Who Killed Bambi? (2003) is a very low key French thriller that takes place in a hospital. The "cock of the walk" hot shot surgeon is a perv, anesthetizing young women and then molesting them. One nursing student is wise to him. His attitude toward her makes her suspicious, and then events convince her that he is a dangerous perv, and probably killed at least one patient. We are let in on his secret from nearly the beginning, so the movie is really all about the cat and mouse game between the doctor and nurse Isabelle (Sophie Quinton). He nicknames her Bambi when he discovers that she has an inner ear condition that makes her dizzy and unsteady on her legs.

Quinton has screen presence, can deliver lines effectively, and shows emotion. We will be seeing more of her, or rather, as she did full frontal in this film, we will be seeing her often. Two female patients also show full frontal, Lisa Huynh and one I was not able to identify. IMDb readers have this at 6.5. Some critics were unhappy with the low key ending, others felt that a low key ending was perfect for this low key thriller. I side more with the first group. I found it a terrific film with a weak ending. This is a C to C+, a rather good hospital thriller. It is a letterboxed transfer in French with forced English subtitles.

Sin City (2005):

Since just about everyone knows what Sin City is, I know I will be stating the obvious in these first couple of paragraphs, but I need to do it anyway. I have to provide the background info for those who have just arrived on Earth today from distant planets. I do this as a public service to help them collect the data they need to study our quaint earthling ways, in the hope that by doing so I will get to be a zookeeper/trustee when they enslave our race and force the rest of you into their distant zoos. Most of you will be called upon three times a day (your "feeding times") to demonstrate cute and primitive earthling behavior in a realistic natural habitat. For example, perhaps you will be herded into a smoky bar and forced to sing karaoke. Meanwhile, I will be standing behind the glass walls with the aliens and other condescendingly superior beings like Tom Wolfe, laughing at your poor Sinatra impersonations while all-skillful galactic pleasure women take me to the Inn of the 14th Happiness. Sorry, suckers.

This film is an adaptation of three noir stories from an eponymous comic book, but to state that is to oversimplify the film's provenance because the comic itself is pretty much of a personal interpretation of the pulp stories of the 30s and 40s, interpreted as they would have been interpreted in the film noir movies of the forties if the mores of that day had allowed it. Therefore, Sin City is something of a third or fourth derivative. If we skip all the intermediary interpretations and filters, we can probably state fairly that it is a story from the pulp magazines brought to life with the technology of today and a tip of the hat to the dramatic lighting of 1940s film noir. Stated another way, it is a living, moving comic book. Oh, yeah, I'm aware that they don't call them comic books any more. Now they are "classical graphic dramas", or "pictorialized novels", or "feats of rendered imagineering", or some such imperial hoity-toity euphemism, but let's not kid ourselves, shall we? They are comic books, for better or worse.

The intention of the co-directors, Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller, was to come as close as possible to the precise look and feel of Miller's black and white comic about the lousiest part of the lousiest town on the lousiest planet in the galaxy, a place which looks like what Earth might look like if we had screwed up the development of our world even more than we already have. Sin City is a combination of the worst parts of Detroit and Bangkok and Manila and Hell. The similarity of the comics and the film is reflected in the full name of the movie, "Frank Miller's Sin City", a moniker which not only gives credit where it is due, but will also help you get to the right theater in your local multiplex and thus avoid the mistake I made. Since the multiplex had three theaters playing Sin City, and I thought they were all the same movie, I accidentally wandered into the competing "Charlotte Bronte's Sin City", and it just wasn't the same. I mean instead of nudity and torture scenes, the only sins I saw were withering sidelong looks, hastily averted glances, and subtly smug apothegms. There was not one single decent on-screen castration of any of those Dukes or Earls. What the hell was wrong with those people in the 19th century?

