Lower City (2005, Braz.) (aka Cidade Baixa)

This acclaimed, sexually-explicit independent film was by co-writer/director Sérgio Machado (his debut feature film). The noirish, sultry, and grungy cityscapes were seedily portrayed in the film, including its strip clubs for lap dancing, floating brothels, gruesome cockfights, fixed boxing matches, violent and bloody fistfights, and sweaty, open-air bars.

The main star was Alice Braga (niece of famed 70s Brazilian actress Sonia Braga, appearing in her first major screen role, before appearing in the blockbuster I Am Legend (2007) opposite Will Smith), as:

• beautiful, 20 year-old bleached-blonde stripper-lap dancer/hooker Karinna (Alice Braga), with her two poor hustler friends
• Deco (Lázaro Ramos),
• Naldinho (Wagner Moura)

Karinna was part of an erotic, doomed love-triangle threesome - often compared to a Brazilian version of Jules et Jim. She split the bonds between the two "brothers" with sexual tension, jealousy, taking advantage of their deteriorating relationship since childhood, and betrayal.

While traveling to Brazil's port city of Salvador da Bahia with them on their broken-down cargo motorboat in exchange for favors, the alluring Karinna soon became sexually-involved with both men in many heated sexual encounters and couplings (but never menage a trois), including dark alleyways.

The film's sexiest scene was Karinna's memorable pole-dance strip tease as "the blonde volcano" (with glitter on her glistening skin) performed in pulsating strobe lights at the Xanadoo club. At one point, Karinna declared to Naldinho: "I can't stay away from you or from him" - while he demanded: "You have to decide."

In another scene, Deco told Karrina: "We're not crazy enough to fight over a whore. I've had it with you. I don't want anybody's leftovers" but later asked Karinna to go away with him, although she feared prophetically: "You'd end up killing each other."

Manderlay (2005)

Controversial director Lars von Trier's sequel film to Dogville (part of a planned trilogy) was set in 1930s Alabama in a rural community that still practiced slavery at a secluded cotton plantation named Manderlay. The main character was:

• reforming, headstrong do-gooder Grace Margaret Mulligan (earlier portrayed by Nicole Kidman, but now 24 year-old red-haired Bryce Dallas Howard (daughter of actor/director Ron Howard))

In one of the film's subplots, Grace performed in a graphic, inter-racial sex (simulated) interlude scene (interpreted as semi-rape by some critics) on a basically bare soundstage with former studly slave Timothy (Isaach De Bankole). She was ritualistically undressed and placed fully naked on a bed as a detached narrator in voice-over spoke:

"In Mam's bedroom, Grace recalled Flora's worrying intimate little details. Sexual intercourse amongst the munsie was determined by ancient traditions. It would not appeal to Grace, Flora had said, not with Grace's modern ideas of equality of people and the sexes. (A handkerchief was placed over Grace's head before the first strong thrust of penetration) But Grace seemed to have left her progressive attitudes at the table. Now actually in the situation she had dreamed of, it was all more bizarre than erotic. Anyway, Grace decided to hang on to this opinion."

As the grunting and thrusting continued, Grace's mouth appeared wide-open as the handkerchief was displaced from her face. All of a sudden, she screamed: "No" as the camera dramatically pulled back from a side-view of the bed.

Match Point (2005)

This was famed director Woody Allen's first R-rated dramatic-erotic thriller. Its main characters were:

• recently-retired Irish tennis pro Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers)
• shy heiress wife Chloe Hewett/Wilton (Emily Mortimer)
• femme fatale American actress Nola Rice (Scarlett Johannson), the ex-girlfriend of Chloe's younger brother Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode)

Chris engaged in a steamy clandestine affair with Nola. There were two scenes of their love trysts...the steamier one was out in a field during a rainstorm when they made love.

[Note: The film recalled Body Heat (1981), Fatal Attraction (1987) and Allen's own Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989).]

Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)

With her debut "indie" film, Miranda July served as writer/director and star of this year's winner of the Special Jury Prize for "Originality of Vision" at the Sundance Film Festival, as well as the Camera d'Or (Golden Camera) Best First Film prize winner at Cannes. The film was rated R for "disturbing sexual content involving children" - even though it presented comic views of underage sexuality in a series of subplots.

The story told about a romance between:

• an aspiring amateur video artist and service driver for the elderly Christine Jesperson (Miranda July)
• recently-separated, socially-awkward shoe salesman Richard Swersey (John Hawkes)

Other scenes included Richard's two Internet-savvy kids: six year-old son Robby (Brandon Ratcliff) anonymously sex-chatting on the Internet (in an instant message session initiated by his older 14 year-old brother Peter (Miles Thompson) with an unaware adult woman (Tracy Wright), and using the boy's own personal and innocent fixation about 'I want to poop back and forth' as the basis of the coprophiliac fantasy conversation:

"I'll poop in your butt hole and then you will poop it back into my butt and we will keep doing it back and forth with the same poop. Forever."

