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Tuesday
  • Tonight on the WB. How can he save the city when he can't even save his own soul? It's Father Blaise, priest-firefighter. When he can't put out the flames with water, he calls on a higher power.
  • The best news story of last week: Pam and Tommy to reconcile. Pam announced that they'll probably re-marry and "it'll be more fun now". As for the six months he spent in jail for beating her, Pam told "Access Hollywood" that it was an isolated incident, that Tommy's done very well in anger-management class, and that he's evolved as a person. Perhaps with a little more evolution, he can make it to Homo Sapiens. I think we already know he was quite good as Homo Erectus. Well, he has demonstrated progress. He's gone six months without beating her.
    • From the mailbox. "Here in L.A, 'Election' just opened. Broderick's wife is played by someone named Molly Hagen (IMDb spells it Hagan), whom I've never seen or heard of. I found this picture (click here) from "French Exit". Anything on her?" Not me. Only thing I remember is that she played a young Miss Ellie in the ill-fated "Dallas: The Early Years". After looking in the IMDb, I can't even vaguely recall her as the nun attracted to Kramer in the Seinfeld episode where George converts to non-existent Latvian Orthodoxy in order to get laid. Any feedback? Any better caps?

     

     

     

    Crash

  • David Cronenberg is a filmmaker who requires a great deal of intellectual participation from the viewer. When you watch his movies, you can either sit there and say "God, this is stupid", or you can take up his challenge. "Crash" is a good movie if you just accept one thing. It doesn't take place in our universe, but in a parallel one where the connection between cars and sex is far more explicit. Auto-eroticism has a different meaning in that universe, and the darker side of this fetish involves automobile accidents, which really turn some people on.

    James Spader is in a distant marriage which seems barely held together by the two of them having affairs and turning each other on with the descriptions of their outside liaisons. When Spader has an automobile accident, he finds that his wounds and breaks have become erotic objects for his wife and others. This widens his interests to a cult of accident survivors who obsess about their scars and braces, about famous crashes and cars, etc. For light entertainment, they all watch public safety films, and masturbate over the crash dummies. As you can imagine, they turn rubbernecking into a science, and pore through accident sites feeling the hot metal, tasting the blood, and photographing the aftermath. Since they live in an alternate universe, police and paramedics and firefighters simply ignore them.

    Cronenberg uses this imaginary universe to explore some facets of our own:

    Is Cronenberg a looney tune? Absolutely. Is he brilliant? Absolutely. He illustrates perfectly the fine line between genius and madness. The movie is well performed, masterfully photographed, sustains its mood perfectly, and is an aesthetically pleasing replication of its own cold-steel emotionless Bizarro world. There is no love or warmth in this world, only obsession and stimulus. There are no children or kittens, or anything else which might soften the hearts of the denizens. This movie is like Andy Kaufmann's comedy: it never winks and comes out of character and tells you everything is OK. It wants you to hate it, because if it is authentic you should hate everything about it, if you are a normal person. This film might repulse you, but you can't deny its imaginative power. Here's Holly Hunter

  • Now that I said all of those good things about Cronenberg, I hasten to add that I don't know why anybody finances these things. He's nothing but a guy who uses his own particular medium to explore and detail his own personal obsessions. Imagine, for example, a guy whose medium was the internet instead of film, and he just used his web page to rant on interminably about Russian movies, and William Shatner, and Abe Vigoda, and how Gerard Depardieu is so big that he wears Van Allen's Belt around his waist.... Oops. Never mind. Here's Holly Hunter again.
  • Rosanna Arquette
  • Rosanna Arquette
  • Yolande Julian in the challenging role of "airport hooker". Wasn't Airport Hooker a Shatner series?
  • Yolande Julian. I take it back. Airport Hooker is a new show on the WB.
  • Alice Poon as "camera girl"
  • and, of course Deborah Unger, full frontal. The rest of these are Unger
  • another frontal
  • more full-frontals
  • one famous crotch close-up
  • the other famous crotch zoom
  • bare breast. These facial expressions vividly illustrate the total lack of warmth in the movie. This is intentional, of course, and the actors carried it off well.
  • bare buns
  • this frame sums up the movie. She gets into a near-fatal crash. In fact, she appears at first to be dead. When she becomes conscious and says that she is not dying, he screws her and says "well, maybe next time". The movie ends, and we really feel satisfied.

