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Tom Sizemore sex tape, part 4:
We will carry it in eight parts, as it was posted in Usenet. Well, at least
this 10 minute segment features a naked chick and a fully-dressed Sizemore. That
seems like progress. She isn't anyone famous, at least not that I know of. For
thirty meg, I call it hu-hum, but here it is for you completists.
Pie in the Sky (1996):
The Region 1 DVD of
Pie in the Sky was missing the beautiful and sexy
lovemaking scene between Josh Charles and Anne Heche. The scene is included in
the German DVD, on which the film is called Mr. Traffic.
Inside Deep Throat (2005) For those of you who have been serving time in a
third world prison for forty years, Deep Throat was a seminal hardcore
porn film made in 1972, perhaps the first to achieve full acceptance from mixed
gender suburban audiences. The basic premise of the film was that
the main character (Linda Lovelace) was unable to truly enjoy sex
until her doctor discovered that her clitoris was in her throat,
after which point she began to experience earth-shattering orgasms
from oral sex. It's worth noting that her clitoris was
deep in her throat, not just to give us a cheap opportunity to iterate and
clarify the title,
but also because the unique gimmick of the film was Ms Lovelace's ability
to make even the largest penis disappear entirely during oral sex by
using a technique similar to that employed by sword swallowers. In
order to make the film appealing to women, Deep Throat avoided the
raincoat-perv sleaziness that had permeated earlier porn efforts,
and employed humor, sometimes very silly humor, to create a
consistently unthreatening tone. Its success was phenomenal. It
would be a dramatic use of litotes to say that Deep Throat
became the highest-grossing porn film of all
time, since it was actually the highest grossing film of any kind up
until then. If the
playing field is restricted to American theaters, Deep Throat still rivals
Titanic for the top spot. Its success went beyond the box office. Deep
Throat also entered into the mainstream consciousness of American
culture, its references penetrating Johnny Carson's monologues and
even The Washington Post's Watergate investigations. Not bad for a
film that cost $25,000 to make!
Inside Deep
Throat is a scattershot documentary which looks back at the legal, artistic, and
cultural context in which Deep Throat appeared, and the changes that
may have resulted from the film's popularity and mainstream
acceptance.
So is it any good?
Well, kinda. It depends on what you want from a
documentary.
Think back to when you were in school. Your
English professor assigned a paper on "Shakespeare's Comedies." You
couldn't come up with any single interesting point to make, so you
assembled lots of accurate facts, cited some experts, made some safe
and petty observations of your own, checked your spelling and
grammar, and did your best to package the paper attractively. You
were embarrassed to hand in a paper with no real point to make, but
you really had no choice, and were ultimately relieved to see that
your professor recognized the effort you made and gave you a B+.
Inside Deep Throat is a documentary like that
paper.
It presents lots of interesting historical
footnotes about the film. For example, the courts in Memphis,
Tennessee successfully prosecuted the film, but did not go after the
mobsters who made hundreds of millions from it, or even the people
who wrote and directed it. Instead, they prosecuted co-star Harry
Reems for his participation in a conspiracy to create obscene
material. Reems is a guy who made $250 for his participation in the
film, and wasn't even supposed to be in it. He was working on the
production crew and the shooting schedule was ready to begin when
director Gerry Damiano found himself without a male star, thus
pressing Reems into service.
I could continue to cite many more forgotten but
fascinating bits of trivia about the film, and that should give you
an indication that the film is a fascinating journey back into the
early 70s, especially when it is remembering the film's genesis,
documenting the film as a cultural phenomenon, and recalling the
context of the legal battles fought over it. Where the documentary
fails is when it starts to analyze the cultural or economic impact
of Deep Throat. Like your English paper, it spends a lot of time
dithering about and tests out a lot of different themes and
observations, but just can't seem to come up with a major point
which it can support.
