"The Dreamlife of Angles"

The Dreamlife of Angles (La Vie Rêvée des Anges, 1998) stars Élodie Bouchez who you all remember from The Wild Reeds, and less well known Natacha Régnier. Natacha is an incredibly cute and charismatic petite young actress with lovely small but all-natural breasts and perfect perky pink nipples.

Ok, go ahead and look. I'll wait here.

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Natacha Regnier (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13)

See, I told you.

It is difficult to draw an audience in and hold them through an entire film, even when it is a high-testosterone suspense thriller, but try it with a long, subtitled character driven drama. That is exactly what writer/director Erick Zonca attempted here, and achieved. It is a slice of life story centered around two lower class 20 something girls. Isa (played by Bouchez) is a drifter with a zest for life, an upbeat attitude, and great compassion and empathy. When she tries to sell a card (hand made from library magazine images and construction paper) to a bar patron, he gives her a real job as a seamstress. She is a disaster at any regular work, and has no idea at all how to sew, but it is here that she meets Marie(Régnier). Marie is a polar opposite -- sullen, caustic and a loner. They meet over lunch break, and when Isa is fired her first day, Marie agrees to let her sleep in her flat. To be more precise, she is house-sitting the flat as it's owners are in a coma from an auto accident.

Isa and Marie become inseparable. They meet two motorcycling bouncers, and, after a rocky start, spend time with them. Marie becomes intimate with the genuinely nice but overweight and unattractive of the two, and Isa forms a friendship with them without getting too close to either man. After finding a diary kept by the younger of the accident victims, she starts visiting the young girl in hospital, and spends hours reading to her in hopes it will bring her out of her coma. Her mother has already died from her injuries. Meanwhile, Marie has become intimate with a young womanizing nightclub owner. The more Marie sees of men, the further she and Isa drift apart.

This is enough to give you an idea. As mundane as the plot sounds, I was drawn in to these characters, and their small lives. Part of the reason was the direction, which was carefully designed to hold interest, but the chief reason was brilliant performances from everyone, but especially Bouchez and Régnier. Mine is not a minority opinion. They won best actress in nearly every European festival. It is a travesty that this film didn't get so much as a nod from the Academy. Art direction was also great, but not impressive. Outside shots of the small industrial French town were intentionally drab and depressing. Some of the interiors, however, were vibrant. A lot of the photography was done with hand-held cameras, which gave a real feeling of intimacy. The sound and score were done with absolute precision. This made for a very realistic feel to the film, and helped to sustain interest. If you like character driven drama at all, don't miss this one.

"Blaze Starr Goes Nudist"

Early exploitation producers discovered that they could get away with nudity in Nudist films. This is one of them, but with a twist. It features Blaze Starr. This is the same Blaze Starr whose affair with Huey Long cost him the job of governor of Louisiana. (This was the subject of the Paul Newman film, Blaze). This was produced by Doris Wishman. The story is typical of these nudist films. Blaze is an over-worked actress, and runs into a theater to hide from autograph hounds. A nudist film is playing. Nudism looks like the perfect cure for her stress, so she joins and loves it.

Something Weird video did an amazing job on the restoration and transfer, and even included a short of actual Starr strip performances. The "nudists" are more than likely actresses, as most of them have tan lines.

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Blaze Starr (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12) Nudist (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16)

I got tricked into watching this puppy. Recent, R-rated movie, starring Jennifer Love Hewitt, and IMDb says it has scenes of sexuality. Baloney. If there is any sex, I missed it. No nudity. No reason for an r-rating except a few "fucks" and "fuck yous". JLH plays a fashion-obsessed bimbo, but stays fully clothed. Dreadful, talky, boring gen-y movie about coming of age. The dialogue consists of crap like "if you could have Superman on your football team, would you play him on offense or defense?" I think somebody thought this was fresh. As it turns out, it was fresh horse manure. IMBb viewers rate it 3.5. To make a quick point of reference, Ed Wood's "Glen or Glenda" is 3.4.

"And God Created Woman" (1996)

David Friedman's eccentric autobiography, "A Youth In Babylon" mentions that this was the first European movie ever to receive general US distribution in its original version. Although many foreign films had traveled the arthouse circuit, this one actually made it into drive-ins and the old pussycat circuit. Just prior to "Woman", Friedman and his cohorts had circulated Bergman's "Sommeren med Monika", but the promoters cut it about in half, dubbed in American voices, and re-scored the entire movie to make it light-hearted. Bergman wouldn't even have recognized the thing. It was successful because (1) it had some fleeting nudity when Harriet Anderson did a skinny dip. (2) it somehow escaped the "Condemned" rating from the Legion of Decency. I actually enjoyed the Legion's ratings. I only went to movies they condemned, because you couldn't trust the ads. Exploitation filmmakers always tried to make it seem like there was more flesh in their movies, but if the Legion condemned it, you could trust that it would have nudity or extreme weirdness. It also turned out that these were some of the best films of their era, like "The Pawnbroker", so I got an education as well.

Friedman tells one absolutely hilarious story where they were once picketed by the Knights of Columbus in full regalia, with ceremonial swords and the assorted headgear of the old British Admiralty. Initially, Friedman and his mentor thought it was a street theater group performing "H.M.S. Pinafore", but when they figured out the situation, they turned it to their advantage as a free publicity opportunity. During the brouhaha between the promoters, the cops, the public, and the press, Kroger Babb, Friedman's mentor, kept referring to the festooned Knights as "Admiral" and "Commodore".

