Inside Out III (1992) the third volume from this series is rather disappointing after a pretty good second volume. We do have the best exposure so far in one episode called The Portal, with both male and female full frontal, but the women are not identified. Only six of the episodes have nudity, but two of them have more than one nude woman, so the last two episodes will be in tomorrows edition.

The Portal is a view of what happens when you die. Without giving the entire thing away, you enter the portal through a swimming pool, and come out the other end with a young trim body, and lots of the opposite sex.

The Branding could have been a good story were it better done. A film crew is shooting on location in Brazil, and a devoted husband is mugged in town and rescued by Bianca Rossini. He tries to resist, but, after way too much tequila and too much Rossini, he wakes up with a real problem for when he gets home. Rossini shows breasts.

Dogs Playing Poker is about a stolen art collector who sets out to screw a guy in a poker game, and then screw his wife, Cary La Salle, but ends up getting screwed himself. La Salle shows breasts.

The Perfect Woman is about a man depressed by his life and lack of companionship, who responds to a TV sex add for the perfect woman. He describes in great detail a woman that could never exactly exist, and ten minutes later, she knocks at his door. Things are going well, when another woman knocks, and claims to be from the agency. Naturally, everything is not as it seems. Roxanna Michaels shows breasts and most of her buns in two lengthy scenes. Whitney Weston is briefly shown topless.

The Tango takes place during an elevator ride between a chauvinist shock comic and a feminist. No Nudity.

The Houseguest is about a woman who thinks a deranged homeless man is her long lost fiancee. No female nudity.

Cafe l'Amour is a interesting flirtation between a woman and a man with no dialogue. This may be the best episode on this volume. Again. no nudity.

Tomorrow, the last two episodes from vol III, and the fourth and final volume. This is a D+. Only a genre addict would find anything of interest here.

Gothika (2003)

I have to admit that this campfire story fooled me.

Halle Berry played a respected psychiatrist who woke up one day confined as a patient to the same hospital where she had been a physician.  In fact, being a physican there is the last thing she remembers when she wakes up as a patient.

Even in the most difficult of circumstances, a physician would not be confined to the mental institution where she had been on staff three days earlier. (She has no memory of the intervening three days and nights.)  In addition to that implausible scenario, automatic writing appears on Halle's skin and prison walls, and she sees ghosts. Therefore, given the impossibility of those events, I assumed she was either dreaming or dead, in the tradition of Jacob's Ladder or The Sixth Sense.

I was wrong. The authorities really did throw her into her own institution, and there really were ghosts. Essentially, the presence of real ghosts explained all the unexplainable mysteries, including some elements of her patients' cases which she had been unable to understand back in her psychiatrist days. If anything didn't make sense - anything from the patients' paranoia, to the square root of minus one, to the 2000 balloting in Florida - you can blame it on the ghosts. Except for romance - you can blame that on the Bossa Nova.

In fact, whenever things didn't work out the way I planned, I used to blame pretty much everything in my life on the Bossa Nova, but now I realize that nearly all of those things could have been blamed on ghosts. And I thought my bad luck was just a result of  some silly, but infectious Latin rhythm.

Logical enough. Can't imagine why I couldn't figure it out before this.

Even more implausible than the omnipresent interference of ghosts as an explanation for all human mysteries, ranging from that Dewey-Truman thing to the career of Justin Timberlake, was the way the film resolved her problem. Incarcerated, drugged, haunted by ghosts, accused of murder, advised by her lawyer to plead insanity, and with all of the evidence stacked high enough to convict her beyond any reasonable doubt, Halle seemed doomed to spend the rest of her life in an institution.

How could the script possibly get her out of that?

Easy as pie:

• First, Halle breaks free from the institution by overpowering a guard in her cell, taking his keys, and using the high-tech approach of "running away". That escape process starts in motion a final act which consists of the oldest crime movie cliché in the book: "the police believe I'm guilty and have closed the case, so I'll have to escape and solve the crime myself."

