somniloquence

sdwolfpup asked: your favorite and least favorite William Fichtner roles!

I thought this would be easy, but it's turned out to be very difficult! I mean, he's just my faaaavorite, and even when I hate something he's done, I can still find something to like just because he's so awesome.

I think for least favorite, I'd have to go with hair roles: while I really cringe and curl into a ball at the violent racists roles like in Switchback and that one where he plays an old-timey sheriff or something, it's the ones where he has weird horrible hair that I think I hate the most: The Longest Yard, What's the Worst That Could Happen, Drowning Mona. I can't handle the hair, man. At least Longest Yard, he's wearing muscle shirts a lot of the time or tight football pants, so there's that. And then there's the bad teeth roles, like Pearl Harbor, which give me the willies.

I could, though, possibly say The Lone Ranger, because that's sort of a horribleness trifecta: bad teeth, bad hair, and bad facial scars, all wrapped up in a terrible, execrably bad movie that should never have been made. And no I still haven't seen it, because I can't bear to. The clips have been enough.

But for favorite, wow, that is hard. That is really, really hard. How do you choose from Kent in Contact, Sanderson in Black Hawk Down, Alex Mahone in Prison Break, the "dad" in Blades of Glory, Andrew in Nine Lives, the hilariously creepy cop in Strange Days, to Ryan Sparks in Grace Under Fire, and my beloved Bruce Kellerman in the little-known MDs? I can't! I can't choose! They all have something wonderful I love, and he's just such a good actor that he leaves me fascinated by even the most reprehensible characters, and when he plays good guys, I'm over the moon. I also adore him in the horrible movie Drive Angry, because his character, The Accountant, is one of the most delightfully funny nasty pieces of work you'll ever see.

But there are still many roles of his I haven't seen, because they haven't been released either on DVD or aired on TV or shown in theatres. I hope at some point I can see them, because I wonder if there might be a new favorite in there somewhere.
____

In other news, Ginny left today for her adoption tomorrow. A woman fell in love with her at an adoption event last weekend, and somehow talked her macho husband who seems to think real men only have big dogs into adopting her. I'm so happy for her, but I cried when she left. I should post the pic I got of her with Santa. She's the longest-residing foster dog I've ever had, and we've been through a lot of changes. I'm a little worried about her transition to a family with kids, but I'll keep my fingers crossed. I miss her already, but the cats are very happy.

I think I will try to do both Festivids and Yuletide again this year. Dad's already dead, so at least that won't interfere with my ... uh, deadlines again. And after the books I have now, I'm not taking on anymore projects for winter. So there.

To wit, I've nominated 16 fandoms so far. Only a couple have other nominations, I was mildly heartened to see one other person has listed Case Histories, but I know better than to hope for something in that. Some of these are just "gee, that might be fun to vid" while others are more of the "OMG want" category. We can do 20 max, so I still have room for four more if I change my mind.

Awake (2012) [TV]
Big Trouble In Little China [Movie]
Black Hawk Down [Movie]
Burn Notice [TV]
Case HIstories [TV]
Charlie Jade [TV]
Drive Angry (2011) [Movie]
Generation Kill [TV]
Local Hero [Movie]
The Magnificent Seven (1998) [TV]
Mayhem (Allstate TV ads) [Commercial]
MDs [TV]
Miami Vice [TV]
The Middleman [TV]
Strange Days [Movie]
Strike Back (2010) [TV]
ETA: And Kiss Kiss Bang Bang! I knew there was another one I forgot.

Some might notice the preponderance of Jason Isaacs and William Fichtner. I'm just saying. (I wonder why Case Histories has the uppercase I in the middle -- I bet that's my fault from nominating it last year, because I'm the worst typist.) Strike Back seems problematical because the first season is a different cast and tone, and the second series was referred to as Strike Back: Project Dawn to distinguish it in some markets. I wonder if that will have an effect on what's requested/offered and could cause "not the fandom I'm talking about" issues.