The phrase was mistaken for exotic scatological talk (with the response: "It makes me want to touch myself") - drawn by Robby with this smiley or emoticon: ))<>(( . Eventually, the young Robby had a real-life meeting with the stranger sitting on a park bench, revealed to be Nancy Harrington (Tracy Wright), the director-curator of the local art museum (the Center for Contemporary Art) where Christine had submitted her work.

In another scene, 14 year-old Peter allowed himself to be the blindfolded subject of a blow-job competition (off-screen) by two precocious, sexually-provocative teenaged neighbor girls who wished to practice their fellatio skills - Heather (Natasha Slayton) and Rebecca (Najarra Townsend) - the act required two washcloths, a towel, and two pieces of candy (preferably mints). The same neighbor girls took up the dare of Richard's jolly co-worker, a perverted older neighbor named Andrew (Brad Henke) after he left sexually-lewd come-on notes taped to the windows of his house for them ("Then I would tell you to lick each other's tits while I licked both of your pussies") - but he sheepishly cowered inside when they called his bluff and came to his door to practice on him.

Melissa P. (2005, It.)

The coming-of-age tale by director Luca Guadagnino (and produced by actress Francesca Neri) was based upon the frank, scandalous best-selling teen memoirs book 100 Strokes of the Brush Before Bed by Melissa Panarello. It was co-produced with Spain by Italian thespians Francesca Neri and Claudio Amendola. Remarkably, the sexy Italian film was rated only PG in its own country, opening its viewing to 14 year olds there.

The title role was:

• baby-faced Melissa, a maladjusted 16 year-old Sicilian high school girl (18 year-old Spanish actress Maria Valverde (with dubbing into Italian))

She used sex to combat loneliness and neglect by her parents, conveyed through a "Dear Diary" format. Geraldine Chaplin played the part of Melissa's understanding, heavy-smoking grandmother Nonna Elvira, until she was taken to a convalescent home.

In the opening scene, bare-breasted Melissa masturbated and caressed herself in her room in front of a hand-held mirror. She also pleasured herself during a bath with a detachable hand-held shower nozzle aimed at her privates.

Opening Credits of Melissa P.

The child seductress also sought riskier extreme contact through sexual encounters with wealthy schoolmate Daniele (Primo Reggiani), first delivering oral sex to him near a swimming pool. After experiencing an orgasm in gym class while hanging from a rope and thinking about him, she lost her virginity with him in a more forceful coupling.

Further, through other sexual behaviors, threesomes, orgies (a shocking scene in a basement), and oral sex, she became a plaything for other males' gratification and sought to make an identity for herself.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005)

In this action/comedy by director Doug Liman, two married assassins targeted each other from rival organizations, while engaging in romantic and sizzling interplay:

• John (Brad Pitt)
• Jane Smith (Angelina Jolie)

[Note: This was the film in which the two fell in love on the set. Pitt divorced a year later in late 2005 from Friends' Jennifer Aniston - and subsequently partnered with Jolie.]

In the memorable formal dance scene, they both stripped each other of their weapons as they danced. He joked with her about his sexuality when she checked his crotch for a weapon: "That's all John, sweetheart."

Later, in a monumental and destructive fight scene in their own house as they still called each other "sweetheart," they fought each other first with their fists.

John: "Come on, honey. Come to Daddy."
Jane: (after retaliating) "Who's your Daddy now?"

They then fought with oversized weapons, concluding with guns raised at each other, but both were unable to pull the trigger. They called a truce - and then the bruised, turned-on lovers made passionate love.

At film's end, the couple were still engaged in marriage counseling (which also opened the film) - John encouraged the marriage counselor to ask the happy couple "the sex question" about how their sex lives had improved - the answer was "Ten" (on a scale from 1 to 10).

Mrs. Henderson Presents (2005, UK)

Stephen Frears' UK comedy (Oscar-nominated) was based on the true story of the Windmill Theatre in the 1940s in London - the playhouse was managed by an eccentric 70 year-old war-time widow:

• Laura Henderson (Judi Dench), the title character

She battled government censorship and transformed a run-down theater (the Windmill) in the 40s into a flashy revue of naked showgirls, when allowed to present shows with 'immobile' or motionless, fully-nude stage performers as living statues in 'artistic tableaux.' The performers (among others) included:

• Doris (Anna Brewster)
• Maureen (Kelly Reilly)
• Vera (Sarah Solemani)

To provide equality of the sexes, there was a brief nude glimpse of the theater's stubborn manager Vivian Van Damm (Bob Hoskins).

