Note:

It was a wild night. Digg linked to Other Crap. You might think that to be a good thing, but I wasn't prepared for the sheer magnitude of volume that came through - 5000 hits in the first half hour! I spent the night on the phone with my IP trying to do everything possible to allow the server to run smoother at that volume level, which involved temporarily re-writing and deleting a lot of scripts. As I write this, it's still going a bit slow, even though the Digg effect has calmed down a bit. The moral of the story: people love some Jennifer Aniston titties. I am not going to host those pics myself. I just linked to sites sent in by the Other Crap contributors. There are several appropriate links, so check it out at http://www.othercrap.com

Anyway, I saved a lot of submissions for tomorrow, but I got all the daily contributors finished. Sorry for the crazy delay.

The Naked Ape

Playboy Magazine really got involved in the film industry back in the late sixties and seventies. In some situations, the film would feature a Playmate, and the magazine would run a lengthy pictorial (e.g. Can Hieronymus Merkin ...) In other situations the magazine would take additional photos on the set - perhaps persuading the principals to do a more graphic version of their onscreen sex scene (e.g. The Sailor Who Fell ...). At some point Hef and the gang decided that it might be worthwhile to get involved in producing their own films, and their first effort was excellent - the acclaimed, innovative Roman Polanski version of MacBeth (1971). Buoyed by the success of that project, Hef kept at it and the second effort was a sophomore slump -The Naked Ape (1973). It fell more than a bit in quality from the Polanski film. Macbeth is rated 7.5 at IMDb while The Naked Ape is rated 3.5.

This is fundamentally an ambitious attempt to film an unfilmable book: The Naked Ape by Dr. Desmond Morris. The zoologist stunned the 1967 universe by writing a pop anthropology book, first serialized in London's Daily Mirror tabloid, in which he described humans in the same objective, analytical way that zoologists describe animals. Dr. Morris was the curator of mammals at the London Zoo, a specialist in primates, and his particular slant on the nature of man was that our species is a very high and complicated primate. The title of the book is derived from the fact that there are 193 species of monkeys and apes on the planet, but only man is not entirely covered in fur and is, therefore, the only naked ape.

Morris would, for example, compare popular human mating rituals to those of higher primates, and he filled the book with provocative observations like his oft-cited contention that Homo Sapiens not only has the biggest brain of all primates but also the largest penis. Scientific critics of the book pointed out that  Dr. Morris was a zoologist, not an anthopologist, and as such was making unformed and unscientific speculations by defining man in purely zoological terms, because while man is an animal, he also stands apart from the animals in many ways. Religious groups had, as you can imagine, much harsher criticisms.

It is very difficult indeed to make something like this into a movie. The film version of The Naked Ape is somewhere between a documentary and a series of anecdotes, which is to say that it's an odd film and very hard to watch. The scientific arguments are presented in a heavy-handed way. At times, people walk around with Dr. Morris's book in hand, quoting from it liberally. At other times, university professors recite passages from the book while addressing their classes. The director sometimes uses stock footage to show connections between human rituals and animal behavior. Some of the book's points are illustrated with anecdotes about a mating couple in various stages of their relationship, while other points are illustrated with animations, Terry Gilliam style, and the film wanders haphazardly back and forth between the live and animated segments. There are also scenes which seem to drag on and on for no reason at all, like a section in which male gymnasts do a long routine. The individual anecdotes and illustrations don't connect very well, and the film doesn't make much of an attempt to let the recurring human characters have any dimension. It's all presented in a remarkably tame PG format, which is surprising when one considers that it's a book about primitive sexual urges which was made into a movie by Hugh Hefner.

Woody Allen had a very similar film project derived from a similar book (Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex ...), but Allen managed to get his points across through humor and parody, while this film gets sucked into the trap of self-importance and does altogether too much pontificating. It's harmless enough, and it's points are not unsound, but mostly it's just plain boring, like your college professor who really knew his material but had no idea how to make it as interesting to you as it was to him.

As viewed through the prism of three decades, the most interesting element of the film is that the co-stars of the "story" segments are Victoria Principal of Dallas fame and Johnny Crawford, the former Mouseketeer who also played the little kid on The Rifleman.

If you look closely at the sex scene, you may get a fleeting glimpse of Victoria's natural resources. Below are some caps which Mr. Skin made from a different print (obviously also sub-DVD quality.)

Victoria Principal

Little Children

A double-feature today. Kate Winslet in "Little Children" - she's naked but really all we see are her breasts.

Phoenix

... then more boobs from the always sexy Kari Wuhrer in Phoenix

"The Hunger"

Episode "A MATTER OF STYLE"

An experienced older vampire (Isabelle Cyr) initiates a young male protege. She teaches him the ways of becoming a seducer and killer of young women. But she will have a lot of problems in doing so, since the guy is a virgin. This episode was a comedy. It was entertaining and the girls in it looked great.

 

Images

First, Amber Heard in Alpha Dog

Videos