New Yorkers, I didn't forget you, even if my suggestion for the evening's entertainment might seem slightly less palatable, if not downright sordid. You see, tonight at 7 p.m. at the Barnes & Noble Lincoln Center, Daily News film critic Jami Bernard appears with several of her fellow scribbling contributors to the saucy volume she edited, The X List: The Movies that Turn Us On.
Now, I know that most right-thinking members of the population would rather do anything else than learn which films give which critics a pervy thrill. Critics should be as sexless angels, right? But for the depraved out there--and you know who you are--this is your opportunity to hear notables like Amy Taubin, Charley Taylor, Stephanie Zacharek, Armond White, David Edelstein, and Stuart Klawans 'fess up about which films set their pulses racing. So to speak.
Not surprisingly, The X List makes a great bedside read. Bernard did a fine job of collecting pieces by a wide-ranging variety of critics, but it's the "quickies"--like Gerald Peary coming clean about his underaged Drew Barrymore movie jones--commissioned especially for the book I enjoyed the most. De gustibus.
For those of you far from New York, I promise to put up a teaser later on tonight.
I was nineteen when I saw Behind the Green Door in 1972, the same age as Marilyn Chambers, a Meg Ryan type who played Gloria, the innocent babe abducted and whisked off to a private sex club where onstage she is stripped, caressed by tender women in black cassocks, suckled by a coven of hippies, and penetrated by male trapeze artists in crotchless tights. Thus pleasured, Gloria becomes an avid pleasuregiver, fellating one trapeze artist as she milks the other two, and whipping partners, club patrons, and movie audiences into Chantilly cream.
Was my face red! Then, as now, I couldn't say whether it was from embarrassment, excitement, or some combination thereof. When the lights came up, I recall lacing my boyfriend's fingers into mine and joking, "Now that's process art."
Thirty-three years later, I'm amused that I felt compelled to intellectualize the experience. -- Carrie Rickey