Monday

 

Sunday Cable Round-Up

I had a tech problem last night. For some reason I couldn't extract the audio files from the HD version of the cable shows, even though I had no problem with the exact same shows in standard definition. I hope Deep at Sea will have better luck, so we'll wait for his HD vids. I did include my True Blood video below, because the audio is more or less unnecessary crap, as you can guess from the cheesy video.

True Blood. The only nudity came from two anonymous women in some kind of alternate dream universe to which Sookie apparently belongs. (It's a brand new dimension in the show and the details have not been revealed.) Here's the soundless video.

Entourage. There was no nudity, but Perrey Reeves did one very hot lingerie scene. In place of a film clip, here are some HD captures.

Hung. Anne Heche did full frontal and rear nudity - maybe. The scene is very, very far from the camera, so anything is possible, from body stockings to body doubles. Here are some captures.

 

  • * 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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wetherby

(1985)

Joely Richardson film clips. Samples below.

Suzanna Hamilton film clips. Samples below.

 

 

Scoop's notes on the film:

Wetherby is the name of a nondescript and middle class English town which provides the backdrop for a mysterious whydunit. (It's a suicide, so we already know WHOdunit.)

Vanessa Redgrave plays an unfulfilled middle aged schoolmarm who hosts a small dinner party one evening. As the guests arrive, a stranger appears at the door, says he is John Morgan, and walks in to the dinner. They set an extra place for him. Nobody really knows whether someone else extended a kind invitation to this lost soul, but it turns out that he has simply invited himself.

John Morgan returns to the teacher's house the next morning, makes a little small talk, pulls a gun from his pocket, sticks it in his mouth, and calmly shoots himself.

And there is our whydunit premise. Why was John Morgan at that party? Why did he commit suicide? Why did he choose the teacher's home to make his farewell statement? The last question is especially intriguing to the police, because a suicide among strangers is totally uncharacteristic. Typically a suicide happens alone, or as a dramatic statement made in front of someone for a purpose, but not among random people. The police inspector tries to assemble the pieces of the puzzle, with only limited success, but we in the audience get a significant amount of additional insight when we see incidents from John Morgan's past, from the teacher's past, and from additional moments during the evening of the dinner party.

The solution to the puzzle is never really explicit, but the script maintains an appropriate feeling of ubiquitous portent throughout the story by the unspoken parts of the secret. The story thus stands apart from the type of mystery which functions logically and deductively. It is inductive, and oblique. It offers not solutions, but hints, suggestions, or working hypotheses. This technique is quite an intelligent way to present the unraveling, as if Harold Pinter had decided to take his elegant dialogue and sense of foreboding away from psychological dramas about the rich and write instead a mystery story about the educated middle class. On the other hand, not everyone watches movies to see displays of intelligence, suggestion, and subtlety. If you want to see a true mystery story, you will really not care for this much at all. You will probably sit quietly during the closing credits and think, "Am I supposed to understand why it happened? I'm not sure that I do, even after all that exposition."

The dialogue is smart and it is delivered by a first-rate and classically trained cast, headed by Ian Holm, Judi Dench and Tom Wilkinson, as well as the aforementioned Vanessa Redgrave and Vanessa's look-alike daughter, Joely, who plays her mother's character in flashback scenes. The story had its origin on the London stage, not in a play written by Harold Pinter but one from David Hare, who adapted his own play into this screenplay and also directed the film, constructing it carefully to maintain a certain portentous tone. If you enjoy Pinter's plays, or other works which rely on the careful maintenance of tone to evoke a calculated emotional response from the audience, you'll find this to be a good example of the type. Roger Ebert felt it was worth four stars.

I myself don't especially enjoy watching Pinteresque plays. I don't know how much of Pinter's (or Hare's) dialogue is meant to represent realistic characterization and how much is stagy artifice, but I've always thought this sort of dialogue to be merely a component of the contrivance necessary to evoke a certain audience response. It always sounds like speechifying to me. Of course, I may be wrong about whether these characters are realistic. The fact that I don't know any people who talk or think like these people doesn't obviate the possibility that these portrayals do fairly represent a certain side of British life of which I am unaware. If that is so, I'm glad I don't have to spend any time there. I didn't even want to spend the very little time encompassed by this movie. I found Wetherby very tough going  - tedious, talky, and utterly devoid of warmth. Its putative subtlety could also be described as a lack of clarity and catharsis. Roger Ebert may be correct in his assessment that this is a superior film, but frankly the vast majority of you would top off a viewing by questioning how anyone could possibly like this. My own reaction to the film involved a great deal of admiration, but not one scintilla of enjoyment.

 
 

A mixture of things.

There is one original scan, that of Victoria Principal on the back cover of her book, The Body Principal.

Vidcaps include the familiar and the obscure. Darlanne Fluegel, the first one presented below, probably fits in the latter but ever since I saw her in Running Scared, playing Billy Crystal's wife, I have been a fan. Hung around quite a while but between 1996 and 2007 she had nothing, nada, zilch. A movie in 2008 and back she went into the vault of obscurity. Too bad. She was hot.

Darlanne Fluegel in To Live and Die in L.A.

Ingrid Steeger in Blutjunge

A.J. Alexander in American Summer

Alexandra Hay in Fun and Games

Carla Nieto in Acusados

Carrick Glenn in The Burning

Christina Ricci in Black Snake Moan

Dani Dare in the Cowboy Killer

Eva Mendes in The Spirit

Kira Miro in Broken Embraces

Lizzy Caplan in True Blood, s1e9

 

And then there is a clip plus a collage of some crazy Italian infomercial starring Veronica Ciardi wearing not up top 'cept some paint. Never met an Italian I did not like and I suspect that I would like Veronica very much were I ever lucky enough to meet her.

 

 
 

Pics

Ali Larter in Crazy

Emmanuelle Vaugier in 40 Days and 40 Nights

Marie Guillard in Jacque the Fatalist

Laurence Larel in Jacque the Fatalist

Angelina Jolie in Changeling

Monica Bellucci showing massive cleavage in some Twitter pics

 

Clips

Charisma Carpenter in Psychosis (sample below)

Kalina Malehounova, Ella-June Henrard, and Laura Ballyn in Bo (sample below)

Katrena Rochell in Psychosis (sample below)

Thylda Bares and  Nina Ambard in L'amour c'est la honte (samples below)

 

Raven Isis in Psychosis (sample below)