Awkward sexual moment

I was two-and-twenty the summer I experienced what I ticked off would certainly be the single most awkward moment in my life.  Not embarrassing, not humiliating…I keep hitting the refresh button on those two.  No, what I am talking about is that moment of being inescapably uncomfortable in a situation, where the only possible resolution is to just wait it out, keep quite and avoid any eye contact until you can pretend that you were never there.  Every seemingly maladroit instance since that time has been a walk in the park.  After all, what else could possibly ever rattle me more than sitting in a dark room on the sofa next to my mother while watching Laura Dern and Nic Cage “go at it” in the David Lynch directed Wild at Heart on cable?  If you haven’t seen it, I will attest that it is awful on just about every level.  The dialog, the accents (Cage was clearly working on what he would later use in Con Air, which I have already blathered on about here), and the whole story line in general is just garden variety bad.  And the sex scenes?  It was more like characters acting out and having tantrums while partially and entirely naked.  If I were sitting around with friends guzzling alcohol and watching it, it would be hilarious.  Like when me and Big Daddy got a case of beer and watched Showgirls.  But in a dark room, with my mother…both of us sober and alert, it was punishing.  The sounds alone of the characters were bad enough, but the sights just pushed it to my limit.  The remote control had been set down too far away on the coffee table for either one of us to have gotten to it without a reach over and possibly a grunt.  Neither one of us was mature enough to just throw out a nervous laugh and make the move to end it.  I still cringe thinking about it.  My personal discomfort could never be topped…or so I thought.

 

In fact, there is something far, far worse than watching an eager “up for anything” sex scene in a dark room with your mom.  It’s me being the mom watching an eager, glamorized teenage vampire-mortal sex scene with my own daughter in a dark theater.  Yes, it’s true.

In an unprecedented move, Snakebite wanted to go see Breaking Dawn, which had me breaking down.  But right now, she is the middle school Queen Bee in our house and I just want to earn her approval and am thrilled when she wants to do anything with me.  I complied, mainly because I thought it’d be laughably bad and then I could blog about it later.  Know this: we aren’t up on the franchise.  We both read the first book and saw the movie when my niece came to stay with us one summer.  I thought it was some of the dumbest fodder I’d seen since my friends and I made a slasher movie one bored Sunday afternoon in high school.  This was 1988 and my mom’s huge VHS camera that we used was not equipped with steady cam.  That movie had a richer plot line than Twilight.  If I recall correctly, about 30 minutes into watching that first one, Snakebite said it was weird and lame; she was bored and was going to go to bed.

 

I have a scant understanding of what goes on in the Twilight series because the world is populated with people who call themselves “Twihards”.  Ugh.  I can’t plead that I was ignorant that the girl character, Bella, was going to marry her glittering and frosty vampire beau, Edward.  And I knew from the trailer that they would be starting a family.  It just never occurred to me that they would have rocker Tommy Lee filming the honeymoon.  While nothing as out there as Ron Jeremy showing up in a nurse’s outfit happened, there were ripped feather pillows, broken furniture, tilted light fixtures, body bruises and a lot of position changes.  And they were both allegedly virgins.  There was no, “Ouch, wait, that hurts”, not a single, “You’re on my hair!” nor, “The school nurse said to always use birth-control, Edward.  I am not on the pill.  Did you remember to bring condoms?”  Nope, none of that real life deflowering dialog.   Instead it was Bella glowing and begging for more the next morning and me trying to neutralize the acid reflux in my throat with a fist full of popcorn.  I can’t even discuss the birthing scene that has, like the Pokémon movie, spawned epileptic seizures in movie houses across the world.  The silver lining, I guess, is that Bella didn’t end up with Jacob, the werewolf boy.  That could have been a far worse sex scene to have had to white knuckle through.

What have I learned from this?  Well, for starters, nothing is absolute.  All the things that I thought were awful about being a disgruntled and misunderstood teen daughter myself are now amplified now that I am the mother of a disgruntled and misunderstood teen daughter.  I will never be smug again in thinking that by getting through adolescence and young adulthood I have passed some imaginary finish line where I am now always mature and insightful in the face of awkward moments.  I have not been properly inoculated against personal horror and am therefore not immune to it, as previously thought.  I did exactly what my mom did when Wild at Heart’s credits rolled.  Nothing.  I didn’t mention anything about Bella and Edward’s sexy time and Snakebite announced that she was tired.  And so the cycle is complete…I hope.

