Full Frontal and the R Movie Rating

I was just sitting here in my office, the place where I'm supposed to "work," indulging in a little daydream action featuring my most recent celebrity crush, Jason Segel.

I don't know what's got me crushing on him all of a sudden, I mean he has been around for awhile after all; I think it's that Lifetime recently started airing 2 episodes of How I Met Your Mother every Monday night, starting at the very beginning of the series, and I just happened to get a TiVo right before they started, so I've recorded all of them so far and sometimes engage in a random late-night How-I-Met-Your-Mother-athon when I can't sleep, and I've decided way late that I really do like that show. Mostly I've decided that I really do like that actor, Jason Segel.

He seems pretty goofy, comes across kind of dorky but yet still fun, like you'd probably have a good time if you were ever to just hang out with him doing a whole lot of nothing. And he's cute, again in a kind of goofy way, and tall, and he's good at the whole comedy thing, which makes me think he's a funny guy in real life. And there are all these previews floating around right now about this new movie he's in that's coming out soon, Bromance, or I Love You Man, or something like that, that I'm probably going to end up going to see in the movie theater, because it looks like it should be pretty funny, at least as far as I can tell.

Then I remembered how he was also in that movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which I saw, which I was kind of disappointed in overall but I did still enjoy just the fact that he was in it, because like I said, there's something about him I find likeable. Like, he seems like the kind of guy I would really, really like to date. And THEN I remembered, and couldn't believe that I had forgotten, that he has full frontal nudity in that movie. Which I also really enjoyed, even if it wasn't done in a way that was supposed to turn you on but instead was done in a way that it made the scene funnier, it was still nudity, which I generally enjoy.

So since I was spending all this time sitting here thinking about all this, I googled Jason Segel, to see if I could find any more fodder for my daydream/fantasies of him in which he plays the part of my boyfriend. And I saw this interview he did where he talked about the full frontal scene in the Sarah Marshall movie, and there's this quote in the interview where he says he found out that you can have male full frontal nudity in a movie and keep an R rating so long as the penis is flaccid. And there was this other quote in the same article from John C. Reilly, who apparantly has also done a full frontal scene in a movie, which I did not know, and Reilly was agreeing about how you can show the penis in a movie and keep an R rating as long as the penis is flaccid, and then he said, and I thought this was funny, "In my movie, when people are looking at it, they feel a little bad for the penis."

I think he hit on something there, even if he was just being all self-deprecating and funny when he said it; I think maybe that's the distinction. If a movie shows a guy with a rock hard dick, well then, he's obviously either about to fuck someone or really wishes he was fucking someone; either way it makes you think about sex, it's very sexual. But if a movie shows a guy with a limp penis hanging there, well then, I could see how you might just look at that and feel a little bad for the penis. "Awww, look at that poor little penis, I can't believe they just showed that." And I guess if you're either laughing at it or feeling sorry for it, then it's just an R, whereas if you're looking at it with drool running out your mouth thinking about how you haven't been laid in ages and you'd like to feel that pounding away inside of you, well then we're a little beyond the R at that point.

And those are my Wednesday afternoon thoughts, brought to you from my office. I think I just spent a good half hour at least with all this, what with the daydreaming and the googling and the random stream of thoughts and the post that has no point and probably makes little sense, and now I'm a little closer to time to go home. And really, I guess that was the point after all, so mission accomplished there.

UPDATE: Uh-oh, I think maybe that whole logic up above about the flaccidness of the penis dictating the r movie rating is flawed after all ... because I just remembered, wasn't Harvey Keitel shown fully naked and sporting a solid erection, about to throw down Holly Hunter and take her right there, in the movie "The Piano," and wasn't that movie rated R? I believe so. I believe I do recall that erection, and I think it was an R. Oh well, so much for that theory.