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Keeping Up With The Steins (2006):
In the manner of TV's "Wonder Years," Keeping Up With the
Steins is a coming of age story with first person narration by a
young boy. He is approaching his Bar Mitzvah, and he's filled
with trepidation. First, he is terrified that he will make a
fool of himself in the temple, since he has no idea what the
Hebrew is all about and also has a bad case of stage fright. As
if that weren't enough intimidation, he has a big-time Hollywood
hotshot agent of a dad (Jeremy Piven, playing what is now his
official obnoxious agent role) who wants to use this Bar Mitzvah
to outdo a rival who threw his own son's party on a cruise ship.
How does one top that? Dad's thinking of renting out Dodger
Stadium for the party!
The lad contrives a plan to get the uptight dad off his case.
He sneaks an invitation to the grandfather he has never met, and
changes the date by two weeks so that grandpa will arrive early.
He figures that the friction between his overachieving
father and his ne'er-do-well hippie grandfather will occupy all
of the two men's time, thus getting dad's spotlight off of the
Bar Mitzvah. The situation starts out far more negative than
expected when grandpa shows up with his much-younger hippie
girlfriend (Daryl Hannah, playing a character named Sacred "call
me Sandy" Feather), parks his beat-up trailer in the driveway of
their expensive Brentwood home, and starts skinny-dipping in the
family pool. Dad and grandpa immediately get at each others
throats over every one of grandpa's real and imaginary slights
in the past. As it turns out, and as you can probably
anticipate, the flawed crackpot of a grandpa turns out to be
quite a decent human being, really helps the youngster cope with
growing up, and even melts dad's heart eventually.
I think you've probably already deduced that the film is
fundamentally a sitcom in convenient film format. I liked the
first half better, when it was basically a satirical comedy with
some fairly broad characters. It gets all mushy at the end, but
even though the second half got a bit too sappy for my taste,
it's still a pleasant way to pass the time, if you enjoy a
warm-hearted coming-of-age sitcom. I was able to relate to it in
a lot of ways since the wound-too-tight dad is way too much like
me, and the laid-back grandpa is a lot like my own dad, who also
had a calming influence on our family.
The film stars Garry Marshall as grandpa, and it was directed
by his own son Scott. As far as I know, no relative of Jeremy
Piven contributed to the film or, for that matter, will even
acknowledge being related to him.
Call it a C. It's solid for the genre, but not spectacular.
It came out this May and grossed less than a million dollars
in very limited distro.
Not much nudity (It's rated PG-13). (See "third party"
section below for a video.)
Third party videos:
LC's
zipped .avi of
Marisa Coughlin in Masters of Horror,
the premiere episode of season 2. The
collages are in yesterday's edition.
LC's
zipped .avi of
Daryl Hannah in Keeping Up With The
Steins.
OTHER CRAP:
This week's movie openings ... Three
critical smashes this week.
- Borat: 91% positive reviews. Outrageous
comedy, in 800 theaters.
- Volver: 88% positive reviews. Almodovar's
new film, in arthouse distro.
- Flushed Away - 83% positive reviews. 3-d
animated film, in 3400 theaters.
- The fourth noteworthy opening is Tim Allen's
latest Santa Clause movie. No review yet, but it
will be in more than 3000 theaters.
The Weekend Warrior's box office predictions for
the upcoming weekend
- He thinks that the kiddie movies, Santa
Clause 3 and Flushed Away, will duke it out for
first. The other new release, Borat, is expected
to finish a strong fourth and also to win the
race for the highest revenues per theater.
Girls Gone Wild :: FREE Girls Gone Wild Videos &
Pics
TV Links - TV shows available for free online
'Queen of the Internet' finally bares all for
Playboy
- Her hilarious claim to be the most
downloaded woman on the internet is based on
one incident in 1996. When Uncle Scoopy's Fun
House was a completely free site back in 1996,
the downloads of Jennifer Connelly from my
site alone were far more than the total
number of downloads claimed by Cindy!! (And my
site was just one little source for Connelly
pictures --- one of many.)
Bob Barker is retiring, 50 years after his TV
debut , and a full ten years after his own
death.
The Daily Show, Monday, October 30. Part 1 ...
Part 2 ...
Part 3 ...
Part 4.
