Sunday

The Phantom Punch

2009

The Phantom Punch is a biopic of boxer Sonny Liston, and not a very good one. Ving Rhames evokes Liston quite well, although he is twenty years too old for the role, but the film is a pedestrian and rather old-fashioned effort which offers neither compelling storytelling nor lively direction. In fact, the direction includes just about every cliché necessary to recreate a 1930's boxing film, except maybe stock footage of trains chugging on one direction with a "Boston" word slide superimposed, followed by trains going in the other direction with a "Philadelphia" word slide. Oh, and maybe it could have used a 365 day calendar with the pages falling off one at a time during a montage of successive fights. But if it had used those clichés, they would have fit right in. The director did use very similar techniques.

In terms of the two great Liston controversies, the film offers the following:

  1. The script posits that Liston did not take a dive in either Ali fight, and never took nor would take a dive in his life, not even from the phantom punch (below) which gave the film its title.

  1. The screenplay does have an original spin on the death of Liston. As the story is told here, Sonny's manager found out that Sonny was having an affair with his girlfriend. As revenge, the mob-connected manager failed to pass along some important high-level mob instructions to Liston, and then told the local don that Sonny had received the instructions (taking dives) and had refused to comply. The mobsters, the same men who built Sonny's career in the first place, thus engineered the death of their ungrateful protégé.

The problem with taking these two positions is that they are inherently contradictory. By presenting Sonny as a proud man who would never throw a fight, the film rendered the  manager/girlfriend angle nugatory. If Sonny was really as proud as he was pictured here, then there was no need for the manager to tell a lie to the mobsters. He could simply have asked Sonny to throw the fights, as the mob asked him to do. The Sonny of this film would have refused, and that refusal would have signed his death warrant. Furthermore, it made absolutely no difference that Sonny was sleeping with the guy's girlfriend in the first place. Let's assume the opposite - that Sonny and the manager had been on the best of terms, and that the manager wished only the best for his fighter. In that case he would have relayed the mob's requests, the Sonny as presented here would have refused to take a dive, and the result again would have been the same. In other words, the manager/girlfriend angle was completely irrelevant to the plot. The point is that if the mob wanted Sonny to take a dive, and if Sonny was really unwilling to do so, as pictured here, then no other details could alter the final result, and the manager's failure to relay the request woould have had no effect on whether Sonny lived or died. Obviously, the only way the girlfriend/manager angle makes sense is if the manager had known that Sonny WOULD have agreed to play ball with the mobsters. In that case, the manager's failure to relay the info to Liston would have been the difference between life and death for Liston, and would have been revenge for the alienated affections of his sweetie. But that particular version of Sonny Liston, the flexible and reasonable guy who might have been willing to take a dive in certain circumstances, is not the Sonny Liston presented here. In other words, if the film wants to stick with point #2 above, it needs to alter point #1.

 

Brigitte Wilson-Sampras does a sex scene, but she somehow manages to keep everything covered, even in the throes of passion.

 

  • * Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe).

  • * White asterisk: expanded format.

  • * Blue asterisk: not mine.

  • No asterisk: it probably sucks.

OTHER CRAP:

Catch the deluxe version of Other Crap in real time, with all the bells and whistles, here.

 

 

 

 

 

 


All the Right Moves

1983

Classic nudity today as the Time Machine goes back to 1983 for All the Right Moves.

This one starred a young Lea Thompson and Tom Cruise. Lea shows the tits and even a quick flash of bush. If you look real close Tom's tool is even visible. Caps with a clip.

 

 

 

"The Christmas Clause"

2008

Over in TV Land we have Lea 25 years later in the TV movie The Christmas Clause. No nudity this time, but she still has a great pair of legs. Caps with an HD clip.


 

 

 

 

 

Death Becomes Her

2000

Isabella Rossellini film clip (samples below)

Catherine Bell as Isabella Rossellini's body double film clip (samples below)


 

 

 

Bull

(2008)

Another week, another movie Talia Russo has been nekkid in.

Talia Russo: topless sunbathing nude.


Sans elle

(2006; aka "Without Her")

Karine Vanasse: Quebec actress shows some bare butt.


"Pure Pwnage"

episode: "Girls"

Episode about chicks who have sex with 20-something internet gamers who live in their mom's basement. I thought those were hunted to extinction.

Christina Notto: cleavage

Melanie Scorfano: cleavage

Jessica Rimmer & Rachelle Corbeil: lesbian kiss.


"Republic of Doyle"

episode: "The Pen Is Mightier Than the Doyle" (s1e10)

Jeananne Goossen: cleavage


"Doc"

episode: "Breaking Away" (2004)

Ashley Wolstat: sexy as uncredited babe.


"Slings and Arrows"

episode: "Vex His Ghost"

Not any nudity but Melanie Merkosky shows more skin then what she did in American Pie Present The Naked Mile. She's very sexy as an understudy bunny in a skimpy aerobics outfit.


"Zalman King's Body Language"


Lots of nudity in this stripper drama but the hostess Jessica Rimmer doesn't shake her booty until the last episode. David Duchovy did the same thing for Red Shoe Diaries.

Jessica Rimmer

 

Fair Game

(1986)

Cassandra Delaney collages:

 

 

Pics

Keira Knightley

Lesley-Ann Brandt in Friday's Spartacus

Lucy Lawless in Friday's Spartacus

Viva Bianca in Friday's Spartacus

rare pic of Shirley MacLaine, excellent quality

just because we need more Dutch chicks: Sophie Vlaming

 

 

Film Clips

I am Curious Yellow and I Am Curious Blue were must-see films for those of us baby boomers who were in college in the mid-sixties. These Swedish films were talked about at every party because they reached the artier mainstream theaters, but were filled with sex and nudity.

As it turns out, they were astoundingly disappointing. They have meandering narratives, and seem all but pointless. Of course, we expected that going in, but the problem was that when they finally got down to the nudity, the chicks were fat and ugly. I'm the first to admit that I was willing to sit through some pretentious arty claptrap to see Jacqueline Bisset or Julie Christie naked, but not these chicks. I went to see Yellow when I was a callow freshman in the period before the Summer of Love, and had rarely seen naked women onscreen or elsewhere, but I took a pass on Blue the next year, when the world had changed and I was no longer desperate. I tried to watch it on vid many years later, but ended up in fast-forward mode.

Lena Nyman in I Am Curious Yellow

Lena Nyman and Sonja Lindgren in I Am Curious Blue

Bim Warne in I Am Curious Blue

 

Also:

Vica Kerekes in The Rain Fairy (see below)

Olga Pihiliangegedera (there's a mouthful) in Belleville Story in 720p (see below)

Emmanuelle DeVos in L'Origine (see below)

Miriam Morgenstern in Summer Storm