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:
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.
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.
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.
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.