Un Año perdido (1993) is a Mexican coming of age/buddy film. Vanessa Bauche is 16, and lives in a small farming community. She is engaged to the only boy she has ever dated, and has never been outside her town, but dreams of more than being barefoot and pregnant. She tests for entrance to High School in a city large enough to have one, and is accepted. Her older sister helps talk the father into letting her go. She moves in to a boarding house run by a family friend, and starts classes.

On her first day, she makes a friend of the "wildest girl in her class," Tiaré Scanda, and the two become inseparable. When the older godson of the landlady interrupts the near rape of Bauche by another boarder, the two girls become infatuated with him, and both give him their virginity. The two also become involved in student strikes, hence the movie title, which translates "The Lost Year."

Information at IMDB is sketchy, but the film one a best song award in Mexico. The transfer looks like a bad VHS, and is very dark. The subtitles were also it and miss. This could be part of the reason the film ever quite drew me in. Bauche shows breasts during the attempted rape and rescue. Bauche has 20 credits at IMDB, and was believable in the role. With the quality of the transfer, I can't give it more than a C-.

Movies:

OOPS! After I posted the damned poll results, I realized that we left one of the sure-fire top 10 off the list completely - Patricia Arquette in Human Nature. I got fooled by the 2001 date at IMDb (it actually premiered in the April of 2002 in the USA, but in 2001 in France, so either year made some sense, but it was not in last year's competition). Anyway, I arbitrarily overrode our poll and inserted her in spot five and a half on the results page, my best guess of where she would have placed. If I had my own personal list, she would be in the top five with Salma, Rollergirl, Bellucci, and Romijn.

ALERT! PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT! I haven't had time to review The Hours yet, but you need to know this right away. If your wife or girlfriend tries to get you to see The Hours, do anything you can to get out out of it. It is a precious, pseudo-feminist sobfest about dying, suicide, people who commit suicide because they are mad, people who commit suicide because they are in too much pain, people who commit suicide because they are gay, people who commit suicide because they are not gay, and people who abandon their children because they feel like they are about to commit suicide if they don't get away, thus causing their children to grow up gay or suicidal (or both, in Ed Harris's case).

Dr Kervorkian would find this movie a little depressing, Oscar Wilde would find it prissy and lacking in masculinity, and Yoko Ono would find it a bit affected. If God is not already dead, he would consider suicide after watching this. I can't stress too strongly that any good things you may have heard or read about this movie are essentially in error, other than that it has great actors in it, like Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore. Those actors spend all their time committing suicide and/or being gay.  Nicole Kidman plays Virginia Woolf, using the John Cleese upper-class-twit accent and wearing a putty nose.

In case I haven't made myself clear - if you need a date movie, you would even be better off with Richard Gere's singing and dancing, hard though that may be to believe. (To be fair, it's not a complete stinkfest like Solaris, but it is not for you unless you have at least one vagina.)

Updates:

The following volumes were updated: Patricia Arquette, Rosanna Arquette, Joanna Going

The following new volumes were added: Francesca Neri, Amber Newman, Amanda Peet, Parker Posey, Olivia Pascal, Miranda Richardson, Joan Severance.

Mailbox:

Hey Scoopy, I have something to add to the genre of Naked Gymnasts, if not Naked Romanian Gymnasts.   Some time ago I had a movie, ordered I think from Adam and Eve, which featured naked "Gymnasts".  I immediately recognized some of them as veteran porn actresses such as Chasey Lain, always one of my favorites.  It seemed to be some sort of bogus competition between two teams of gymnasts (complete with cheesy announcers) who performed some of their exercises nude.  Actually, sometimes it would show the same trick both in a leotard and nude, and sometimes the shot would "morph" from clothed to nude.   Although there was a lot of Full Nudity, it stopped short of gyno-shots, and even avoided showing anyone doing the splits from the front.  I remember I sent it back as not being as
advertised or something.

Later, I rented an actual porn movie that I found had the same "gymnasts" and some of the same exercises, mixed in with hard-core scenes.  Well, after some searching, I found my copy of that tape.  It was from VCA Labs Inc. (at the end) or VCA Pictures (at the
beginning) and was called Real Tickets 2.  It starts with some scenes supposedly from Real Tickets 1, but I don't know if that existed.  The two bogus teams are the Malibu Vikings and the West Palm Beach Bunnies. It even has the announcers (veteran porn star Joey Silvera, Nick East, and Veronica Hart) doing the "color" for the broadcast.  Some of the actresses are Chasey Lain, Sahara Sands, Brittany O'Connell, Debbi Diamond, Tiffany Minx, and so on.  One actress was called Debbi Jointed and another was Venus Butterfly -  I wonder if that's their real names? :)  They actually perform some real gymnastics routines on the Floor Exercise, the Beam, and the Uneven Bars, and also rhythmic gymnastics and ....wonder of wonders...Naked Trampoline.  I know Brittany O'Connel and Chasey Lane were either gymnasts or cheerleaders, and Chasey for one actually does a back flip in the nude, a first for me.  Of course, their "form" in the gymnastics sense, is not of Olympic quality, but if you've ever watched Gymnastics and wondered what it would look like in the Nude, this is the tape for you.  BTW, the famous Seinfeld episode where his girlfriend was naked around the house comes to mind.  In it the phrase "There's good Naked and Bad Naked" played a major part.  Now, even though it is mixed in with hardcore porn of every variety, there are still no gyno or spread shots, which I can never understand in a porn flick.   In fact, this seems to be the the exact same footage I had before, but with the added hardcore scenes.  I'm fairly certain the original I had was NOT called anything like Real Tickets.   One other oddity:  at the end of this movie, there is a disclaimer that says "THE NATURAL  BREASTS OF THE FEMALE ACTRESSES IN THIS FEATURE ARE REAL.  THEY HAVE NOT BEEN ENLARGED OR ENHANCED BY SILICONE, PLASTIC, SALINE, OR ANY SUCH METHODS."  I used to have a source for hard-to-find porno (sort of like the Video Search of Miami of Porn) called Excallibur Films or Excallibur Video.  It was run by a female porn star, and even boasted they could find any movie you were looking for.  I don't know if they
survived the advent of the Internet or not. 

