What do you feel is the biggest problem with modern entertainment

It's a mash up of Taxi Driver and King of Comedy (without the comedic elements of the latter).

Since they used De Niro as a talk show host, it could almost be a sequel to King of Comedy decades later.

Yeah, I would agree with that.

As an aside, I don't think King of Comedy could be made today. Well it could be made but I bet no one would want to finance it. Just to dangerous of a subject. If I remember correctly even Scorsese had second thoughts about making the movie. Good movie though, I prefer it way over Taxi Driver.

Joker isn't as dark or gritty as Taxi Driver though, or at least I didn't think so. Plus they were willing to take more risk there because it already had a comic book fan base, as opposed to a script not based on prior source material.

I don't think it's a linear progression. There were silent movies that violated a lot of what today would seem as the "limits" and for sure, there's that ultimate cinematic horror, Birth of Nation, which would never pass corporate political correctness censors today. Some years later, however, you have movies like Judge Priest, which starred that comedic icon Will Rogers. It also starred that character known as Stepinfetchit (Lincoln Perry), who would never be seen on a screen today. In that environment however, nudity was a moral horror.

Then there's also the "pre-code" movies from the beginning of sound up to the Hays Code that began to be enforced in 1934. Then....there's the McCarthy era when actors and movies were exorcised from the movie world for anything that might suggest "communist" sympathy, or WW II when there were political censors of a different kind. For a moment or two, we were allies with the USSR, but that ended after the war.

In the past century, the limits of what you do, show or write have been through many revisions. The 70's seem to be one of the premier eras for testing whatever limits were still around, including some fairly explicit sex and the strangeness of movies like Taxi Driver. If you're looking for logic and consistency in this just ask yourself about mainstream movies with male nudity. We've had plenty of female nudity in various eras, but censors seem to want to avoid the obvious "comparisons" that come with males doing the same thing.

I wonder if it’s because producers think women don’t want to see male nudity? When men make it very obvious that they love female nudity. (Which is perfectly natural.)

I would love to see more male nudity, including full-frontal. (It’s interesting though how men automatically try to cover up their genitals.)

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I don't think anybody on the male side of the equation, who's not in the porn business, is completely comfortable with just what the limits are there, especially given the lack of a legal specification on what you can do. I read that, going back to Boogie Nights, which referred to a John Holmes sort of character, Mark Wahlberg still has the prosthetic that he used and keeps it locked up, especially since he has kids in the house.

There's a number of contributing factors. I think even if you get past all the male insecurities (which compared historically, I think are getting less insecure), you still run into the ratings board. If you don't know what you can get in, then you don't want to risk getting an R or an NC-17 needlessly if that means losing box office numbers as the number of people who can see your movie drops. I think in the late 90's I once heard to NC-17 as the financial kiss of death at the box office, though it's not like there weren't NC-17 movies being made. Showgirls being NC-17 was a big deal it seemed - though there's always the question of what media bubble you exist in at that time for hearing this type of perspective.


And it's not like Jane Champion wasn't throwing male full frontal into her movies.

Seems like a lot of fuss over nothing. (Not literally. )

She did?

Oh thought males would probably be more comfortable doing nudity than female actors because female actors sometimes complain about how they were sexually exploited in movies, such as Sharon Stone or Scarlett Johansson, but I never heard a male actor complain about it and therefore thought they would be more comfortable doing than women more do possibly.

But as for the NC-17 rating, I thought it didn't matter anymore near as much since people hardly go to theaters anymore and just watch movies at home now anyway and therefore would not care about the rating?

Seems like there is more male frontal nudity in new films than there is women full frontal nudity...And if there is full female nudity, genitally is rarely shown, (at least in the new films I've seen).

I'm not well versed in her oeuvre, but my understanding is The Piano wasn't a one off (though that was her famous one, because it did well and got an Oscar). I'm mean, I don't think you were getting balls to the wall... um, balls, and it wasn't in every movie, but you know, it'd show up.

I think when I check keywords, In The Cut had male full frontal as well. I haven't checked any of her others (just going off of off-handed comments I've seen other people make).

Good points.

There is?

Seems like it to me, but then i don't watch new movies much.

Well, speaking about the past or now?
I don't know if we know about the past, because they weren't being asked to do it. I seen to recall Patrick Swayze or Stallone talking about feeling really exposed just showing their butts on camera for Tango and Cash (but that's a stretched memory).


IIRC, young Ewan McGregor tried to show off his dong as much as he could.


There's a lot of power dynamics in play, so IDK. I suspect the discomfort was probably more from either, the directors, the producers, or their perception that the (male) audience would feel uncomfortable. Some of it is a self-perpetuating thing. No one does it, so it feels weird to do it, which leads to no one doing it.


The quote from von Trier about Defoe's dong for Anti-Christ is amusing.


Last I checked the box office still exists, and the recent shift to streaming had a dramatic jump literally only a couple years ago, so who knows how that's going to impact what gets made going forward (it can take some time before people realize the rules have changed in terms of what is the most profitable and then also time to actually make movies according to those changed rules).


I think one thing that's been touched around a bit is what we mean by modern entertainment, since it's been mostly implied the big pole blockbusters. And those probably still need to appeal to as many people as possible (which means alienating as few as possible).

My limited observation of the recent increases of penises - it seemed to coincide with the complaints of the ridiculous female nudity ratio on Game of Thrones. This caused that to drop (a little bit) and to start getting some dicks. That said, in comparison, I feel like penises, when they are on screen, aren't on screen as much as boobs (and almost never erect. I'd say there might be practical, bodily reasons standing in the way for that). And when we see full frontal female nudity, we often don't exactly get, um, shots between the legs. Men kind of lack those kind of transitions of degree of nudity. But that's just my brain spitballing partial causes and making observations.

I'm afraid Matt & Trey don't agree:

LOL. Unintentional pun?

I would say that some men are very sensitive about the size or lack thereof of their member & therefore are reluctant to do full frontal onscreen. Whereas there’s tons of naked breasts small or big.

But breast aren't vaginas think the proverbial apples to apples.

Women aren’t bothered by showing their vaginas onscreen as part of full frontal. I mean, there’s nothing to see really.

Even as I was typing it, my brain was going "tent pole?" or has the idiom been enlarged even more in the current mega-blockbuster, "big tent pole," "am I just conflating this with 'big tent,' which isn't what I meant, but they are defacto trying to be that, 'tentpole,' 'big tentpole', 'big tent,' 'big pole,' okay, I'm going to stop overthinking it and will just for the last one."