Welcome to Queerty’s Looking Back 2017, an ongoing series featuring the best and brightest in queer entertainment that you may or may not have missed. Check back with us every day until New Years 2018 for a spotlight on all things entertaining magnificently queer.
Best use of fresh fruit: Call Me By Your Name
Who doesn’t enjoy a smooth, supple peach?
Or was it an apricot? We’re not totally sure. In either case, 2017’s best—and most ironic—use of the passion of fruit came from one of the year’s best films: Call Me By Your Name. The torrid coming of age/first love story of a young American teen living in Italy, Call Me features two fantastic performances from Timothee Chalamet and Armie Hammer.
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The movie also features the most inventive and erotic use of a peach (or apricot) on record. As erotic feelings for Oliver (Hammer) begin to awake in Elio (Chalamet), Elio, like many warm blooded 17-year-olds, comes up with some creative ways of coping. One involves burying his head in Oliver’s used undies (who wouldn’t?), while the other involves penetrating a peach without the consent of the peach.
Related: Which intimate part of Armie Hammer’s anatomy was digitally edited out of “Call Me By Your Name”?
What were we saying?
The greater point: go see the movie, and have some canned peaches and some cream on hand for afterword. Or a Peaches Christ record.
Or dig into some peach cobbler…
Or send someone special a peach emoji…
Or groove out to the sensuous sounds of Peaches & Herb…
Or reflect on this quote about peaches from an old Pashtun folk song…
“There is a boy across the river with an ass like a peach/ but alas, I cannot swim.”
Um…what were we saying again?
Call Me By Your Name is in cinemas now.
Mandrake
I saw this film twice. The second time was with two other friends who wanted to go after dinner one night. I thought maybe I had missed something the first time I saw it, so I figured a second viewing might improve my opinion. It didn’t.
The best part of this film is the scene between the boy and his father on the sofa near the end of the movie. Otherwise, I found it a bit too pretentious for its own good. Armie Hammer was miscast, in my opinion. He looked well into his 30’s, older than the character should have been. Liam Hemsworth who is talented, handsome, and only 27 would have been a better choice for the role.
The context of this romance being one of sensual awakening within a libertarian, intellectual family in 1983 was too much to swallow, peach or no peach.
Umoja
I agree. We’re meant to buy a certain helpless slave-to-society’s-expectations that contrasts with his intelligence… he has to be early twenties to really believe this outcome, a thirty plus year old just comes off as stiff and close-minded.
Frank
The movie was awesome and Armie did an incredible job bringing passion and vulnerability to the rule…if your only quibble is that he did not look young enough…let go of the pearls and smoke a joint…
Also you are correct the couch scene with dad made the entire movie!
JaredMacBride
Looks like Queerty continues to be on the payroll of this thoroughly mediocre, badly miscast, overly long and dumbed down snooze-fest.
lykeitiz
Couldn’t agree more. It had a few moments, but I was surprised how overall bad it was.
russellhm
As the movie opened in NYC and LA for several weeks, my impatience led to my reading the book, one of the best novels treating a young man’s coming to terms with who he is. The first-person narration is perfect as, in time, he is relating the events of that summer with Oliver from the vantage of an older man. (I read that a sequel to the film is in the offing which will cover those latter portions of the novel not in the original film.) But it’s so warming to be able to identify with someone who will remind anyone who’s struggled with his sexual identity as we are given the minutest details of his thoughts, his fears, his desires, his submission, and his coming-of-age. The culminating sex scene if powerful but the lengthy prelude is even more so. Oscar will smile on this bold foray into acceptance of self.
Herman75
I recommend the audiobook. Surprisingly good, and the steamy scenes sound so nice when read by Armie Hammer. I love the way he says C0CK!
mz.sam
Other the the dad and son scene or the Bi-curious kid abusing a juicy freestone the entire movie is a coming out rehash between two skeletal thin actors (snore). Best of Luck at the Golden Globes with the ‘Shape of Watery Peaches’.
Umoja
This film has more explicit hetero-sex than gay sex so should bear that fact with shame.
lykeitiz
This movie had its moments, the peach scene being one of them, but they were very few and far between.
As has already been pointed out, there were no insights to the boy’s thoughts until at least half way through the movie, so unless you read the book, which I understand was written from the boy’s perspective, you were left wondering what, if any, direction the movie was trying to move toward.
The mother’s character is not developed at all except for her insight to one very important plot point, so to suggest later in the movie that she does not have insight into something else is absurd.
Long sequences of bike rides, so if you like to watch people ride bikes, then you will make it to the last 15 minutes of the movie……the only effective part.
If the very vocal politics behind this very mediocre movie push it all the way to the Oscars, it will be years before we see anything deserving come behind it.
Mandrake
A far better film is “God’s Own Country.” It’s more believable and the characters richer and more deeply developed. It did not get the marketing hoopla that “Call Me…” has unfortunately.
Frank
I did enjoy “God’s Own Country”…what a wonderful story of lost identity, regret, maturity and redemption….
JaredMacBride
Yes sir, Mandrake. To me God’s Own Country is in the conversation for the best gay-themed movie ever.
Herman75
Perhaps it plays better to and audience of young hipsters and straight women under 35, but not so much for a bunch of bitter Queenz.
Brian
How do you not know it’s an apricot? There is a whole freaking scene in the movie about the genesis of the word “apricot”, and it’s mentioned several other times as well.