| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"stoney" |
| Date: |
29 Sep 2006 10:09:47 PM |
| Object: |
SEX FOR SEXAGENARIANS Movies Target Frisky Seniors |
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,439981,00.html
September 25, 2006
SEX FOR SEXAGENARIANS
Movies Target Frisky Seniors
By Malte Herwig
With the younger generation seemingly content with the Internet and
video games, seniors have become the new target audience for the movie
industry. New productions are even challenging taboos. Senior sex has
hit the silver screen.
Getting old is a tragedy. Even Homer, the master of the Greek tragedy,
recognized that misfortune speeds up aging. After 40 years of marriage,
Marilyn's husband Marty dies in an accident, throwing her entire,
well-ordered life off-kilter. With whom should she share her table and
bed, and all the other important details that have pulled the soft cloak
of habit over her decades of married life?
The silver screen story of the widow Marilyn (Brenda Vaccaro) is set in
Boynton Beach -- a town in sunny Florida that looks as though a Gray
Panthers battalion just marched in. The place is a retirees' paradise
where everything seems to revolve around tea dances, coffee klatches and
senior aerobics. And where the Boynton Beach Bereavement Club is
constantly welcoming new members.
There they sit, the old and the lonely, on plastic chairs in a sparsely
furnished room with floral wall-to-wall carpeting, eating cake from
paper plates. Most are over 60, and there are eight women to every man
in the room. Those who don't have beach houses yet aren't about to start
building now. This is life in Boynton Beach, a place where desire has
had its day and where passing the time is about all these people have
left to do.
Or is it?
Certainly not in the movies. "Who wants to start?" an ample woman asks
the group. A saucy old woman in a turquoise T-shirt that reads "Old Age
Isn't For Sissies" pipes up and asks: "What do you say to a fellow who
can't raise the flag?" "Forget it, honey," a chorus of women behind her
responds. "Get yourself a younger guy."
The American film "Boynton Beach Club," a story about the love lives of
American retirees, is not a tragedy about aging by any stretch of the
imagination. Rarely has an American film dealt so skillfully and
uninhibitedly with two topics that have long bordered on taboo in the
prim United States, both alone and especially in combination: sex and
old age.
"Boynton Beach Club" has developed into something of a cult film,
especially among older moviegoers, ever since director Susan Seidelman,
53, released the film in Florida without the backing of any Hollywood
distributors. The industry experts were unconvinced that the film's
supposed niche subject would attract a wider audience. The New York
Times praised the director for being courageous enough to venture into
the world of the elderly, and the Washington Post celebrated its
"brilliant cast of discarded '70s-era Hollywood stars." Dyan Cannon and
Sally Kellerman are prime examples. They are both 69 years young.
Yet despite the doubts prior to the release of "Boynton Beach Club," it
is clear that the ailing movie industry could use the extra ticket
revenues from older moviegoers. Especially now that younger viewers are
increasingly being lured away by the world of the Internet and video
games. Indeed, according to a current study by Germany's Film Promotion
Institute (FFA), demographic change could even represent an opportunity
for the German film industry with the over-50 generation having the
potential to become German moviemakers' key target audience. More than
half of German moviegoers are already 30 and older and, as the FFA study
concludes, now play "an increasingly important role for producers and
marketing departments. In fact, this is the group to which recent German
hits like "Das Leben der Anderen" ("Life on the Other Side") and "Sophie
Scholl -- Die letzten Tage" ("Sophie Scholl -- The Final Days") owe much
of their success at the box office.
Old people and the movies are rediscovering one another. "We thought,
wait a minute, why hasn't anybody discovered this audience?" says
Seidelman, who wrote and produced the film with her mother Florence,
herself a resident of a retirement community. The mother-and-daughter
team was also responsible for marketing the film, and in doing so they
honed in on the over-50 set, a group the major movie distributors have
all but ignored. While Susan took over the task of placing ads and
issuing press releases in the local media, Florence and more than two
dozen fellow retirees embarked on a campaign to hang posters and hand
out flyers in community rooms, retirement homes and restaurants.
Then something astonishing happened. Seniors went to see Seidelman's
movie in droves. Within a week it had made more than $100,000 in ticket
sales in only 10 theaters -- an impressive achievement for a low-budget
production, especially in Florida where senior citizens pay discounted
ticket prices. The trade publication Variety ran a story about the
film's success, and suddenly Hollywood was interested in Seidelman. "The
film shows that 60-year-olds are the new 40-year-olds," says Eric
D'Arbeloff of Roadside Attractions, the distributor that has now
released "Boynton Beach Club" in theaters throughout the US. "It's an
event film for the older generation of moviegoers, because it's about
dating and sex."
