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Elizabeth Perkins (1991
and 1995)
Since Elizabeth was thoughtful enough to pose
naked in Allure last week, I thought it might be a good time to
look at the nudity she did when she was in her prime.
He Said, She Said is a fairly cute 1991 romantic comedy
designed to be a date movie. Elizabeth Perkins and Kevin Bacon
play newspaper columnists turned TV commentators who do a
Point-Counterpoint routine every night on TV. They start out
despising each other's politics, and competing for a single job,
but the story is a romantic comedy, so I don't think I'm spoiling
anything when I say that they eventually fall in love. In an
earlier time, Tracy and Hepburn would have played the bickering
journalists who fall in love despite their differences.
The film begins with an incident that represents their apparent
break-up, and then breaks off into two separate segments. The
first half shows Kevin Bacon's recollections of how they met and
fell for one another, and the second half covers the exact same
ground from Perkins's point of view. They do not always talk about
the same incidents, because each of them had another love interest
which affected the columnists' relationship in one way or another,
and they dealt with those matters separately. The film's best
humor, however, comes in the scenes where they have very different
recollections of identical incidents.
Tracy and Hepburn would have added an extra layer of skill with
the dialogue, but that kind of sharp badinage was above the
capabilities of Perkins and Bacon. They did bring some strengths
to the table. Perkins was sweet and funny. On the other hand,
Bacon had a tougher job than Perkins, since he was a womanizing,
insensitive, egotistical reactionary who reformed for his true
love. Unfortunately he was more believable before the
transformation, and I was never quite persuaded that he was a good
enough guy to deserve the dream-girl, but the script pushes all
the right buttons.
On our scale it is a C: a good, not great rom-com.
Film clip (zipped
.mpg)
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Elizabeth Perkins
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Ashley Gardner |
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Moonlight and Valentino is formulaic 1995 chixploitation
film which covers typical ground. Elizabeth Perkins stars as a
woman suddenly and tragically widowed when her perfect
astrophysicist husband is killed in a jogging accident. She is
comforted through her tragedy by the usual chick-flick suspects:
her bossy, high-powered stepmother (Kathleen Turner); her kooky
friend (Whoopee Goldberg); and her neurotic sister (Gwyneth
Paltrow). The entire film basically consists of girl talk between
them.
On our scale it is a D. It has good moments, but it is not a
good film. It's basically a stock footage festival from
chick-flicks, and rambles on to no particular destination.
Film clips (zipped .wmvs) (1,
2)
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Elizabeth Perkins
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Gwyneth Paltrow |
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Other Crap:
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"The federal government
intends to invoke the rarely used 'State
Secrets Privilege' -- the legal equivalent of
a nuclear bomb -- in the Electronic Frontier
Foundation's class action lawsuit against
AT&T"
One more reason to study
your vocab words
The Tonight Show's Pump
Cast News
BBC ON THIS DAY
... enter your birthday (or any other day) and
see BBC's take on that day in history
Daily Box Office -
Friday, April 28, 2006
- The big surprise:
Stick It, which was expected to finish 8th
or 9th, pulled into second in Friday,
beating United 93 and all the carry-overs.
It didn't miss #1 by much!
- The big
disappointment: the well-reviewed Akeelah
and the Bee, which was expected to finish
third for the weekend, is languishing in
seventh, and just barely holding on to that
spot!
- The overall Friday
box looks a bit softer than expected, but
that often happens on a week with many
second-tier releases and no big grosser to
shoulder the load.
Letterman:
"Top Ten Signs You're At
A Bad Prom"
- It's scheduled for
Tuesday at 10:00 AM
- Not only is D.J.
playing Bryan Adams, D.J. is Bryan Adams
- Instead of ice,
punch bowl is chilled by the frozen head of
Ted Williams
- Principal
interrupts festivities with a short film on
Scientology
- The janitor is
mixing the punch with his wrench
- It's chaperoned by
Whitney Houston
The Wonder Years Pilot
Episode
Jefferson Airplane sings
White Rabbit on Ed Sullivan
Cheney Did Not Fall
Asleep During Hu's Speech, He Died
The trailer and two clips
from One Last Thing...
- "'One Last
Thing...' tells the story of 16 year-old
Dylan Jameison (Michael Angarano) who has
terminal cancer. When the charitable
organization 'United Wish Givers' grants
Dylan a last wish, he initially chooses to
go fishing with his football hero, Jason
O'Malley (Johnny Messner). In a moment of
inspiration during the locally televised
news conference, Dylan changes his mind and
reveals that his actual final wish is to
spend a weekend with the supermodel Nikki
Sinclair (Sunny Mabrey), whose poster hangs
proudly above his bed.
Nikki is on the
downward slope of self-destruction. In need
of a splash of good publicity after pushing
another model offstage at the latest fashion
show, her agent (Gina Gershon) books a photo
op with Dylan, setting the stage for an
unlikely 'courtship.'