The Notorious Bettie Page (2005)

Writer/director Mary Harron's R-rated period biopic, from a script co-written with Guinevere Turner, covered the life of '50s icon and brunette (with bangs) bondage pin-up queen Bettie Page (remarkably portrayed by actress Gretchen Mol).

The film (alternating between both B/W and color) surveyed in a sketchy way Page's life history:

• Page's fundamentalist background
• her innocent country girl roots in Nashville, TN
• her molestation by her father
• her abusive marriage
• an incident of a brutal gang rape
• her early days as a topless camera club fetish model posing with a whip and chains and other bondage set-ups
• her 1955 Playboy Magazine (Miss January) centerfold with a Christmas tree
• her targeting by a government 'witch hunt' against pornography (a "smut probe") led by Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver (David Strathairn)

During her modeling days, she was photographed in numerous tawdry and kinky, S/M cheesecake poses for self-promoting photographer Irving Klaw (Chris Bauer). Later in life, she turned back to Christianity and was born-again transformed.

The Real Bettie Page

Shadowboxer (2005)

Director Lee Daniels' daring, exploitative and provocative melodramatic crime-thriller (his directorial debut film) pushed the envelope and provided shock value with its story of inter-racial (and incestual) sex and crude violence.

It told about a female assassin named Rose (Helen Mirren) who was diagnosed with terminal cancer. She and younger inter-racial lover/step-son Mikey (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) were commissioned to kill Vickie (Vanessa Ferlito), the supposedly unfaithful wife of Clayton (Stephen Dorff), a sociopathic and villainous mob boss. Their plan went awry when Vickie's 9-month pregnancy compelled Rose and Mikey to protect her and her newborn son.

In addition to the film's crude and violent content, it also contained sexually-graphic scenes. In an early controversially-indulgent scene of sodomy and anal sexual assault, Clayton gagged Tommy (Jack Krizmanich) with an 8-ball and rammed a jagged, half-broken pool cue up his rear (off-screen) before killing him.

In another equally-controversial scene, while having coital sex from behind with his topless girlfriend (Maria Soccor) draped over a desk - Clayton withdrew himself when interrupted by an argument outside his door, exhibiting his semi-erect condom-covered penis, and then shot dead those who disturbed him.

And in an outdoor sex scene between Mikey and Rose, he shot her in the head with a revolver as she climaxed - an unusual mercy killing.

Transamerica (2005)

Desperate Housewives ABC-TV sitcom star Felicity Huffman earned an Oscar nomination for her role in this low-budget, R-rated independent road film. She was in a gender-bending role as:

• Bree (with the given name of Stanley), a pre-operative transgendered woman (or male-to-female transsexual)

Bree displayed full-frontal nudity as both a man (with a prosthetic penis) and as a woman!

S/he discovered that (s)he had fathered a 17-year-old son - a troubled and surly, drug-abusing 17-year-old gay hustler named Toby (Kevin Zegers).

In one scene, she/he relieved himself at the side of the road while traveling from NY to CA by car with his/her son (witnessed by him through the car's rear-view mirror).

Another scene showed him/her coming out of the bathroom and embarrassed to be seen in his/her underwear by his/her son, and in a post-operative scene, she checked herself out in the bathtub.

The Wayward Cloud (2005, Taiwan) (aka Tian bian yi duo yun)

Tsai Ming-liang's porn-musical was controversial for its full-frontal nudity and explicit oral sex.

In a metaphoric scene, a nubile nurse (real-life Japanese porn actress Sumomo Yozakura) was lying naked from the waist down on her back on a white bed - her legs were spread-eagled and bent at the knees, with a juicy half of a watermelon between her legs. Low-budget porn film actor Hsiao-Kang (Kang-sheng Lee) crawled toward the nurse's fruit - his tongue lapped at her, and his fingers prodded into the sweetly-sticky, squishy melon. After she had an orgasm, Hsiao-Kang stuck a vagina-sized chunk of drippy watermelon pulp in her mouth.

In another outrageous and bizarre Busby Berkeley-esque production number, a troupe of marching, bikini-clad females with red plastic buckets on their heads, small pink toilet plungers attached to their breasts, and thrusting blue plungers, circled around Hsiao-Kang dressed as a giant penis head in a large men's restroom.

The Wayward Cloud

Other scenes included one of Yozakura sitting on a kitchen counter and masturbating with a plastic water bottle, various making-of-porn scenes, and the film's controversial, open-ended final sequence.

Wedding Crashers (2005)

This bawdy film from director David Dobkin marked a return to R-rated comedies with numerous T & A shots. It was about two intrepid Washington DC bachelors, divorce mediators, and lifelong friends:

• John Beckwith (Owen Wilson)
• Jeremy Grey (Vince Vaughn)

They invited themselves to nuptial receptions to pick up on women and bridesmaids (including one named Claire (Rachel McAdams) and her "stage-five clinger" sister Gloria (Isla Fisher)).

