Saturday

A note from Jimmy the Saint

His holiness sent me a set of links that will allow you to obtain "Resurgence," the complete 24-minute BBC show which features a topless scene from a 21-year-old Catherine Zeta-Jones, as taped off Jimmy's own TV. To the best of my knowledge, this is the only place in the world where you can obtain this show, and may be the only record of its existence. I've never seen it anywhere else, and IMDb doesn't list this in Zeta's filmography.

I have downloaded it and will work on a compact film clip for tomorrow. If you want the whole show for your own collection, here are the three Rapidshare links. RAR is a popular compression technique which you can easily master with a Google search. I use win-rar to compress and decompress everything, including all .zip files. (NOTE for the uninitiated: the way .rar works, you need all three or nothing. Having one part will do you no good. Place all three files in the same directory, then uncompress.)

 

Breathtaking

I had no idea that Breathtaking had even been issued on DVD, but I found this clip on USENET, and it appears to be DVD quality. I've never seen the movie, but I know that it's a 2000 thriller starring Joanne Whalley. That's a pretty big deal because Whalley did no nude scenes between 1982 and 2000, so this one kinda came out of the blue. ("Blue" in more ways than one, as you'll soon see.)

The quality was good enough that I did some captures to go with the clip.

Joanne Whalley

 

Fur

Fur is, as noted in its subtitle, an imaginary portrait of a real photographer, Diane Arbus, a woman who made a rather sudden transition from a repressed 1950s housewife to a daring photographer of the fringes of society and a participant in those fringes. When she was about 35, she separated from Allan Arbus, a successful commercial photographer who later became an actor (he was the Sydney the psychiatrist on the TV version of M*A*S*H), and started her own career. In her twelve years as a solo act she managed to test the outside of the envelope of alternative 1960s lifestyles in New York City, all the time chronicling with her lens the people she met along the way. She photographed visions of bourgeois ennui, but she specialized in the downtrodden, marginalized people of society.

In Arbus's own words, "Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot. It was one of the first things I photographed and it had a terrific kind of excitement for me. I just used to adore them. I still do adore some of them. I don't quite mean they're my best friends but they made me feel a mixture of shame and awe. There's a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats."

Her work became popular enough to warrant one-woman shows in the important New York museums and galleries, and to inspire a collection of articles by Susan Sontag, On Photography, in which the formidable essayist tried to expressed why she was simultaneously fascinated with and repulsed by Arbus's work.

In 1971, at age 48, Diane (DEE-ann) swallowed a vast quantity of barbiturates and cut her wrists, thus assuring that she would die from one or the other, and elevating her to the pantheon of rebellious, romantic, troubled, unconventional 1960s artists who would die from suicide or O.D.: Joplin, Hendrix, Sylvia Plath, Jim Morrison, etc.

The movie Fur pays essentially no attention to Arbus's career as a photographer. In fact, if you do not already know about her work and its themes, you will leave the theater no more enlightened, other than to realize that she was interested in freaks. The film never really shows the part of her life when her career had blossomed, nor does it not explain how she developed her technical or artistic skills. (It wasn't from her experience in fashion photography. When she decided what she wanted to do, she studied the art of photography under a master.) What the film does do is to ask a theoretical question, "What set of circumstances could have transformed a Good Housekeeping housewife of 1957 into a kinky fetishist in 1967?" It imagines those circumstances as follows: Arbus meets Lionel, a sideshow freak with a condition that makes him appear to be Michael Landon in that Teenage Werewolf movie. (This is a completely fictional character.) She is immediately fascinated by him, then attracted to him. Through her Beauty and the Beast affair with the human werewolf, she meets the people who used to be his colleagues on the sideshow circuit, and is transformed by her fascination with their world, and how essentially normal and mundane it is beneath the sensational exterior. She begins to ponder the nature of normality itself.

Fur was directed by Steven Shainberg, who also directed the kinky Secretary, and seems to have a bit of the Arbus spirit in his own soul. Shainberg does an excellent job at capturing the tension inherent in Arbus's point of view, as she takes her first tentative steps from the mainstream into an underculture which both excited and terrified her. Nicole Kidman and Robert Downey Junior provide some heft to this project, but the film ultimately fails for two reasons:

First, Downey's wolfman make-up is inadvertently hilarious when it should convey dark mystery and an ominous sense that the forbidden and outré are nearer than they seem. The film works perfectly when Downey is covered by grotesque masks, but falls apart when the teenage werewolf faces the camera squarely and makes us giggle.