Once I high-tailed it out of that costumed creepshow and made it into the Frank Miller version, I felt cozy and right at home. The film has just about everything you need in a pulp story: heroes willing to die for little girls, ugly tough guys with a code of honor, creepy super-powered baddies, and hookers whose butts are never covered. And then you get your hybrid archetypes, like creepy super-powered hookers and baddies whose butts are never covered. The violence level? Over the top. What's your pleasure? Dismemberment? Decapitation? Torture? Violence against women and animals? If you can name it, it's probably here. What about the sex and nudity level? Outstanding. Various women parade around in thongs and/or see-throughs. Jaime King shows her breasts in a scene with Mickey Rourke. Carla Gugino walks around in nothing but a thong in a scene with Mickey Rourke, and she is photographed from many angles. Later on, Carla even shows her butt without the thong, in another scene with ... well, I guess you can figure this out. I can't say that I would like to be Mickey Rourke, but there is something to be said for a career which seems to consist entirely of having beautiful women show you their bodies, so a tip o' the cap to the Mickster.

Mick plays some kind of deformed super-human monster with undefined and mysterious maladies that give him great strength and a very confused mind prone to delusions. Not unlike what Mick himself is like in real life. This particular story is kind of a new take on Beauty and the Beast. In all of his miserable existence, even hookers have refused to sleep with the beast, even the special extra-sleazy Sin City type of hookers! Only one woman has ever been kind to him. When some bad guys kill her and frame Mick for the murder, well ... remember Bruce Banner's line, "You wouldn't like me when I'm angry"? Well, the Mickster is like that, too, and he is one angry monster dude. He does whatever it takes to get revenge. This story was absolutely the best of the three - the grossest, the wittiest, the sexiest, and ... Mick was just terrific. Miller came up with some tremendous lines in this section. At one point Mick is about to kill a corrupt Cardinal who was behind the murder of his girlfriend when the cardinal says, "you're going to enjoy killing me, aren't you?" Mick responds with an evil smile and a flick of his cigarette, "The actual killing - no. But everything leading up to that - that'll be a gas!!" When ol' Mick finally gets the electric chair, someone pulls the switch, he convulses and seems to be overcome, then opens his eyes and sneers furiously, "Is that the best you got?" Mickey Rourke's career should be in full-fledged comeback after this film is widely seen. Know what? He deserves it. He played the man-beast perfectly. He got the integrity. He got the sleaze. He got the humor. He just plain nailed it. 

The other two stories weren't as good as that one, and they seemed to run a bit longer than necessary, but they were kept constantly energized by the visual imaginations of Miller and Rodriguez. I don't think it is at all unfair to talk about this film among the great genre films of all time: Rear Window, Pulp Fiction, The Good the Bad and The Ugly, Blade Runner, or any other one you can name. Robert Rodriquez has taken the film noir genre about as far as it can possibly go, and he's rendered the comic-to-film genre about as accurately as can possibly be done. I have always said he was probably the most talented director in the world (although I have not always liked his movies), and I am ready to reaffirm my belief.

Interestingly, Rodriguez is following the wild-cannon prediction that I made for him a couple of years ago. I likened his career to Sergio Leone's, and I said that the next step would be to master genre films, before moving on to deeper material. Leone delivered Once Upon a Time in the West and The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly,  thus doing just about everything that could possibly be done with a Western. After a lull of about a decade and a half in which he couldn't seem to move forward, Leone suddenly emerged with one of the greatest masterpieces in the history of film, the full-length version of Once Upon a Time in America. Mr. Rodriguez now seems to have mastered genre films. I suppose he will make a few more. Will he eventually follow Leone's path and try to create something deeper from some important source material? Lord knows he has plenty of time to mess around. He's only 37.

Not everyone will like this film, and you should absolutely not expose young children to this material. Hell, one character gets castrated twice - try explaining that to your impressionable minds! The R-rating was generous. It could easily be NC-17.  The film is lurid and seamy,  is filled with gratuitous sex, and is politically incorrect. It is filled with violence committed by despicable, ugly people who take pleasure in the suffering of others, and the violence is often portrayed graphically and explicitly.  In other words, it is everything it should be to interpret pulp stories properly. Even if you don't like it, you still owe it to yourself to have seen it if you consider yourself a lover of films or a student of what can be done with the art of cinema, because this is the 9th Symphony, the Pieta, the Hamlet of genre films. Look, Sparky, I think it's a safe guess that Beethoven, Michelangelo and Shakespeare are not likely to come back to life, so you might want to enjoy the work of a master while we have still him among us.
 