OK, back to work now. Regency romance proofread is awaiting my eyeballs.

sol_se posted a wonderful little trailer for some new BBC shows coming up or already running, including a show with... gasp!! Jason Isaacs called Case Histories, and John Simm's new show Exile. I am beside myself. Shirtless Jason! Action Jason!! ::contented sigh::

I think I need to resurrect my Men Who Make Me Happy posts and do one for Jason, because he does indeed make me happy.

All right, fine, Ewan McGregor, almost everything is forgiven, even that Polanski shit. (Although you're on notice; don't slip up again.) It's impossible not to tilt my head and go "d'aaawwww" at this picture and feel my heart grow two sizes:



For the hilarious article with more pics on Tom and Lorenzo's Project Rungay blog, go here.

In other news, I'm continuing with Community watching, and loving it. The Halloween episode just about did me in, with Abed's hysterical Christian Bale as Batman impersonation. And I loved the ChristmasMr. Winter episode, and the debate team one. I'm officially hooked. I even was excited to realize that a song I've wanted to vid for over a decade finally has a fandom! I've never found anything that works for this song, and now I have, and it makes me v. v. happy.

For more joy day, I decided to do something that would bring joy probably only to me, but that's okay, too. I have been eaten alive by Prison Break fandom, specifically Michael/Mahone slashiness, but since the show ended a year and a half ago, everyone's moved on, which means I am very late to the party and short on cash. But I've been reading through past posts by my PB friends for the last few days, and just enjoying the hell out of the conversations, and wishing I'd participated a bit more back then (not that I didn't participate, but it wasn't as extreme as what I feel now).

What is bringing me joy about this cracked show? Oh, so many things. Let me tell you about them!
( Crackiest show ever? You decide. )

John Barrowman is interviewed in AfterElton.com and he had this to say about the upcoming season of Torchwood.
( Read more... )

With Invasion set to premiere tomorrow night (my TiVo better not fail me, which it has been doing lately constantly and of course there's no way to tell TiVo how unhappy I am because they no longer have any way to reach them except by the worst voice mail system on the planet), I am reminded that I've been remiss in singing the praises of one of my favorite actors... largely because whenever I do sing his praises, most of the time I'm met with either "Who?" or "Ew!" As you can imagine, this tends to discourage me from saying much about William Fichtner.

Fichtner's (and yes, I almost always call him that, and it's pronounced fik-ner, with the T only barely sounded) one of those journeymen actors who rarely ever gets a lead role, and has only once been in a romantic leading role in a movie (an awful film with Demi Moore but it makes me happy nonetheless), but is always in the main cast, doing good work, stealing scenes from the leads. Sadly, the most well-known movies he's been in he's usually playing a bad guy, but his looks are not the standard hottie Hollywood type, so of course he plays bad guys. He's very, very good at being sinister in a polite, charming, insinuating way, so movies like The Longest Yard remake or Strange Days (where he said nearly nothing but was one creepy dude) will usually pick up on that. He's tall, too, with a kind of pointy face, high forehead, and goggly eyes, and that will say "bad guy" to the suits in Hollywood like nothing else.

But he's used that ability to play really weird and off-kilter guys to great advantage in a lot of indie movies, especially the pervy, freaky cop in Go, and the place I first saw him, the TV sitcom Grace Under Fire, where he played Grace's mad-scientist type boyfriend, Ryan Sparks. They really amped up his weirdness factor with crazy wardrobe choices and standup Eraserhead hair, and the character was so odd and edgy and funny that I fell madly in love, and have followed his career ever since. (Also, he reminded me in that role of a cleaned-up, nearly normal brother of the hissing creepy guy with the president's finger in Escape from New York, and how can you resist someone who reminds you of creepy finger hissing guy? I ask you.) Some folks discovered him even earlier on the soap As the World Turns. What I think most people would remember him from are two space-themed blockbusters, one that I despise -- Armageddon -- and one that I love -- Contact. In Armageddon, he gets what I consider one of the best lines ever ("Boy, talk about the wrong stuff!") and IMO, the single worst line of dialog ever on film when he tells Liv Tyler he wants to shake the hand of the daughter of the bravest man he's ever known (seriously, it hurts me to write that). That he could deliver both those lines in such a crapfest with such aplomb made me love him all the more.