The film also included the sped-up, musical "wedding sluts" montage sequence, to the tune of the Isley Brothers' "Shout," of the two scammers at wedding receptions carousing, drinking shots, dancing, and popping champagne bottles - and soon after in bed with partly-clothed and topless women who flopped down on the bed in front of them (including in order, unclothed: busty brunette Rachel Sterling, Ivana Bozilovic, blonde Diora Baird as Vivian, and ?).

Wedding Montage "Shout" Sequence
Rachel Sterling	Ivana Bozilovic	Diora Baird

There was also the racy scene of John being seduced by sexually-insatiable Kathleen "Kittycat" Cleary (54 year-old Jane Seymour) - the socialite wife of Treasury Secretary and presidential wannabe William Clearly (Christopher Walken). Kathleen invited John to sample her new breast implants. She opened her blouse and seductively boasted to the shocked John:

"I just had my tits done. Do you like 'em?...William doesn't give a s--t about my tits...You've been playing 'cat-and-mouse' with me ever since you came here....Call me Kat... Call me 'Kitty Kat' (growling)...Feel 'em...I said feel them!...I'm not letting you out of this room, until you feel them."

Left with no choice, he reluctantly reached out and felt her breasts, replying:

"Wow! They feel really nice. Real orb-like. It's amazing what they can do..."

Although she appeared turned on by his mammary massage, he was rebuffed for sampling them and accused of being a "pervert."

Where the Truth Lies (2005)

This controversial, tangled and convoluted film-noirish feature film from Canadian director Atom Egoyan was set in two time periods. It was a lurid and sexy backstage crime/murder mystery based upon Rupert Holmes' 2003 novel. The film was filled with female and male nudity and was initially rated NC-17 by the MPAA for its sex scenes (especially the threesome scene). The film was released in both an explicit unrated version and as an R-rated version.

It told about an amoral and pill-popping comedy duo team in 1957, resembling Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis:

• Lanny Morris (Kevin Bacon), an American
• Vince Collins (Colin Firth), a Brit

They broke up their act after red-headed college coed Maureen O'Flaherty (Rachel Blanchard) - who was the room service waitress (and adoring fan) from the Miami Versailles Hotel they just vacated in Florida after their record-breaking polio telethon - was found naked and dead in their New Jersey Palace Del Sol Hotel room. Her corpse was found in a case of iced lobsters immediately after they arrived (although the official story was that she was found in the bathtub). The cause of death was from supposed drowning combined with a drug overdose (although her corpse had been flown from Florida to Newark, NJ and planted there).

Later, it was revealed that she was killed because she witnessed Vince's closet bisexuality-homosexuality during a threesome sex scene between Maureen, Vince and Lanny in their Miami suite the night before the telethon, in which Lanny screamed at Vince for attempting anal sex with him as he made love in the missionary position to Maureen:

"You got the endzone there, Vince...Get the f--k off me. We don't f--k, Vince ! We're buddies, we're pals, we're partners, we're a duo. We love each other, but we don't f--k!"

Her killing was a psychosexually-related crime committed by Lanny's bodyguard and valet Reuben (David Hayman) who smothered her with a pillow in order to silence her and presumably protect his employers from blackmail and ruin.

15 years later in 1972, worldly, award-winning aspiring young journalist Karen O'Connor (Alison Lohman) - once a polio-cured "miracle" guest who dressed in an Alice in Wonderland-like outfit on their final telethon show before the murder, pursued the two to write a provocative article/book to find "where the truth lies" in the circumstances surrounding the duo's split and the girl's death. She became sexually involved with Lanny after a dinner date at a Chinese restaurant, impersonating her best friend elementary school teacher Bonnie Trout. She made love with him during a one-night stand.

In one of the film's hotter lesbian scenes, Vince drugged and photographed Karen at his place (to produce possible incriminating evidence against her) when she experienced 'wet' oral sex performed on her (a glistening chin emerged on her partner's face) by aspiring singer/prostitute Alice (Kristin Adams) who wore a bluish Alice in Wonderland outfit (earlier Alice had performed at the Wonderland clinic, supported by Vince, that treated children with physical handicaps).

The film's offensive scenes, some of which were shortened/edited, were set in their Miami hotel in the late 1950s:

Some of the More Controversial or Offensive Scenes
	The repeated hip thrusting of Lanny as he took Denise (Rebecca Davis) from behind doggy-style. She begged: "Don't stop" when room service (Maureen delivering food three days before her death) interrupted them.
	Vince on the couch received oral sex from unnamed hookers, seen blurrily only in the background during a fabricated orgy scene (in a flashback from the memoirs).
	The threesome scene (see description above) between Vince, Lanny, and Maureen.