That accent ain’t workin’

The battle of bad accents continues to rise

A few years ago Tom Cruise made a movie called Valkyrie.  It was a German movie, about Germans who are speaking English, but they sound German.  Because it’s a movie about Germans.  In Germany.  Critics and moviegoers were in fits because Cruise didn’t even attempt a German accent.  Not so much as a “Gesundheit” after a sneeze.  I dunno.  I think he did the right thing here.  Maybe Tommy felt like if he couldn’t deliver an authentic replication, it would be an insult to Germans, not to mention really distracting for the audience.

I get that, if it’s what he was thinking.  There is no shortage of movies and TV shows that stick in my mind only because of how god-awful the accents are.  I will forget the film entirely and just remember bad lines. Especially the Southern doozies.  Please feel free to weigh in on this topic and make suggestions for additions:

Worst All-Around Bad Southern Accent Film:

Mandingo – James Mason (think Gigi and Lolita) portrays a New Orleans plantation owner in the 1840s.  He has a son, played by Perry King, whose wife, Blanche (Susan George), beds and is impregnated by a strapping yard slave, Mede.  In the end they try to boil him in a big kettle and hilarity ensues.  Only I don’t think it was meant to be funny.  The best scenes involve Paul Benedict (ie Bentley from The Jeffersons) checking a slave boy for hemorrhoids or Blanche declaring to Mede, eyelashes fluttering, “Buts I’s craaaves ya”.  Almost every word ended with an s.  Also notable is that the last half of this movie used more sweat than all of Cool Hand Luke.

Worst Single Offender in a Film – Male

 

Nothing compliments a Southern accent like a dirty wife-beater and a mullet

Nic Cage in Con Air beats out Nick Nolte in The Prince of Tides.  That is quite a feat.  Con Air should have been an awesome action flick.  Instead it was an accidental comedy due to frequent narration by Cage’s character, Cameron Poe, as he reads a letter to his daughter while he is en route home from being wrongly imprisoned.  I was initially confused as to whether or not Poe had suffered brain damage as part of the story line.  It was the only possible explanation of why every “a” was followed by an “h”, any middle vowel got sandwiched beeetweeeeen three mooore, any final or middle “r” was removed and the words were delivered soooo slooowly.  Oh, mah haaaavens.  The most memorable line was delivered to John Malkovich, who messes with the stuffed animal Nic Cage plans to give his daughter, “Put dah bunneh baaawk in tha bawx”, he demands.

Worst Single Offender in a Film – Female

I hate to do this, but I must call out “she who can do not wrong – almost”, Jodie Foster. I decided to cut her some slack for Nell because that character’s accent was all wonky since she was raised only hearing the “Tweeee in da wiiiin”.  Instead, she gets it for Silence of the Lambs.  What was that exactly?  I recall that her character, Clarice, was from West Virginia, but she gave her this kind of creepy clipped yet slurry accent.  It was almost a speech impediment.

Weirdest Southern Accent in a Film

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil with Kevin Spacey was just plain bizarre.  Hot Damn logged her fair share of time in Savannah back in the day and I never came across anyone who sounded like this.  Savannah does have a blend of low-country, deep south and coastal accents, but it works and sounds pretty nice. Makes you want to sit down with a bourbon and coke underneath a moss draped live oak.  What Kevin Spacey did to Jim Thompson was like a jumbled tribute to a repressed gay decorator from Gone With The Wind.  Awful.

Then there is television.  Oh Lawsy!  Has anyone seen that show True Blood?  What am I thinking?  Of course you have.  People have lost their minds over it.  I tried to watch it.  Once.  Let’s gloss over that the characters are derelict vampires in a bayou.  Just suspend that silliness for a second, m’kay?  The dialogue delivery is like retarded meth-heads with white bread in their mouths.  It may be hilarious and riveting, but for me it is unwatchable based on how unlistenable it is.  Oh, and did I make mention that it is about vampires in a bayou.  Jeesh.

Then there’s The Closer.  It centers on Atlanta transplant, Brenda Johnson, played by Kyra Sedgewick, working as an LAPD Deputy Chief.  The story lines are solid, the acting is fine but the accent makes my ears want to furl up and cry.  As an Atlantan, I promise that no one here sounds like Flo from Alice and Mel’s Diner.  Sedgewick’s accent is at once sassy, curt and 100% exaggerated.  It embarrasses me.

“Kiss my grits!”

I do have an honorable mention to mention.  It blows me away how clear and beautiful the singing is of, say, Oasis’ Liam Gallagher.  And then you hear him in an interview and he is utterly unintelligible.  Usually, he even has to be subtitled.  It’s like that with many musicians.  AC DC, The Who, The Scorpions, Ozzy Osbourne…the lot of them sing English, but talk all foreign and accenty.  Except for one.  Check out the Rolling Stones’ “Sweet Virginia”.  Cracks me up how much Southern twang can come out of that little English man with the big mouth.