Anyway, when Monika made a few bucks, the exploitation guys looked around for some Euroflicks where they could get the US distribution rights cheap, and not have to spend all the money they spent making Monika acceptable to a general audience. This particular Vadim flick, And God Created Woman, was in vivid color, featured the beautiful Bardot in lovely locales, and wasn't too depressing, so it was a natural to be the frontrunner. By our standards, there wasn't much nudity in it, but for the time, it was shocking. Many more Bardot flicks followed, and Bardot's fame in America was thereafter certifiable across all economic classes. The working class guys couldn't tell you what continent France is on, but they could tell you the country's sexiest film star.

Bardot. (These are actually my collages from Tuna's captures) (1, 2, 3)

"Hackers" (1995)

In the two words above, you have all the review you need, "Hackers" and "1995". Given the rate of acceleration in technological development it all fields, the gap between now and 1995 is about the same as the gap between 1995 and Attila the Hun. Come to think of it, the best internet site of the first Christian milennium was probably Uncle Attila's Hun House, but I digress. It's kind of hilarious to hear them stand back in absolute awe at a new laptop computer with a 8k of ram and built-in 28.8 modem! Man, that's the power to harness the universe right there. Well, it must have impressed filmmakers who still owned their Commodore 64's.

It seems to me that future forecasts are always wrong, since they always base the future on an exaggerated version of the trends of the present. But the cycle of history shows that things do not move forever in a straight line. When trends become unacceptable to most people, countervailing trends moderate the development, often to a radically different path, and we can't really predict how long it will take for the direction to change. Vico theorized that it was circular, but I think that oversimplifies. We move forward, but not in a straight line, and we often double back temporarily.

The book "1984" assumed that the future would be a darker extension of the Stalin/Hitler phenomenon of absolute state interference in all thought processes. What could be further from the truth? If anything, the world is moving toward absolute anarchy as much as toward absolute monarchy.

About the only literary future scenario that seems all too close to us now is "A Clockwork Orange", which seemed to be on target in its prediction of a youth culture filled with drugs, music, sex, and stylized violence. But even that could change dramatically. We may yet see a more peaceful world. If you had seen the sleaze and lawlessness of Times Square in the 1980's, you could not have predicted what it would be like today. You would have imagined Blade Runner coming to life by now. You would have predicted further deterioration at a similar rate instead of the response of a countervailing force which turned it in a completely opposite direction, so that it is now like Disney North. An excess of anything seems to max out at some point and cause a counter-reaction.

It seems that very few people, neither literary nor scientific types, can build any kind of model that can predict when existing trends will be modified by countervailing pressures, or simply by chance. Pretend you were living in 1940, and try to predict what 1946 would be like. Who could have known that Hitler was stupid enough to invade Russia so late in the year? Who could have predicted that Japan wanted to force a war with the country that had most of the world's industrial capacity? Who could know that the race to develop atomic weapons and rocketry would end up the way it did? Modeling the future from 1940, I doubt many people had an accurate idea of what 1946 would be like. Now add this to the equation. According to futurists the rate of change is accelerating constantly. In other words, it's probably about a thousand times harder to predict 2006 from 2000 as it was to predict 1946 from 1940.

Let's consider science, and how recent developments have altered the thinking from just five years ago.

One team in Italy, another in Princeton, New Jersey, are convinced that the speed of light is not an absolute. That it may be possible to force a laser beam through controlled environments at hundreds of times the speed of light. Think about the implications for space exploration, and how it might change all our assumptions about the universe.

Just a couple years ago, virtually all scientists would tell you that the universe must be teeming with other technological societies, given the vast number of stars, the likelihood of planets, and the presumed life-imperative. (Which means that when life can exist, it will exist. Nature's imperative.) But we have now scoured an area 40,000 light years in radius without finding any trace of radio waves. Nothing. Now scientists are turning toward the theory that while life is an imperative, technological life may be an accident. Remember it appears to have been an accident on our own planet. They now believe that technological life exists only because of a one in a zillion fluke: the Alvarez Hypothesis. A meteor strikes earth, destroys all the giant reptiles who have held sway for 140 million years, and permits mammal life to flourish in the new world. But take away that fluke meteor, change its path in space by a thousandth of a degree, and there's no technological life on this planet. The dinosaurs made no progress toward technology in 140 million years, and they'd have made no more in the next couple of million.

Imagine what's going to happen in genetics in the next few years. I wish I were my daughter's age. I would own every book on genetics. Remember how the computer age has developed from 1980 until now. Genetics are about at the stage now that computers were at in 1980. Now that they've assembled the human DNA sequence, what is the limit to that knowledge?

Finally, what happens in astronomy as we look out ever farther? Each time we see stars farther away, we are seeing them farther back in time. Where does that end? Do we finally see an end to that? Let's say the universe is "x" years old. What happens when we look at stars whose light is "x+1" years away. If there is no more physical universe, what is there?

The answers to these questions may radically change the future in ways we can't begin to predict. Or the chaos theorists may have their way, and something which now seems completely unpredicable, some chance occurance in global climate, perhaps another rogue meteor, may re-shuffle the deck again. OK, interesting speculation, but enough of my babbling away like Marshall McLuhan. Here's Jolie, looking quite different from today. The frame where she wears warpaint is from the trailer, and I didn't see it in the film. The one of her in the transparent blouse came as a surprise to me, since I didn't remember it from the captures I had seen.

Angelina Jolie (1, 2, 3)

New from Graphic Response

Cynthia Nixon from "Sex and the City", episode: "Games People Play".

The film is about incest and a thoroughly dysfunctional family. The acting is very good and it was critically acclaimed. This was the young, British actress' first role. She was only 18 at the time, and there is considerable nudity from her.

Nudity Breakdown:
#1 and #2 are topless scenes. I apologize for the poor quality of #2
#3 Full frontal nudity. It was a quick flash but I managed to snatch quite a few captures!
#4 and #5 Full nudity as she has sex with Ray Winstone (her father)