With the help of his
two best friends, Slap (Gideon Glick) and
Ricky (Matthew Bush), Dylan spends his last
days in Manhattan, trying to fulfill his
wish, to the dismay of his single mom, Karen
(Cynthia Nixon). In addition to the usual
growing pains encountered by a boy his age,
Dylan is faced with coming to terms with his
imminent departure from this world. His
resulting journey is both touching and
surprisingly funny."
Lock in your guess -
real or spoof?
Keith Richards
hospitalized after falling out of a palm tree
SOUTH PARK- Osama Bin
Laden
- Check out this
abridged version of OSAMA BIN LADEN HAS
FARTY PANTS from the animated series SOUTH
PARK.
- Funny spoof of
Warner cartoons. After a short intro, it's
"Bugs" Cartman against Osama Fudd Laden
Here's the HQ trailer for
Monster House, the new family-style horror
comedy in 3-D animation
The Vatican has urged
Catholics everywhere to boycott the upcoming
Da Vinci Code film
for two reasons: (1) it patently 'offended'
the Christian faith; (2) Jean Reno movies
always suck when he doesn't wear sunglasses.
Who would have guessed that L'Osservatore
Romano had a hip movie critic?
Limbaugh weasels
out cuts deal in drug probe
Jewel goes glam.
The trailer for
Invincible
- "From the studio
that brought you 'The Rookie' and 'Remember
the Titans' comes 'Invincible,' inspired by
the true story of Vince Papale (Mark
Wahlberg), a man with nothing to lose who
ignored the staggering odds and made his
dream come true. When the coach (Greg
Kinnear) of Papale's beloved hometown
football team hosted an unprecedented open
tryout, the public consensus was that it was
a waste of time -- no one good enough to
play professional football was going to be
found this way. Certainly no one like Papale
-- a down-on-his-luck, 30 year-old,
substitute teacher and part-time bartender
who never even played college football. But
against these odds, Papale made the team and
soon found himself living every fan's
fantasy -- moving from his cheap seats in
the upper deck to standing on the field as a
professional football player."
The first clip from X-men
3 (It's
actually a pretty cool clip, thanks to Jackman,
who is brilliant as usual!)
"A new television reality
show, My Bare Lady, invites porn stars to test
their serious acting abilities in London's
theater district"
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Movie Reviews:
Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe). White asterisk: expanded format.
Blue asterisk: not mine. No asterisk: it probably sucks.
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Cash on Delivery (1992)
"Yu ya gong wu" is a Hang Kong comedy. A famous former gigolo who has
turned to buying antiques, accepts a bargain with Veronica Yip to spend three
days with her and make her pregnant, in return for a priceless antique watch.
She and her husband stand to make a fortune from the husband's wealthy family
if they produce an heir, but he is impotent and sterile. Unfortunately,
Simon is such a good gigolo and performed his role so perfectly that the
sex-starved wife Yip becomes obsessed with him after their three days
together. The gigolo is not interested because he has recently fallen for a
young and inexperienced attorney.
The film then evolves into a courtroom drama when Yip's husband is killed
in a fight, and she has Simon charged with the murder. The attorney who will
defend him is, of course, his girlfriend.
Much of the humor was supposed to be in the dialogue, and it was lost in
the translation. There was some physical humor that worked well, such as the
battle between gigolos as to who could reach with their tongue into the
deepest shot glass and retrieve a piece of paper on the bottom.
I found the ex-gigolo and the female attorney to be very sympathetic
characters, but the cinematography was nothing special, and with the humor
eviscerated by bad subtitles, this just doesn't have enough going for it to
recommend. D+
Eight Days a Week (1997)
Eight Days a Week is a teen romantic comedy that played to ecstatic
festival crowds, but was unable to win a real theatrical release, and went
straight to video. It will be released next Tuesday on DVD. Scoopy wrote a
wonderful review, which I
completely agree with, including his award of a C+, as an intelligent but
delightful coming of age teen romance story. It's rather talky, and a little
light on pace, but made up for it in off-beat energy. This film works for me
for several reasons. Russell is adorable, and her persistent suitor, Joshua
Schaefer, is a very sympathetic character, smart, sensitive, amusing, and
totally devoted to Russell.
To recap the nudity, Keri Russell spends the first several minutes of the
film playing in a sprinkler in a wet shirt, is sunbathing showing major
pokies, and her character shows a breast near the end of the film. I am
suspicious of the actual breast exposure near the end of the film. While we do
see Keri Russell's face and a breast in the same frame, it was carefully shot
so the two are never connected. Further, her neck angle looks wrong to me. The
breast is standing up much higher than in a swim suit scene with her on her
back, and the clincher is that a previous scene that should have shown her
breasts didn't. However, the opening wet shirt see-through action is worth the
price of admission!
IMDb readers say 6.0.
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