"World's wittiest lonely hearts ads"
Douchebag gets first question wrong on Millionaire
David Letterman interviews Borat
"Top Ten Things I Have Learned From 'Dancing With
The Stars' ... as presented by Jerry Springer
"Lena Headey is Leonidas's hot, happy to take her
top off wife, who is smarter than she appears. Oh
yes, there is AMPLE nudity and sex in 300, a
quality missing in too many movies these days."
'Dancing With The Stars' final four include A.C.
Slater and Emmitt Smith
World's tallest tower rising in Dubai
- The contractor is keeping the final size a
secret, but he's revealed that it will have at
least 160 stories
"Of all the cases I've worked with phony money,
this is the sorriest bill I've ever seen"
- How could you expect poor the guy to know
that the face on a $100 bill isn't Les Nessman
of WKRP? That's the kind of shit that only Ken
Jennings knows.
Chertoff Raises Threat Level on Reports of
Imminent Election Calls Threat of November 7
Vote 'Credible'"
- "My advice to all voters who were thinking
of voting for Democrats is to stay at home until
this current threat passes," Mr. Chertoff said.
"In this business, it's better to be safe than
sorry."
Reese Witherspoon, Ryan Phillippe split
- I don't usually care about these things, but
I thought this one was a keeper. They are both
attractive and talented. They've got two kids,
have avoided any messy tabloid stories, and have
been together for something like eight years.
Shame, really.
From the "cats and dogs living together"
department:
In a surprise U-turn, the right wing New York Post
endorses Hillary Clinton |
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Movie Reviews:
Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe). White asterisk: expanded format.
Blue asterisk: not mine. No asterisk: it probably sucks.
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Slim Susie (2003)
Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004) is a sequel to a zombie movie based on a
video game.
Umbrella Corporation has decided to reopen "The Hive' in Raccoon City, and
guess what? Yes, the dread T-virus escapes again and starts creating zombies.
One of the employees of Umbrella will help some women escape The Hive if they
agree to find and rescue his daughter. Everyone else will be nuked. The nuke
is a fascinating development, in that the radiation doesn't bother "good
guys."
I am not the least bit frightened by slow motion monsters. It could have
helped that the chief zombie fighters were Milla Jovovich, Sienna Guillory and
Sandrine Holt, but the director kept them mostly in the dark and wearing way
too many clothes. The fight scenes were especially dark, probably in an
attempt to make it seem like it is a great feat to kick a slow motion monster.
Two of the women and all of the men were too stupid to learn that you need to
shoot zombies in the head. Stepping on their toes doesn't work.
Roger Ebert, in awarding 1/2 of a star, summed up my feelings perfectly:
"The movie is an utterly meaningless waste of time. There was no reason
to produce it, except to make money, and there is no reason to see it,
except to spend money. It is a dead zone, a film without interest, wit,
imagination or even entertaining violence and special effects."
Well said, Roger. I admit to a prejudice against zombie movies, but I could
see nothing about this film to recommend.
D
Fans of this tripe will be glad to know that the film ends with a blueprint
for the next sequel, Resident Evil: Extinction. I can only hope it will
include no nudity so that I will not be obligated to watch it.
IMDb readers have this incomprehensibly high at 5.7. It did somehow manage
to earn $120M worldwide against a budget of $43M.
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The Church (La Chiesa - 1989)
opens in the manner of the "Blind Dead" films. We see a medieval witch-hunt turn
into a massacre, followed by a cathedral being built over the graves of the
demon-worshippers. Cut to the present day, with the church librarian
investigating various supernatural occurrences and falling under the spell of
the ancient evil. In the third part, the old demons finally awaken and,
taking a cue from Demoni and
The Exterminating Angel, shut the
Church's doors with an old mechanism, thus trapping inside a bunch of
stereotyped characters (female school teacher, pupils, priests, old couple,
young couple, bride-to-be) who eventually kill each other or meet
blood-splattered deaths.
There are visual "loans" throughout the film:
- The girl embraced by a winged snake man is a recreation of the well-known
Boris Vallejo
fantasy art illustration.
- The scene with Barbara Cupisti and a horned demon seems modeled on
Polanski's similar one in "Rosemary's Baby." There’s also a mirror who
reflects strange things, a monster outside the window, the list goes on and
on.
