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"Ray Donovan"

s4e1, 1920x1080

Paula Malcomson





"Virgin"

s1e4

Georgina Leeming





It's a Boy-Girl Thing

2006

D'Orsay Brooke film clip (collage below)

Samaire Armstrong film clip (collage below)  




Broken Flowers

2005

Alexis Dziena film clip (collage below)


Wondering "Where did she go?" Alexis has not had an especially good time of it after this film. For details, Check this out.

Scoop's comments on the film:

Bill Murray plays a profoundly depressed ex-lothario named Don Jonston. That name would be the English-language version of Don Juan. Get it? If you don't, the script will help you out with a scene in which the character actually watches an old Don Juan movie on TV. Ol' Don receives a anonymous pink letter informing him that he has a 19-year-old son who may be looking for him. Prodded by a neighbor who loves detective stories, Don decides to embark on a cross-country search for his girlfriends from that era, hoping to ... well, really hoping to learn something about himself, I guess. If he just wanted to know more about whether one of them could have written the letter, he could have accomplished the same thing telephonically, so I guess we can assume he wants to meet them face-to-face for other reasons unrelated to the son's identity.

It is an arthouse film which was nominated for arthousey awards, and won a special jury prize at Cannes. It's one of those films where the author derives some alleged humor by standing condescendingly above all the characters, giving them ridiculous ideas and outlandish professions. (Don's four ex-girlfriends are a pet communication facilitator, a professional closet organizer, a refined and demure seller of "high quality pre-fab homes," and a biker chick.) I believe the point is that your life is shallow and empty unless you are a judgmental middle-aged filmmaker. Bill Murray turns in yet another of those sad sack performances in which he plays a man with no enthusiasm for anything, no spring in his step, and no facial expressions beyond a single mask of despondent boredom. Within the spectrum of recent film performances, Murray is most comparable to Wilson the Volleyball.

It's the kind of movie that people either love or hate. Critics mostly loved it. Moviegoers mostly avoided it. If you have not seen it, you can read more about the movie at Rotten Tomatoes. To me the most incisive comment was the following:

We are reminded in every possible way that this man is a "Don Juan" and yet nothing in the story or character development suggests how someone so broken, so numb, so completely uninterested in life or people, could be that sort of man. We have no idea how or why he has become so broken, and so ultimately don't much care that he is. No light is shed on this at any point - the movie is just one long dip into a stagnant pool of listless nothingness.

I can only imagine that the transitions between scenes of simply fading to black again and again and again, and the endless travel footage (Don in plane, Don in car, Don reading map, Don sleeping in hotel) were one of three things: lack of imagination, self-indulgence or laziness. I can think of no other reasons as this just adds to the stultifying feel of the movie. The parallel between the film's pace and Don's life seems like an amateurish parlor trick to fool the audience into thinking that the mundane is meaningful - not in this movie! Here, the mundane is just plain old boring. All the symbolism is lurid in its obviousness (ex: Don watching the old/original "Don Juan" movie on TV as his life unravels) while the character/story development is so subtle as to be non-existent.

Some trivia: Based on the extra features, the film seems to have been named Dead Flowers until the very last minute.

I wrote much more in The Movie House review, but it won't mean anything to you unless you have seen the movie.






Amalie Lindegard in Nyforelsket (2017) in 1080hd

Sonya Walger in episode one of Tell Me You Love Me in 1080hd



That series really went for shock in the first episode. We have already seen that Michelle Borth apparently had non-simulated sex. In the clip above, Walger apparently gives a non-simulated hand job, complete with a money shot.

Rosalinde Mynster and Anna Rothlin in Atelier (2017) in 1080hd

Julie Christie in Demon Seed (1977) in 1080hd




Science fiction, in order to work property, needs these components in a powerful combination:

1. Visual imagination.

2. Challenging concepts that draw out our own hopes and/or fears about the future.

3. The usual things that make any movie work: witty and/or profound dialogue, a good story, interesting characters, heartfelt emotions, great acting, cinematic poetry, etc.