In fact, its strongest passion evokes an
anti-censorship message, but does it so ineffectively that I, a
libertarian who opposes censorship, was unconvinced by the film's
argument. The documentarians started out with some black
hats and white hats in the censorship battle - free-thinking
liberals supporting artistic expression versus close-minded
religious nuts advocating repression - but the film's P.O.V.
suddenly got confused at the point when free-thinking liberal women
suddenly realized that porn glorified the objectification of women,
and at the point where some liberal thinkers concluded that porn was
harmful to society and desensitizing. Does that mean that the
prosecutions may have been justified in the first place? Oh,
sure, the prosecution of poor ol' Harry Reems was absurd, but what
if the film had been shut down in an effort to shut off the cash
faucet which was undisputedly and admittedly pouring money into the
mob's coffers? Would censorship then have been OK? I kept
expecting the film to try to wrap these points up a bit, but it just
left everything hanging. After all, it only had 90 minutes to work
with.
It also makes the point that Linda was fired from several
subsequent jobs in mainstream business, always soon after her
employers found out that she was Linda Lovelace. Let me not pull any
punches here. It was this very film which convinced me that this
could not be true, since the film never gave any of those employers
a chance to respond. I can only conclude that one of the following
two things is true:
- Either (A) the filmmakers just gullibly accepted this point at
face value without trying to determine whether it was true.
- Or (B) they did interview some employers, and those interviews
inconveniently refuted the point, so they simply left that footage
out of the final cut.
I can't see where there could be another explanation, and neither
of those speaks very well for the documentarians, does it? So why
did they bring it up in the first place? Surely they had enough
points to cover without getting into such unsupportable minutiae.
As film critic James Berardinelli wrote:
"Although the film starts out with a clear thesis, by the time its
90 minute running length has expired, it is grasping at themes and
topics that are beyond the limited scope of what a superficial
documentary can achieve."
Between archival footage and new interviews, the
filmmakers collected 800 hours worth of material. It must not have
been a simple matter to pare that down to 90 minutes of theatrical
running time, or 120 minutes if you count the DVD extras. Given that
they used less than one percent of the material they collected, I'm
not surprised that the themes were difficult to focus.
Yes, perhaps it tried to cover too many topics and
ended up treating them all too superficially, but still and all,
don't forget that you did get a B+ on that paper, and you may feel
the same way about this documentary that your professor felt about
your essay - that there is so much work put into it, and the period
details and the background stories are so good, that you can just
sit back and be entertained and ignore the fact that it is shallow
and rambling.
And that's not so bad at all.
You may not have seen, or you may not remember the exact skills which made Miss
Lovelace a household name. Here is her demonstration:
S.F.W. (2005) You would think that it would be easy to make a good
film satirizing America's obsession with fame and the famous. Certainly our
country has conferred fame upon more than a fair share of the undeserving,
certainly we are obsessed with our idols, and certainly our media have
shamelessly fueled and profited from our obsessions.
I reckon it isn't as easy as we think, because that blistering and hilarious
satire has yet to appear. There were two major efforts in 1994. Oliver Stone's
Natural Born Killers, with script work from Quentin Tarantino, and SFW, which
was written by the same guy who wrote the BAFTA-winning script for Groundhog
Day. (The release of S.F.W. was postponed until 1995, some say because of
thematic similarities to Natural Born Killers. Whatever the real reason, the
delay didn't help at the box office. The film grossed less than $100,000.)
In both cases, some big-time sharpshooters were taking aim at broad targets -
yet missing in both cases.
Natural Born Killers is the better of the two films because, while it lacked
subtlety and wandered off on some downright foolish tangents, it also has
moments of genuine brilliance. SFW is really just loud and strident. If it were
a person, it would be that loud uncle at your family Christmas parties who
thinks he can win every family argument by simply speaking louder and more
confidently than those who oppose him. You say Aunt Tilly has a better line of
argumentation, or a fact which destroys his entire chain of reasoning? No
problem. He will simply regain the upper hand by browbeating her and raising his
voice a few notches until she wearies of the debate and concedes every point
just so she can get some peace.