- Pretty effective music by Goblin and Keith Emerson, a large part of it
“based on” the works of Philip Glass.
The film was co-written and produced by Dario Argento, and it's surprising to
see the obsessive way he films and frames his daughter Asia in various
suggestive situations. Of course, the film was actually directed by Michele
Soavi, who is considered to be one of Argento's acolytes, and also gave as
Dellamorte Dellamore (Cemetery Man) and Deliria (Bloody Bird).
Considering his uneven output, it seems to me that the end result of Soavi's
films always depends more on luck and the particular circumstances of the time,
rather than anything else. The Church is a satisfying effort for genre
fans, a gothic horror film with impressive imagery, bloody set pieces and
effective music, art direction and camerawork (as usual in Argento films). The
plot is not one of it's strongest points however, being essentially a "haunted
church" film. All in all, the film's underdeveloped characters and scattered
storyline transform it from its beginning as an investigative thriller like Name
of the Rose, to a "kill the possessed" gore-fest in the end. This will put off
the more demanding viewers. More ’s the pity for them then, because all the
rest, like me, will be easily seduced by the film's visual style, camera
pyrotechnics and meticulous attention to detail.
| Asia Argento |
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| Antonella Vitale |
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| Barbara Cupisti |
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Dann reports on Hard Luck: You get three for the price of one in this
crime thriller from 2006 that follows three convergent story lines,
following a group of bootleggers, a pair of serial killers, a former drug
dealer, and a stripper, thrown together by coincidence.
Out of jail and vowing to go straight, a former drug dealer finds himself dragged into a bootlegging
deal by a friend. Turns out the deal is a setup by the cops, but during
the ensuing shoot-out, our guy has a chance to escape with two suitcases
full of money.
Making his escape, and being chased by both bad guys and cops, he carjacks a car driven by a
stripper who had danced for him only minutes before. They wind up in a
motel, but with the bad guys hot on their tail.
Continuing to try to make a clean getaway, our guy is kidnapped by a sweet middle-aged housewife and
her much younger lover, who just happen to be serial killers.
Lots of action and a pretty
cool story idea, but the script is less than perfect leading to a lot of
confusion along the way. Once you finally figure out what's going on, it's
not bad.
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Jackie Quinones |
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Notes and collages
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Angela Aames in "Bachelor Party" |
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This opening scene from "Bachelor Party" is obscenely juvenile...which is
okay considering the rest of the film. Angela Aames looks great as usual.
(She died young: R.I.P. dear lady.)
...and this was Tom Hanks being that complete humorous idiot before he
started to win well-deserved Oscar awards.
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Scoop's note:
As you can well understand, we let Flauti have the night
off. The only reason this section is here is because some of the captures
from last night were not visible because the code I wrote for the Spanish
letter "ñ" was not acceptable to all browsers, so
many of you did not see the following captures. Here they are with a
regular old "n" in the filenames. If you are persnickety about such
matters, you can change "nino" to "niño" after you download the pics.
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La habitación del niño
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| Leonor Watling
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Jamie Lee Curtis. OK, she
now looks like your aunt,
but a really cool aunt! |
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The usual daily picture of
Lindsay Lohan's coochie, this time in hi-def. |
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Suzanne Snyder in
Femme Fatale |
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Some familiar faces match up with bare breasts
in The Heart of Me. First, Helena Bonham Carter ... |
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... and then Olivia Williams |
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Pat's comments in yellow...
Early Monday in Lancaster, Texas, a Lincoln Town Car drove off the road, nearly
hit a house, went across several yards and knocked down some trees before
stopping. Inside, police found two dead men in the front seat and one uninjured
passenger. The two dead men had apparently gotten into an argument while one
was driving and both pulled handguns and shot each other. The passenger was
questioned by police.
* They asked if he'd mind autographing his latest rap
CD.
Scientists at Britain's Newcastle University have used stem cells taken from a
baby's umbilical cord to grow the world's first artificial liver in the lab.
It's currently a "mini-liver," only about the size of a penny, but they plan to
develop it into a full-size, functioning liver. They say within 15 years,
people will be routinely getting transplanted livers grown in a lab.
* Well, now we know why Ted Kennedy backs stem cell
research. |
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