Delta of Venus (1995) is a Zalman King adaptation of erotica by the same name penned by Anais Nin, and published posthumously. Audie Englund plays Elena, a struggling American writer living in Paris on the eve of WWII. Manuscripts aren't selling anyway, and hers are not that good. She writes all night, then goes to the Seine to watch a man (Costas Mandylor) row his skull. This has been a daily ritual with her. This night, she attends a party and runs smack dab into Mandylor. He is also a writer, but is to leave soon for America. She wastes no time at all becoming intimate with him.

After he leaves, she is just as brook, and starts doing nude figure modeling for rent money, when her publisher makes her an offer. IF she will write erotica for an Anonymous client, she will be paid 200 Francs per page. She must, of course, experience eroticism to write about it. Wheeewww. Now we have the premise in place for Zalman to present whatever sort of sexual cinema he is in the mood for. Elena watches as hooker Markéta Hrubesová is ravished by a huge black man, attends an opium den where several women, including her, get naked, and sees an exhibitionist, Eva Duchkova, have sex with a blindfolded man. I will leave it to you to guess who the anonymous benefactor was, and you will probably be correct.

This new DVD is the full NC-17 version, and I have no idea why the rating. Yes, Englund and Duchkova show everything, Hrubesová shows breasts, and several unknowns show a variety of body parts, but the film simply is not explicit or shocking enough for an NC-17 rating. Zalman was quoted as saying that this was the sexiest film he ever had license to make. IMDB readers are not impressed at 4.8 of 10. The minor critics linked from IMDB were not impressed. I was not either. The US gross was $62.9 K. Even shooting in Prague, I doubt that it made a profit. This is a very low C- at best. It is passably filmed, unevenly acted, and weakly scripted, but does give us flesh and sexual situations.

Mobsters (1991):

Let's see if I can get the analogy right.

Mobsters (1991) is to Goodfellas (1990)

as

The Don is Dead (1973) is to The Godfather (1972)

Both Mobsters and The Don is Dead came out a year after their better-known counterparts, presumably hoping to capitalize on the then-current interest in wiseguys. Both of them starred Zorba the Crook as a Mafia Don. Apparently, Zorba is the official grade-B knock-off movie Don.

Mobsters follows the friendship of four real-life gangsters who grew up together: Charles "Lucky" Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello and Ben "Bugsy" Siegel. Their unlikely alliance (two were Italian, two Jewish) was based on true friendship, mutual trust, and mutual benefit. None of them ever tried to take more than a fair share. None of them ever betrayed any of the others. At least that's the way it went down in the film.

Now that I think about it, I probably should have gone in another direction with this introduction. I think this movie probably owes as much or more to Young Guns than it does to Goodfellas. Young Guns (1988) and Young Guns II (1990) were attempts to tailor western scripts to feature a bunch of hot, rising, good-looking young actors thrown together in an ensemble cast. Young Guns was the movie equivalent of a boy band. I suppose Mobsters was trying to do the same thing with a gangster script. Maybe it could have succeeded if it could have come up with young actors who were more in demand, but three of the gangsters were played by the usual B-list actors.

The film did manage to latch on to the then-rising star of Christian Slater, who played Luciano, the first among equals in the criminal band. Slater delivered an intriguing performance, portraying Luciano as a mostly regular and fairly laid-back guy who stayed away from major vices, was always loyal to his friends, kept his word, and had a sense of humor. I don't know how that corresponds to reality, but the character in the movie was essentially likeable, a guy who relied on violence only as a last resort, in defense of himself and his friends. Filtered through Slater, he was a regular Joe, with just a slight hint of eccentricity, the latter mostly supplied by Slater's personal mannerisms and not by the words in the script.

Irrespective of the historical accuracy, the film is quite static and its technique is old-fashioned. In a typical scene transition, we might see anonymous guys firing tommy guns at the camera while newspaper headlines waft past the camera in a time-passage montage. At least three times, the film fades completely to black, then  starts up abruptly in a new scene, as if leaving a space to insert a commercial.

This film doesn't look bad at all. It fact it looks so damned good that I probably shouldn't have suggested in the Anthony Quinn remarks that this was a grade-B effort, because the cinematography alone lifted it above that level. D.P. Lajos Koltai is another in the seemingly endless list of brilliant cinematographers produced in Hungary who later developed reputations in American and international productions. His recent successes include some works of true genius, like Malena and Sunshine. He got an Oscar nomination for Malena, and could easily have gotten another one for Sunshine without raising any eyebrows. And The Legend of 1900 is as good as either of those two.

Koltai created the interiors in Mobsters using the same general russet/gold/brown interior palette as The Godfather.

