"L'Amour Braque"

TomCat continues to impress with the material he finds. A couple weeks back it was the rarely-seen "Passion of Beatrice", with full frontal nudity from a very young Julie Delpy. This time it is the rarely-seen 1985 film, "L'Amour braque", with full frontal nudity from a 19 year old Sophie Marceau. This film, an adaptation of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, marked the first of several times that director Andrzej Zulawski used Marceau as his leading lady.

I don't know anything about the movie, but Marceau - c'est magnifique. (1, 2, 3, 4)

IMDB summary: 7.7 out of 10. (A high score, but based on only 18 votes.)

Amazon does not have this film available in any medium.

"Il Guardiano"

TomCat again. A 1998 Italian film featuring Chiara Muti.

IMDb lists the film, but has no information at all. It does not appear to be available in any medium.

"Damage"

This is Louis Malle's soap opera featuring those two happy-go-lucky comic geniuses, Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche, so you can bet that there is plenty of anguish on display.

Binoche plays an emotionally damaged woman who is haunted by a past relationship wherein her boyfriend committed suicide. It is later suggested that the boyfriend was her own brother.

She seems to have some problem getting rid of the whole incest thing, because she promptly screws up her one chance for happiness with a normal, kind-hearted and successful guy by striking up an obsessive passionate relationship with the guy's father (Irons). This gives both Irons and Binoche the opportunity to do what they do best. In Irons' case, this means he gets to sleep with a younger woman and deliver many anguished facial expressions. In Binoche's case, she gets to look like she is about to cry, and actually gets to deliver a few tears now and then.

To top off the whole soap opera, the son catches his woman and his dad in flagrante, and is so shocked by the site that he falls down a staircase to his death. So it's a feel-good lighthearted summer kind of film.

Of course, it's a dissection of the nature of obsession, and the effect it can have on our lives, and the lives of others. It a beautifully filmed movie, beautifully transferred to DVD. Do you want to see it? Well, it does a good job with the subject matter, so I guess you'll have to figure out if it is your kind of subject matter.

The nudity and eroticism are not especially steamy, despite the presence of an "unrated"version. In fact, although the lovers have on-screen sex many times before they are discovered by the son, and they twist each other into most of the positions in the Kama Sutra, the passion is more suggested than shown, and is in continuous motion, so it is not easy to come up with a worthwhile capture. I just really wanted to catch some of the most beautiful facial shots to make some better collages for the encyclopedia. Tuna did a comprehensive job on this film, and you can find everything on his archive site.

Wildflowers (2000) is being released Tuesday. It was written and directed by Melissa Painter, who was raised in Marin county, and knows and loves the area she is filming. This is evident in her choices of location, and her DP (Paul Ryan) obviously shared her vision. In fact, the photography is the best thing about this film. The premise, I think, is a good one, and could be turned into a good film, but that didn't happen here. The film tries to address the question of what happened to the "Flower Children's" children. Cally, played reasonably well by Clea DuVall, was raised in a commune by her father, and never told much about her mother. She is now about to graduate from High School, and lives with her dad in the Sausalito houseboat community. She meets an ex-hippy (Daryl Hannah) at a concert, and becomes fascinated by her. Turns out, Daryl is the mother she has always missed. Unfortunately, this is a less than stellar performance by Hannah. She does look the part, however. Even a great performance would not have saved this one, as there wasn't enough plot to make a film.

This is ponderously slow, and what I hoped would be a story about the aftermath of an era I lived, in an area I know well turned out to be a rather unremarkable coming of age story. I did watch the entire thing, and it was the photography that kept me watching.

Joe Don Baker and celeb nekkidness: now those are two words you don't find together on just any website. In fact you find them together only in the Funhouse. It's something of a strain, but here you are: a few weeks back Mike and the bots on MST3K watched a movie called Final Justice, starring..... Joe Don Baker, in the role of.... a maverick lawman in... Cyprus. Don't ask. JD is paired with an actress named Patrizia Pellegrino (Greek, Italian... six of one, half-dozen on the other, I always say). The name rang a bell and sho nuff I find squirreled away on my hard drive a few scans of one Patrizia Pellegrino. I think its the one and same actress although her own web site does not list Final Justice in her filmography (who the hell can blame her?) and she has discovered the wonders of peroxide in the mean time. These are not my scans and some were in wretched shape, but I cleaned em up a bit. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

In another part of Europe we have your page 3 babes. It seems that a few programs on British telly were or are the equivalent of Married With Children: they employed as guests or bit actresses the prominent nekkid models of the land. That's true of the two lovelies I sent along, Debbie Linden and Gillian Duxbury: they wound up on the same shows after showing off their finer features on page 3.

Linden (1, 2, 3)

Duxbury (1, 2)