{"id":276,"date":"2006-03-13T13:22:10","date_gmt":"2006-03-13T18:22:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=276"},"modified":"2008-07-05T01:55:39","modified_gmt":"2008-07-05T06:55:39","slug":"hotness-in-hollywood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=276","title":{"rendered":"Hotness in Hollywood"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I had planned my string of meditations on the movies to stop with<br \/>\nthree. But, having succumbed to the mischievous blandishments of my<br \/>\nbeloved wife Cathy, here&#8217;s a fourth.  Today I shall consider hotness in<br \/>\nHollywood &mdash; some movies that at least partly sold me with<br \/>\nsex, and how they did it.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>So, without further ado, my personal tribute to the most<br \/>\nincandescent lovelies in recent movies.<\/p>\n<p>First, Kelly Ann Hu in <cite>The Scorpion King<\/cite> (2002).  No<br \/>\nswashbuckling sword-and-sorcery movie would be complete without a<br \/>\nscantily-clad sorceress in it.  Kelly Ann Hu fills her chainmail<br \/>\nbikini in a way guaranteed to make any red-blooded geek fall to his<br \/>\nknees and howl at the moon.  This is your most traditional sort of<br \/>\nstarlet role, as a sexy arm decoration for the male lead.  You<br \/>\nfeminist killjoys out there can grump all you want about all that<br \/>\nexposed flesh, but <em>oh<\/em>&#8230;<em>my<\/em>&#8230;<em>Goddess<\/em>&#8230;she<br \/>\nwas <em>fine<\/em>.  And I didn&#8217;t hear any of you gals complaining<br \/>\nabout The Rock running around in nothing but a loincloth, did I,<br \/>\nhmmm?<\/p>\n<p>Next, Liv Tyler as Arwen in the Lord Of The Rings movies<br \/>\n(2001-2004).  Another fantasy, another fetching wench.  This one,<br \/>\nhowever, displays much less skin and gets to kick butt occasionally<br \/>\n&mdash; one of Jackson&#8217;s better plot changes was having her replace<br \/>\n<strike>Gildor Inglorion<\/strike> Glorfindel in the rescue of the hobbits from Weathertop. Most<br \/>\nerotic moments for me: the close-ups on Liv&#8217;s face and lips as<br \/>\nshe was speaking Elvish.  This is surely the most beautiful woman<br \/>\non the planet.<\/p>\n<p>No discussion of recent screen hotness can possibly be complete<br \/>\nwithout a nod towards Angelina Jolie in the Tomb Raider movies<br \/>\n(2001, 2003). Given Ms. Jolie&#8217;s luscious natural abundance of curves, I<br \/>\nthought it silly and unnecessary that they padded her for this role.<br \/>\nI admired her game efforts to perform something resembling acting in<br \/>\nthe first movie; I feel she she might even have succeeded but for the<br \/>\nhorrible dog of a script.  In the second movie she gave up, but no<br \/>\nblame attaches.  My favorite moments were the homages to Diana Rigg<br \/>\nplaying Emma Peel back in the sixties.<\/p>\n<p>Now we come to Kate Beckinsale in <cite>Van Helsing<\/cite> (2004).<br \/>\nMuch more active butt-kicking here, albeit conducted in an improbable<br \/>\nleather corset vaguely recalling Frank&#8217;n&#8217;furter in the old <cite>Rocky<br \/>\nHorror Picture Show<\/cite>.  There is no question about Kate&#8217;s gender,<br \/>\nhowever, and her sexiness is only enhanced by the array of exotic<br \/>\nweapons and martial-arts moves she wields. Made me want to spar with her,<br \/>\nthen bed her, then spar with her again&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Halle Berry in <cite>Die Another Day<\/cite> (2002) gets plenty of<br \/>\nalpha-female things to do and ought to have been more convincing at<br \/>\nthem than Kate Beckinsale or Angelina Jolie, if only because she isn&#8217;t<br \/>\ntrapped in as absurd a setting. But Halle has a problem, which is that<br \/>\nshe&#8217;s as dumb as a box of hammers and it shows.  Even Kelly Ann Hu<br \/>\nplaying an arm decoration looked more involved and alert.<br \/>\nStill&#8230;still&#8230;Berry was so exotically gorgeous and graceful<br \/>\nthat I forgave her for sleepwalking through her role.  On some women,<br \/>\nstill photography just works better.  Hollywood, take the hint!<\/p>\n<p>In <cite>Troy<\/cite> (2004) Rose Byrne managed to out-hottie the<br \/>\nlead.  The way she did it is instructive &mdash; where Diane Kruger<br \/>\nsettled for playing Helen as the lacquered blonde bombshell to end all<br \/>\nlacquered blonde bombshells, Rose&#8217;s Briseis seems warm and human and<br \/>\ntouchable.  Sometimes, personality matters even when all you&#8217;re really<br \/>\nsupposed to be is an object of desire.<\/p>\n<p>Reaching back a little, Sigourney Weaver re-confirmed the proposition<br \/>\nthat smart can be sexy in <cite>Galaxy Quest<\/cite> (1999).  Her comic<br \/>\nturn as a bright woman pretending to be a dumb blonde and chafing at it<br \/>\nwas wonderful &mdash; now there&#8217;s a female lead you could <em>talk<\/em><br \/>\nwith the next morning.  I heard a rumor that Weaver was equipped with an<br \/>\ninflatable device that gradually pushed up her breasts to make them<br \/>\nappear larger even as her costume disintegrated during the course<br \/>\nof the movie.  If so, this was funny but just as superflous as<br \/>\npadding Angelina Jolie &mdash; <em>some<\/em> women have the knack<br \/>\nof being delicious without a centerfold figure, and our Sigourney<br \/>\nis one of them.<\/p>\n<p>And here&#8217;s one I&#8217;ve added for gender balance:<\/p>\n<p>Daniel Radcliffe in <cite>Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire<\/cite> (2005).  I have it on good authority that the sight of young master Radcliffe with his shirt off can make a woman weak in the<br \/>\nknees.  I&#8217;d solicit some more detailed analysis of this phenomenon, but Cathy tends to drool and mumble incoherently when the subject comes up.  I&#8217;d rather look at Cho Chang, myself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I had planned my string of meditations on the movies to stop with three. But, having succumbed to the mischievous blandishments of my beloved wife Cathy, here&#8217;s a fourth. Today I shall consider hotness in Hollywood &mdash; some movies that at least partly sold me with sex, and how they did it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-sex","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}