And finally, famous American Gymnast, Cathy Rigby, who later played Peter Pan on the stage, posed nude at least once, I think it was for the Bunny Mag, but I seem to remember one shot showing up in a Life End-of-Year Issue.  It was quite controversial at the time.
 

E

Other crap:

• The Skeptic and 20/20 plan to expose John Edward?? - the psychic who South Park calls "the biggest douche in the universe"
• GQ magazine uses digital manipulation to make Kate Winslet thinner for their cover photo. Winslet says that she lost 63 pounds following her baby's birth (one "stone" equals 14 pounds, or a bit more than 6 kilos)
• Steven Seagal claims in a bizarre new lawsuit that he has recently been the target of an extortion plot hatched by members of the "German Mafia and other nefarious underworld figures" who have threatened to assault the 51-year-old actor and destroy his "reputation in the movie industry." They've done a remarkably good job at destroying his reputation in the industry. Typical German efficiency even extends to the mafia.
• Here are the various trailers for Daredevil
• Hitman tells judge he couldn't have committed crime, and has an air-tight alibi - he was killing somebody at the time
• J-Lo's big-ass game
• Roman Polanski got a big Oscar boost as his Holocaust drama, The Pianist, dominated the National Society of Film Critics Awards, taking away four honors, including picture, director, actor (for Adrien Brody) and screenplay (for Ronald Harwood's adaptation of Wladyslaw Szpilman's memoir). Diane Lane also saw her Oscar hopes rise, picking up her second critics' award for her role as an adulterous wife in Unfaithful. Expect Brody to be nominated for a Best Actor Oscar. Other likely nominees include Nick Cage, and Sam Rockwell. Notable director P.T. Anderson has been lobbying to get Adam Sandler a nomination.
• Sex with the Teletubbies
• Rosie Perez you shouldn't expect her to look that good naked

• Kournikova to act as film classification symbol

   

   

   

   

"The Bush Jernals"

Here are the latest movie reviews available at scoopy.com.

• The yellow asterisks indicate that I wrote the review, and am deluded into thinking it includes humor.
• If there is a white asterisk, it means that there isn't any significant humor, but I inexplicably determined there might be something else of interest.
• A blue asterisk indicates the review is written by Tuna (or Lawdog or Junior or C2000 or Realist or ICMS or Mick Locke, or somebody else besides me)
• If there is no asterisk, I wrote it, but am too ashamed to admit it.

First up, Back to "The Defilers", that 1965 b&w roughie about two sadistic young men who take Scandinavian born Mai Jansson, a blonde cutie, and keep her captive in a dingy old basement. They fondle, terrorize and seduce this young lady over a period of days. The first scenes are of Mai as she arrives in Hollywood and then as the two creeps spy on her through her apartment window as she takes a bath. The scenes then move on to the basement room of captivity where things just keep getting worse for her. Considered a kinky classic in it's day this film would now be as quite tame by many people.

• Mai Jansson (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17)

We are still in a time warp as once again we return to 1965 and a look at "Bloody Pit of Horror" an Italian gore-fest which starred Mickey Hargitay, probably best known as the husband of Jayne Mansfield. The story revolves around an old castle which is being used by a group of people as the backdrop for some macabre photo stills. We start off our visit with scenes of the lead female star Louise Barrett being carried off by the Crimson Executioner (Hargitay) and winding up on a bed of hot coals. Louise is the only lucky female in this flick as she is rescued. Then we give you a look at another female victim Rita Klein as she is a "Babe in Bondage" on a revolving device which has spikes protruding from it and the spikes begin to cut into her bra & skin. A bloody movie which featured lots of "Damsels in Peril" and near nudity which this old buzzard says can be oh so provocative.

• Louise Barrett (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)
• Rita Klein (1, 2, 3, 4)

• Helana May Lim, breasts and a bit of bum. (1, 2)

• Maribel, topless.

• Rae Dawn Chong, undies and a thong view.

• Tracey Ross, toplessness and a full frontal view in #3. (1, 2, 3)

A great rare find by Aesthete. D'Angelo topless in one of her earliest roles in these scenes from "First Love" (1977). The curly haired dude with her is William Katt, the star of the 80's "The Greatest American Hero".

Full frontal nudity...links 1,2,3,5,6,7 and 9
Topless only...link #4
Thong view...link #8

MARIJUANA SMELL ON MONEY GIVES AWAY POT GROWERS
Pot 'R' Us - Jenny and Virginia Erickson, both age 59, were charged in Spokane, Washington, with running a $1 million marijuana farm out of their basements. They were so successful, they'd bought three other neighborhood homes to expand the business. But they got too careless: a bank teller noticed that the large cash deposit they were making smelled like marijuana. They pleaded guilty to money-laundering to get a lower sentence.