Third Party Videos:

Apocalypse and the Beauty Queen is, well, probably about as good as it sounds. It's rated 2.5 at IMDb and features a post-apocalyptic dystopia run by a former fashion model. At any rate, here are three zipped .avi clips of the action, with samples of each below:

Debbie Rochon	Katie Rudisel	Courtney Kocak

 

The Motel, on the other hand, is a mainstream film rated 6.8. "Thirteen-year-old Ernest Chin lives and works at a sleazy hourly-rate motel on a strip of desolate suburban bi-way. Misunderstood by his family and blindly careening into puberty, Ernest befriends Sam Kim, a self-destructive yet charismatic Korean man who has checked in. Sam teaches the fatherless boy all the rites of manhood."

I'm not certain of the IDs below, because I have not seen the movie, but IMDb says that Cheryl Campbell is nearly 60 years old and if that's her in the collage below she must be the all-time championship GILF! IMDb can't have her age wrong because her credits begin more than 30 years ago; therefore it is either a different Cheryl Campbell or the ID is wrong altogether. I suppose it is a different Campbell. I think IMDB has inadvertantly merged the filmographies of two different women. The Cheryl seen here must be the same one who plays "stripper" in "The Wedding Video" (2006), and not the old gal who does all the period pieces set in the Victorian England. At any rate, here are the three zipped .avis, with samples of each below.

Cheryl Campbell	Kaylani Lei	unknown

 

Sophie Marceau is today's collection-builder. And what a collection! Her nude career is competitive with that of any mainstream actress. Here are clips from 15 different films, plus her famous pop-out at Cannes. Watch her grow up before your eyes. She was 18 in Happy Easter, and nearly forty when she fell out of her dress at Cannes. I don't think she has done any film nudity in the past five years, so that stage of her career is probably over, but who knows? Here are a few gazillion clips to keep you busy:

• Happy Easter 1984
• L'Amour Braque 1985
• Police 1985
• Descente aux enfers 1986
• The Student 1988
• Mes Nuits .. 1989
• Pacific Palisades 1990
• Pour Sacha 1991
• Fanfan 1993
• The Daughter of D'Artagnan 1994
• Beyond the Clouds 1995
• Firelight 1997
• Marquise 1997
• La Fidelite 2000
• Belphagor 2001
• Cannes pop-out (2004, I think)

Sherrybaby

 

Just out of prison after three years and hoping to reconnect with a daughter who is being raised by her brother and his wife, Sherry really seems like a good person at heart. Unlike most junkies we see in films, Sherry is not a jaded, calloused, world-weary soul. She loves children and genuinely enjoys working with them. She relates very well to her own daughter and really listens to what she has to say. She really wants to be a better person. The problem is that Sherry herself is still a child. Her body may say "late twenties," but she has the emotional development of a 14-year-old. When the family gathers at her dad's house, Sherry is jumping up and down on the couch, drawing attention to herself. When they sit down for a meal, Sherry insists on performing an unsolicited song, again drawing attention to herself. She is consistently immature in her approach to every situation, and that creates the film's central dynamic. Because she is basically so ingenuous, we really want her to succeed. Because she is basically so immature, we know she probably won't.

When Sherry gets out of prison on parole, her curfew prevents her from establishing a proper connection with her daughter, and she seems about to be shuttled off into a dreary factory life which will undoubtedly drive her back into drug use. That's the grim reality of people trying to reestablish a life after prison, and those are the rules. Sherry takes the bull by the horns, or rather by the penis, and uses her sexuality to change the rules. She has sex with the manager of the halfway house, which gets her some latitude on her curfew; then she gives a blowjob to her employment counselor, which gets her assigned to a daycare center instead of a factory. 

