"With Everyone Says I Love You" (1996)
With Everyone Says I Love You (1996), Woody Allen proves that it is not that the musical is dead as a viable film genre, it is rather that very few remember how to make them. He starts with an involved but light story about an extended New York family full of interesting characters, casts using incredible talent know for acting, not professional singers, then lets the talent do the songs. In some cases, they could actually sing well, like Goldie Hawn and Alan Alda, and in others, they were good enough to put over a song in a musical comedy, like Julia Roberts. The only one who was dubbed was Drew Barrymore, who can't sing at all, but who made up for it with lots of female "pokeratude." It is not necessary in a musical to cast recording artists, or to write original award winning music. The key ingredient is to have believable characters get so happy they burst into song.
The story takes place in New York, Paris and Venice. There are plenty of good plot summaries listed at IMDB, including Berardinelli (who awards3.5 stars) and a very well-written one by Ebert, who, like Maltin, gives it 4 stars. The film was charming and witty beginning to end. As an example, three trick-or-treaters in appropriate costume do a production number with the Chiquita Banana song. Allen plays his obsessive, neurotic, talkative persona, but it works here even more than usual. Visually, this film is a delight as well. The music is primarily 30's standards. Three actresses poke more or less through there tops, including Goldie, Julia and Drew.
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Drew Barrymore
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"Belle of the Nineties" (1934)
I am frequently amazed by what turns up on DVD, and Belle of the Nineties (1934), is one of those surprises. Written by and staring Mae West, this black and white film was entertaining. Mae plays a showgirl in Saint Louis who is seeing a heavyweight contender. When his manager requests that she
go away long enough for the fighter to concentrate on training, she takes a job in New Orleans. The owner of the club is a true villain, but Mae is more than his equal.
Mae was 41 in this film, but even then looked younger than she was. She sang several blues numbers including Saint Louis Woman and Hesitation Blues, and spouted her famous one-line comebacks. No nudity, of course, but some interesting looks at one of the true legends of cinema.
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Mae West
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Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy)
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News: Bertrand Tavernier's dark, dark masterpiece, "The Passion of Beatrice", will finally come out on an English-oriented VHS tape soon. Amazon's ad says January 1, but it may be available sooner. You who are not fans of moody European cinema can still rejoice in that it means lots of Julie Delpy frontal nudity. Still no plans announced for a DVD.
Kudos: Special congratulations to Schmutzfink yesterday for unearthing two nude scenes from movies not available on tape. Karina Lombard in Expose was fantastic on its own, but Kathleen Quinlan in 1984's The Last Winter was awe-inspiring.
More news: you regulars know that I've been wondering for years which recognizable performer has been in the most films. The highest number that I had previously found belonged to Orson Welles, but I stumbled onto Marcello Mastroianni's IMDb entry recently, and his count is over 150.
Site news: Volume T of the Encyclopedia is updated. About 450 additions.
TomCat
The ol' Polish Puma dedicated the day to Polish cabaret entertainer Ewa Kuklinska, whom you older guys may remember from the Polish-import TV show "Kuklinska, Fran, and Ollie". Actually, the real puppet character I'm referencing, "Kukla", is a word common to all the Slavic languages (as far as I know). It just means "doll" or "puppet".
As for Ewa, she's not a puppet or even the daughter of one as her name implies, and TomCat did two captures of her in concert, in one of which her full breast makes an appearance. The remaining four are posed pictures of an apparently much younger Ewa.
Ewa in concert
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The Insider
The Insider is a specialty filmmaker and photographer who occasionally sends in some of his private collection from outtakes, set-up shots, private parties, and stuff like that. Through the years, he's sent in some pretty cool and unique stuff of both men and women. Here's his story for today:
"Scoop. I was shopping at Ralphs yesterday and passed the magazine rack. It dawned on me that I know one of the cover girls. In the magazine she posed in clothes and unrevealing non-bikini swimsuits, but I have lots of naked pictures of her and she's easy on the eyes. her model name is Collette (no last name). In some of the pictures she appears with Mason Marconi (dark hair) and Tonya Qualls (longer-haired blonde)."
Mason Marconi is also nude in some of them.
Collette
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Rabid (1977)
Boy, this lack of nudity lately is getting me down. I mean, here's a movie with Marilyn Chambers, and even she keeps her clothes on most of the time, and never shows anything but her breasts. If Marilyn Frigging Chambers stays dressed, what is the world coming to?