And even though he's the saintly blind guy in Contact, it picks up on something about him that many other movies (Black Hawk Down, Perfect Storm, The Underneath, Crash, Go, Equilibrium) have as well, which is a kind of ambiguity about what he really is: good or bad. In Black Hawk Down, one of my favorites of his roles, he has a very heroic, almost sweet quality, but there's also that little bit of cowboy in him when he's facing off with Jason Isaacs's character. He gives off a vibe that says you never really know where he's going to go -- maybe he'll continue to smile at you, or maybe he will gut you with a hidden knife. And I think Invasion is playing off that, even though I've seen only one clip so far with him in it. He plays the sort of bad guy sheriff, a role he's definitely played before, but it will be interesting to see what he does with it.

One of my biggest heartbreaks a few years ago, in a season of television that I think might have been the best fall ever and was filled with heartbreak cancellations, was the series he did with John Hannah (the two of them in my icon are the characters) called MDs, which ABC promptly cancelled with six remaining eps we've never seen. To say it was a slasher's dream come true would be putting it mildly; it was so slashy that the TWoP recappers and message boards were filled with things like "Why can't Fichtner and Hannah have a shower scene every week?" answered by "That's a question that keeps us up at nights, too." They had showers together, they had random scenes together for no reason other than that the powers felt they needed to constantly put the two together, even if their jobs had nothing to do with each other, and there seemed to be some kind of obligation to end each episode with the two of them having a deeply felt talk in the locker room or on the building roof... just because. When one of them was done with surgery for the day, the other would just step in and help him, because then they could spend more time together. It was almost comical in its slashiness. And someone on the production team at least had the sense to recognize that maybe Fichtner doesn't have the most drop-dead good looks, but he does have a drop-dead bod, because they frequently featured him in various stages of undress, or in drapey sweats that showed off his assets, and of course the scrubs with the short sleeves so we could see his muscles. Which are lovely. Trust me.

He loves playing weird characters, though, so it's something I have to weigh when I see his stuff -- do I want to watch him playing a freaky detective who looks and acts like a cross between Carol Channing and Truman Capote? Can I handle it if he's playing yet another racist, vicious cop who's going to try to kill the hero? It's always a crapshoot with Fichtner! I'm glad that he's back on weekly TV, and this is a series that nearly everyone has said is sure to be a standout of the season, so I'm hopeful that maybe his character will get more depth. I have no love for ABC, and until Lost became a hit, their support for genre was... crappy doesn't begin to describe it. I will keep my fingers crossed. It's going to be the young studly guy who gets all the media attention, but I'm willing to wager that such a professional scene-stealer as Fichtner will end up being the character the viewers talk about most.

I thought I'd try to do a non-horrible death post for a change and say something fannish.

The reception to my Magnificent 7 vid In a Big Country surprised me a lot, both when it premiered at the con and when I put it up online. It seemed to pique the interest of a lot of people who normally wouldn't give cowboys in love a fightin' chance. Coupled with the fact that Showtime Extreme is currently showing the episodes uncut and unbugged, I think the fandom is poised for a little bit of an uplift. Before, anyone getting into it through word of mouth or fanfic had an awfully hard time getting hold of the 23 hours available (a pilot movie and 21 subsequent episodes, spread over two "seasons" because CBS cancelled it halfway through its first season, but it was brought back by a successful fan campaign, whereupon CBS promptly cancelled it again without airing the final four episodes that TNT, before it became Spike TV, did air with their horrible, horrible station ID bugs and all cut up). When they could get tapes, they were second or third gen, blurry and dark, or people bought the terrible DVDs that someone is selling, where they are compressed, blown up to full screen size, and then crammed on a disc with so many other eps that they are nearly unwatchable. So it's been a difficult fandom to pimp. Hallmark channel showed them a few years ago, but their scheduling was weirdly unreliable, and some eps were drastically cut, often in the slashiest places, or then not touched at all, but they changed schedules without alerting TiVo, so one of the most pivotal eps never repeated.

