Posts tagged with NC-17

Throughout the late 1980s, beloved Chicago film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert campaigned for a rating to replace the MPAA’s dreaded X which, at first, had been used to designate all manner of films containing patently adult content (such as the 1968 Best Picture Academy Award winner Midnight Cowboy).

In the wake of Deep Throat, however, the X-rating became synonymous with hardcore pornography. Siskel and Ebert led the charge for a new rating – they suggested “A” (for adult) – that could be applied to non-sexploitation films that were intended for audiences over the age of 17.

The MPAA ultimately concocted the NC-17 rating, which stands for No Children Under 17, and the first film to reach the public bearing its imprimatur was flesh-friendly director Philip Kaufman’s Henry & June, which opened in theaters on this date in 1990.

Henry & June stars Fred Ward and young Uma Thurman in the titular roles, as libertine author Henry Miller and his omnisexual gamine wife June. The story focuses specifically on their mutual sexual entanglements with erotic writer Anaïs Nin -- scorchingly embodied by Maria de Madeiros -- in 1920s Paris.

Uma and Maria explode in a lust-tastic lesbian scene, and the rest of the movie is chock full of naked nubiles (including Brigitte Lahaie) celebrating sexual freedom as they truly did – and as the NC-17 rating, finally, made possible.

It is the best of films, it is the breast of films.

And the world got its first look at the ultimate orgiastic, over-the-topless, absolutely skinsane NC-17-rated masterpiece (of ass) that we all know and worship as Showgirls on this date in 1995.

Ridiculously smeared as “the worst movie ever made” upon its release, this volcanically energetic, neon-sopped saga of a criminally insane exotic dancer’s ruthless rise to Queen of the Las Vegas Strip was immediately championed by adventurous film skin-thusiasts and nurtured into an enduring cult classic.

The general public caught on once Showgirls hit video and, today, the movie is hailed by even the snootiest critics as a brilliant, hyper-kinetic pop-art opus courtesy of visionary Dutch director Paul Verhoeven.

Showgirls is Mr. Skin’s single favorite film of all time. Come watch a clip of Elizabeth Berkley administering human history’s most explosive lap dance while her bisexual rival, Gina Gershon, leers on. Leave your inhibitions at the door. The show begins right after the jump.