One scene seemed strange to me. Some of the gangsters had a meeting on Staten Island, a beautifully filmed outdoor affair with mountains in the background. That surprised me. I've never been to S.I., except to ride the ferry there and back, so I may have been confused out of ignorance, but that scene sure confused me when I was watching the film. I thought that Slater had been kidnapped and forced to meet with the old Don somewhere else, like Western Pennsylvania, but that didn't turn out to be the case. I guess I need to go to NYC and climb Todt Hill to see if it can really pass as a movie mountain.

Koltai created the interiors in Mobsters using the same general russet/gold/brown interior palette as The Godfather.

One scene seemed strange to me. Some of the gangsters had a meeting on Staten Island, a beautifully filmed outdoor affair with mountains in the background. That surprised me. I've never been to S.I., except to ride the ferry there and back, so I may have been confused out of ignorance, but that scene sure confused me when I was watching the film. I thought that Slater had been kidnapped and forced to meet with the old Don somewhere else, like Western Pennsylvania, but that didn't turn out to be the case. I guess I need to go to NYC and climb Todt Hill to see if it can really pass as a movie mountain.

• Lynette Walden
• Lara Flynn Boyle (1, 2)

OTHER CRAP:

• Welcome to the NEUTICLES Website!: "Testicular Implantation For Pets" I don't know if they are kidding or not. Get this: "Neuticles - allowing your pet to retain his natural look and self esteem - aiding in the trauma associated with neutering. "

• Willie Nelson at 70. I can't really tell you why in very precise words, but like most Texans, I love this guy.

• Triumph the insult dog to release his first album - Come Poop With Me (The name and album cover are an inside Sinatra joke, for you young guys)

• Fascinating look at Subliminal Music and Images

• Keira Knightly as King Arthur's Guinevere

• Manny Ramirez was not claimed on waivers before Friday's deadline, leaving the moody outfielder and his $101.5 million contract with the Boston Red Sox.

• Top 10 worst scary movies ever

• Italiam PM Silvio Berlusconi has gone back to one of his first loves: writing sappy love songs. Where is America's answer? George Bush has written poems. Where are the tunes?

• Microsoft to Buy Google?

• It started as a joke, but naked karaoke night gets plenty of takers

• Poles are exactly like the French, except that they are trustworthy, hard-working, don't whine, understand the truth of their own history, love foreigners, and take care of their families.

• Do you remember Kitty Carlisle? She's 93 and still performing. You probably remember her as an ubiquitous panel show guest, but she was also in A Night at the Opera with the Marx Brtothers in 1935 - 68 years ago.

• These guys love Gator football way too much

• 89 year old blind man gets a hole in one. Or so they told him.

• morning DJ's, a pumpkin bikini contest

• ESPN preseason top 25 in college basketball

• Motorsports bikini babes in Atlanta

• Orsm.net presnets the latest celebrity sex tape circulating around the internet. The site alleges that this explicit home video is Katie Price, aka Jordan, who is probably best described at the UK equivalent of Pamela Anderson. Like Pam, her sex tape involves a pop musician, this time Dane Bowers.

• MovieJuice! reviews Russell' Crowe's new epic sailing yarn, Master and Commander

• SCREEN IT! details all the nudity in IN THE CUT

• SCREEN IT! says that THE HUMAN STAIN contains brief glimpses of Nicole Kidman's breasts and full frontal nudity from Jacinda Barrett

For my money, this spoof of the teen flick genre is a masterpiece. It poked fun at just about every teen movie made in the last 25 years, and left me doubled over from laughing the first time I saw it. Today, even after 10 or so viewings, I still laugh out loud at pretty much every scene, especially when I spend time looking in the backgrounds for all the great subtle jokes they included.

• Cerina Vincent, topless as the nekkid foreign exchange student. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

• Unknown #1, rear nudity
• Unknown #2, topless

"Preaching to the Perverted"
Guinevere Turner plays Tanya Cheex in this 1997 British comedy about a woman running a London S&M club. Understated like many British comedies, but still amusing and interesting.

A Member of Parliment decides to embark on a moral crusade so he has a young computer wizard from his office go underground to infiltrate the club and gather evidence. Problems arise when the young man decides he likes the lifestyle.

• Guinevere Turner

I was watching Survivor Thursday night and saw that Krista's top came down. Sadly is was of course blocked with the digitizer, but I was wondering if anyone out there managed to get 'caps with the digital censoring removed.

Thanks

-C.

BROTHELS LAUNCH "HAPPY HOURS"
Really Cheap Sex - Due to the lingering German recession, Berlin brothels are now offering "Happy Hours" with half-price sex. An organization that looks out for prostitutes' interests said that despite 15 years of steadily-declining prices, prostitutes are still having to lower rates. The "Happy Hours" include discounts for regulars and "Get To Know Me" deals for new clients.