Sexy Sexy Movie Sex

We’ve been running Blue is the Warmest Colo[u]r since Friday, and I’ve been keeping track of the number of people who walk out of it before the end. I put up a tally on my Facebook frequently and as of this post, we’ll have seven people who have walked out. It may not seem like much, but given the amount of people who’ve come to see the movie, it’s more than you might reckon.

Most of our clientele are older, retired types. They’ve comprised about half of the makeup of those who have seen the movie. The other half? Hip twentysomethings keen on seeing a foreign flick with some provocative imagery. None of the younger folks have walked out. All of our walkouts have been from the older crowd, which isn’t totally surprising. Those walkouts who chose to comment on their way out zeroed in on the racy bits, one man even offering up, “That is some of the most graphic sex I’ve seen in a movie.” And it may be, assuming the man has never viewed pornography.

I understand his subtext. He meant, “in a mainstream movie.” And I’m sure it’s true. It probably is the most graphic sex he’s seen in a movie. I didn’t have heart to tell him about Lars von Trier’s next effort, Nymphomaniac. But what about the rest of Blue?

The walkouts seem to occur about halfway through the movie. I confess, I’ve only seen snippets from when I peek through the glass from the projection booth. One sequence I can see giving cause for alarm occurs around this time, and it’s understandable that folks would become upset by it. In the realm of non-X-rated material, the scene in question is borderline outrageous. The positioning of the two female leads looks like something pulled from a scene in lesbian porn. Not porn for lesbians, per se, but porn involving lesbians. There’s already a running dialogue about the depiction of girl-on-girl relations on this film to which I have little to add. But what I hope to get to is why so many people would come to a movie just to walk out halfway through.

I’ll grant you the fact that the movie is 180 minutes. A couple older patrons have told us that they might have to walk out halfway through simply because they’re not sure if they can sit through 180 minutes of film, regardless of how engaging or revolting it might be. They stuck through it. But of the walkouts we’ve had, none suggest a weak constitution in the customer.

I’ll always remember my first: our first walkout looked noticeably disturbed. I was thrown off by the quick exit--there was still another 90 minutes to go of the movie. But out walks an older gentleman, wide-eyed and determined to increase the distance between him and the theater. I called out, “Have a good day,” to which he made no discernable vocal response, just a bewildered look in my direction. I turned to a coworker, bemused.

I don’t mean to mock the man. He did not have the Internet in his youth to prepare him for the horrors of the modern era. But look on his face suggested he saw something far worse than the passions of two young French women. It could have been the blue hair of one of the actresses. Or it could’ve been the unrelenting display of reverse cowgirl scissoring.

The man could’ve come in with prejudices towards homosexuality in general. Maybe not to the degree of blaming the destruction of Washington, IL, on the legalization of gay marriage in that state, but perhaps to that of viewing the gays as icky. I will not begrudge him his opinion. But what drew him to the film in the first place? It couldn’t have been the talk of sex. Sex is in all sorts of movies. The synopsis itself sounds bland: “Adele's life is changed when she meets Emma, a young woman with blue hair, who will allow her to discover desire, to assert herself as a woman and as an adult. In front of others, Adele grows, seeks herself, loses herself, finds herself.”

Critics love it, though. The film earned the coveted Palme d’Or of the Cannes Film Festival. It may be as great as critics would have you believe, though I can’t weigh in since what little I’ve seen of the movie might as well have been a clip on a porn streaming site. Critical acclaim and coverage in such periodicals as The New York Times is going to get a movie a lot of attention. Are these people putting in so much stock into the opinions of the critics that they’ll subject themselves to that which they may not be ready for? Possibly. Though surely the reviews these people read did not gloss over the dirty bits. Reviewers have a responsibility to their readers to let people know why this film may or may not be for them. There may be the few that make their decisions based solely on the arbitrary numbers--5/5, 90%--but I’d like to believe it’s a tiny few.

But then there’s that powerful force called morbid curiosity. Entire websites are built on morbid curiosity. For some, there is a will to be shocked to the point of desensitization. If you want to see how effective a drone strike is, you can easily Google it and bear witness to scenes of destruction and slaughter. Not all who seek such imagery are sociopaths (though there must be plenty), but they all have to share that kernel of morbid curiosity to push them forward, to expend that bit of effort to see something that will disgust them.

Only one walkout looked truly disgusted: the first. Another stifled back his shock and sat in our lobby reading the paper while his wife watched the remainder of the movie. Two older couples made their exit while expressing how flabbergasted they were at how far the film dared to go. Interestingly enough, the most vocal or noticeably frazzled walkouts have been male. Could they be disturbed that two women didn’t have men in their romantic lives? God, I hope not.

I myself have never walked out of a movie. I don’t know if that’s a badge of pride or a mark of stubbornness. Given the motherlode of information on the Internet about every film that comes out, it’s easy for me to gauge whether I want to see it. Even when a movie has completely lost me, I’ll remain seated until the credits roll because I’ve paid the same amount of money to sit in a dark room with strangers for a couple hours that I could spend for a decent meal at a fast-casual restaurant. Of course, that could change if I saw something that was so horrifying that my best course of action would be to make a quick getaway. But I’ve never been blindsided by anything of the sort in a movie.