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    Nekkid Opera and more from DB

  • DB is back with more Mozart Mammaries. Very few people know this, but his dad named him Mozart because he looked just like the guy on the candy wrapper. This time we're talking The Magic Flute. Literally, there's no nudity here, but there may as well be thanks to a great costume on Barbara Bonney, who played Pamina. You have to see this.
  • one more of Bonney
  • here's some nudity from Offenbach's "Orpheus", as performed in Berlin by the Comisch Oper. So, when Orpheus went after Eurydice, what do you think he left on his answering machine? Hi, this is Orpheus, I'm going through hell right now ... Do you think his friends bought it, or did they just think he was ducking their calls?
  • Orpheus
  • a La Scala production of Aida, starring Pavarotti. He performed in Austin recently, and several critics reported that his voice was only a shadow of its former self. The local paper thought that was bullshit, so they played recordings of him at various ages and defied anyone to tell the difference, which nobody could do. Same point would hold for wine-tasting wherein the great critics, when not allowed to look at the label, always rate the classic French whites below various upstarts from the rest of the world. The most dramatic example I ever saw of this was in Fort Myers, Florida, when two guys from the local Schlitz brewery found out about a blind beer-tasting, crashed it anonymously, and rated their own beer a "zero" because they mistakenly thought it was their main competitor's beer. Is all criticism bullshit? Of course. Why do you think I got into it? Beats the hell out of research, when I had to prove my points with standard deviations. Anyway, Pavarotti didn't get naked, but some of his little colleagues did.
  • Aida. La Scala. personally, I don't know if Pavarotti used to be better. I can't even imagine anyone better than he is now, although he is sixty-something.
  • Aida. La Scala. Verdi in Milan starring Pavarotti. Think they sold a ticket or two? Re: the special fascination with Italian opera. When I lived in Vienna, it was impossible to get any tickets for anything by Verdi or Puccini or Austria's own Mozart. But when the German operas were in town, tickets were plentiful. In fact, you could get up on stage and sing a few bars, if you could fit those horns on your head.
  • Aida. La Scala. Actually, there was a cafe in Vienna where they had kind of a live karaoke bar for opera singers. Pretty cool place. Kind of intimidating to get up there and sing, though, after some woman with a trained voice emotes her way through "Un Bel Di". Say, mein piano-spieling herr, do you know "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall"
  • Mr President isn't close to Pavarotti in the music department, but they will appear in public in body paint, which is more than I can say for Mr. Luciano "I'm too grand for body paint" Pavarotti. On the other hand, in those days, body painting Pavarotti could have bankrupted Home Depot. Think Earl Scheib could do it for 99 bucks?
  • Mr President
  • Mr President

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    From Recap

  • haven't heard from Recap in a while, but I think he caught us up today. Included in this collection is some rare and excellent material. This one is Alicia Silverstone in "Excess Baggage". This is just a warm-up. It gets much better. (No nudity in this one)
  • Claudia Christian in "Never on Tuesday"
  • Courtney Love in concert
  • Elena Anaya in Africa.
  • Julie Montgomery in "Revenge of the Nerds"
  • Marina Sudina in "Mute Witness"
  • Rona deRicci in "The Pit and the Pendulum"
  • Buffy in Scream 2.(No nudity)
  • unidentified actress in "Erotic Ghost Story"
  • unidentified actress in "Revenge of the Nerds"
  • various actresses in "Sword of the Barbarians"
  • Yvonne Fraschetti in "Sword of the Barbarians"
  • Yvonne Fraschetti in "Sword of the Barbarians"

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  • and a few more ...
  • Eric Da Red's paparazzi pics of Severine Ferrer
  • Eric Da Red's paparazzi pics of Severine Ferrer, #2