A slacker teen named Spab and his friend are held hostage with three others
by a gang of terrorists. Their captivity takes place in a convenience store, and
lasts for 36 days. The terms of the kidnappers include a demand that the entire
hostage ordeal be televised 24/7, and that demand is met once the terrorists
kill one of the hostages. This creates the ultimate reality show in which
viewers may tune in at any time to see the relationships between the hostages,
or to see them interact with their captors. As the crisis unfolds on camera,
Spab becomes a national idol because he simply doesn't give a shit. Ironically,
the very same quality which made Spab a total loser in society makes him a hero
in a hostage crisis. Just as he defied his teachers, parents, and employers and
made himself a nobody without a future, he now defies the abductors, and makes
himself a hero! Mimicking his nihilism becomes trendy. His catch-phrase of "So
Fuckin' What?" is on everyone's lips as well as their t-shirts.
Imagine his surprise and confusion when the hostage crisis ends and he finds
out that the people who used to ridicule him now hold him up as an icon because
they admire the very same attitude they used to despise. Seeing this hypocrisy
makes him have even less respect for people than he used to, but that in turn
makes the people he despises love him even more! Attitude, man! The next step,
of course, is for him to ward off the vultures and profiteers who want to help
him cash in on his fifteen minutes of fame.
Within the dark comedy, the dramatic focus, if indeed there is one, is
whether Spab can ever find peace of mind and anonymity again when every one of
his attempts to withdraw from people makes them want to be near him all the
more. A surprise ending resolves his dilemma appropriately, and with at least a
touch of wit ...
... which is more than what I can say for what came before.
It's a real disappointment from a guy who has written one of my favorite
comedies (Groundhog Day).
Joey Lauren Adams
SIDEBAR: Joey has offered a bit of nudity in three films. I'm sure you are
all aware of Mallrats, and you now know about SFW if you didn't already. The
third one is more obscure. Here she is in A Cool, Dry Place, with none other
than Vince Vaughn.
Joey Lauren Adams
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'Caps, clips, and comments by ICMS:
Hello!
Here are five out of ten clips featuring Ursula Andress in "The Sensuous
Nurse". All in all former Bond-girl Andress spends more than 10 minutes in
various states of undress. A very good reason to recommend the region 1 DVD
very warmly.
Now I'd like to write a few lines about my contribution of Friday. As you know
I sent in clips from Perfect Friday. In the meantime I made time to watch this
movie and what a pleasant surprise it was.
There are three main characters in this feature about a bank heist. First we
have the bank deputy under-manager Mr. Graham (Stanley Baker), secondly
there's Nick (David Warner), the Earl of Dorset, and thirdly we have his
gorgeous Swiss wife, Britt (Ursula Andress). The earl and his wife are
practically destitute, so they come up with a plan to rob a bank. Not with
guns and all that, but rather some devious scheme to get the bank out of its
money without noticing it. So far ... nothing ground-breaking, you will say. Indeed, but the clever
non-linear editing with flashbacks within flashbacks and then forth again, the
witty dialogues along with the permanent question of who of the three is
exactly conning who, or are they all conning each other, and whether the heist
will succeed, produce a very entertaining 90 minutes of viewing pleasure. Add
the surprise ending, some solid acting performances by the three lead
actors plus some excellent nude scenes by Ursula Andress and you start
realizing what a shame it is that this little gem hasn't made it to DVD
somewhere in the world. This is definitely a solid C+ in our rating system. Oh yeah, and they managed all this without special effects and expensive cgi,
even without any violence. The characters were all recognizable human beings
you could root for. Compare that to the dehumanized empty shells that
constitute today's characters in senseless flicks like Constantine or Catwoman
and you know what I prefer. BTW, for the price of the special effects in those
films they could have gotten Rachel Weisz and Halle Berry out of their clothes
for most of the time. Then their might have been a "raison d'être" for those
movies after all. Modern filmmakers, please take a leaf out of Perfect Friday's
book and start making films again with a decent plot and interesting characters
that are human beings again. Please. Now that I've gotten this off my chest,
it is time to say goodbye for today. Come back tomorrow for the final five clips
from The Sensuous Nurse.
- Ursula Andress
(1,
2,
3,
4,
5)
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