When a film aces item three, it is a great movie in general, while the other two items make it great within the science fiction genre.

In that context, Demon Seed is almost an utter failure. Consider the three components listed above:


Item three: general cinematic elements.

Given the above list of elements which comprise a great film, Demon Seed has pretty much "none of the above." Although it is technically better than the post-atomic paranoia films of the 1950s, it is nonetheless, at its heart, a straightforward 1950s-style cheese-a-palooza about the dangers of science. In this case, the bugbear is not "atomic energy" but "artificial intelligence." A computer absorbs so much information about mankind that it develops human emotions and desires. It astutely realizes that its creators will eventually determine that it did not develop as desired and will shut it down. Near "death" and possessing a anthropomorphic psyche, it longs for some other form of immortality. Because it has derived its feelings from human beings, it hopes to gain its immortal status by having a child with a human woman. One must concede that it has excellent taste, given that the human woman it wants to mate with is Julie Christie, who plays the wife of the computer's creator. The computer's choice of love objects is logical as well. Since its creator supplied his own brain as a source of the computer's modeling, it was to be expected that the machine's development of preferences and free will would ultimately reflect its creator's own subconscious, since the creation could not help but be modeled after the creator. The creator wants Julie, as does the creation. To make a long story short, it ties Julie Christie up, inserts a bunch of wires and fluids inside of her, and somehow manages to knock her up.

I could go on, but if you have seen any similar film, you will not be surprised by this one. It's just your basic drive-in movie. The dialogue has neither the wit nor the poetry required to turn it into Blade Runner. The characters are completely undeveloped, basically just rough stereotypes with nothing much of a back story and nothing much to say. We gain some empathy for Julie Christie because she seems like a decent human being who is mistreated by a machine, but we don't really know anything about her, and what we know is not completely sympathetic. The other two main human characters are simply generic. The robot voice (the man from U.N.C.L.E. - uncredited) is the most interesting character.

All that I wrote above is just so much empty rationalization when you consider the main point -  the kiss of death for any movie - it's  BORRRRRRRRRRRING!



Item one: visual imagination.

No success here either. It is possible that this film impressed in 1977, but it certainly seems primitive today.

The computer visuals are pre-PC-era: laser light shows, shifting geometric shapes, and colored kaleidoscope effects, all of which are about as interesting as watching the screen savers from 1984 personal computers.

The mechanical visuals are so primitive that they would have embarrassed Doctor Evil immediately after he was unfrozen, even before he had a chance to be brought up to speed on modern progress. There's a wheelchair with frickin' laser beams, fer chrissakes!

The purely cinematic visuals include such things as the complete history of mankind force-fed into a one minute video, like those old rapid-fire montages which were accompanied by "Classical Gas." The hybrid human/computer baby looks like a gilded angel from an old religious tableau. Vincent Canby of the New York Times said it looked like Mickey Rooney dipped in brass.




Item two, interesting speculation about mankind's future.

In this area it did a little better, but proved neither especially prescient nor especially engaging. We expect to look at old science fiction films some decades later and see that they were completely wrong about our time. However, we also expect that they will still cause some interesting conversations at our dinner table. The creators of this film didn't even bother to imagine any changes in popular culture. Although the film was made in 1977 and set in 1995, the hairstyles and clothing look vintage 70s, as if the entire film consisted of outtakes from Anchorman. Apparently the people of the 70s thought those crazy polyesters and sideburns were mankind's ultimate fashion achievement and that leisure suits would be in fashion forever.

As for the lessons learned by Proteus the Computer after it assimilated all the knowledge of mankind, they could be boiled down to three words: don't wear fur. That's right. All of mankind's knowledge collected in one place by a super-powered processor capable of making the optimal use of that knowledge - all to duplicate the brain of Pamela Anderson!

Not to mention her sex drive.

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The film does feature a Julie Christie nude scene, so it has that goin' for it, but even there one must face the fact that Julie, albeit still gorgeous, was pushin' 40, so your time could be spent better elsewhere, if you want to see female flesh ...

... or, for that matter, anything else.