I'm hopeful that with the Showtime airings making good copies available, people can discover this wonderful series -- and hope they will show up on the torrent sites, if people don't have someone who can record the Showtime eps for them. The ones I've seen so far look stunning -- the show was filmed using natural light, which is very unusual, so the darks often didn't register well previously, but these airings have restored the look of the show quite well, I think. I'm also hearing things I've never been able to hear before. Like a lot of shows on CBS at the time, Mag 7 was made with a very clean-cut, family audience in mind, so there are a number of the usual Western cliches. But the show really veered away from that in many respects to create a more realistic feeling about what things were like, and they got a number of historical details right that I really valued (being someone who really loves to research the old West). I heard a couple people disparage the show at Escapade as being not bad, but not good, but I disagree -- I think it was frequently great, and had some good solid writing from people who knew their characters well (no mean feat for seven main characters and a couple of recurring secondary characters). The final four eps that CBS never aired, in fact, were superb, and were taking the show to a very dark, very adult place that was everything I could have hoped for.

I really enjoyed killabeez's posts about essential Highlander episodes, and I got to thinking after someone mentioned again how the vid had got them interested in seeing it, what episodes would I consider mandatory watching to be pimped or to pimp someone into the fandom? I'm a terrible pimp, so I might be choosing the wrong things (I like dark, challenging, gripping stories as opposed to lighter weight or humorous, most often), but this is a listing of what I would show someone if I had limited time. (OTOH, I think watching all 23 hours isn't unfeasible, and would recommend that more, especially in order -- I sent mlyn home with a bag o' tapes and she came back hooked. A marathon can be a lot of fun.) Keep in mind, too, that I'm very, very Chris/Vin-centric, with a lot of love for everyone, but not as much for Buck and JD, though I do think they have their moments.

( My essential episodes of The Magnificent Seven )

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Showtime airs them all, and doesn't just peter out halfway through. Because that second season is a corker (I didn't even include the wonderful Love and Honor, and Lady Killers), and I would hate to think that people won't have good copies of this wonderful series.

I finally got a chance to see The Chronicles of Riddick this weekend, and it was every bit as bad as I was expecting it to be. I had no real hopes, based on the trailer and ads, especially after hearing umpteen thousand times what has to be the stupidest line I've ever heard in a movie, "Convert now, or fall forever." What does that even mean, I wanted to scream. Instead I scream it at my friends. But it was a good indicator of the sheer unadulterated moronity of this movie, which going into with low expectations helps. But it was hard, because... I love Vin Diesel. I do. And I'm not going to apologize for it; in fact, I will defend my favorite musclebound bad boy, because someone's gotta do it.

feochadn and I had been driving around Manhattan Beach in LA when we saw all these signs for this movie called Pitch Black, and at the movie we went to that day, saw a trailer for it. We were intrigued -- we hadn't heard anything much about it, but it seemed unusually polished for a b-movie sci-fi actioner. So when it opened in Seattle, where there were no posters for it and it seemed to be advertised only on TV, we slogged up to one of the only theaters showing it, and were completely blown away. By the movie, but also, by Vin. The voice, the body, the mystique he cultivated in that role, just thrilled us, and the next weekend we brought a friend, and then another friend. We kept going back for almost as long as the movie played, because the movie was damn great -- an exquisite piece of b-movie making elevated to A level -- and because Vin was just sooooo sexay. Every time I heard that voiceover at the beginning of the movie, where he purrs "What route? what route" my legs got all rubbery. And those shiny eyes, and that scene where he comes up behind Radha Mitchell and turns on the sex while having that conversation about Johns (the homoerotic subtext wasn't much sub at all), just made me giddy.