Take the story of Jack and Sandy. Because divorced women are considered
less attractive, Sandy (Sally Kellerman) poses as a widow and ensnares
the good-natured Jack (Len Cariou), whose wife has recently passed away.
But the two quickly discover that a first date, after decades of
marriage, is everything but easy, and not just for those who arrive on
Rollerblades, like the eternally young Lois (Cannon) and her dapper beau
Donald (Michael Nouri).
Even practiced ladies' man Harry (Joseph Bologna) learns that all his
youthful insecurities return to haunt him when he runs into his high
school sweetheart at a New Year's Eve party. Sex with one's own wife is
a different story, Harry warns his friend Jack, because you've grown old
with her. "But with a new woman, when you look at her breasts and her
butt, you suddenly realize: You're about to sleep with an old lady."
Seidelman shows that, even in old age, the notorious first time hasn't
lost any of its simultaneously terrifying and titillating magic. In one
sensitive scene, Kellerman drops her clothes in front of Jack for a
moment. But the two are suddenly so discomfited by her nudity that they
end up doing nothing but cuddling.
The director, who made a name for herself as a chronicler of her
generation in movies like "Desperately Seeking Susan" (1985), Madonna's
first film, and in the pilot for the HBO series "Sex and the City," has
apparently tapped into a new trend with "Boynton Beach Club."
Of course, Seidelman's work has been preceded by other films that
revolve around the elderly, such as "Driving Miss Daisy" (1989), the
tale of a difficult friendship between an eccentric widow (Jessica
Tandy) and her chauffeur (Morgan Freeman), or "Space Cowboys" (2000), in
which graying Hollywood heroes join Clint Eastwood on a space mission to
repair an old Russian communications satellite. More recently, Maggie
Smith and Judi Dench starred in "The Scent of Lavender" (2004), the
story of two elderly sisters who become consumed by their jealous
attraction to a stranded young violinist.
But these were all comedies or historical films, in which the age of the
stars was in a sense costumed by the age of the historic material, so
that age itself became a secondary element. Seidelman, however, wasn't
interested in portraying English ladies sipping tea, but instead what
she calls "Sex and the City for 60-year-olds."
Her film hits a nerve among baby boomers who influenced postwar culture
for decades. Now, they are making the difficult transition into
retirement age. But this generation -- perhaps the most sexually liberal
ever -- is unwilling to compromise its quality of life. The baby boomers
got the Pill when they were 20 and Viagra at 60. In Seidelman's film,
Harry says to Jack: "People think that there's no more sex after a
certain age -- they're wrong." And now these youthful sexagenarians are
embarking on another sexual revolution. Under the discreet slogan "It's
never too late to learn something new," ads are appearing in newspapers,
even in the illustrious New York Times, for "teaching films" in which
"real couples" demonstrate the joys of sex in ripe old age. Indeed, one
of society's mottos at the dawn of the 21st century could well be "Sex
in the Sixties."
A new movement in cinema, in which the elderly are the new youth, has
already taken hold in Germany, supposedly Europe's ground zero for
demographic apocalypse. In "Mathilde liebt" ("Mathilde in Love"), a
made-for-TV movie released last year, 66-year-old Christiane Hörbiger
plays a lovesick widow who, after a long marriage, experiences her first
orgasm with a new lover. The film was an overnight hit among 7 million
viewers, partly because of lines like: "Have you ever had an organism?"
When Mathilde's daughter in the film stares in disbelief, Mathilde
assures her that it's "incredible."
"In the South," a French film now playing in German theaters,
demonstrates just how fatal the suppression of such desires can be. The
55-year-old Ellen (Charlotte Rampling) is a French professor at an
American college on the East Coast. Ellen has spent the last six summers
vacationing with her friend Brenda (Karen Young) at a luxurious resort
in Haiti -- sex tourism, but with reversed roles. In this film, the
mature American women while away their days with local boys. As Ellen
says, "there's nothing in Boston for women over 40." When Brenda falls
in love with Ellen's protégé Legba (Ménothy Cesar), their idyllic setup
threatens to collapse. Director Laurent Cantet has created a dark,
claustrophobic film about unfulfilled desire and dangerous
self-deception. The supposed (sex) paradise Haiti proves to be a hell in
which political unrest penetrates into secluded life at the resort.
Those who pursue their Freudian and Hollywood-esque desires seem to have
a decidedly better time of it. The character Burt Munro in the road
movie "The World's Fastest Indian" is one of them. Anthony Hopkins plays
Munro, a cheerful New Zealand senior who travels to America with his
souped-up 1920s motorcycle in a quest to break the speed record in the
Utah salt desert.
