August mailbag! (preview)

Once each month, we answer reader questions in a mailbag. It's a paid subscriber exclusive! Here's a little taste of this month's edition. To read the whole thing, you can upgrade your subscription using the button below:

pretzalz asks:

Excluding new movies, what movies should have had more and/or less sex?

Emily: "Less sex" is easy, because it's any movie where less strict on-set safety protocols and a lack of intimacy coordinators led to situations that were tantamount to sexual assault and sometimes crossed over that line. No amount of onscreen titillation is worth the mistreatment of the people making a movie, even if the resulting scene is seen as worthwhile in some capacity (as the one in Last Tango in Paris sometimes is).

But "more sex"? That's an intriguing question because while I tend to agree that the sexlessness of modern mainstream cinema is a depressing slog, I don't know that I can point to a specific place where I think a well-placed sex scene or two would have really made a particular film better. What we're really talking about is a lack of heat, of the idea that the characters in something might fuck, and the reasons for the lack of heat might be down to Hollywood no longer prioritizing putting human sexuality up onscreen or might stem from actors just having zero chemistry. Like people got mad that Twisters didn't end with Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones kissing, but I can't especially say that I watched that movie and felt a deep, abiding need to see that kissing. The actors' chemistry was totally fine! It also wasn't so all-consuming that I felt it emanating off the screen.

Yet it's also quite clear that, like, the synthetic spectacle of a lot of modern franchise filmmaking keeps chemistry at arm's length. Nobody will ever claim that The Empire Strikes Back had sex scenes, but you wanted to see Han and Leia fuck, so palpable was their chemistry. Are there any couples afforded that sort of space in either of the ensuing Star Wars trilogies? No. And the prequels are explicitly about a man so horny he dooms the galaxy! I did think that the chemistry between Peter and MJ in Raimi's Spider-Man movies was hot enough to want to see more of them together, but I can't say the same for Peter and MJ in the more recent Spider-Man films, and the characters are played by a real-life couple in those movies!

So, a recent movie where the actors did have enough chemistry for me to want them to get it on that also afforded those actors the space to develop that chemistry was 2025's Superman, where David Corenswet and Rachel Brosnahan played characters who've definitely seen each other naked. I wouldn't have minded a Superman and Lois sex scene or two, even an implied one where they were laying in bed afterward. Or just, like, Jimmy Olsen with any number of Metropolis's hottest young adults!

If we're taking things back to past Hollywood, we're very quickly running into a bunch of movies where tossing, like, a sex scene into Casablanca or It Happened One Night is going to fuck up what those movies are doing. How about Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? What would destabilize Nick and Honey more than George and Martha just suddenly having sex in front of them? Nothing!

panicea asks:

What's your personal AI policy? (And doesn't it suck that anyone needs one of these?)

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