This movie was Marilyn's big chance, the road out of porn and into real movies. The brave director who took a chance on her was the eccentric Canadian auteur David Cronenberg, who wrote and directed.
Marilyn plays the victim of a motorcycle crash who is turned into a rabid man-eating monster by bad skin graft surgery. I didn't know that reconstructive surgery could have this effect.
But it sure explains a lot about Madonna.
Anyway, Marilyn bites some people and makes them rabid, who bite some other people, and so on. In addition to whatever she does with her mouth, she has a vagina in her armpit, and inside the vagina is a penis which emerges to penetrate the victims. Where exactly did they graft that skin from?
The Canadian authorities find a way to inoculate against future cases of the rabies, but there is no hope for the previously infected man-eating monsters. The health authorities report that they must be killed and their bodies must be disposed of properly. To comply, the police start driving around in armored garbage trucks. Some of the police are snipers on the roof of the trucks. The other guys serve as the disposal crew in those white anti-contamination suits which make them look like Tony
Manero on the moon.
Here is a highly detailed summary and analysis from an outside source.
The movie is gross and outré, characteristic of Cronenberg films. While it is odd, and occasionally packs some shock value, I thought it was pretty darned boring and flat. The only real surprise was the very first time that Marilyn attacked someone. After that, it was the usual trite dialogue and predictable events, and Cronenberg's usual paranoia about the misuse of science and authority. I wonder if he ever considered working with Oliver Stone.
As for Marilyn, well, her hopes of a mainstream career were dashed. In this film, she showed her breasts many times, but nothing else.
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I met her once, at a magazine convention in Florida in the early 80's. It didn't work out. I wasn't bothering her or anything, but I went over to introduce myself, just to be polite (we were both guest speakers at the convention). For whatever reason she didn't even say "hi, nice ta meecha". I guess I could understand if she just avoided me. I mean she wouldn't be the first woman to do so and nowhere near the last. But she avoided everyone, male and female. The hosts laid out a beautiful party in the evening, and Marilyn wandered off to her own outside table, where she sat huddled and conversation for hours with the other woman who accompanied her to the convention, their heads close and intimate enough to kiss one another without actually doing so.
IMDB summary: 5.8 out of 10. Cronenberg's scores are in a narrow predictable band. He has his enthusiastic cult following, and then there are people who find his movies totally repulsive, so he always ends up far from either the top or bottom because of the pull of these opposing poles. His scores are all within the narrow band of 5.5 to 7.1, and that is the range from Crash (low) to Dead Zone (high).
To illustrate my point, the score most often given to Crash is 1/10. The second most common score is 10/10. So people love him or hate him.
Crash (his movie lowest rated movie at IMDB) got perfect tens from one out of every seven voters, but Dead Zone (his highest rated at IMDB) got perfect scores only once in ten. And I understand completely. I think you could make an equal case that Crash is his best movie, not his worst.
Dead Zone does best at IMDb because it is his most human and accessible film, and it even has a sensitive character with whom we can sympathize. But I suspect that his hardcore fans like that one the least.
DVD info from Amazon. Bare bones, 4:3 aspect ratio. Clean transfer, but no widescreen version and no features. Not a good purchase value, even if you are a fan.
Brainscan
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Comments by Brainscan:
| Loretta Lee
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Loretta Lee is a B movie bimbo from Hong Kong, who sometimes gets credited as Loletta Lee... at least in Japan. You think I jest? Mongoose submitted caps of her a long while back from the movie, Girls Unbutton, and she was referred to as Loletta. I figure this not an inside joke from what I saw while in Japan. The 7/11 right outside my apartment in a Tokyo suburb had their eggs, their cheese, their milk in a refrigerated compartment labeled in big letters... Daily Case. And they didn't fill it up every day either. Anywho, the collage is from an mpg I pulled off the web. Forgot the name of the damn movie but the clip is a riot Loretta's character stops her car on an isolated road. across from a middle-aged couple eating a picnic lunch. As Loretta strips outta one shirt and into another (which the caps capture) the old guy has a heart attack and his wife screams the words subtitled in the last frame. Oh well, it was funnier than it sounds. The other pics are scans from Loretta's career as a nude model.