Second, the film drags on and on as we wait for her transformation and then fails to show us the results after the great awakening finally arrives. It feels as if the Ben Hogan story ended with the car accident and a question about whether he could ever come back. In fact, the film never shows any examples of the art which Diane would develop after her cultural epiphany. It's Diane Arbus without the photographs, just as the recent Paltrow movie was Sylvia Plath without the poems.

It might be a better movie if it had committed to being 100% fictional or 100% biographical. With a better make-up job on the Beast, the movie could stand by itself with no reference at all to Diane Arbus as the Beauty, since it treats the biographical details as mere background elements in the dream-tale of how the Arbus metamorphosis might theoretically have happened. As it stands, Fur is an earnest and slick art film with only cult appeal. Most people are reluctant to watch a pretentious real biography of a tortured artist, let alone a make-believe version of same.

I ran the captures from this film earlier. Here is the film clip of Nicole Kidman's nude scene.

(A body double did her outdoor scene.)

Here is a capture of a sorta-kinda wet blouse thing:

 

* 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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Joys of Jezebel

The Joys of Jezebel (1970) is a bit of grindhouse/drive-in sexploitation produced by the kings of that particular hill, partners David F. Friedman and Peter Perry.

Jezebel (Christine Murray) has been killed by throwing her to the dogs. A man and his girlfriend Ruth (Angela Graves) were responsible, and are trying to get Jezebel's sister Rachel (Dixie Donovan) to marry a repulsive foreigner who has a large army to loan.

Meanwhile, on "the other side," Satan wants to bag Jezebel since, after all, everyone on earth did, but she has her mind set on revenge, and plays to Lucifer's personal weaknesses. She promises to deliver a virgin to him if he gives her time for revenge on earth. Having never seen a virgin in hell, he goes for the arrangement.

Jezebel tricks Satan by swapping bodies with Rachel, and sending her to hell. She does promise not to sully the body she borrowed. Thus she looks just like virginal Dixie Donovan as she goes about her revenge on the toad that is to marry Rachel, the jerk who had her condemned, and Ruth. There is, of course, a surprise ending, but the point of the film is not the ending, but the journey, which is filled with wall-to-wall full frontal nudity and mild simulated sex.

Friedman and Perry created the film under their normal nom de porn, A. P. Stootsberry, but IMDB credits the fictional Stootsberry with direction as well. The film was actually directed by Bethel Buckalew, who made several films for Friedman and Perry, then tried one on his own, but was unable to sell it. Thus, Stootsberry is listed as a Bethelew pseudonym. To make matters even more confusing, IMDb also lists Peter Perry as a pseudonym for Bethelew, when it is actually the real name of a completely different person.

Assuming that The Erotic Adventures of Zorro represents a C+ in exploitation, this one is only a C. While it is corny, it doesn't have the sharp wit of the Zorro film, nor as much acting talent.

It does, however, have much more skin:

 

Dixie Donovan

 

 

Christine Murray

 

 

Angela Graves

 

 

Sherise Roland

 

 

unknowns

 

IMDb readers score this 4.6, but with only a statistically meaningless 8 votes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Blowback

It's an all "Babes in Bondage" day. Erynn Dana Dalton is topless and all tied up and suspended by her ankles.

 

 

Then Gladys Jimenez with some great legs, tits in the bedroom and then she has her turn at the hands of the madman as she too is strung up topless.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Guardian

 

Phil (Dwier Brown) and Kate (Carey Lowell), advertise for a nanny for their new baby. Their first choice has a mysterious cycling accident, but their second, an English woman, Camilla (Jenny Seagrove), proves perfect. But there soon appear to be some increasingly odd things about Crmilla. A friend of the couple follows her into the woods and sees her lying naked being caressed by the branches of a tree but when he tries to tell Phil and Kate he is torn apart by wolves. Gradually Phil and Kate discover Camilla's true identity as a tree spirit who has come to steal their child as sacrifice to a druid's tree god.


 

Jenny Seagrove

 

Carey Lowell

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes and collages

Amanda Peet

in Igby Goes Down

in The Whole Nine Yards

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rest Stop

 

 

Jaime Alexander in the film

 

Jaime Alexander in the special features

 

the real nudity was done by an unnamed body double

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gillian Anderson making a rare schmoozing appearance at some gala or another. (The often prickly actress is not the schmoozing type, a fact which makes me like her all the more..)
Lynn Whitfield in The Josephine Baker Story, a shallow but gorgeously filmed bio of the groundbreaking singer.