Updates:

Charlie's French Cinema Nudity site has been updated. Pretty big update this week.

Predator 2 (1990):

You know the drill, I suppose. The Predator is a big-game hunter from another planet. He and his colleagues come to earth from time to time on safari, in search of humans tough enough to make the hunt a thrilling challenge. In the original film, the Predator took on a team of elite special forces guys in the jungles of Central America. The sequel moved the action to central L.A., where Predator is taking out the baddest drug lords and cops he can find. His ultimate prey is Danny Glover, a rogue cop who makes his own rules. (Gee, we've never seen one of those on film before.)

Not aware that his enemy is an alien, Glover wants to get Mr Predator in a mano-a-mano situation, but he keeps getting shunted off the case by his superiors and the Feds. It's not enough that ol' Danny has to take on an invisible hi-tech alien who is about 8'6", 450, but he also has to cope with some Feds who know all about the alien, and want to capture him alive, for scientific and military purposes. Glover doesn't know jack-all about science, but he knows this: Seņor Predator killed his partner, and for that he's goin' down.

I had never seen this film before today. It was a lot better than I expected it to be. It took some hard shots from critics, and wasn't a real favorite of the fans of the first Predator film either, but I found that it had some real positives:

1. The film has an odd and creative visual sense.

2. Some off-beat performances by Morton Downey Jr and Bill Paxton provide welcome comic relief. Actually, you could list these as positives or negatives. They were negative in the sense of "totally lacking in credibility," but, hell, the whole movie is lacking in credibility so I just kicked back and let it flow. Given the premise that the story takes place in an alternate universe which is an exaggerated version of our own, I found those two guys entertaining.

3. There is genuine tension and a sense of drama in the hunting and showdown scenes. Director Stephen Hopkins has shown himself to be quite capable with a lot of very different kinds of movies. They are not all good movies, but some of them are. He has made six more movies since Predator 2, and five of them are rated higher at IMDB.

1. (6.78) - The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004)
2. (6.40) - The Ghost and the Darkness (1996)
3. (6.39) - Under Suspicion (2000)
4. (6.10) - Judgment Night (1993)
5. (5.70) - Blown Away (1994)
6. (5.50) - Predator 2 (1990)
7. (4.98) - Dangerous Game (1987)
8. (4.70) - Lost in Space (1998)
9. (4.42) - A Nightmare On Elm Street: The Dream Child (1989)

There are some weaknesses as well.

1. I had a hard time buying into Danny Glover as a 1990's bad-ass, especially since the costume department had him dressed in his sharecropper clothing from Beloved. He looked like he was ready to plow the Back 40, then offer to share his meager meal with some hungry strangers, then read some uplifting bedtime stories to his children.

2. The story ended with a lot of loose ends. What happened to Maria Conchita Alonso? Why was she pregnant? (I thought she was supposed to be a lesbian.) Was Bill Paxton the father of her baby? Why did the alien spare her? What was the deal with the 1715 pirate gun which appears out of nowhere at the end?

I assume that this was once a much longer movie, but they dropped a lot of clarifications in the editing process. Unfortunately, although the DVD is a 2-disk special edition, all of those special features on the second disk offer no real illumination of these points. As it turns out, there are answers for all the questions, and they are actually quite interesting, but are not in the movie. I found out by Googling some obscure facts from the movie that there are various comic books and paperback novels which feature the Predator race, and the authors of these works have fashioned quite a complex mythology about the Predators and their long-term interaction with humans and the "Aliens" from their own eponymous movie series. I discovered that a lot of guys are really into this, just as I was once into the mythology of Conan the Barbarian. Here's a good summary of the written sources and the actual mythology for both the Predator race and the Alien race. You may already know that the Aliens and Predators faced off in in a 2004 movie, but perhaps you did not know that that was foreshadowed in Predator 2, which was lensed way back in 1990. The Predator had a trophy case, and it included a Giger-influenced skull which obviously was meant to be one of the Aliens. Anyway, I guess my point here is that too much information was "off the page," making details of the film completely confusing to those of us who haven't read all of these additional books and comics.

Anyway, I call it a C. It's not a genre classic, but is a much better movie than the reviews would lead you to believe, and I actually enjoyed a lot of things about it.

And of course, there's the renegade Playmate, Teri Weigel. Wikipedia gives a summary of her career, including her battles with Hef. A quick Google Image Search will show you why she's had such a tempestuous relationship with the clean-cut Hefmag. And here's her official home page.

