Monday

Important note

Still going around in the Google circles. In case you are still having trouble with Firefox, you should be able to fix it in tools/options/security by unchecking "block reported attack sites" when you surf our sites. You can always switch the settings back later. (Or use MSIE, which is immune from this glitch.)

As of this writing, they have cleared scoopy.net for takeoff again, and once again they removed the warnings without my having made any changes. That is not really good news. Indeed, it means they could also also restore the warning without my making any changes, since it demonstrates that the site's content is entirely unrelated to the presence or absence of warnings.

Some of the other sites in our catalogue are still marked malicious. Sorry about all this. I'm doing everything I can do.

Californication

There was no nudity from Eva Amurri, but there were various female boobs and buns on display.

 

Dexter

So there was no meaningful nudity on Californication this week, but Dexter made up for it with this Courtney Ford sex scene. (Samples below)

 

 

 

The Goods

The Goods is a raunchy 80s-style comedy. In fact, it bears more than a passing resemblance to an actual 80s comedy, Kurt Russell's Used Cars. Both films feature a car dealership on the brink of a financial failure which can only be averted if the sales team can pull off an incredible feat while the clock is ticking. In both films, the team's failure will result in the dealership passing into the hands of a slick and despised rival. Both films feature a love story between the amoral hot-shot salesman and the relatively innocent daughter of the man who owns the dealership.

In the newer film, Jeremy Piven takes over the Kurt Russell role and does his usual Ari Gold thing, once again mining the lode of comedy inherent in the single-mindedness of the obsessively driven. That is both good and bad. Piven has that character down to a science, so the comedy works pretty well, but we don't really like him or any other character. The characters we are supposed to cheer for are as unattractive as the ones we are supposed to hiss, so we ultimately just don't care about resolution of the matter which is supposed to be the film's driving force - the question of whether the dealership gets rescued.

The film might still have clicked if the characters could have drawn us into the love story, but that didn't work either. That failure was not so much the writers' as Piven's. He just doesn't have the dramatic acting chops to convey any sense of sensitivity, sincerity, or vulnerability. When he tries, it seems like mock sincerity, Bill Murray style. Because Pivs always seems like a broad comic character rather than a real person, we just don't care whether he gets the girl. 

On top of the film's other liabilities, there is a particularly ridiculous back-story involving the death of a sales colleague (Will Ferrell) who was willing to do anything for a sales event until he was killed while trying to execute a spectacular sales gimmick. This is less likely to make you laugh as to make you roll your eyes upward.

The failure of the plot/character framework is a shame, because the jokes are pretty good. While the gags sometimes swing and miss by an embarrassing amount, and there are no comic homers, the script overall manages to deliver a fairly good laughter average with a lot of solid singles. Mixed in among the tasteless or failed gags and the uninvolving plot, there's a lot of funny and cheerfully vulgar material that does work and could have been the basis for a top-notch comedy.

  • Metacritic: 39
  • Rotten Tomatoes: 26%
  • Ebert: three stars.

 

Mary Castro shows her breasts as a stripper. Several other strippers are seen in the background of the scene.

An uncredited actress plays a naked porn star in a film-within-the-film.

 

  • * 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.
 

 

 

 

 

 
 

The January Man

1989

Mary Elizabeth Mastrontonio film clip

caps below

 

Katherine Miller film clip

caps below

 

Scoop's notes:

The January Man is a wacky slapstick comedy about serial murder.

No, I'm not kidding.

It features quite charming characterizations from the three principals (Kevin Kline, Alan Rickman and Mary Elizabeth Mastrontonio), but also has some wild overacting from some of the bit players. Rod Steiger is embarrassing - this is the same guy who did The Pawnbroker? Danny Aiello matches him for sheer over-the-top silliness. Wait until you see the scene with Steiger and Aiello shouting at each other at the top of their lungs in a tiny room. Steiger apparently caught Aiello by surprise on the first take with a completely unexpected outburst of blatant scenery-chewing, and the director decided to leave Danny's dumbfounded reaction in the final cut. Harvey Keitel looked embarrassed to be in that scene, in the film, and especially to be talking to Rod Steiger. Keitel was not over the top at all. Quite to the contrary, he was under the bottom, and apparently thought he was really supposed to be behaving like a police commissioner! He played his part completely straight, and seemed to be in a completely different film.

