I read this at the time, and again now, and I still come away with the question: if the Shulchan Arukh forbids reading the poetry of Immanuel of Rome because it arouses desire, then isn’t there all the more reason to forbid movies? I’m not saying that the Shulchan Arukh has authority like the Talmud, but the Rabbi himself said that the opinion of major halakhic decisors carries weight, and the Shulchan Arukh is one of them.

The leniency is based on the fact that you have a different purpose, except that along the way you encounter a prohibition. With Immanuel, that is apparently the main purpose. Alternatively, the prohibition on reading applies only when that is your purpose.

I read Immanuel of Rome in the past and understood what bothered the Shulchan Arukh. On the face of it, it’s not much worse than what goes on today. On the other hand, quite a few sages of Spain wrote love poetry and nobody objected. Maybe the problem with Immanuel of Rome was that the beloved of the patron whom the poet describes was a married woman. That already would have been crossing a line. I don’t know.
Recently I watched a movie with the kids that supposedly was meant to be modest, but at the beginning there was a crude hint that I believe would have been made explicit if they hadn’t wanted to preserve the movie’s family rating. I really cringed there with my son. There’s a feeling that works in our time have no red line. It wasn’t a successful movie, and maybe there is a connection between the movie’s lack of success and its sliding into the crude place I described (a kind of negative signal that in order to cover up for a bad work, they throw in something irrelevant that only highlights the overall failure).
I don’t dismiss the Rabbi’s argument. I’ve seen works that, even though they had immodest scenes in them, even significant ones, still had something to them such that within the framework of the film it took on a different meaning. Maybe in Heaven they’ll think otherwise, but there is room for the Rabbi’s claim. But when I cringed there, I felt that the whole thing just wasn’t worth it.