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Macleans.ca

Canada’s magazine

A good day for erectile dysfunction

I just realized that I saw two movies yesterday about guys unable to get wood. Happily, there was not a third, or I’d have had to certify erectile dysfunction as a legitimate trend with grave implications for the zeitgeist. The two boner-crisis movies were The Lucky Ones and Cooper’s Camera. In The Lucky Ones, Michael Peña, who’s coming home from Iraq with a shrapnel wound in his crotch, frets about his ability to satisfy his fiancée. His condition gives fellow GI Rachel McAdams an opportunity shock him with a deadpan litany of advice on how else he could pleasure her, from strapping on a dildo to inflating his manhood with a penis pump. And in Cooper’s Camera, an outrageously crude Canadian farce about a family Christmas in hell, Jason Jones plays Gord, an impotent husband who receives a penis plump as a gift from his estranged sleazeball brother (Peter Keleghan)—who has designs on Gord’s pregnant wife (Samantha Bee). One point, commiserating with his drunken bozo buddy, Gord says he wishes his doctor could just give him a pill. (The movie is set in pre-Viagra 1985.) The buddy finds this notion too hilarious for words: “What kind of guy would go to a doctor and ask for a penis pill?? That would never sell!”