Movie-goers saw much more than they bargained for this year in the romantic comedy "Going the Distance." Besides a sex scene on a kitchen table, a telephone sex conversation, we also saw Charlie Day do an entire scene on the toilet.
This is not the first movie experience, nor the last in 2010's dirty rom-com department (especially with "Distance" coming out on DVD on Oct. 26).
"I think it's an effort to put more of a dirty reality into it, exposing the underside of relationships a little bit more," Justin Long, the male star of "Going the Distance," tells PopcornBiz.
We've gotten a whole lot of reality in the department this year.
In "The Back-Up Plan" we were treated to Jennifer Lopez peeing on a pregnancy stick (TMI alert) and extensive shots of the now "American Idol" judge sitting on a gynecologist's chair.
In "The Switch" Jason Bateman drunkenly swirls a cup of life-creating bodily fluid about like a fine glass of wine.
"I cannot help but to think that he's contemplating drinking it," says Long of the Bateman image that accompanied "The Switch" poster. "He's looking at it like hmmmm. I don't want to drink it, but I think I should."
And in "LIfe As We Know It" the raunchier trend will continue in rom-coms this Friday (though admittedly more in the normal domain of rom-com humor, with poop and marijuana jokes).
So what gives? Long gives the credit to Judd Apatow, the director/producer/writer of such raunchy classic rom-coms as "Knocked Up." "I thnk it's coming from Judd," says Long. "People are trying to emulate what he's been doing so well over the years."
Long says you can trace the origins of it all from Woody Allen to Albert Brooks.
"But they never took it as far as semen in a cup or sex on the table," he says. "That's coming from Judd."