Director Roger Donaldson tells the tale of the speedy senior as the
typical American success story of a man who struggles against countless
obstacles -- and ultimately triumphs. But Munro's greatest obstacle
turns out not to be his age, but the prejudices the elderly encounter.
"Everyone wants us old guys to crawl into some corner and die," the
sprightly motorcyclist tells a group of younger cynics, "but I'm not
ready by a long shot." It just so happens, the old man cheerfully
reflects, that one can play a lot of songs on an old banjo.
Director Seidelman, who as a young woman in the 1970s was influenced by
New York's punk scene, could just as well have become a sociologist or
anthropologist, and it is through this lens that she observes American
pop culture. "I think we should completely reinvent our ideas about age
and sexuality," she says.
Ursula Staudinger, a professor of psychology at the International
University Bremen, believes that the time has come for a change in
attitudes. "First we have to change something in our heads. We have to
internalize new images of aging." And this, says Klaus Keil, is a task
that's practically made for the cinema. In a large-scale study involving
psychologists, gerontologists, sociologists and market researchers Keil,
the director of the Erich Pommer Institute in Potsdam outside Berlin,
has examined the cinematic preferences of the 50 and older generation, a
group he calls the "Best Agers." The study concludes that, although
their share of the movie-going public has almost doubled in the last
five years to 14 percent, Germany's more than 30 million Best Agers have
hardly been taken seriously as an audience.
"The German film industry is sleeping," says Keil. While US chains like
Muvico and boutique cinemas like Paris's MK2 are courting older
moviegoers with high-quality fare and refined interiors, Germany has
seen little movement in this direction. The problem is made glaringly
obvious by a visit to any ordinary German movie theater, where the roar
of THX sound is too loud for many older viewers, the advertising too
long and the seats too uncomfortable. And instead of super-sized soft
drinks and popcorn, the fare offered at the theaters' concession stands
would be more attractive to older viewers if it included items like wine
and olives.
Klaus Keil can only shake his head at theater operators' collective
frenzied pursuit of the youth market. After all, the Best Agers are not
just low-cost babysitters who occasionally go to the movies with their
grandchildren. On the contrary, they are professional consumers who know
exactly what they want: service, hospitality, polite treatment, a
diverse program and movies they find relevant and with which they can
identify. Keil says he could even imagine the audience staying behind to
discuss a movie after it ends, which is exactly what Seidelman
experienced with her audiences. "They said to me: Finally someone is
telling our story. This wasn't just any old movie for these older
people, but practically a political manifesto." The revolution has
already begun.
/end
--
Fundies and trolls are cordially invited to
shove a wooden cross up their arses and rotate
at a high rate of speed. I trust you'll
be 'blessed' with a plethora of splinters.
.
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| User: "johac" |
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| Title: Re: SEX FOR SEXAGENARIANS Movies Target Frisky Seniors |
30 Sep 2006 12:33:23 AM |
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In article <lqnrh2dbdpn1peuetc4jta1782fnkj7k8g@4ax.com>,
stoney <stoney@the.net> wrote:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,439981,00.html
September 25, 2006
SEX FOR SEXAGENARIANS
Movies Target Frisky Seniors
By Malte Herwig
With the younger generation seemingly content with the Internet and
video games, seniors have become the new target audience for the movie
industry. New productions are even challenging taboos. Senior sex has
hit the silver screen.
The movie must be very long. :-)
--
John Hachmann aa #1782
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities"
-Voltaire
Contact - Throw a .net over the .com
.
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| User: "stoney" |
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| Title: Re: SEX FOR SEXAGENARIANS Movies Target Frisky Seniors |
03 Oct 2006 06:35:29 PM |
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On Fri, 29 Sep 2006 22:33:23 -0700, johac <jhachmann@sbcglobal.com>
wrote in alt.atheism
In article <lqnrh2dbdpn1peuetc4jta1782fnkj7k8g@4ax.com>,
stoney <stoney@the.net> wrote:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,439981,00.html
September 25, 2006
SEX FOR SEXAGENARIANS
Movies Target Frisky Seniors
By Malte Herwig
With the younger generation seemingly content with the Internet and
video games, seniors have become the new target audience for the movie
industry. New productions are even challenging taboos. Senior sex has
hit the silver screen.
The movie must be very long. :-)
[rrrrrrrrroooooooooooolllllllllllllliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnnnnnggggggggggg]
--
Fundies and trolls are cordially invited to
shove a wooden cross up their arses and rotate
at a high rate of speed. I trust you'll
be 'blessed' with a plethora of splinters.
.
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