The critical reactions to this scene were fascinating. Many condemned her behavior and cited these instances as proof that she always takes the easy way out and is not willing to pay the real price to get what she wants. Others cited the same events as proof that Sherry is willing to do whatever is necessary to get a decent job and be close to her daughter. I fell more into the latter camp. If you remove your own preconceived morality from the situation and see it through Sherry's eyes, you can evaluate what she did pragmatically. She is trained to be a daycare worker and she loves children. In order to get the daycare job, all she has to do is give one guy some head. If she does not give the blow job, she will spend the rest of her life on an assembly line. From her perspective, the price is very low, and the reward is very high. If one withholds moral judgment, Sherry is the feisty outsider who has found a way to beat an oppressive system.

The problem is that she doesn't know when it's time to stop fighting the system and start joining it. Once she gets everything lined up in her favor, she wants to keep taking short cuts to solve the problems that inevitably arise. Her brother and his wife have been raising the little girl as their own, and they are understandably worried about the impact of Sherry's re-emergence in the girl's life, given that Sherry is a promiscuous, immature junkie and is on parole for armed robbery. Unable to consider their point of view, Sherry is offended by their attempts to restrict her access to the girl, and by the fact that her sister-in-law instructs the girl to call Sherry "Sherry" instead of "mommy." Perhaps the brother and his wife made some mistakes and perhaps they should have discussed a parenting strategy with Sherry, but they acted out of concern for the child's welfare. Sherry couldn't or wouldn't understand that. She wanted to short-cut the relationship with her daughter the same way that she was able to short-cut the curfew and the job interview. She doesn't seem capable of grasping the difference between the situations, or reasoning that some problems have instant solutions while others take time. She's not capable of thinking that she just needs to sit down with her family, discuss the situation rationally and create a mutually agreeable plan. Her only reaction is to fly off the handle and overreact to her family, as if the entire situation were about her own short-term emotional needs and not the long-term welfare of her child.

Didn't I already see this same movie last year with Vera Farmiga? I thought it was called Down to the Bone then. When you first read about this film you wonder if it is one of those genre parodies, using the cores story of Down to the Bone as the central focus, and targeting "indie films" as the genre to be lampooned. It could be called something like "My Big Fat Sundance Movie." Heroin addict: check. Sexual adventurer: check. Betrayed as a child: check.

Hey, where's the pudding and the cowboy hats?

Although the film does have a "made for Sundance" quality about it, the one thing that raises this story above the usual, predictable indie level is that the script gets the most important thing right: it gets the audience rooting for Sherry to kick her jones and reunite happily with her family. We really want her to do better, and we rejoice with her when she seems to make some progress. That's the good news. The bad news is that she's not a very good horse for us to bet on. She's a real long shot, so our hopes for her are probably doomed to be dashed. Of course, since this is an indie movie, we're never sure exactly what the future holds for Sherry. In a Hollywood movie, Sherry would probably have something very close to a happy ending, or perhaps she would have an emotionally devastating sad ending, but it would be something tidy in either case. This film comes from the indie world where things are not so tidy. Sherry basically has no ending at all. Like most people in real life, Sherry is somewhere in the middle of her story.

Maggie Gyllenhaal's scenes with the little girl have a unique quality that I can't compare to any other adult-child interaction on screen. They convey the feeling of a documentary or home videos. The girl doesn't seem to be acting at all, but seems like a real little kid, rambling and often distracted. At first I was put off by this, and then I realized that was because I wanted her to act like a movie kid instead of a real kid. It seems to me that the director and Maggie probably improvised much of this with the girl rather than giving her specific lines to deliver. My guess is that they were just playing make-believe games with the child and allowing the camera to film the games, thus creating footage which could later be culled and edited into the story. I'll bet there was a lot of footage discarded as well. I am just speculating about that but however they pulled it off, Maggie and the director made the scenes with the little girl seem to be taken from a family's home videos, with none of the synthetic quality that usually obtains from movie children. Kudos to Maggie for working so effectively with the little nipper. The critics were lukewarm about the movie, but universally praised Maggie's down-to-earth portrayal of Sherry. She was understandably touted as an Oscar candidate, but the nomination failed to materialize.

