Sex and "The Kids"

[lillibet]

Jason and I recently saw The Kids Are All Right, Lisa Cholodenko's film about the children of a lesbian couple finding the sperm donor who is their natural father. We really enjoyed it--it's one of the best depictions of marriage that I've ever seen on screen and the acting is fantastically unstudied

Comments

[desireearmfeldt]

This is related to my perplexity about why some books get translated to movies -- those books where the internal voice/perspective of the viewpoint character is a major part of the point. Flowers for Algernon, for example, which I've seen both screen and stage versions of. The entire point of that story, as far as I'm concerned, is the way the character's perception of the world around him, his place in that world, and how others see him, changes as his intelligence changes. If I'm watching it from the outside, sure, I can see how his manner and behavior change, but I don't see the world filtered through his interpretation.

Similarly, watching sex just isn't the same experience as having sex, or even "watching" sex through reading a first-person narrative about it. It's not about what it looks like, it's about what it feels like.

[firstfrost]

I think a lot of good fiction puts an imaginative gloss on reality. Real conversations have not only a lot of banality, but a lot of "uh" and repetition and sentences that go around in circles and trail off. But our voices on tape recorders don't sound like our voices in our heads - and our conversations when transcribed by a mercilessly accurate transcription service don't sound like how we imagine our conversations to go, either.

Sometimes this leads to weirdnesses like TV programs that have no bathrooms, or the whole "Everyone, especially women, is really good looking" aspect of the media, but in smaller doses I think it's okay.

[quietann]

Sex isn't, usually, an arty thing. I've watched a few "training" films for aspiring sex therapists (psychologists) with running commentary from the man who made them (Joe LoPiccolo, who was a pioneer in the area of behavioral retraining for treating sexual disorders.) When I was not laughing, or busily observing the treatment details, I was pretty bored

[firstfrost]

Clicking on the link gets intercepted by IMDB, which instructs me to re-enter the link and the reload. I've never seen a web site block linking like this - what's going on here?

[lillibet]

That is bizarre. It's doing the same thing for me. There doesn't seem to be anything special about the URLs. I wonder if it's a temporary thing or some link-busting strategy they're trying. Weird. Sorry if that's annoying.

[firstfrost]

I started experimenting with my own links (I was especially wondering if it had something to do with blocking the LJ link-intercept middleman thing). It does seem to be movie-specific, as none of the other ones I tested did the intercept. I wondered if it was "adult" content, but my other tests didn't trigger it. (Not that I could get IMDB to pull up any of the titles I think of as explicitly "porn" - either they don't have them, or there's some "yes, really, show me" setting I didn't find.)
http://web.mit.edu/boojum/www/test.html

(This is kind of a digression from your original post, though - sorry!)

[lillibet]

No worries--that is really odd.

[miss_chance]

I dunno, but I think that when I have sex it's very unrealistic