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"Whity", from Tuna
Tuna's comments:
"Whity -- According
to the one review in IMDB, this is a great film,
and a wonderful example of the work of Rainer
Werner Fassbinder, who is known for great color
and framing, a slow pace, and a melodramatic way
of telling a story. I agree with the color -
examples are included in the images. I definitely
agree with slow -- I watched it at 4x and still
thought it would never end.
Whity is the
illegitimate son of a white midwest ranch owner
and his black housekeeper, who is treated as a
slave (complete with whipping if he or anyone
else in the house makes a mistake). His two
half-brothers are real prizes -- one gay, and the
other retarded. His stepmother is promiscuous,
and after her husbands property. There is also a
saloon girl who has an on-again off-again affair
with Whity. There is some hint that Whity stays
because he enjoys the domination and abuse. When
the family members come to him one at a time
asking him to kill one or more of the others, he
has decisions to make.
For me, this is in the
top 20 worst films I have watched."
thumbnails Hanna Schygulla (1,
2,
3,
4)
"Mad Dog
and Glory", from Tuna
Tuna's comments:
"Mad Dog and Glory concerns a police
photographer, who is given the gift of a girl for
a week (Glory) by a mob boss (Bill Murry) after
Mad Dog saves his life. Glory and Mad Dog fall in
love, and Mad Dog develops the testicles to fight
Murry for her. Lots of laughs and a decent love
story." Scoop's note:
I guess there may be some body doubling here, as
usual with Uma, but number six looks like it is
Uma's face and chest, together at last. Does
anybody know to what extent, if any, Uma used
doubles in this film? thumbnails
Uma Thurman (1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8)
unknown
"The
Bare Breasted Countess", from Johnny Web
Not my caps. Somebody
sent me a bunch of raw screen snaps.
A movie from the
immortal Jess Franco. A female vampire who bites
her victims on .... (take a guess. Hint: not
neck)
If you guessed that she
wants to suck more than your blood, you have the
right idea. There are a zillion different
versions of this movie floating around under a
gazillion different names. (Franco himself used
many dozens of aliases). The one you want is The
Loves of Irina, from Private Screenings video,
which includes all the scenes of Lina Romay
sipping the slurpee straw d'amour, and even has a
whole bunch of unrelated and completely
gratuitous hardcore inserts just tossed in for
fun. Erotikill is the r-rated version. In the
first collage here, you can see a sample of the
vampire technique, but not in pornographic
close-up. The other version demonstrates why the
director ended up marrying this girl. Lina Romay
(1,
2,
3)
"Love is
the Devil", from Johnny Web
Very artsy-fartsy and
excessively talky 1998 biopic about the esteemed
20th century English painter Francis Bacon and
his lower-class (male) lover. Needless to say,
the lover didn't fit into the pretentious
cultural circles in which Bacon hung his hat.
Gives Derek Jacobi a chance to show off, but just
rambles interminably. The director even shot some
scenes through a fish-eye lens!! And he used
every other arty cliche that was discarded in the
70's. And the Bacon estate wouldn't let the
filmmakers use any of his real paintings, so
everything is "in the manner of". If
they showed this film to the Deltas, they would
have been mumbling "bullshit, bullshit, blow
job, blow job ..." under their breaths, or
would have thrown their beer cans at the screen ,
like they did for Flounder.
On top of all that, all
the sex was of the homosexual male variety. This
woman was a photographic model for one of Bacon's
colleagues. Avoid this movie at all costs.
Annabel Brooks (1,
2,
3)
"The
Sweet Hereafter", from Johnny Web
Every once in a while a
movie gets is exactly right. The story is just
intelligent enough, it focuses on important
issues, touches us with real people, and
reinforces all its points with the visuals and
the music and a sparkling cast. Then it creates a
structure that makes the whole even greater than
the sum of its parts.
If this movie doesn't
get you, nothing ever will. It is so intense that
I had to turn it off a couple of times, because I
couldn't stand the emotions it put me through.
It winds three stories
together. All three involve the loss of children.
The main story is about a small Canadian town
which one day lost almost its entire child
population in a bus crash. The second story is
about a lawyer who comes to that small town to do
a bit of upscale ambulance-chasing, and who once
heroically saved his baby when she was little,
only to lose her in a different way, to heroin
addiction. The third story is the Pied Piper of
Hamelin, the famous children's story in which the
village lost its children. All three stories
reflect back upon each other in ways sometimes
subtle and sometimes obvious.
The main story shows
real people, some of them touchingly simple,
dealing with the tragedy in whatever ways they
can muster.
The most brilliant
moment of the movie occurs when the lawyer gets a
call from his drug-addict daughter, and she tells
him she is HIV-positive. He knows that is
entirely possible because of her lifestyle, but
he doesn't really believe her because he thinks
it's just another one of her scams to get some
drug money from him. She's pulled scams like this
for 15 years. She'd want money for a ticket home.
He sent her the ticket, waited at the airport,
but she never showed because she sold the ticket
for drug money.
Now, if you were he,
would you believe her this time?
Atom Egoyan was
nominated for best director, but the picture was
not nominated. ("Bullshit, bullshit,
blowjob, blowjob"). For some reason, the
academy nominated "As Good as it Gets"
for best pic, but not best director, and
vice-versa for "The Sweet Hereafter".
Both of those movies are better than Good Will
Hunting or The Full Monty, both of which were
nominated. I would vote for it over Titanic,
which won that year.
It also deserves a medal
for extraordinary restraint on matters of
Canadian importance. There must be about an hour
of ice and snow on this movie, and only one brief
scene of hockey, and that on TV.
Anyway, the nudity,
full-frontal at that, came from Alberta Watson,
who plays Madeline on "La Femme
Nikita". I suppose she must be in her
mid-40s', but she still looks great with her
clothes off. (1,
2,
3)
Miscellaneous
from Stone Cold
Stone Cold said that there wasn't much to scan
in Celebrity Skin this month. He sent these
three. Drew
Barrymore paparazzi Drew
Barrymore paparazzi Catherine
Keener, in "Living in Oblivion"
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