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Blue Seduction

(warning: complete spoilers)

Not for nothing is Blue Seduction represented by the initials B.S. - it's another straight-to-vid "erotic thriller" which is neither erotic nor thrilling.

In the erotic department it features only one exposed nipple which is seen in nearly complete darkness. Worse, it's not the nipple of the sultry seductress, but that of the frumpy, betrayed, 40ish wife.

In the thrilling department, it must have the single least logical "surprise twist" I've ever seen. Here's how it goes down:

A washed-up pop star is facing a deadline from his record company, after which he would forfeit several royalty streams. He must produce an album within a week, but he's written only two songs and no longer performs his own material. Therefore, within a single week he must find a prolific and speedy collaborator, then he must find a great singer to perform his material, then he must get the actual album produced in grueling recording sessions. This won't be easy, since he lives in a remote area of Vermont, which is played by New Brunswick. Somehow, miraculously, a beautiful female singer emerges at his rinky-dink recording studio and blows everyone away with her renditions of the songs Mr. Washout has already written. Even more miraculously, she is not only the greatest singer since Sinatra, but she is also a brilliant songwriter, and has conveniently already composed several great songs in the general style of the washed-up star, only better. She is willing to give him those songs for free, because she wants her big showbiz break. Even more miraculously, she also want to screw him senseless 24/7, despite the fact that she's a hot young tootsie and the greatest singer-songwriter in human history, while he is a total burn-out who looks like he should be living under a bridge, trolling for billy goats.

Now ... about that illogical twist I warned you about. Are you ready?

The femme fatale, a musical genius combining the best qualities of Sammy Davis Jr, Mozart, and Marilyn Monroe, is actually not in the music business at all, but is a hit woman. She has been hired by the wife, who is ostensibly a goody-two-shoes, in a surprising grab for the life insurance.

I would love to know how the wife, operating from small-town Vermont, found someone with that job description and with only a week to go before hubby would lose all his revenue streams!

It must have been Craigslist.

Oh, the magic of the internet!

 

Nudity:

Estella Warren, the busty former swimming star turned actress, plays the femme fatale. She does not actually get naked except behind a frosted shower door, but she has a crazy sex scene in lingerie, and her gigantic breasts bob around like corks in a jacuzzi.

Jane Wheeler supplies the solitary exposed nipple.

 

  • * 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 King of Marvin Gardens

1972

Ellen Burstyn film clip (with Julia Robinson)

caps below

Scoop's notes:

This film was a re-teaming of the group from "Five Easy Pieces", and you will easily spot the similarities in tone. Jack Nicholson plays a late-night radio monologist, spinning heart-warming material for insomniacs, laboring for a bit above minimum wage. His brother (Bruce Dern) is a dreamer, a very low level mob guy who dreams of opening up a casino and resort on his own island in Hawaii. The shy and scholarly Nicholson somehow gets enmeshed in his brother's criminal web.

The Dern character lives with two women, a stepmother and stepdaughter who are essentially classy hookers. In the original script, the Nicholson character was supposed to end up with the stepdaughter, a beautiful screen newcomer named Julia Ann Robinson. As the filming progressed, everyone realized that there was no chemistry at all between Nicholson and Robinson, and that Robinson was not going to be the next coming of Jessica Tandy, so the screenwriter kept reducing the significance of her role. I could see that Robinson had a couple of scenes that were pretty stiff and rough around the edges, but she was so ethereally gorgeous that I honestly didn't pay that much attention to her line delivery. At any rate, IMDb says she never worked in another movie in her lifetime, so her entire filmography consists of a starring role opposite Jack Nicholson! (Other sources say that she had small roles in two films called A Safe Place and A Fan's Notes, which IMDb credits to Julie Robinson and Julia Robinson respectively.) At any rate, she disappeared without a trace soon after making this film. "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" mentions that she had a serious drug problem, and some years later died in a tragic fire, according to director Bob Rafelson.

Cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs did such respected films as "New York, New York," "Frances," "Mask," and "Ghostbusters," and he did a great job at evoking the lost glory, decadence, emptiness, and desperation of pre-gambling Atlantic City in the wintertime. For you foreigners, Atlantic City has had a great renaissance in the past two decades, and was a great resort in the 1920's and 30's. In between those two eras, however, from the end of the war until the legalization of gambling, it just kept getting seedier and more run-down. If for no other reason, you should see this movie just to see the marvelous evocation of that epoch of decay. The best view of the city comes in a sweeping panorama when Dern and Nicholson hold a standing conversation in a closed sky ride, a scene which serves as a tribute to the genius of another film, a classic called The Third Man.

Marvin Gardens has been largely forgotten, despite being a spectacularly filmed movie with the star power of Jack Nicholson. One of the reasons is that Nicholson was largely wasted in a non-Nicholson role as a soft-spoken nerd. Although he did OK in the role, there are times when you really wish he would show some of his usual spark. If you know your way around films, you are probably thinking that it would have worked out much better if Bruce Dern had played the shy, socially awkward scholar and Nicholson had played the free-wheeling dreamer. Well, you're quite astute if you made that observation, because that is exactly how the film was originally cast. Nicholson and Dern switched roles just before shooting started!

Overall, Marvin Gardens is a noble, if not totally successful, effort at creating a big-budget American movie in the European fashion, concentrating on character development rather than action. In fact some scenes further neither the plot not the development of the characters, but just seem to be there to create atmosphere. Not only is the point of those scenes utterly baffling, but at various times scenes seem to jump from one to another without clear transitions, so you have to fill in a lot with your imagination. Tres Euro!

Although I liked the film, I don't especially recommend it except for the marvelous visuals. If you're really a film buff, you'll have to rent the DVD just because it is a marvelous transfer of Kovacs' photography. If your tastes are mainstream, you'll find the film talky and disjointed and boring.  I enjoyed the total package, flaws and all, and consider it to be somewhere between a highly-flawed masterpiece and a noble failure, both of which are OK by me.

 

Nudity report:

Whether a great actress or not, Julia Robinson sure looked great with her top off in a squirt gun scene!

The other nudity in the film featured the very ample chest of 40-year-old Ellen Burstyn. Of course, there really aren't any nudes of Burstyn as a young woman. Burstyn, who won one Oscar and was nominated for four others, never made a movie at all until she was 37. She worked as a model, and then as one of the high-kicking Rockette-cum-Busby-Berkley hoofers called the June Taylor Dancers. You probably remember them from the famous overhead cam shots on the old Jackie Gleason variety programs. After her June Taylor years, she worked as a stage actress for a decade or so, with an occasional TV guest appearance until she caught a break and Peter Bogdanovich cast her in The Last Picture Show.

 

Jennifer's Body

(2009)

 

Megan Fox

Amanda Seyfried

 

 
 

Pics

another Adriana Lima see-through

Eva Mendes nip-slip

Tara Spencer-Nairn in Wishmaster 4

Christian Serratos shows her butt in a PETA ad

CC Costigan in an episode of Hot Springs Hotel

Jennifer Aniston just hanging around

 

Film Clips

The women of Edmond: Mena Suvari, Bai Ling, and Rebecca Pigeon

The women of Creepshow 2: Jeremy Green and Lois Chiles

Teresa Weissbach and Barbara Auer in Schiller

Crystal Lowe in Wrong Turn 2 - in 1080p

Uma Thurman and Valerie Gogan in Dangerous Liaisons