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BLADE RUNNER (1982):
I couldn't believe it when I typed in the date for this movie. Has it
already been a quarter of a century? Maybe they will finally do a definitive
DVD set for this 25th anniversary year. I would love to have one set with both
versions of the film, plus all the other scenes which were seen in the
workprints, plus whatever other footage Ridley Scott might have lying around,
plus commentary/debate from Scott and Harrison Ford, who have nearly opposite
opinions on every debatable topic raised by the movie. (Movie
House Commentary)
The film was recently broadcast in HD on German TV, so I made some new caps
from the HD broadcast. Below are some collages, followed by the raw HDTV caps
in their full size
| Joanna Cassidy
(collages) |
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| Joanna Cassidy
(raw HD caps) |
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THIRD PARTY VIDEOS
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Slaughter's Big Rip-Off is a Blaxploitation pic from that
genre's Golden Age. Mr. Slaughter was kind of a rip-off himself, being
basically Shaft with a different name. The co-stars were football legend Jim
Brown and Budweiser-drinking legend Ed McMahon. I'll leave you to guess which
one played the tough black guy. The film is considered one of the best in the
genre, but the DVD caused quite a stir because it did not include the original
James Brown score, and the music was always the best reason to watch these
things. (Well, except for the naked chicks, of course.) The women are
Pamela des Barres, Gloria Hendry, and
Judith Brown. (Three
avis zipped together.)
OTHER CRAP:
Catch the deluxe version of Other Crap in real time, with all the bells and whistles, here.
MOVIE REVIEWS:
Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe). White asterisk: expanded format. Blue asterisk: not mine. No asterisk: it probably sucks.
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Coming Apart (1969)
A psychiatrist is in some sort of mid life crisis, and rents an apartment
in Manhattan where he entertains women, and tapes these encounters. He is
avoiding his pregnant wife, and supposedly trying to document his collapse.
The film, which was made for $2,000 (that's not a typo), takes place in a
one-room apartment and is shot entirely by a single stationary camera aimed at
a wall mirror across the room. Thus the film consists entirely of
conversations mixed with some sexual encounters.
Coming Apart (1969) was writer/director Milton Moses Ginsberg's first and
last film. Critics at the time hated it with very few exceptions. It played a
few nights in theaters at the time, was buried by the savage reviews, and then
finally resurfaced on DVD. Despite its failure, Ginsberg says he made
exactly the film he wanted, and claims he would do nothing different. He
feels that he was simply decades ahead of his time. Probably true, although
its difficult to calculate how many decades since his time has yet to arrive.
If he's still waiting, I hope has a perpetual calendar.
There are some positives. Ginsberg feels (with some justification) that he
got excellent performances from Rip Torn and Sally Kirkland. Those two made
the action seem real and improvised, even though the film was tightly
scripted. And then there is the nudity, which is top-notch, especially
considering the year. The sexual content was enough to earn the film an X
rating. That could have been because of an orgy which included a
cross-dresser, but probably had more to do with a stark naked Sally Kirkland
masturbating on camera by humping Rip Torn's leg. In fact, she took the gold
medal for leg-humping that year, defeating a heavily favored Aleutian dog sled
team and a particularly inventive gay Pomeranian.
The 7.1 rating at IMDb proves Scoopy's maxim that there is an audience for
nearly any film. Such a high score clearly demonstrates that Coming Apart does
have a narrow appreciative audience, but I suspect that only a select few of
the cinema verité crowd really enjoy anything about this except the nudity.
That makes our proper score a C-.
Nudity includes breasts from Julie Garfield, Lois Markle as a woman with
dozens of cigarette burns on her upper chest, and Lynn Swann as a young mother
who tries to sell her body to Rip Torn. Sally Kirkland is naked for half the
running time, including full frontal and rear nudity before her implants.
Scoop's notes: On a side note, you will see that this particular
Lynn Swann was definitely not a wide receiver, or a wide anything. I wasn't quite as charitable as Tuna when I reviewed
this some five years ago:
Rip Torn plays a psychiatrist who keeps an apartment in the city. In
that apartment he secretly tapes his encounters with various women, almost
all of a sexual nature. The entire movie is filmed by a single B&W camera
shooting into a couch in front of a mirror. Neither the zoom nor the
camera's position ever changes, more or less as if we were watching a
compilation of secret tapes made by the psychiatrist character with a
hidden camera.
This movie came out in 1969, lasted about a week in the theaters, and
then disappeared until now. I'm sure existentialists and proponents of
cinema verité would argue that this is a lost work of genius, but I was
basically watching it with my jaw slack, except when I was fighting to
stay awake. Roger Ebert can't ever sit down to write his column and
say "Boy, is this movie fucked up," but I can. And hereby do.
I was impressed by the actors' ability to maintain the illusion of
reality, and with the hollow irony of some of the conversations, but not
with much else. Anyway, the quality of the film is irrelevant. The key
point for us is that this was some pretty naughty stuff back in 1969,
including Sally Kirkland full-frontals, transvestites, an orgy, and a very
strange scene in which a naked Kirkland masturbates by humping Torn's leg.
The film was simply the lame justification which allowed all of that to
occur on camera legally in the sixties.
I think it was Leonard Maltin who wrote the famous one-line review of a
movie called From Hell It Came. The review: "And Back to Hell it Can Go."
The same review could apply here.
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Been out of the loop for a long time. Thought I should make amends with a
big-ass New Year's post. First part yesterday. Here's the second installment.
Here's a movie called Pastries. Hankster did a bit of this several days ago from
a clip of Uschi Digart that showed up on another disk. Pastries itself, is one
weird-ass mofoing movie. It is classified as XXX because the scenes shot
specifically for Pastries are intercut with short, grainy clips from what have
to be 8 mm stag films. So you get lots of insertion and money shots but all
that action is from nameless and largely faceless folk. What Pastries is
supposed to be is Uschi telling a friend back in Sweden all about her escapades
in the U.S. In addition to Uschi, the movie also has crossover pornstars Sandy
Dempsey and Sandy Carey and B-movie starlets Barbara Mills and Peggy Church.
The Sandy's are nice to look at; Ms. Dempsey, in particular, has quite the
rack. All of the acting looks to be one-take, without a bit of rehearsal and
the transfer is absolutely, positively atrocious.
This next batch includes collages from several movies and three TV shows.
This is me fooling around with the HDTV I got for my birthday. That's true for
all the collages except for the last one. That is of a beauty Tuna captured
long ago, named Rikki O'Neal.
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Evangeline Lilly on Lost |
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Helen Shaver in The Osterman Weekend |
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Joan Severance in Black Scorpion (probably
a body double) |
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Lolita Davidovich in Intersection |
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Maggie Gyllenhaal in Secretary |
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Evangeline Lilly on Lost |
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Melissa George in Dark City |
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Mimi Rogers in The Door in the Floor |
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Penelope Ann Miller in Carlito's Way |
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Sondra Locke in Suzanne |
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Rikki O'Neill |
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The Last up are edits of paparazzi pics, featuring the divine Vida
Guerra. She has to have the most famous rumpus on the planet, unless you
calculate these things on a per-pound basis. Here are 18 edits showing
see-thru hooter action, acres of bare bum and something special in the last
one. That final collage is said to be from a stolen cell phone or some such
craziness. There are other pictures of more intimate body parts that may or may
not be Vida's, but the ones in that collage are certainly hers.
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Notes and collages
The Supernatural Ladies
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