The L Word (Pilot Episodes) (2004) is a Showtime softcore lesbian soap, written and produced by lesbian Ilene Chaiken. The pilot does the usual job of establishing main characters, and starting a plot line for each. Jennifer Beals and Laurel Holloman are in a long term committed relationship, but are having some troubles. Their sex life has degraded. They want to conceive a child. Mia Kirshner has just moved to LA, is a wannabe writer living with her boyfriend, and is strongly attracted to lesbian club owner Karina Lombard. Katherine Moennig is obviously out, and rather promiscuous, but actually yearns for a real relationship. Beals is half sister to Pam Grier, a dysfunctional entertainer.

The pilot evidently ran two nights. It includes nudity from Beals (dark breast shot), Holloman (breasts in good light), Moennig (full frontal), Kirshner (breasts in two different sex scenes) and two unknowns. According to the commentary by Beals and Chaiken, they not only have to please Showtime, but also all of Chaiken's lesbian support group as well, so I suppose it has authenticity. I will reserve judgement until I have seen more, but nothing about this pilot caught my interest.

Head in the Clouds (2004):

Despite the presence of Charlize Theron and Penelope Cruz, this film bombed miserably at the US box office. It maxxed out at 47 screens, and after 10 weeks it has taken in the princely sum of $383,000, which probably didn't even pay for the manicures for Cruz and Theron. Last week it took in $1,100 on four screens.

I haven't seen the film, but it was filmed by the guy who did Sirens, so you know it should look great, and Charlize definitely looks great again. The IMDb rating is weak, and it sounds like a chick-flick. It comes to DVD on the 25th of January.

• Charlize collage (1, 2, 3)

• Charlize film clip (Good clip, but in German. Zipped .wmv)

Endangered Species (2002):

Surprisingly, there are intelligent and thought-provoking elements in the basic premise of this grade-B sci-fi film made in Lithuania.

Suppose you are a game warden or an anti-fur activist. You find a poacher about to kill a rare leopard for the pelt. Would you kill the poacher rather than let him fire that shot? Of course not. He's a human being. You would try to prevent his action, perhaps try to get him arrested, but not kill him.

Now suppose that there is a race of highly advanced beings. They prize the skin of earthlings. They have made earth a game preserve and have forbidden the hunting of humans. But there is still a big demand for human skins on their planet, so poachers come to earth to hunt us. Their game wardens will try to prevent them from poaching, but will not shoot the poachers. Why not? Go back and read the previous paragraph. You would not kill a member of your species to protect an inferior species. Neither will these guys.

Arnold Vosloo plays the game warden. Some Lithuanian guy plays the poacher who murders dozens of humans for their pelts. Eric Roberts plays the human cop investigating the murdered humans. Eric doesn't have the firepower to defend against the powerful alien, so he keeps begging the alien game warden to use his own powerful technology to counter the bad guy's powerful technology, but the warden, although a good guy, will not take the life of a member of his own race just to defend mere human animals.

Not a bad premise at all. In the hands of James Cameron or somebody like that, it could make for a terrific movie, an exciting thriller which also has far-reaching social implications.

Unfortunately, Cameron and his peers were nowhere to be seen, and we are left with bad dialogue (much of it dubbed), laughably bad special effects, miscast actors (John Rhys-Davies as an American cop?), and production values only slightly worse than those on the vintage Dark Shadows soap opera.

Way to go, lads. Terrible movie from a great idea.

I did learn some interesting facts about making cheap movies in Eastern Europe. Here are some of the things I discovered:

(1) They use about a half dozen English speakers. (In this film, Roberts, Rhys-Davies, Vosloo, Tony Lo Bianco, the coroner, and the woman who played Roberts's wife.) The people in small parts simply speak their lines in Lithuanian and are dubbed over in post-production. The guy who played the poacher was on camera more than anyone else, but this presented no problem since the character did not speak any earth languages.

(2) They create the illusion that the film is made in an American town by using only a few signs. The police station is a local building with some inexpensive English language signs hung on it. Same with the local strip club and health club. A couple of cars are painted to look like American police cars from a generic city.

(3) They are not especially careful about where they film, because all traces of local culture and signage are blurred out in post-production. Here's the way it works. As they drive through the streets, the words on all the street signs are blurred out. The identifying signs on local gas stations and retail establishments are blurred out. This film actually has a long chase scene through the streets of Vilnius, and I watched it very closely. There is nothing to betray the location. It might have taken place in Syracuse, except that there is something vaguely unfamiliar about it. There are no oil companies in America that use that color combination, for example, so even though the brand names are blurred away, it is obviously a brand that does not really exist in Syracuse or anywhere else in the USA.

To tell you the truth, the whole process is quite ingenious, and I had a good time studying how they disguised Vilnius and its inhabitants to look like some generic small city in the rust belt.