Sorry to say these are the same old three pictures you've already seen. I'll keep my eyes open for more.

• Carla Gugino (1, 2)
• Jessica Alba

Miscellaneous:

• Zipped .wmv. Nice little downblouse of Maria Sharapova at Wimbledon in 2004.

Other Crap:

• Scientist impregnates beluga whale. He was just warming up for his date with Kirstie Alley.
• Various ways in which websites marked April Fool's day this year. Some good stuff!
• Letterman's Top Ten Signs You're Not Getting Enough Sleep
• CrazyIllusion.com - An Astounding Optical Illusion
• Vince Vaughn will join David O. Russell's next project, as the wiseass host of a radio call-in show "whose life gets turned upside down when he starts becoming his callers." Whatever that means.
• Kiki, lookin' mighty sexy!
• The Pat O'Brien re-mix - cuz he's one groovy cat.
• Europe's new cigarette pack warnings. (Let me point out that Larry Flynt was doing this 15-20 years ago and everyone thought it was gross.)
• A good, non-religious reason to avoid pork - Carl's Poo-Eating Pigs
• Both trailers for Turtles Can Fly
  • "'Turtles Can Fly' is the third feature from internationally acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi ('A Time For Drunken Horses'). Written, directed and produced by Ghobadi, the film features of cast of local non-actor children."
• The trailer and four clips from Walk on Water
  • "'Walk on Water' follows Eyal, a fierce Mossad agent (Lior Ashkenazi of 'Late Marriage') and second-generation Holocaust survivor on assignment to track down an aging Nazi war criminal, Alfred Himmelman. Posing as a tour guide, Eyal befriends Himmelman's German grandchildren in Tel Aviv: Pia and her openly gay brother, Axel. What begins as a deceptive mission evolves into a deeply personal and political journey of conflicting ideologies, changing Eyal's view of the world forever."
• Hootie J. Blowfish sings about chicken sandwiches.
• Ms. Wheelchair Wisconsin Stripped Of Crown For Standing Up. In fact, around midnight on St Patrick's Day, she's the only person in Wisconsin who can stand up.
• PC gone rampant - Cookie Monster eats sensible snacks.
• This is awesome - the dialogue in Closer compared to the meaning of the Chinese subtitles on a pirated DVD.
• Passing the Big Hat - How a new Pope is Elected
• Just to show you can bet on just about anything: Betting Odds on the new pope
• Weekly World News weighs in on the legend that is Hogzilla
• What's Up With Wrestlemania XXI. I actually attended one of these! It was the one that was held in three different areas, and I saw the portion in the Nassau Coliseum - featuring a "boxing" match between Mr T and a man who was not only my favorite wrestler, but my favorite movie star as well, Roddy Piper. Other 80s icons were present, like George The Animal Steele, The Macho Man, Jake the Snake, and The Magnificent Muraco. (Who can forget his incredible performances in Fuji Vice?)
• Fox News Channel scooped all the other networks in reporting the death of Pope John Paul II on Friday afternoon. Only one problem. They were reporting it on spec! That was odd enough, but the story gets better. My favorite part of the report: "Television networks have been preparing for this story behind the scenes for years, renting apartments and space on roofs overlooking St. Peter's Square so their anchors and reporters will have backdrops for the story." So they were, in fact, renting apartments on spec!
• Naomi Watts doubts she'll ever find love because she only attracts "jerks." Like ... oh ... I don't know .. Heath Ledger?? Assuming she can wait a few weeks, Affleck should be available.
• One-Eyed Bob's Inappropriate Toys for Children.
  • Did he test them personally? Why do you think they call him one-eyed Bob?
  • (I'll bet he tested the Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model Air Rifle!)
• Hunkin's Experiments (over 200 home experiments)
• The Museum of Hoaxes presents: The 10 WORST April Fool's Day Hoaxes Ever. (For the best, see below.)
• The Museum of Hoaxes presents the Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes of All Time
• Classic April Fools jokes as presented by the fans of PressAnyKey
• Pat Buchanan gets his salad tossed
• The Smoking Gun: American Idol Finalist's Violence Rap
• Bond. James Bond. The new James Bond has finally been chosen, and it's a dark horse - former Philly firstbaseman John Kruk!  All kidding aside, they have finally made a choice. It is an actor named Matthew Goode, a handsome kid in his late 20s. Here's a picture and interview.
• 100 Better Ways to Leave Your Lover
• JoBlo breaks a huge scoop: Fincher is currently directing EI8HT.
  • "David Fincher is currently shooting a sequel to his first major hit from 1996, SE7EN, starring the same two men from the original, Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman, in what is tentatively known on the set as EI8HT. Our source from the set, who asked to be called Jimmy Doe, told us that every single person working on the film had to sign NDAs (Non-Disclosure Agreements) so that the project would be as secretive as possible."
  • LOTS more detail on the linked page.
• THREE INCHES OF THUNDER: Confessions of an ill-equipped man whore.
• PETA to Target Star Jones Reynolds. Geez! Who do ya root for? This is why Vince McMahon rarely pits baddies against one another.
• 'Sin City': 7 deadly sins. Director Robert Rodriguez "simply ran out of rules to break."
• Remixing vintage pulp fiction art as commentary about our mixed-up world. I know that sounds pretentious and boring, but it is not. It's actually quite a good concept once you get into it, and some of it is very well realized.