• Second, even with her heroics, Halle still would have had trouble solving the crime, except that the ubiquitous ghosties helped her. Ghosts, it seems, have their own agenda, and sometimes they will assist humans in an investigation if it frees their souls, or punishes their murderer, or perhaps just because they're bored with the whole humdrum routine of the spooky noises thing.

I guess I'm being pretty mean, and when you couple that with the 13% good ratings at RT (comparable to Boat Trip and Gigli), you might assume that the film is entirely without merit.

That wouldn't be fair.

This is the kind of movie where you want to praise the director (Matthew Kassovitz) and criticize his film. I liked a lot of what he accomplished here. I liked the sets he chose, and I admired the way he maintained the atmosphere with a deft balance of lighting, music, dampness, rapid camera movement, effective acting, and nimble editing. Very creepy stuff, lots of "boo" moments. Even though the critics didn't care for it, it's rated a respectable 6.2 by IMDb voters. Yahoo voters are even more enthusiastic, scoring it a B+, and that is based on thousands of votes.

So there's no denying that it had some appeal and some strengths. Unfortunately, the second half of the script cried out for the Monty Python "too silly" guy.

Kassovitz will undoubtedly make some great genre films in the future. He almost pulled it off here, but he just didn't have the stud hoss script he needed.

• Halle Berry
• naked insane chicks (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)

The Human Stain (2003)

I want to begin with a simple statement: Human Stain is a good movie. I want to establish that before I get off on a rant about how nobody will ever want to see it, because if you are that one person in a hundred who appreciates Ibsenesque insight, it may be your kind of film. The other 99% of you will find it duller than an evening with Andy Rooney, and more painfully serious and obviously wounded than John Hurt discussing world hunger.  In fact, Hurt should be in this film somewhere, acting pained.

This flick features a cast of four excellent actors who play their parts perfectly (Nicole Kidman, Gary Sinese, Sir Tony Hopkins, Ed Harris). It is a serious, faithful adaptation of a significant novel. It contains human truth and some vivid analysis of society. I admire what it accomplishes.

But I'll be damned if I can figure out why the investors thought they'd get their substantial investment back. Don't expect packed houses. It is a thirty million dollar film packed with stars, but it has the soul of an arthouse indy. It is an oh-so-serious-and-literary treatment of a man who is fired for making a "racist remark", although he did not. He is a college lecturer and two of his students have never shown up for class. He asks, "do these people really exist, or are they spooks?". I guess he should have said "phantoms" instead of "spooks", because it just so happens that the two missing students are of African descent, and one of them turns the remark into a racial incident.

Why is this enough material for a film? Because the offensive professor is, himself, a light-skinned African American man who has been passing for white since he graduated from high school and joined the navy. Within a few years, he was in a different city, he and his family had turned their backs on one another, and there was nobody to dispute his whiteness. His wife lived with him for forty years and never knew.

The film chronicles his life after the incident with provoked his resignation, and shows the path that led him to that point in the first place. Ultimately, the film suggests obliquely that perhaps all of our assumptions are incorrect, and that he might harbor a form of racist feelings against black people, even though he is black.

The forward engine of the story is, unbelievably enough, a love story between the disgraced professor and a young female janitor half his age, played by Kidman. She has also rejected her past, although she has moved in a direction nearly the reverse of the professor's. She came from a wealthy family and rejected their values to do some downward social climbing, resulting in a trailer-trash life, a violently insane husband (Ed Harris), and a tragic incident with her children. The lovers who have each rejected their families manage to find some (uneasy) comfort in one another.

Yeah, you read that right. It's Nicole Kidman and Hannibal Lecter in the sack.

Ed Harris is tremendous in this movie. Not only does he depart from his usual refined self, but you'll barely recognize him, and he'll just frighten the hell out of you. It is amazing to me how he can take his haunted intensity and apply it in so many different ways. After I saw this film, I realized that Harris has just the right qualities to make an excellent villain in a horror movie.

