The Sexiest Mainstream Movie That You Probably Missed In 2022

This ain’t Aladdin’s genie………..

Hey Fleshbot fans! A few weeks ago, I wrote about Poor Things, and since then, Emma Stone won an Oscar for it and it also garnered several well-deserved Oscars for its production staff, so again, if you haven’t seen it, get on that. Writing about Poor Things got me thinking about other mainstream films that Weird Movie Boyfriend and I have enjoyed that have a degree of spicy fun and beautiful naked people in them and I settled on Three Thousand Years Of Longing from 2022. It was sadly a box office bomb despite critical acclaim and a six minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival that year when it premiered.

Much like Poor Things, when WMB saw it, he said I absolutely needed to see this new offering from George Miller, an Australian director whose credits include Babe, Happy Feet…… and two Mad Max films (with two more on the way!) What a mix! We saw it in the theater in 2022 and it’s something I needed to own as soon as it came out.

The film begins with self-described narratologist (a person who studies stories, basically) called Alithea Binnie going on a trip to an academic conference in Istanbul, Turkey. She is played by self-identified queer Tilda Swinton who I’ve always enjoyed from her roles as The White Witch in The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe (I’d totally be drawn in by the Turkish delight if she was offering) to the thousand year-old vampire Eve in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive. She starts seeing strange things and when she’s not at the conference, she goes shopping in a bazaar and picks up a cool looking artifact. She’s cleaning up the lamp and out pops the djinn, a word which is anglicized as genie, played beautifully by Idris Elba. He’s a big handsome Black fellow, and we mean big, his body fills the entirety of her hotel room, but in a matter of minutes, this supernatural creature is able to become the size of a normal human and communicate with Alithea, who, in her line of work, finds creatures who offer to grant your wishes, well, more than a little bit sus. I mean, there’s always a catch in these stories, right? Something to teach greedy people a lesson and to be careful what they wish for etc. She feels like she knows a trickster when she sees one.

Above all, Alithea as a person whose life is stories, really just wants to hear about this guy’s fascinating life in and out of his bottle so he tells her of three times in history that his bottle was discovered and he was summoned out of it to grant wishes and what actually happened with the wishers and the wishes. This saga begins with his steamy romance with the Queen of Sheba (who was actually part djinn, according to him), till that fancy douchebag Solomon came along and stole her heart. We also learn that the djinn has some significant difficulties living in the modern world. I won’t spoil the rest of the story, but there are naked people, so watch it all! There are concubines! I was very happy to see fat bodies, as in actual fat people, not “Hollywood fat” depicted in this film. The visuals are incredible throughout--- it evoked old Hollywood epics but with today’s technology. I found the story deeply engaging because I enjoy folklore and fairy tales immensely. It was unlike any movie I'd seen in awhile and I remained engaged the entire time.

The story of Three Thousand Years of Longing is adapted from a short story entitled “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” from the eponymous story collection by A.S. Byatt. The film is currently available for streaming on Amazon Prime.