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Jo Hicks
Nikki Kidd
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Two page 3 babes today. Jo Hicks and Nikki Kidd are two of the more recent and more popular beauties on the page of 3.
| Malgosia Bela |
Lastly, let us look again at fashion model Malgosia Bela, naked again. Seems to me these fashion model types get naked more often in front of a camera than a similar sized crowd of porn stars.
| Blackshine
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Ok, so I think if you add today's batch of Nadja Auermann pics with yesterday's...then perhaps we do have bazillion!
I guess the real question is..."When does Blackshine sleep?"
Here's the breakdown:
Non-nudes.......Links #1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,16,18,19,21,22,23,24,25,26,30,31,32,33.38,39,40,42,43
Topless.........Links #17,20
Holding boobs...Links #34
Semi-full.......Links #37
Semi-nude.......Links #35,36,44
Artistic........Links #27,28,29
Latex/leather...Links #15
Other...........Links #14 (another topless model holding Nadja's boobs),41 (non-nude with a hiny of pokies, but mostly it's just a really cool bit of photography)
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New from Scanman. "Two Moon Junction" has been done more than a few times by a lot of guys, but Scanman recently revisited the movie, and brought back even more great 'caps of excellent celebrity nudity. Plus a few of the frames are new to me, or at least not as famous as the others that we've seen in the past. Including the Kristy McNichol topless scenes.
| Lara Flynn Boyle
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3 teaser scans by RVF. Each as partial exposure of some body part. #1 features partial breast and bum exposure. #2 has more partial breast visibility. #3 has faint see-thru nipple exposure and a lot of leg.
| Kartika Luyet |
No clue who she is, but she looks great in a bikini. Scan by RVF.
| Calista Flockhart |
I've pretty much hated everything about Ally McCheese since the beginning, but mostly just the annoying pouting of the wafer thin Calista. So naturally, this isn't easy for my to say, but here is a very sexy picture of Calista in a skin tight outfit. Actually, I have doubts about the authenticity. But if it is a fake, it's a fantastic job!
| Denise Richards |
A little see-thru nipple action from the last Bond film, "Gadgets and Babes are Enough". I'm not sure about Tuna, but speaking for myself as Bond fan, I think I'd rather watch a "View to a Kill", "Living Daylights", "License to Kill" back to back marathon.
The only way Denise could have saved this one is if she and co-star Sophie Marceau had done some hot-lesbo-scenes a la "Wild Things".
| Tabatha Cash
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Excellent collection of nudes and non-nudes of the former porn-star. (All non-porn pics, by the way.)
| Patsy Kensit |
Another great desktop collage of new Patsy images by ZonononZor.
| Kelly Brook |
Nice "holdin' the boobs" pose.
| The Funnies
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Dear Tech Support,
Last year I upgraded from Boyfriend 5.0 to Husband 1.0 and noticed that the new program began making unexpected changes to the accounting modules, limiting access to flower and jewelry applications that had operated flawlessly under Boyfriend 5.0.
In addition, Husband 1.0 uninstalled many other valuable programs, such as Hot-sex 1.0 and Romance 9.9 but installed undesirable programs such as NFL 5.0 and NBA 3.0. Conversation 8.0 no longer runs and HouseCleaning 2.6 simply crashes the system. I've tried running Nagging 5.3 to fix these problems, but to no avail.
-Desperate Wife
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Dear Desperate Wife,
Keep in mind, Boyfriend 5.0 is an entertainment package, while Husband 1.0 is an operating system. Try to enter the command: C:/ I THOUGHT YOU LOVED ME and install Tears 6.2. Husband 1.0 should then automatically run the applications: Guilty 3.0 and Flowers 7.0.
But remember, overuse can cause Husband 1.0 to default to GrumpySilence 2.5, Happyhour 7.0 or Beer 6.1. Beer 6.1 is a very bad program that will create "Snoring Loudly" wave files.
DO NOT install MotherInLaw 1.0 or reinstall another Boyfriend program. These are not supported applications and will crash Husband 1.0.
In summary, Husband 1.0 is a great program, but it does have limited memory and cannot learn new applications quickly. Consider buying additional software to improve performance. I personally recommend HotFood 3.0, Lingerie 5.3 and Keep-a-nice-body 10.1
-Tech Support
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