The film was directed by Robert Benton who is most famous for having written Bonnie and Clyde and having directed Kramer vs Kramer. He's not exactly what one might call prolific. In 31 years as a director, he's made only ten films:

1. (7.39) - Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
2. (7.36) - Places in the Heart (1984)
3. (7.19) - Nobody's Fool (1994)
4. (7.07) - Bad Company (1972)
5. (6.78) - Human Stain, The (2003)
6. (6.51) - Late Show, The (1977)
7. (6.11) - Twilight (1998)
8. (6.07) - Still of the Night (1982)
9. (5.72) - Billy Bathgate (1991)
10. (5.22) - Nadine (1987)

That's not a bad list at all. Benton has seven Oscar nominations and three wins (one as a director, two as a writer). He has been nominated for his work on five different films. The Human Stain has been ranked in the middle of his career output by IMDb voters, beating out one of his Oscar nominees. That's fair enough. As I said in the first sentence, it is a good movie, but don't know how the investors thought this kind of literary introspection would pay off, because it is not only a serious film, but a seriously depressing one as well. Winston Churchill described the Soviet Union as "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma". If he saw this movie, he might have called it "calamity wrapped in pathos inside of tragedy". From the board's callous firing of the professor to the professor's callous rejection of his family, to the tragedies of Kidman's past, to Harris's insanity, to the ultimate tragic conclusion of the bizarre love triangle, this may be the single most depressing film you'll ever see.

It just has "feel-good summer blockbuster" stamped all over it.

I reckon Miramax considered this a "prestige" picture and hoped it might warrant some Oscar consideration, at least for the actors if no other categories. If that were the case, the additional publicity might have pushed the receipts up as well, but I don't that is going to happen, despite the undisputed ability of Miramax to lobby successfully for awards consideration.

• Jacinda Barrett (1, 2)

• Nicole Kidman. (1, 2) In addition to this rubbish, there was one scene in which Kidman's breasts were seen clearly, but it was so dark that it will have to wait for the DVD.

Consenting Adults (1992)

I have to give the screenwriter of this film a reluctant tip of the cap for having more chutzpah than just about anyone else on the planet. He wrote a script which has one fatal flaw, one enormous gaping loophole in its logic. He was not only aware of the flaw, and knew the question that needed to be asked, but he actually had one of the characters dare to ask the correct question right within the film's dialogue - and failed to answer it!

Now that takes one giant set of cojones.

In a nutshell, the basic plot is this. A con man takes out an insurance policy on his wife, talks his neighbor into swapping wives one night, but does not go to the neighbor's wife. He waits until the neighbor has slept with his own wife, then murders her with a weapon which he has carefully tied to the neighbor. The patsy goes to the slammer, the con man gets the dough. The con man even moves in with the patsy's wife.

Given the other circumstances in the film, which are too detailed to enumerate, it would have been a perfect crime except for one thing. He actually hired a hooker to impersonate his wife that night, then killed the hooker. The real wife, who is not in on the murder, but is happy to take a pay-off, has been shipped out of town and given a new start in a singing career. Of course, that is a loose end which the killer must eventually tie up. It is in the process of killing the real wife, who represents living evidence of the patsy's innocence, that the con man is betrayed.

Now the really big question that you should be asking, and that an insurance investigator actually asks in the movie, is this, "given his willingness to murder his wife later, why didn't he just kill the real wife in the first place? What was the point of the hooker?"

I guess the real answer is this: if he had done it that way, he would have been successful, the patsy would have gone to jail forever, and there would have been no movie.

And that might have been a good thing, now that I think about it.

Leaving the wife alive as a professional singer was an absolutely ludicrous plot twist. Her records were on the radio, so the patsy recognized her voice, and tracked her down. But even if that had not happened, how long can someone who is supposed to be dead live on in such a public business as the entertainment industry? (Cher, of course, being an exception.) She wore a red wig - and that was supposed to keep people from noticing? Come on. She was a singer, and she still had the same voice, and sang the same songs! In addition, she was portrayed in the script as a very nice person. How long would she let the situation go without coming forward, once she realized that her beloved neighbor was going to get the electric chair for her murder?

