![]() ![]() ![]() The film is Say Anything …, directed by Cameron Crowe and stars John Cusack as Lloyd Dobler, the boy. Now, let’s jump in the wayback machine and head to 1989, to a film that, at the time, was earning high praise for tweaking the teen sex romp and turning it into a genuinely moving story of a boy coming of age. It’s aggressive, fits perfectly within the rules of the story, and as such, feels very organic, even with the nudity and softcore sexual nature of what we see on screen. She’s not really all that interested at first, committed to a number of other things, but sensing something honest about him, relents a bit and in a rather ‘oh boy, this is happening’ moment, brings him to her house, strips naked, and invites him to have sex with her, which he promptly does. He awkwardly tries to get her attention, even playing the ukulele in class to serenade her in a classic movie grand gesture trope. Oddly, it works, flipping expectations and allowing these young women to be completely natural, even if our old-time movie sensibilities have us feeling a little on edge.Įither way, in the film, which is dominated by the four female leads, there is a male character named Noah played by Alex Wolff, a kind of stringy, nebbish, Jewish boy with a massive crush on Lily ( Lucy Hale), one of the girls. Thing is, it’s wickedly raw and unabashedly in your face with the four girls at the heart of it all seemingly under no restrictions to just outright be as raucous and graphic as you can imagine. It’s a girl-centered movie about a group of high school students growing up a bit while dealing with a devastating loss. I recently reviewed a new film on Netflix called Dude. So, with that in mind, let’s do so and see how two very different stories in two very different decades took to showing young people – to borrow a phrase from even further back – getting it on. Picking two from the lot and comparing them is, of course, sort of reductionary, and yet, it’s also important to take a look at the evolution of where sex in the movies has come from and where it’s going. High School sex in movies is far from a new thing, with the 80s building an entire genre around it, from the raunchy ‘gotta get laid’ Porky’s franchise to the more sentimentally-themed John Hughes films, each paving a path through cinema that has had its fair share of influence. Dude and Say Anything are teen romance dramas from very different times and directions, that both share an important moment in sexuality. ![]()
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