 

 

Teri Weigel

Other Crap:

Quote of the day: "A celebrity sex tape of actor Steve Guttenberg was reportedly leaked in the late 1980s, but it did not achieve wide distribution or popularity."

• Interestingly, this is considered his best film.
• Guttenberg recently said, "I made so many bad movies that now, when someone else makes a crappy film, I get a royalty payment"

"Red Light District has acquired a tape that shows Kid Rock and former Creed lead singer Scott Stapp engaged in explicit sex acts with several female fans."

The Ex Girlfriend Revenge site.

• Actually, the entire thing seems to be a bogus story concocted to create a porn site. But it is entertaining.

Jimmy Kimmel found some rare footage of Dick Cheney singing a country song about his shooting incident.

A clip from Ultraviolet

Sony put a tremendous amount of effort into the official website for Basic Instinct 2

Headline of the day: "Officers monitor urination hotspot"

The trailer for The Woods, a new horror film with Bruce Campbell and Patricia Clarkson  

A new clip from the DaVinci Code (doesn't work with Firefox)

Lisa Marie Presley marries #4

Daily Show: "Michael Brown's job performance has been downgraded from 'Heckuva' to 'Faulknerian Idiot Manchild'"

Daily Show: Trendspotting: Social Networking

"Jon Stewart doesn't want to ask Julianne Moore to cry on cue, but he's tempted."

"A musical based on the songs of Bob Dylan is heading for Broadway, triggering further head scratching among fans of the reclusive rock icon over his recent commercial projects.

Lindsay Lohan gets all sexy for Allure

Tom Cruise on Oprah - As It Should've Been

Eva Green to be the new Bond Girl?

• She certainly has the body for it.

Brokeback Gump

The trailer for Miami Vice 

World Baseball Classic: Rosters

• Here's a partial line-up for the Dominican Republic: 1B Pujols, 2B Soriano, SS Tejada, 3B Beltre, OF Guerrero, Manny Ramirez P Pedro Martinez

"Terrell Owens television will become the latest in a never-ending line of 'reality' programs in the not-too-distant future."

Letterman's take on the Cheney Shooting

The Haunted Places Index

Did you hear the one about Dick Cheney?

HALLIBURTON WINS CONTRACT TO RECONSTRUCT CHENEY'S REPUTATION ... At $42 Billion, Largest Contract of its Kind, Company Says

Daily Show: "The Vice President has gone four consecutive days without shooting someone in the face."

Howard Stern's crew debates whether "the world's best breasts" are implants.

Mads Mikkelsen will fill the shoes of James Bond nemesis Le Chiffre in Casino Royale  

Incredible pictures of a Russian Ice Festival

Reporting on Cheney's hunting accident in orange fatigues? Part of a distinguished journalistic tradition.

Iraq, the Musical

"This is the official 'Unofficial' Monty Python And The Holy Grail screenplay. This file contains the script as it was on March 20 1974, before filming took place.

Letterman: Top Ten Good Things About Winning A Gold Medal (Presented By Olympic Gold Medal Winning Speed Skater, Chad Hedrick)

Film, TV actors take the mic on "Unexpected Dreams"

• "Actress Scarlett Johansson, 'Moulin Rouge' star Ewan McGregor and 'Desperate Housewives' principal Teri Hatcher are among the celebrities who will put their own spin on famous tunes on 'Unexpected Dreams: Songs from the Stars.'"
• One of the most highly-anticipated cuts will be Vice President Dick Cheney's mellow version of Eric Clapton's rock anthem, I Shot the Sheriff.
• Cheney was meant for Top 40 stardom. After all, he's already #2 with a bullet.

A bazillion new pics from V For Vendetta!

TomKat bares litigious claws at mag

• "Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are as committed and in non-creepy love as ever. And what about Life & Style magazine's Web site story, which says otherwise? Let's just say TomKat's attack lawyers have been fitted with their extra-fancy spiked collars."

Bourne Franchise to Exceed Three Films?

• Now, see, that surprises me. I thought that if the third one made a gazillion dollars, they would just walk away happy, because - hell, how much money does anyone really need?

Movie Reviews:

Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe). White asterisk: expanded format. Blue asterisk: not mine. No asterisk: it probably sucks.

Designer Julien Macdonald and Paris Hilton were posing for photos at a party after a showing of his fur fashions at London Fashion Week when they were attacked by a PETA protester who threw a flour bomb at them.  An onlooker said they were covered with white powder.   Paris couldn't stop laughing.  They were hustled into a limo, but returned a few minutes later,  all cleaned up.

*  They just drove back to the fashion show, where models snorted all the white powder off of them.