In addition to that gigantic flaw in the script, there were lots of others almost as irritating:

• The patsy was supposed to be in jail for bludgeoning his beloved neighbor to death in a first degree murder. Therefore, as an obvious homicidal maniac, he was released on bail and allowed to go back to his house and his neighborhood? Remind me to avoid South Carolina, the populace of which must be teeming with bailed criminals who were originally arrested for homicidal rage.

• The patsy was in such a desperate financial situation that he thought his $25,000 debt was a hole so deep that he could never climb out of it. Then, after he was arrested, his wife asked for a divorce. Financial disaster, right? Yet he was able to make bail on his murder rap and pay a private attorney (tens of thousands of dollars in a case like this).

• The police never knew who the victim really was. Again, here's a two word tip for you criminal youngsters - South Carolina. Not only do they have easy bail in that State, but the police really don't make any effort to find out the identity of a victim in a homicide case. If you just say, "that's my wife", then arrange to have her cremated, you're home free on the ol' life insurance scam.

• One more matter on the bail. I don't know the rules, but after the patsy was released on bail, he crossed the state line between South Carolina and Georgia, and he flew out of the state. Is that allowed? Can accused criminals awaiting trial for a brutal murder just go wherever they want to?

• The patsy resorts to the ol' "the police have closed my case, so I'll have to get out of prison and solve the crime myself" trick.

• The patsy's wife was NOT in on the scam, yet as soon as the neighbor's wife turned up dead, she abandoned her husband of fourteen years, and took her daughter to go live with the con man. Because of those facts, I assumed that she must have been in one the scam. Wouldn't you? Yet the patsy never made that assumption! He just accepted at face value that the wife dumped him without knowing whether he was guilty. Furthermore, there was no history which caused the wife to doubt her husband's word, and he proclaimed his innocence. If she had even the slightest inkling that he was telling the truth, she moved in with only other guy who might have committed the murder! Yet the patsy assumed that illogical scenario was true rather than making the logical assumption that she was in on the scam. How can this be explained? Only one way that I know of. He read the script, and knew she was innocent.

• Our final point involves Physics, but it's easy. It comes in the form of an illustration. In the picture shown at the scoopy.com page, Kevin Spacey (as the con man) has been hit from behind by a baseball bat. He was standing, just about to shoot Kevin Kline. The woman who hit him entered through the door (far left, near the pillar), then dropped the bat, then walked back out the door with Kline. Nothing has been moved. You can see where the bat is. Given those facts, look at the photograph and tell me how his body got in that position. Show all your work in your blue book.

I guess I really crabbed about this film a lot, and that is somewhat misleading.

Consenting Adults is no masterpiece, but if you turn your brain off and just enjoy it, it is sort of fun from time to time. The director was Alan Pakula (Sophie's Choice, All The President's Men). Kevin Spacey and Kevin Kline are fairly effective in the leads, and Rebecca Miller is gorgeous.

Rebecca no longer acts, by the way. She quit nearly ten years ago. The daughter of playwright Arthur Miller, she is now a writer and director. (Personal Velocity, a Sundance winner, is her most noteworthy project.) She is also married to Daniel Day-Lewis, which means that her low budget independent films can always draw on a great cast of various thespian luminaries that other indy filmmakers do not have access to. Mr. Day-Lewis himself will appear in Rebecca's next film, Rose and the Snake.

• Rebecca Miller (1, 2)
• Melissa Moore, aka Melissa Anne Moore, aka Michelle Moore (1, 2, 3)
• Mary Elizabeth Mastrontonio

OTHER CRAP:

• What was the song used in that television commercial?' Now you can find the answer at Adtunes.com - the weblog of information on music from TV ads, film trailers, and more.

• It ain't easy making movies. Tiny blunders get made all the time. Nothing escapes the hawks at moviemistakes.com. For kicks, NEWSWEEK ran the site's best catches past Peter Jackson to get his side of the "screw-ups".