Maggie's efforts landed this among the best five nude performances of 2006 in our annual poll, and deservedly so, since there is a lot of nudity performed by a famous, capable actress. The nude scenes have an important continuity error which you will be able to spot since I edited them together into one large zipped .wmv. In the first sex scene, Maggie is showing the guy her bald crotch (which is off screen). No problem with that, except that the other sex scene takes place soon thereafter and Maggie is wearing see-through panties which expose a normal amount of pubic hair. Well, normal by today's standards, that is.

To see a comprehensive set of still captures, see Tuna's section in the January 20th edition.

 

Titus

Titus (2000) is a bold interpretation of Shakespeare's first tragedy, Titus Andronicus. This was an interesting choice for director Julie Taymor in that this play, which was immensely popular in Shakespeare's own time, is neither highly regarded nor well known today, and is full of violence and gore. Since Shakespeare himself had presented an ancient Rome that was some amalgam of history and myths dating from ancient Rome through Elizabethan England, Taymor took this to its logical conclusion, and created MTV Shakespeare. We have Roman characters playing video games, drinking Coke from pop-top cans, and riding motorcycles. Weapons range from swords and crossbows to automatic firearms.

The short version of the plot is that the black guy did it.

If you want more detail:

General Titus Andronicus (Anthony Hopkins) returns to Rome victorious over the Goths. He brings the bodies of several of his sons who were killed in battle, and he has captured the Goth Queen Tamara (Jessica Lange) and her sons. He is convinced that he must sacrifice her oldest son to the gods to compensate for his own sons' deaths. Tamara is not amused. It is proposed that Titus be made emperor, but he declines in favor of Saturninus, who is so honored that he decides to marry Titus's daughter. The daughter has other ideas, putting Titus in a bad light with the emperor, who then decides to marry Tamara. This seals Titus's fate. Tamara is after revenge, and using the combined influence of her husband the emperor and her Moorish lover (Harry Lennox), she will make Titus pay dearly. The highlights of her revenge plot include Tamara's remaining two sons viciously raping Titus's daughter, before cutting out her tongue and cut off her hands, followed by Tamara giving birth to the Moor's son, and the Moor convincing Titus to cut off his own hand to appease the emperor and save the lives of his two sons.

It was the feel-good hit of the summer of 1585!

I am of two minds about this film. On the positive side, it is a fairly painless way to experience one of Shakespeare's lesser plays. The film is richly set and beautifully photographed. The performances are all at least adequate and some are outstanding, like Anthony Hopkins who seems to have gotten it exactly right. On the other hand, I found many things about the too-hip, anachronistic production distracting and the entire film was overly long in general, and the lengthy sequences without dialogue served to make it seem even longer.

• IMDb readers have this at 7.1.
• Berardinelli and Ebert were impressed, awarding 3.5 stars each.
• Critical acceptance was not universal, however. Metacritic scores it 57, and Rotten Tomatoes 69, with 50 from the top guys. It is not clear to me if the scores are for Shakespeare's story or for Taymor's interpretation.
• On our scale this is a C+, well worth seeing for Shakespeare fans, and those interested in bold interpretations, but probably slow and tedious for those not already predisposed to be interested in Shakespeare.

 

NUDITY:

Jessica Lange shows breasts in a palace room

... while revelers enjoy an orgy nearby, showing various body parts.

Note that the nudity comprises perhaps three minutes of the 162 minute running time.

The Hunger

Episode "Red Light"

 

A beautiful supermodel escapes from a show and returns after a six year absence to her ex-lover, who is also the photographer who discover her. When he tries to photograph her, she tells him not to, because she feels that the photographs are stealing her soul. But he gets a very juicy offer from an editor who wants an exclusive picture of the runaway model.

This episode was so-so. Terence Stamp's prologues and epilogues are always fun, and Liliana Kamorowska was pleasant to watch, but the ending didn't hold any surprises.