Friday

Updates:

  • Charlie's French Cinema Nudity site is updated

 

Speaking of French Babes:

Clemence Poesy may be the hottest one of all. You saw her in one of those Harry Potter thingies - looks like Kirsten Dunst, has the same type of hyper-femininity, and the same great body, but has a prettier face, and is willing to show the bod on screen. Here's her entire nudography from various sources

 

Mujeres infieles (2004)

If you speak Spanish, you know why the two-color scheme exists in that title. If you don't, it gives the film another title within the main one. "YOU are unfaithful" inside "Unfaithful Women."

Big fuckin' deal.

Many of us, including me, used to enjoy a lot of those Italian sex comedies from the 1960s and 1970s. The best ones provided an interesting mixture of legitimate narrative, nudity, philosophy, and buffoonery that made them relaxing and pleasant to watch. Perhaps you wonder why people don't make movies like that any more. Well, they do. In Chile. This 2004 film is basically an Edwige Fenech movie for the new millennium.

It begins with a bang. In more ways than one.  A Santiago couple pulls into one of those ornate love motels, and engages in some really spirited stripping and sex. There's one bang. Then they light an after-sex cigarette. Their problem:  the hotel has a gas leak. Bang number two.

Backtrack a bit to earlier in the same day. The woman we've been watching in the motel is a famous news anchor. She is seen hosting a TV program about the astronomical rate of infidelity among Chilean wives (62% of them cheat - highest percentage in the world by far, according to the story.) Oh, isn't that ironic, based upon what we know! During the course of the program, she has a big fight with her male co-anchor. She corners the producer and says, "I'm the star. Get rid of that guy." The producer says, "He has an iron-clad contract." She responds, "Then give him shit jobs out in the field that will keep him away from me, and maybe even cause him to quit." Fair enough. The producer assigns the poor schmuck to a midnight report from the fire station, where nothing ever happens in Santiago.

Until now.

As we already know, tonight there will be an explosion in a posh motel, and when the male anchor covers it with a live report, who does he find in a hotel room, close to death,  but his much-despised and very naked female colleague!

This is one of those movies with several parallel stories, all of them about female infidelity in some way or another, and the other stories were nowhere near as clever as that one. Some of them were outright bummers, like the one about the woman who falls in love with her step-son, and the pain they cause her husband (his dad). 

There was one very funny scene in one of the other stories.  A young woman has never had an orgasm. She gets some tips from a horny friend, and starts using her new vibrator while locked in the bathroom. When the vibrator runs out of battery life, she swipes the batteries from the TV remote. That might have worked fine except that her cold fish of a husband wanted to watch the big soccer game, and didn't know where to find the spare batteries ... so he had to find his wife to ask her ...

That scene was played out purely for farce, but the film follows the general format of the Italian sex comedies and therefore doesn't stick entirely to wacky bedroom hijinks. I mentioned the pain caused by the father-son thing. Well, I didn't mention that the news anchor was a married woman who had lied to her husband about where she was on the night of the explosion. So he was home babysitting their daughter and ... watching TV. Get the picture? That provided some somber moments, but not quite as somber as later on when the husband threatened to kill her and himself with a pistol.

Frankly, the tone shifts in this film can be very disconcerting, and they seem very close to unnecessary in a film with such lightweight ideas. Yes, granted, cheating is a bad thing which leaves a trail of pain behind, but maybe the painstakingly accurate documentation of that pain should be left to Atom Egoyan and Inniaritu and the other arthouse hot-shots, and should be downplayed in a fuzzy sex comedy which uses lots of artificial pastel lighting schemes to relate the trials of trying to hide giant dildos from your mom and husband.

Still, one cannot deny that life includes both comedy and tragedy, and I did very much like the main story about the anchorwoman. I think Mujeres Infieles would have done well to stick to that one and develop it still further. Unfortunately, the film's creators felt that they needed several simultaneous stories to make whatever points they were trying to make about infidelity, gender inequality, and the general cluelessness of men. One story, after all, is just an anecdote, but six stories is a trend, don't you know.