After the movie left theatres, we went on a Vin hunt. I'd only barely remembered him from Saving Private Ryan, but he'd definitely made an impression as Caparzo, the doomed soldier who sacrifices himself to save the little French girl. We found a copy of his short Multi-Facial, which he wrote, directed, and starred in, and were completely amazed at how really versatile and talented he was. I hadn't known, either, that he was the voice of the giant in The Iron Giant, and when I bought that and watched the making of features on the disc (as well as the incredibly charming WB special about it, which he hosted and seemed like nothing more than a big, fanboy kid), there was a whole other picture of this actor than I'd got from either the commentaries about making Multi-Facial (which is on one of the Shorts collection discs, a series of outstanding DVDs that collect some of the best short films being made) or the publicity, what little of it I could find, on Pitch Black.

And of course, not long after that it seemed like Vin was everywhere, and his ambition and attitude were all anyone wanted to write about. And yeah, I definitely get the impression this is a guy who has no problem with his ego except fitting it into a room, but it hasn't stopped me from admiring the guy. He knew he always wanted to be an action star, apparently, and single-mindedly went after that, but Multi-Facial, and what little I've seen of his other self-made feature, Strays, are proof that he really can act and write and direct, and that he's not just a big lunkhead. His voice work on Iron Giant is fantastic, and in his brief screen time in Ryan and his shot in Boiler Room, I think it's pretty obvious that the guy has more talent than people are giving him credit for, which makes me sad. The bad boy/party animal image, the apparent lack of humility (though every time I've seen him talk about himself, he's been wonderfully self-effacing but confident, so I'm not always sure where this comes from), the focus on becoming a big star, all seem to have earned him a rep that makes everyone hypercritical of everything he does now.

Though, strangely, I don't care -- a lot of times people's 'tudes about themselves put me off, because it can often come across in their performances. But I never get that feeling from Vin, for some reason, despite the overblown action of his last few movies, or the clothes carefully chosen to highlight that incredible body, and so on. And it's too easy to mock him for the name he chose (which, I dunno, if I could change my name to something that cool? I would, totally), or the movies he's elected to do and how confident he is in trying to create franchises, but it makes me wonder why that should matter. He's making the mistakes of the young and very confident, and that makes him an easy target, but I admire some of that. I don't get confidence at all, and like many, I often see confident people as arrogant, but objectively, I understand that those two are not the same things. Unfortunately, this is how he's been branded.

I know he has a 'tude, and a major one -- he got kicked off Reindeer Games (and how I wish he'd been in that awful film, it might have made it more tolerable to have him sparring with my beloved Gary Sinise instead of ultra-bland Ben Affleck) for giving that 'tude to Frankenheimer for various reasons, and probably his rising star and ego didn't help with getting Diablo made well (later renamed as A Man Apart, and a potentially cool movie that was messed up), and XXX is a piece of shit by any definition, that often seems like nothing more than a love letter from Vin to himself, which is sad. But despite all that, and the crappy movies and all, I still love him, because of those really good movies, and because he is the sex.

The friend I saw Riddick with told me that while she thinks he has an incredible body, she doesn't like his face because his features are outsized and his nose is too big -- which is partly why I think he's so gorgeous. I love that about him, and the shaved head, and in PB and Riddick, the goggles (has anyone ever made goggles sexy? I think not -- as far as I know, Vin Diesel is the only guy who's ever managed to make such a dorktastic piece of gear look so cool). A few years ago, GQ did a photo essay featuring Vin, and he wore these leather trousers with a lace-up front, and I thought I might actually perish of fits when I saw that photo, he was so damn hot. A number of reviewers called him mushmouthed and a lunkhead and whatnot when reviewing Riddick, but I get the impression that they're not really paying attention, because he can show incredible diction when called for, and then not, and he radiates a kind of feral intelligence as Riddick that I wouldn't, frankly, demean that much. I like the fact that he so easily embodies all these disparate qualities (well-spoken or uncouth, scary or soft, macho or sensitive), that he is handsome in a non-standard way (thank god for his multicultural heritage, it makes his face fascinating to my eyes), that he can seem to be many things at once depending on your attitude about him.

