Wednesday

Tetro

2009

Citizen Koppola.

In the space of just eight years, Francis Ford Coppola wrote and/or directed four of the greatest films of all time (the first two Godfather films, Apocalypse Now and Patton). He also wrote an original screenplay for and directed a low-budget film which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes (The Conversation). The Conversation was also nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, but lost to a film directed by some guy named Francis Ford Coppola.

FFC was in his thirties when that streak ended. Since then (going on 31 years at press time) he's had to be content with some highly visible failures like One from the Heart and a few minor successes like The Outsiders, Rumble Fish, Godfather III, Dracula, Peggy Sue Got Married, and Tucker: the Man and His Dream. Those three decades seemed like a time when he was treading water while trying to assemble his still-unmade futuristic masterpiece Megalopolis. From time to time rumors floated East from California that something  was moving forward on Megalopolis. One great star or another was attached to it.  A massively long script was making the rounds. The film would run five hours. The film would cost $300 million; $500 million; whatever.

Coppola finally had to accept the fact that Megalopolis was a pipedream because he simply could not convince investors that the risk/reward ratio was acceptable. But by the time he did that, he had become a rich man from a variety of sources inside and outside the world of cinema. He then came to the realization that his wealth equaled absolute movie-making freedom through the self-financing route. Oh, he could not finance Megalopolis or even some Godfather sequels out of his own pocket, but he could make a nearly limitless string of modest films like The Conversation. Indeed, if he's willing to consider the cost of his films as a write-off rather than an investment, he can do whatever the hell he pleases, critics be damned, investors be damned, box office be damned. Like the fictional Charles Foster Kane - "I think it would be fun to run a newspaper" - he can create anything he would actually enjoy creating.

So Coppola has turned to projects he really loves with the enthusiasm and passion of a young man, and he's making the kinds of films young men make when they have not yet learned the value of subtlety and the difference between drama and melodrama. That kind of fearless willingness to wear one's heart on one's sleeve, coupled with a disdain for compromises designed to perk up the box office, can produce some brilliant, personal films (Magnolia, e.g.) - the sorts of films that inspire as much passion as they exude. Such projects almost always lose money, of course, but what difference does that make to the very rich?

Two or three years ago, FFC made Youth Without Youth from an obscure novel by a Romanian theologian. Like a university student in an elderly body, Coppola dared to work outside the bounds of natural law to take on the big philosophical questions of existence, to deal with lost youth and might-have-beens. It's not an exceptionally good film, and yet, as I wrote at the time: "There is great filmmaking on display here. The problem is that Coppola just had no idea how to manage the rambling, internalized discourse on the many subjects Eliade had mastered in many languages, ranging from linguistics to metaphysics to the history of religion to the place of man in the universe. One cannot make a film about everything, or even all the things in that last sentence, so Coppola would have had to winnow all that down to a comprehensible and focused movie which allowed us to understand and empathize with the characters. It plays out just as you might expect - as a brilliant student film, except one made by a student who just happens to know more about filmmaking than any of his classmates or his professors." Or anyone else.

Tetro is more of the same. It's an epic-length black and white film, half in English and half in Spanish. It's about unbearable family secrets in the Darth Vader mold, but played out in Buenos Aires rather than in outer space. The context includes mental illness facilities, experimental theater productions, opera, classical dance, and symphonic music. It's filled with the release of long-suppressed emotions, sweeping panoramas of Patagonia, aesthetic theory, the pain of one's coming-of-age  ... you name it. It has a balletic dream sequence like the one in "Oklahoma!" in which dancers mirror and re-enact the characters' memories and fears. Like Coppola's previous film, it is distinctly uncommercial: Youth Without Youth grossed a quarter of a million dollars on 18 screens; Tetro made it to 16 screens and raised the gross to $400,000 - on a budget of some $15 million.

Citizen Kane, like Citizen Koppola, lost money on his vanity projects. His response: so what? Coppola could echo Kane's exact words, adjusted only to put the cost in 2010 dollars: "You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place  - in 60 years." Coppola doesn't need to stretch his fortune out for 60 years. He is 70 now. I assume he can keep making these intense, idiosyncratic, and sometimes overwrought films until he dies.

I hope he does.



In addition to his other achievements, Coppola got some hot chicks naked, including:

You go, grandpa!

 

  • * 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.

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

Stripper Academy

2007

Today we finish up our coursework at that prestigious institute of higher learning, the Stripper Academy. The MIT of TIT.

First up Ciera Rose Allen who seduces the boss. She shows breasts but damned if I can see a nipple. Maybe she doesn't have any. Caps and a clip.

Katie Cleary with just a little bit of tit. Caps with a clip.

Jenae Altschwager does her strip routine and shows off a nice pair of jugs. This is more like it! Caps and a clip.

 

 

 

Blind Date

1984

Part 1

Two Star Trek babes showing flesh in the same film

Kirstie Alley film clip from her younger, thinner avatar (samples below)

Mirina Sirtis film clip (samples below)

More tomorrow

 

 

After

(2009)

Johnny's comments: "After is a Spanish film about three long-time friends around 40 who get together for a dinner and a booze-and-drug-fueled night/morning. Told from the perspective of each friend: we have the father who is having trouble bonding with his son and feeling it for his wife; the corporate raider who has to decide to fire one of a sales team and is oh, so lonely (similar to the plot of Up in the Air); and the woman who finds a dying dog on the road and desperately clings onto it as her boyfriend becomes evasive. I couldn't keep up with the narrative of the story. It all seemed out of the order when I'm pretty sure it was supposed to be in order and there's more than one 'uncomfortable' moment in the film for those who like that sort of thing (my favorite being the corporate raider pulling down a sleeping woman's dress to expose her breasts, then masturbating to the sight). And the corporate raider keeps taking out his cock for no reason ..."
 

Alicia Rubio film clip (collage below)

v

Valeria Alonso film clip (collage below)

Blanca Romero film clip (collages below)

Cristina Dominguez film clip

 

 

Pics

Abbie Lee Kershaw

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley

Lady Gaga

 

Film Clips

Toni Collette in The United States of Tara. S2e2 in 720p. Various samples below.

Megan Lee Ethridge in Eugene. Sample below.