Since it's a sex comedy, you're probably wondering about the nudity and sex. Well, like the movie itself, it started out like gangbusters. The sex scene with the news anchor and her lover is hot - great dialogue, great full-frontal nudity from both of them, passion, fun, and great photography. It's two animals in heat.  Then the scene between the woman and her stepson is tender and loving, also beautifully photographed, showing two people sharing love and sex with the true loves of their lives. Both of those scenes took place in the first nineteen minutes of the film, after which I thought this movie was going to be a record-setter in both the quantity and quality of sex scenes. But that was it. The rest of the film offers just the necessary resolution in those two stories and never moves beyond tease in the other stories.

Oh well. My take is that it's a film that was terrific in many ways, and had the potential to be great. After the dynamic opening scene in the motel, with the hot sex and the explosion, I was ready for a great film experience. It didn't live up to that promise, and ended up being just a pleasant, lightweight time-waster with some outstanding moments.

A solid C. Not a genre classic in the Italian Sex Comedy sub-genre, like The Sensuous Nurse for example, but a solid and watchable entry. (And certainly, to my knowledge,  it is the top entry in the Chilean Pseudo-Italian Sex Comedy sub-sub-genre.)

  • Maria Jose Prieto plays the news anchor.  Here is a zipped .wmv of her sex scene.
  • Viviana Rodriguez is the woman who falls for her stepson. (Zipped .wmv)

It's certainly a very colorful movie, as you can see below:

Viviana Rodriguez
Maria Jose Prieto

 

 

 

 

 

OTHER CRAP:

Song Parody: POPPY’S REVENGE — HIS "BOYS ARE BACK IN TOWN"

 

A newly-trim Britney makes a surprise appearance on Letterman's show

 

Will Ferrell prepares for his new role as Broadway's next Phantom of the Opera (This is tremendous. Ferrell sells it perfectly.)

 

Letterman's "Top Ten Thoughts Going Through Saddam Hussein's Mind At This Moment"

  • I guess there's no point in counting carbs anymore
  • So much for the lucky beard
  • My approval rating is still higher than Bush's

 

Denise Richards throws two laptops from a hotel balcony - striking an 80-year-old woman in a wheelchair, and thus qualifying her for the winter olympics as Dick Cheney's partner in that event where they go skiing and shoot old people.

 

The trailer from Backstage, a heavy-handed French drama about the dark side of celebrity culture.

 

A clip from Fur, the bizarre new Kidman film about photographer Diane Arbus.

 

Watch Ryan Phillippe in the trailer for Breach, based on the true story of Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent convicted of spying for the Soviets.

 

Ten clips and five featurettes - Casino Royale (2006)

 

Democrats, Republicans Agree to Take Two Years Off ... Two Parties Find Common Ground in Decision Not to Work

  • "Elsewhere, with the USS Intrepid mired in mud and unable to budge, officials were considering a variety of options, including renaming it the USS George W. Bush."

 

Bush Asks For Do-Over with Rumsfeld Fired.

 

Man hurt after lighting firecracker in buttocks

  • "Several of the man's friends recorded the incident on a mobile phone. The blurry images show a man bent over with his pants down and a white flash as the firecracker explodes."
  • (I haven't seen the video yet. Something tells me it will make it to the internet.)

 

Debunker: Britney And K-Fed Still Keeping Us Waiting On That Leaked Sex Tape

 

60 Minutes' Ed Bradley Dead At 65, Veteran CBS News Correspondent Succumbs To Leukemia

 

"2-headed snake picks up corporate sponsorship", after losing the Senate race in Florida.

 

"Celeb chef Mario Batali's two new Michelin stars didn't protect him from a merciless basting at Tuesday's dinner kicking off the New York Comedy Festival"

 

Another awesome HD trailer - Eragon

  • The movie studios don't want to hear this, but HD has made the home theater experience superior to the big screen, especially when the films have great production values. Plus at home you can pause to visit the restroom, rewind if you missed something, avoid cell phones. Your home has no ticket lines, no smelly or noisy neighbors, booze if you want it, and the food costs a tenth as much. I'm surprised that theaters have survived as well as they have. Old habits?