But not all of the older people who saw the film were walkouts. As I mentioned earlier, one elderly woman whose arthritis could’ve prevented her from sticking out all 180 minutes of the film stuck it out. She may have been disgusted, or she could’ve enjoyed the film, but either way she made it. Another older woman told her friend in the lobby that the film was “very good.” In fact, it was the older viewers who more more vocal about the film. The young’uns emerged from the theater in silence, unfazed by what they saw.

Nothing they hadn’t seen before.

Silencing the Call of Duty

I've kept up with the Call of Duty franchise since the first one came out. The first was one of those games in the early '00's that was foregoing the industry standard of allowing the player to carry as many weapons as the game had available and moving towards a more realistic approach. You could carry only as many guns as humanly possible (not Duke Nukemly possible), so when your MP44 and M1 Garand both run out of bullets you better find yourself some replacements. It also moved towards the more cinematic with scenes evoking various World War II films and adding a "shellshock" effect that made the visuals go dizzy when things went boom. Even though my PC had trouble running it, I dug it. Call of Duty 2 was the second game I got for my Xbox 360 and became a permanent fixture for splitscreen multiplayer at the summer camp I worked at. Despite it not being an Infinity Ward effort, I still found pleasure in 3 when it came to running down my online enemies in a shoddily-handled truck.

There was a delay, but I finally got into Modern Warfare and liked it enough to grab Modern Warfare 2, though I waved my hand at World at War because I wanted no part of its return to WW2, regardless of its zombies minigame. The Modern Warfare games had shiny new guns. I could have an TAR-21! I could accessorize it! But then there came the drama at Infinity Ward and the ousting of its leadership and subsequent gutting of its staff, all the while Treyarch was quietly putting out Black Ops which I warmed up to and played the hell out of. Though the story was meh it was only marginally so as I gave Treyarch props for injecting an unconventional narrative into the Call of Duty franchise. It didn't quite feel like a cannibalized Tom Clancy novel despite the presence of Pinko Commie Scum. The protagonist was a broken individual, not the silent professional that MIGHT AS WELL HAVE BEEN THE SAME DAMN GUY IN EVERY GAME. He was voiced by Hollywood favorite Sam Worthington who has since gone missing (if someone sees him, let me know).

Shortly after, the franchise was stale for me. I knew already that Activision was pulling off this ludicrous trick of putting out a new game every year between two studios, all in the same franchise. The games haven't been outright terrible--they're polished and they've got that AAA budget behind them that makes hella dough back. It wasn't that I saw behind the curtain and saw Bobby Kotick's elfin face rubbing his palms. It just fizzled out for me.

So now we have Call of Duty: Ghosts upon us. And nobody's excited. People seem satisfied...mostly. Metacritic ratings show nothing above a 78. Self-profess CoD fan Jim Sterling expressed his disappointment in a somewhat melancholy review, giving the game a 5/10. Chris Carter confirms the franchise's staleness, but credits developer Treyarch with "innovat[ing] the franchise" and blames "complacency" for Ghosts' loss of love. But the sin is greater than complacency.

For years, we've been getting a yearly helping of mediocre techno-thriller served as a side to the bullet ballet of death that is the CoD multiplayer. We're getting the dish served by two different cooks: Infinity Ward and Treyarch. But now it's more complicated. While there are two different names serving out the food, there are different hands chopping up the carrots and browning the beef of the stew. Treyarch's got the same hands but they're learning and sort of innovating. Infinity Ward's got different hands but they've got the name, so now they're left to just mimic what the old guard did.

On paper, Activision had a killer business plan. But they should have known that the franchise would get diluted. And it happened much sooner than people are led to believe. The big argument for World at War was its "innovation" with the zombie mode: shooting Nazi zombies = pinnacle of fun. But it lacks depth and, despite it being initially only an unlockable mode after completing the campaign, that was the big selling point for the game. Treyarch's main multiplayer offering was CoD 4's reskinned for World War 2. Again, fun, but was hardly innovative. Hardly innovative but still successful.

Now we've got Infinity Ward version 2.0 copying Treyarch's recipe for success, using that secret zombie ingredient--but replacing it with aliens. Treyarch lucked out when they were riding the wave of zombie craze and have been able to continuously ride for a while. Aliens, unfortunately, haven't seen the resurgence that zombies had. Yeah, you've got a show like Falling Skies that shows there's some interest in little green men, but it's got nothing on the momentum behind The Walking Dead and every other god-awful zombie-centric creation. Sterling argues the alien mode lacks the camp of Treyarch's Zombies, instead manifesting as "a fairly bland slice of chaos, in which fairly uninteresting aliens are mowed through across blasted cities littered with quivering pustules." But of the two sister developers, Infinity Ward has always appeared the more severe and prudish one while Treyarch presented itself as the one who might buy you a beer if you take her out.

Perhaps the franchise has gone long in the tooth, and the weakness of Ghosts is just symptomatic of that. Judging from the gameplay footage, Titanfall might be the very cure that Call of Duty needs. The ease of controls that Call of Duty has always been praised for appears to have been "borrowed" by the former Infinity Ward devs that makeup Sledgehammer Games. But they didn't just add big-ass robots. They added another dimension to the gameplay altogether. Titanfall might be the Call of Duty game that is long overdue.