• The President does his Gerald Ford impersonation

• The Sun catches Cameron Diaz in some very unflattering poses

• JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE is officially is the coolest person on the planet. It can't be right. Clint Howard didn't place.

• These Movies Are The Top Turkeys Of All Time - 2003-11-26 Well, at least the top turkeys of the past two years, which is when most of them were made. Apparently they were chosen by people under the age of 14.

• EWAN McGregor can't understand why Americans don't want to see his dick.

• The County of Los Angeles has requested that equipment vendors avoid using the industry term 'Master/Slave' in product descriptions and labelling.

• Jacko has his personal press room, now Jack the Ripper has one as well.

• Russians fume at Mormon scheme to buy `dead souls' By the way, the obscure reference for the day is that this story bears a certain similarity to a satirical Gogol novel called "Dead Souls". (Too long a story to explain, and not worth it)

• What was the world's first photograph? Dated 1826, it shows Cher's First Communion

• The best zero tolerance story ever - 11 year old boy taken from fifth grade in handcuffs - for drawing pictures of guns

• Dbacks try to sign Jesse Orosco, but his trembling, ancient hand is unable to sign the contract

• More Michael Jackson Jokes

• Virginia bans Christmas trees in apartments. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, but he'll be skipping you.

• The Michael Jackson arrest is just a Republican conspiracy to distract the news media from Bush's mismanagement of the war. Sure, and the Blair Witch is real - and it's Tony Blair's grandma.

• Safest and most dangerous cities in the USA. Safest: Amherst, N.Y. Most dangerous: Detroit.

• How much does a cloud weigh?

• Welcome to the 419 Eater - Baiting the Scammers. These guys pretend to be scammed by e-mail, then publish the results.

• The Smoking Gun: Glen Campbell mugshot following his hit and run, drunk driving arrest. He's was also charged with assault on a police officer, because of conduct during his arrest.

• Anna Nicole Smith mugshot

• Vince Vaughn mugshot

• The Smoking Gun: "we're not sure what the unenlightened folks at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office were thinking when they recently rejected a Kabbalah application to trademark 'Kabbalah Red String' in connection with the production of 'religious articles.'"

• Austria to tax fat people?

• the NBA's Orlando Magic Dancers

• URL says it all AsSeenOnTV.com. You need Jack LaLanner's power juicer, a thighmaster, a vegematic, or the Pocket Whaler? Here's the place.

• Border agents last week landed a massive bust on a personal car, seizing 756 pounds arranged into the shape of a car seat Marijuana? Crack? Not hardly. It was 756 pounds of sausage. What a bunch of baloney.

• Mouseketeer update. YUCCH, she did it again! The plucky pop tart supposedly vomited while partying with a passel of pals.

• video of fitness model Di Copeland

• A bullet fired in the air during a Ku Klux Klan initiation ceremony came down and struck a participant in the head

• Michael Caine has agreed to play the role of Bruce Wayne's trusted butler Alfred in the Warner Bros.' new Batman adaptation for which Christian Bale has been cast in the title role.

• NFL Power Rankings: Thankfully, we're in the stretch run

Other crap archives. May also include newer material than the ones above, since it's sorta in real time.

Click here to submit a URL for inclusion in Other Crap

Lori Singer

"Cat Chaser"
From a novel by Elmore Leonard, this 1989 movie contains his usual generous helpings of sex and violence.

Although it's pretty predictable, this story of a man getting involved with his childhood sweetheart who is now the wife of a deposed general of the Dominican Republic is still exciting to watch. Kelly McGillis' nudity, although very lowly lit and highly shadowed, is an additional treat. Despite my best efforts, it's very hard to see, but it's there.

• Kelly McGillis, the lighting stinks, but all three B's are there.

Granted, the visual effects are great, but other than that....

BUSH PARDONS TWO TURKEYS
Al Franken And Michael Moore? - Monday, in a Thanksgiving tradition, President Bush pardoned the White House turkey, Stars, and sent him to live at a petting zoo. To keep Stars company, he also pardoned the back-up turkey, Stripes, whom he joked was like the Vice President.