The fundamental plot is the usual super-criminal stuff. In bad movies, bad guys always act out their multiple murders with painstakingly complex patterns, ala the Riddler and The Joker on Batman. This calls for a completely different kind of detective from the ones who solve real murders. To solve movie serial murders, we need guys who understand a Fibonacci series. Kline, the hippie genius, realized that the apartments of each murder, when highlighted on identically scaled photographs of the buildings, form musical notes on a treble clef, thus forming a song which is a clue. The buildings themselves, when marked on an aerial photograph of New York, form the Constellation Virgo.

If anybody had asked me about this in the development stage, I would have told him the following:

First - if you're going to do slapstick, don't mix it with mutilated women. As it is now, the film is often in quite bad taste. The detectives do plenty of Jerry Lewis shtick while looking at, talking about, or standing by, badly mutilated bodies. Turn the serial killer into a serial bank robber who uses complex numerical patterns or computer code in the process of ripping off greedy rich fucks, and have the greedy rich fucks pressure their buddy, the mayor, to stop the cyberterror. Then you can joke about it all you like, and nobody will care. Furthermore, the mathematical patterns might make sense in such a scenario. The criminal might need a certain pattern in order to make the code work, for example, if he is exploiting dated security loopholes in some software. In such a case, Kline could have figured out the next date when the exploit would work, and the exact code necessary on that day, blah, blah, blah, yadda, yadda.

Second - make the villain match the crimes. If the crime has obviously been committed by a mathematical genius with a special eye for patterns, let's make the guy capable of such a thought process, and maybe spend some time with him.  Everyone knows a Bond film is only as good as its villain.

Third - either make all the authority figures realistic (ala Keitel), or broadly comical (Aiello and Steiger). Think about this question as well - why does the script require all three of them in the first place?

Fourth - don't hire Rod Steiger to be the mayor. I'd suggest Tom Wilkinson, or somebody who really behaves like a mayor. Hell, use the real Giuliani - he's a real mayor, and he can't act any worse than Rod Steiger did in this film. If you re-write the Captain role and make him speak real dialogue, then Danny Aiello would be perfectly OK in the role, but as it is, he is a weak spot in the movie. (I don't blame Danny. He didn't write this stuff, and nobody could have done anything with the part as it was written.)

Fifth - hey, I love Susan Sarandon, but write her part out of this film completely. It's completely irrelevant and time-wasting.

Sixth - watch The Zero Effect for a model of how to handle the exact same premise, with humor and mystery combined in a tale of a modern day Sherlock Holmes and his Watson.

As I was watching January Man, thinking that I had never seen it before, and thinking that parts of it really were sorta cute in a way, I was struck with how familiar it all seemed. And then it dawned on me.

I saw it in German when I lived in Austria, and I thought it completely stunk.

That kind of brought the film into high relief for analytical purposes. In English, it is watchable because Kline, Rickman, and Mastrontonio are charming, and have a clever way to deliver their lines. In a German-language broadcast, those actors are replaced by dubbers. Oh, sure, their bodies and faces are still there, but someone else delivered their lines. If you stop and think about it, without those three and their verbal gifts, this is not much of a film. 

 
 
 

Satisfaction

season 1, 2007

"Set in a high class brothel this new series creates a hyper reality whereby we are privy to the private lives and emotions of five beautiful young women."

 

Johnny Moronic is re-doing all of Satisfaction, season 1, in better quality. This series has a lot of nudity and these film clips will be very big downloads spread over a considerable period of time.

 

Today: all of the Bojana Novakovic collages (below), and the first few nude film clips of Novakovic.

 

 
 

Pics

Denise Clewis in Suburban Nightmare

Marisa Miller from that Room 23 project

Film Clips