Which is, of course, part of the problem. By now, most people have a very bad attitude about him, which may or may not be deserved. I keep hoping that he will eschew this action star thing and maybe try to get back to some good stuff to show people what he really can do. XXX was indefensible, and Riddick, while I can see what he was trying to do, just wasn't a good enough movie to carry on the legacy of the sublime Pitch Black. Not that it wasn't fun, but... it had none of the qualities the original did. I immeditely went home and put on PB to get the taste back for the original, and one of the things I noticed this time (you'd think that I'd have noticed this the first, oh, 60 times I watched it, but I'm slow) is that Riddick only mentions a few times that he is a killer. Everything we know about him primarily comes from Johns, and Johns has a very deep ulterior motive for keeping the crash survivors terrified of Riddick. I found this fascinating, especially in light of how much they tried to take that mystique away from Riddick in the new movie.

Now they have to give him this whole Furian race background, and make it something larger than the humans who are trying to survive in PB, and Riddick more mythical in an overblown way. What made Riddick so unforgettable, besides Vin's talent, was that he ends up redeeming himself to save others even while staying a killer, and we don't really know whether this is a huge character change for him, or not. We have no knowledge of whether he's a sociopathic murderer, or if he killed for some other reason. The Chronicles of Riddick, unfortunately, loses sight of that mystique and diminishes a lot of what was so cool about him (though they kept the hilarious, .sig-worthy lines), makes him nigh-on invincible (which is boring), and only gives us a glimpse of the guy who would go to enormous lengths to keep the girl he rescued in PB safe from harm (and that, frankly, is the best part of Riddick as a character -- the battle of these two highly divergent parts of his emotional life).

And I think that's a huge missed opportunity, because Vin could do that, and could show people once again that he really does have those acting chops that we were so taken by when we first saw him. The bod and the voice and the head are probably always going to be the focus with him, but I'd love to see his talents be taken as seriously, too. Criminy, if Arnold can do it by carefully mixing his roles, why can't Vin? I like him too much to see him disappear into the Hell of the Steven Seagals.

I finally got the chance to see Master and Commander yesterday, though it had gone from the best theatre in town, the Cinerama, and of course, loved it as much as anyone else. There was also a double dose of Horatio Hornblower this past week on A&E, and so my British naval uniform fixation was ably handled by all this stuff. (Although, I have one quibble with everyone who discussed M&C -- why didn’t anyone mention that Billy Boyd was in it? I was so thrilled; I’ve grown quite smitten with him.) Of course Russell looked unbearably hot in his poofy shirt and the long flowing locks. But it was Pellew in his admiral’s uniform on HH that got me really going; you’re right, merryish, Robert Lindsay is still of the hot, even with a few more pounds and a few more wrinkles. There’s something about all that high-collared, buttoned-up, gleaming and glitteringly decorated stuff covering a guy up, and then the occasional glimpse of forearm or chest, that makes me go “oooooo.”

A long time ago, I realized that I prefer people to be covered up. At least a little -- that the power of suggestion, the hint at what’s beneath, is far sexier to me than total nakediddity. Not that I don’t appreciate a full-on disrobing, or anything. One of the things I love about many of my favorite actors is that they’re not afraid to drop trou, and to flout that annoying convention that full nudity from a woman is PG-13 material, but a glimpse of penis is at least R. Actors like James Marsters, Russell, Clive Owen, Sean Bean, Ewan MacGregor, Liam Neeson, David Duchovny, Harvey Keitel (not that I necessarily want to see Harvey nekkid, it’s more the principle), Michael Biehn, Roy Dupuis (who’s not even content to just be naked as hell throughout most of a movie, he’ll even do a fairly graphic simulated sex scene with another man),and probably most of the acting contingent from Down Under -- I’ve gathered quite an extensive list of favorite guys who are also willing to go the full full frontal route and don’t seem to have any issues.

