NOTES:

Austin is a mess from the ice storms. I can't get to the store. I have a stack of letters to mail, but I can't get to a mailbox, and there is no mail being delivered to residences. Almost all schools and businesses are closed. There's no trash pick-up and the sides of the roads are littered with overturned cars. I feel like a character in Children of Men.

To be honest, the weather is actually not that bad. It's nasty outside, but if I still lived in Wisconsin, I'd be out in shorts, grilling some brats. The same conditions are disastrous for us in Texas, however, since we are not prepared to deal with icy roads. We have been fortunate in one respect: we have never lost either power or the cable connection, so it's warm in the house and we have TV and the internet! Mighty lucky, iff'n you ask me, considering all the trees weighted down with icy branches.

Anyway, if you are expecting mail from me, I can't get out to mail it, and if the page is late tomorrow, you'll know our power grid is hurting. We don't expect any relief until Friday, but everything will get there eventually!

 

THIRD PARTY VIDEOS

• It's Jamie Lee Curtis day, with three zipped .avi clips from Trading Places, and three more from The Tailor of Panama.  (Movie House Commentary)

• Natasha Richardson several zipped avis from Asylum (Movie House Commentary)

 

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.

Murder-Set-Pieces (2004)

A serial killer is shaving the heads off of strippers, hookers and models in Las Vegas. He actually divides his time evenly between photographing his victims, and slicing-and-dicing them. Director Nick Palumbo, in the interests of authenticity, hired actual hookers, adult film stars, strippers and models to play the corresponding roles as victims. 

I would love to say more about this film, but there really isn't anything else to it except naked women being photographed and chopped up. There's no suspense. Although we follow another point of view in the film, that of a young girl whose older sister dates the freak, we are in on the killer's secrets. 

This obscure title is Nick Palumbo's second horror film, made with a whopping budget of $2M. He served as writer, director, and producer. Judging from the special features, he's also the film's biggest and possibly only fan.  He also shares that Texas Chainsaw Massacre is his idea of the perfect horror film, which goes a long ways towards explaining why he likes this one so much. I, on the other hand, hated the film and won't ever be watching it again.  In fact, for probably the first time in my life, I agree with the Village Voice, which said,

"Depraved, disgusting, misogynistic, ugly, and interminable, Murder-Set-Pieces is the lowest form of cinematic life, a movie so utterly degenerate it makes you wish that indie filmmakers had to prove a basic standard of decency in order to buy a camera. Nothing more than a succession of fake, snuff-like executions perpetrated by a hulking Nazi serial killer, it's too shoddily assembled to qualify as narrative and too conceptually bankrupt to count as avant-garde."

Yup. What they said. The killer is a German Nazi, as the Voice mentioned, but his party membership adds nothing substantial to the film. It's just a shorthand device to give him some dimension. He could just as easily have been a Quaker, as far as the plot goes, but Nazis are instantly identified with mass murder rather than Oatmeal. 

If boobs and gore are enough to entertain you for 105 minutes, go for it. As an alternative, you could watch Girls Gone Wild, then visit a butcher shop.

D+.

• IMDb readers say 4.1.

• It appeared in several festivals, and is now available on DVD.

• We have breasts and buns from Christina Holdsinger, Jenna Vellani, Crissy Moran, and Valerie Baber, and breasts from Lauren Palac, LeAnn Clinton and Renee Sloan. Several strippers also show body parts.

 

Christina Holdsinger

Jenna Vellani + Crissy Moran

Valerie Baber

LeAnn Clinton

Lauren Palac

Renee Sloan

various strippers

LOST THINGS

Four teenagers, with the end of school on the horizon, head up the New South Wales coast for a weekend of surfing, drinking and sexual tension. The boys have told their parents they are going alone; the girls have told theirs they are having a slumber party. As time wears on, something starts to make them feel uneasy, which the appearance of the eccentric Zippo does not help to abate, especially as they themselves all start to act strangely, and friendships start to fray.

NENETTE AND BONI

This film is set in Marseilles, where a petty criminal and generally unsavory 19-year-old Boniface Pavone has inherited his deceased mother's house and a pizza van from a concerned uncle who hopes the lad will earn his keep as a pizza chef. Boni keeps a pet rabbit and an air rifle around to shoot at stray animals, and is one horny guy who keeps a journal entitled Confessions of a Wimp, in which he writes of his obscene sexual longings for the voluptuous baker's wife. While kneading dough, the work is turned into a masturbation experience as Boni fondles the dough as if it were the baker's wife's breasts. Soon Boni's miserable life is interrupted when his estranged 15-year-old sister Nenette, sneaks out of boarding school and finds her way to Boni's place. It's soon learned Nenette is more than seven months pregnant, too late for an abortion, and refuses to name the father. Her plight seems to bring about a change in heart in Boni, who suddenly finds a purpose in life and matures into a responsible sibling as he becomes concerned with the childbirth and then with the baby after sis gives birth in a clinic.

Emmanuelle Devos in La Moustache

Tamsin Egerton in Keeping Mum

A Stanford University researcher who analyzed 31 different studies found that human growth hormone injections do not reverse aging, increase lifespan or make you fitter. And some of the potential side effects of HGH include joint swelling and pain, carpel tunnel and a higher risk of diabetes. They did find that taking it for six months increased muscle mass by about 5 pounds and decreased fat by 5 pounds, but they said you could get the same result without having to pay up to $2,000 a month by going to the gym and just barely breaking a sweat.

* Yeah, but avoiding that is worth $2,000 a month.

* You mean all those spam e-mails were LYING to me?!

ANP News reports that Amsterdam's red light district plans to erect a bronze statue in honor of prostitutes around the world. It was promoted by Mariska Majoor, a former prostitute who founded a local center for prostitutes. The statue will depict a self-assured woman standing on a doorstep, her hands on her hips and her face towards the sky. It has not yet been determined what the title will be or where the statue will be laid.

* Of course, where it's laid will depend on how much they're willing to pay.

* I think they should wait until it's erected before they decide where it will be laid.

* It will be paid for in cash, mostly fifties.

Porn star Jenna Jameson says there's interest in making a movie from her book, "How to Make Love Like A Porn Star," and she wants Scarlett Johansson to play her. Jameson told FHM, "She's my choice. I think she's beautiful." Of course, there would probably have to be lots of nudity, but Johansson recently said, "I'm not opposed to doing nudity; it would just have to be the right project."

* I haven't seen a script or even read the book, but trust me, Scarlett: this is the RIGHT project!

* Market research shows that a movie in which Scarlett Johansson plays a porn star would gross more money than "Titanic."