 

The Spider-Man 3 trailer in High Def

 

The Colbert Report for Wednesday, November 8th

 

A longer version of the alleged Britney sex tape

  • To me, it looks nothing like her, but I'm old and the eyes may be going.
  • It's not her. More info here

 

GALLUP: Democrats' Election Strength Evident Across All Voter Segments

 

The Straight Dope: Why are pound and ounce abbreviated "lb." and "oz."?

 

 

Movie Reviews:

Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe). White asterisk: expanded format. Blue asterisk: not mine. No asterisk: it probably sucks.

 

 

 

 

Cannibal Ferox (1981)

Cannibal Ferox, or Make Them Die Slowly, is an Umberto Lenzi cannibal film.

A scholarly woman is going to the Amazon to prove her PhD thesis that there is no such thing as cannibalism. She brings along her brother as an assistant, and Zora Kerowa to get naked. At the same time, a junkie goes to his pusher's house straight from rehab to encounter two Italian businessmen who are also looking for the pusher. Seems he skipped town after screwing them out of a lot of nose candy. Some say he was going to hide out in the jungle.

Then, surprise, surprise, surprise, the scholar and her party run into the drug dealer in the jungle, where he has been torturing the cannibals. Oddly enough, the cannibals didn't much like the torture, and since all white folks look alike, they decide to make all of them die slowly.

We presume that her thesis was not accepted.

The DVD box claims that this is one of the most violent films ever made, with at least two dozen scenes of barbaric torture and sadistic cruelty shown graphically. The blurbs further claim that Cannibal Ferox was banned in 31 countries. Frankly, I didn't find the gore level especially higher than in other genre efforts, although hanging Zora Kerowa by grappling hooks through the breasts was a fairly nasty bit. On the other hand, I liked it when they did a sex change operation on the bad guy with a machete, and also when they cut off his skull to make brain pudding.

The transfer is rather grainy, but is well saturated and doesn't seem to have scratches or other similar damage. The DVD includes feature length commentary. The fact that the film is dubbed in English, which most of the cast was actually speaking, helps hold one's attention.

If you call this a cannibal film, it is a C+ on the Scoopy meter, a must-own for genre fans. As Euro Horror, lets call it a C or thereabouts.

IMDb readers say 4.8.

 

 

Zora Kerowa is completely naked, but only shows breasts.

 

 

Several indigenous women also show breasts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Today we continue our theme of "Hankster Light" material.

 

 

More caps of our "Take your breath away" girl Penelope Cruz  in The Girl of Your Dreams. Once again she is topless.

 

 

 

Also today what I consider as one of the all time classic nude scenes in film, Amanda Peet in "The Whole Nine Yards".  Caps below and a zipped .wmv clip here.

 

 

 

 


Leela Saavasta in Masters of Horror, Season 1, Episode 12, "Haeckel's Tale" (Two .mpgs zipped together.)
Elizabeth McQuade in Masters of Horror, Season 1, Episode 12. This is from the same show, but this clip and cap do NOT come from LC. The clip was made by Mkone. (Zipped .avi)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes and collages

Jackie Swanson in Lethal Weapon

 

per the standard Hollywood machine: Jackie Swanson topless in the opening credits....

 

 

 

 

Alex Meneses in Amanda and the Alien

 

...so I walk into my work this morning...and my friend Sean asks me if I am okay since I only emailed him ONE collage...

My reply to him was that I was working on a second collage then decided to sleep instead...

Ms. Meneses looks great in this scene from "Amanda and the Alien."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rebecca DeMornay in Risky Business. One of the great sex scenes of all time. You can feel the wind blowing through the room, hitting their sweaty skin.

Zehra Leverman in Valentine's Day. Whatever happened to her? She entered the business in 1997, had this film and five other credits in 1998, but hasn't been seen anywhere in years, although she must still be quite young.