But it’s often that suggestion, or of being partly dressed, with mere glimpses of skin, that I like best, even when the actor is willing to go all the way. There’s something about being half dressed, or a uniform undone so that the character is down to their shirt and trousers, or a shirt sleeve rolled up on a forearm, that can set my imagination in gear and make it much sexier. Even though I know Lord of the Rings isn’t exactly a pulchritude-fest, I found a scene in Fellowship to be incredibly slashy and sexy in a surprising way -- when Boromir and Aragorn are in Lothlorien, talking about Gondor and the White City, each of them has shed a lot of his gear and is finally relaxed a little. Aragorn has his sleeves rolled up on his forearms, and that seemed like the closest thing to pass for sex in the movie -- it’s suggestive forearm flirting! Plus, you throw in the intensity of their conversation, the way they’re bonding finally, and it’s all very. . . yummy. And so suggestive to someone with that (okay, admittedly perverse) frame of mind.

There’s a total Z-level movie Michael Biehn made a number of years ago called Breach of Trust (I know it has another name I can’t remember), where we get the closest scene he’s ever done to true full-frontal, but except for a well-placed camera just hovering at the edge of his hip, we don’t see everything. But what we do get to see is quite lovely, and it’s that suggestion that’s both frustrating (because it’s such a tease) and compelling at the same time. Later in Magnificent 7, when he’s sitting in a big copper tub in the episode Obesssion, you can see nearly everything under the waterline and you know he’s naked as a jaybird under there; the only thing making it TV-friendly is a well-placed circle of soap scum. There’s something about all that that’s even sexier than if he were prancing around; we’re seeing a lot, but not everything, and our minds fill in the rest.

My Ex used to have quite the extensive porn collection, but nothing got him more hot and bothered than the Victoria’s Secret catalogs I used to get sent by the pound. It took me a long time before I understood what he saw in those things. He once rhapsodized about the suggestion of it, especially things like the then-fashionable over the knee stockings with mini-skirts, where you got about three inches of bare thigh between stocking and skirt hem. The whole garters and stockings thing got him panting like a dog, too, because, as he explained it, the lines of fabric outlining patches of bare skin, and the hint of being able to take things off slowly, in pieces, was irresistible. Mostly I just laughed at him, but over the years I’ve come to understand what he was saying. It used to be that so few actors were willing to be naked on screen (and that so few movies were willing to risk the higher ratings because of puritanical nudity double standards), that you never really had the chance to say, well, I prefer a little clothing on my man. But now that it’s more common to see actors in the buff, I’m realizing how much I like it when they’re more suggestive in their approach to this. The fact that we’ve been able to see some of these guys nude, though, also helps -- we have less work to titillate our imaginations because we have seen them in the altogether, so future glimpses where they’re not naked might have more power than if we’ve never seen the whole man.

Sometimes, too, it feels exploitative, just as much as it has in the past for women actors. I know that after JM talked about how he’d started to feel like a piece of meat towards the end of season 6 on Buffy, it made it a bit harder for me to view those scenes with the same level of squealy, adolescent glee that I’d taken before in seeing so very much of him on screen. So here’s hoping for maybe a little less skin, but an extra dose of suggestion now that he’s back in the world again on Angel. And much as I loved the gorgeously framed nude backside scenes on Now and Again of the spectacuar Eric Close, my favorite publicity still of him during that time period (which I wish I could make an icon of, dammit!) is one where he’s wearing these midnight blue pajama pants and an open white shirt (is there anything sexier than a white shirt? I ask you), sitting on the edge of a barely made bed, and he has bare feet and the cuffs of the shirt are undone. This is simply the sexiest picture I’ve ever seen of any guy, I think, and it’s so wonderfully suggestive, just enough skin of the feet and lower legs, the chest and stomach, that it’s breathtaking. And you can think anything about it.

There’s something about watching someone, too, who’s all buttoned up normally (whether it’s Pellew in his high-collared, super formal uniform or Lt. Castillo’s sixties Dragnet-inspired uniform of thin black tie, plain black trousers, and short-sleeved white JC Penny shirt), becoming slightly unbuttoned, particularly when they’re around someone else. Again, it sends hints to our imagination, gives us blanks we can fill in in our own way. They always say the brain is our most powerful sex organ, and I think they’re right. When it comes to sex appeal and sexual excitement, I think I’d pick the power of suggestion any day. Give me a bare forearm extending from a rolled-up poofy shirt sleeve, or a glimpse of thigh under a loosely thrown sheet, and I’m there.