicken leg is somehow more off-putting, as it is made of organic material while the gun is just metal.

Of course, these surface-level readings would both be quite incorrect. Both are violent scenes, actually, but only Killer Joe features the scene where a) it is quite clearly not consensual, and b) it's a man committing an act of violence against a woman. That's the trump card ... as well it should be.

In doing a little research for this post I discovered that Samantha (Kim Cattrall) fellates a hookah pipe in Sex and the City 2, but that obviously makes it in as an R because a) it's fully voluntary, and b) Samantha is about the most ribald character ever committed to the big or small screen.

The one certified, definite no-no among fellatible objects: the penis. You can't have a discussion like this without referencing The Brown Bunny, Vincent Gallo's scandalous film in which Chloe Sevigny actually sucks his penis on camera. No fakery, no implied mouth-to-penis action -- an actual blow job. That one never had a chance at an R.

There must be some prominent examples I'm missing ... let me know about them in the comments.

When Bigger might actually be better

Although I watched the last few seasons of Sex and the City, and only started to get fed up with it near the end, I didn't see the movie until a couple weeks ago, almost two years after its release.

I might have seen it sooner had I not been daunted by the 145-minute running time. But I was also daunted by expecting it to suck.

And suck it did -- at least I thought so. Or maybe more accurately, it was protracted and boring, and I found the characters unsympathetic. It's funny, because the rules are different for a movie and a TV show. On a TV show, the characters' tunnel-vision materialism can seem charming. But in a movie, they have the burden of being Protagonists with a capital P, so their motivations need to be deeper, their actions more magnanimous, than the ongoing pursuit of the perfect pair of Gucci high heels. (For the purposes of this argument, I am going to assume Gucci makes shoes, though I really have no idea).

Sex and the City, the movie, actually went for magnanimity in a way that I found laughable, insulting and almost racist. Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) hires a black assistant, Louise, played by Oscar-winner Jennifer Hudson. When we meet Louise, she has a designer handbag that she's renting because she can't afford it. So even though she's sophisticated enough to assist fashion maven Carrie Bradshaw, she's ghetto enough to put her bag on the equivalent of layaway? Carrie's decision to hire Louise is supposed to make her look super enlightened, like she either doesn't see race or believes firmly in affirmative action. But the power dynamics in their relationship are pretty gross -- and when Louise returns home to St. Louis to pursue love, Carrie gifts her a real Dolce & Gabbana handbag, which creates this unfortunate "Oh thank you massa!" moment between them.

But I didn't mean to write about race today. No, the real problem with the Sex and the City movie is that it played like an entire season crammed into one 2 hour and 20 minute movie. Each character followed the kind of plot arc that they would normally follow during a typical season of the show, and given that agenda, you could say it was a miracle they fit it into 145 minutes. But that also left the movie feeling very small and workaday, with only one plot point (Carrie and Mr. Big potentially getting married) to raise it above the level of mere TV show.

And this is where Sex and the City 2, which comes out today, may actually have the chance to be better than the original, by being bigger.

A couple weeks ago I shared my concern about the potential for bombastic excess in Iron Man 2, cautioning against the bigger-is-better approach to sequels. But I guess it depends what kind of bigger you're going for. By making this movie bigger than TV, the Sex and the City girls could have me interested again.

In this case, "bigger" means "taking a trip to Morocco."

What may seem like a gimmick is actually a stroke of genius -- take the sex out of the city. That's what a movie version of a TV show should be all about -- expanding the universe of the show and giving us things we haven't seen before. Creating new stimuli to bring out the essential prissiness in Charlotte, the essential sarcasm in Miranda, the essential romanticism in Carrie, and the essential horniness in Samantha.

I haven't read a plot synopsis for Sex and the City 2 -- maybe because I worried it would damage the thesis of this post -- but if the entire movie, give or take a few establishing scenes, takes place in Morocco, I can think of nothing better for the potential fortunes of this potential franchise. Of course, it gives me pause that Sarah Jessica Parker famously sniped that they should never have made a second movie, and I doubt there will be a third. But if they do in fact stick to the Morocco setting, at least the second movie will be a respectable way to go out.

The ideal way I envision it is that it's a week-long trip to Morocco (this much I've gathered from the ads), and that each character's plot arc is something that can be resolved in Morocco itself, even if it may involve phone calls to loved ones back in New York. Make the whole movie one giant travelogue, set in the always-epic cinematic location of the desert, and give each character something Moroccan to keep them occupied for two hours (at least they've shaved 25 minutes off the running time). It will feel both big and appropriately cinematic, which are probably one in the same thing, and it will feel nothing like a TV season on fast forward.

My worry, of course, is that they will spend about as much time in Morocco as they spent in Mexico for Carrie's abortive honeymoon in the first film -- about 15 minutes of screen time. And that will mean they've learned nothing from the criticisms directed at the original.

There's a second way that I hope Sex and the City 2 will be Bigger. You probably noticed that I capitalized the B in Bigger in my title for this post, and, knowing that I'm not someone prone to random capitalizations, you probably assumed I meant something by it. Indeed I did.

Simply put, I hope to see more of Mr. Big (Chris Noth) in this movie. Although he plays a crucial role in the first film's plot, he also disappears for huge stretches of time. And what can I say -- I just find this man extremely debonair. He's clearly a supporting character in the Sex and the City universe, but a viewer -- especially a guy like me -- needs a little diversion from all the talk of shoes and adoptions and pregnancies and orgasms.

However, I've heard some scuttlebutt that Aidan (John Corbett) is the only male character who makes it to Morocco, which means either one or the other of my hopes for the movie will be dashed: Either not very long in Morocco, or not very much Mr. Big, especially since Aidan is Mr. Big's rival for Carrie's affections.

Oh well. What can I expect from a brand name that long ago crossed over from charming me to irritating me?