Other Crap archives. May also include newer material than the links above, since it's sorta in real time.

Click here to submit a URL for Other Crap

MOVIE REVIEWS:

Here are the latest movie reviews available at scoopy.com.

• The yellow asterisks indicate that I wrote the review, and am deluded into thinking it includes humor.
• If there is a white asterisk, it means that there isn't any significant humor, but I inexplicably determined there might be something else of interest.
• A blue asterisk indicates the review is written by Tuna (or Junior or Brainscan, or somebody else besides me)
• If there is no asterisk, I wrote it, but am too ashamed to admit it.

I'll have the offical results and write up in a day or two.

Here are the results of our most recent other polls...
The Top 20 Nude Scenes of 2004
The Best Nude Film Debuts of the 80s
The Best Nude Film Debuts of the 90s
Which actress has been the most convincing playing a stripper.
Who has the best bum in Hollywood?
Best All Time Television Comedy
Best Nudity in an Oscar-winning performance.

Email Scoopy Jr. with more nominees, comments or suggestions.

Today from the Ghost....3 video clips featuring some of the nude highlights from Madeleine Stowe's career. (zipped wmvs as usual).

• Madeleine Stowe in "Stakeout" (1987). In this clip we see her showing off a first class bum as well as some rear/side breast views as she gets out of the shower.

• Madeleine Stowe in "Unlawful Entry" (1992). Here we see Stowe topless in a love scene from the Kurt Russell/Ray Liotta movie "Unlawful Entry".

• Madeleine Stowe in "China Moon" (1994). In this last clip Stowe strips for Ed Harris. At first we have close up breast views, and then a far off full frontal view.

"Soho Square"
A very good British crime drama from 2000, Soho Square requires some patience and close attention, but delivers a good thriller in return.

A police detective is investigating a series of killings in the Soho Square area. This is a very nasty killer. He kills his victims by setting them afire with lighter fluid, while they're still alive. His score is eight, and he shows no signs of stopping.

Complicating things is the fact that the detective is still mourning the loss of his wife who killed herself. The movie plods somewhat in the middle, and if you don't pay attention, you could easily get lost.

The ending is twisty, surprising, and even shocking, but all in all it's 90 minutes well spent.

• Lucy Davenport

Iva Singer
(1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

JACKSON IS #1 FOOL
What A Doo-Doo Head! - For the third April Fools' Day in a row, Michael Jackson has been named America's Most Foolish Person in a poll by PR consultant Jeff Barge. 80 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that Jackson had done something foolish in the past year. He beat out runners-up Scott Peterson, Martha Stewart and Paris Hilton. Barge said it's hard to imagine an America in which Michael Jackson isn't the most foolish individual, and short of Paris Hilton having a lesbian wedding, he can't think who could push him out of the #1 spot.

If you have your own site or blog, sign up today and earn some extra cash in 2005 by promoting the Fun House!