The good news is that the nudity is plentiful, and the women are lovely. The final flesh count: frontal nudity from two identified actresses, breasts from eight or nine more, of which two are identified.

Since the alien poacher prizes the best human pelts, he does his hunting in strip clubs and health clubs. The film begins in the woman's locker room of a health club, where two completely naked women have a long chat as they prepare to become victims. Later on, the poacher wreaks havoc on a strip club, where we see an unidentified topless waitress, several unidentified topless strippers, and a lovely topless bartender (Viktorija Soldatenko). The three identified actresses all speak with perfect American accents. Of course the words we hear don't even come close to matching their lip movements! Additional nudity is provided by the breasts of Sarah Kaite Coughlan in a sex scene with her cop husband (Eric Roberts).

• Evgenija Zakarevieiute (1, 2, 3)

• Viktorija Soldatenko

• Sarah Kaite Coughlan

Other Crap:

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• Colin Farrell checks to see if his wax pee-pee is to scale. (With Picture.)
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  • The NFL record for TD passes in a season is 48. Manning is on pace for 60. He already has 41, with five games left to play.
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  • The Colts are averaging 34.5 points per game, the NFL record is 34.7.
• What Went Wrong with the Exit Polling? This is a good article which truly analyzes some issues which have been treated superficially by both journalists and partisan hacks (and even by some scientists at Cal Tech and MIT!)
• The Washington Post reviews Alexander the Crybaby.
  • "In this (version of Alexander) you think: Teri Hatcher could kick this twerp's butt."
  • "It has the same biopic failings as any MGM product of the mid-'30s"
  • Jolie: "best impression of Bela Lugosi while hampered by a 38-inch bust line."
• Learn to write in fluent 1337
• The new illustrated health warnings on European cigarette packs. (Including open heart surgery!)
• The Movie House reviews Richard Gere as King David, or "Dave" as he likes to call himself.
  • "Dave starts out as a humble shepherd boy who writes some songs and sings them to the sheep. Hey, even Sinatra started small."
  • "They smite the living shit out of a whole bunch of pagans with tribal names ending in "_ites", like the Hittites, Amalekites, Kenites, Jerahmeelites, Jezreelites, Carmelites, and Plebiscites. He even smote the asses of the obscure and peaceful sheep-herding tribe called the Woolites."
  • "Dave didn't really need to smite the Plebiscites. He just hung out with them and got them to hold a direct vote on whether to surrender to Israel."
• The first look at a trailer for Valiant. "The animated comedy tells the story of a lowly wood pigeon named Valiant, who overcomes his small size to become a hero in Great Britain's Royal Air Force Homing Pigeon Service during World War II. The RHPS advanced the Allied cause by flying vital messages about enemy movements across the English Channel, while evading brutal attacks by the enemy's Falcon brigade."
• Producers of the 32nd Carry On film insist the movie will still be made, despite losing cast members Danniella Westbrook and Shaun Williamson.
• Brazilian women apply decorative paint prior to their group dancing presentation, at the VII Indigenous Nations' Games. So what's so good about that? They do the dance topless, and Reuters took a picture of them getting ready.
• WWE parodies the NFL/Desperate Housewives ad. ("Watch the clip" link near the bottom of the page.)
• Brit execs choose Baywatch as worst US import show ever. It may have been bad, but people surely liked it. It is probably the most watched show in the history of television, having been watched at its peak by a billion people in 140 countries.
• Playmate Gallery - Dalene Curtis, June, 2001 - Courtesy of PlayboyPlus.com!
• Four free short vids from SPICE UNCENSORED!
• President Bush Offers Congratulations to House Majority Leader Tom Delay on His Formal Elevation Above Ethics and the So-Called "Law" (WHITEHOUSE.ORG)
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• Former Cheers star Shelley Long has been rushed to hospital after taking a suspected drug overdose.
  Friends fear the actress tried to kill herself.
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• Fifteen people have died mysteriously in front of their TV. Cause of death: the Gigli DVD.
• The trailer for Million Dollar Baby, Clint Eastwood's new boxing movie, starring Hilary Swank as the boxer.
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• The trailer and 4 clips from A Talking Picture. (John Malkovich, Catherine Deneuve, Stefania Sandrelli.) Rosa Maria, a young History professor, sets out with her daughter Maria Joana on a cruise that will travel through the Mediterranean to Bombay , India, where they will meet her husband. This pleasure cruise also serves for Rosa Maria, to get to know for the first time and show her daughter, places about which she talks in her classes but which she never visited. So, this trip through Ceuta, Marseille, the ruins of Pompei, Athens, the pyramids of Egypt, Istanbul, is also a journey through thousands of years of history, through the Mediterranean civilization that marked and still marks the West cultures. On the cruise, she will also meet three impressive women, well-known figures of different nationalities: a renowned French businesswoman, an Italian former model, and a Greek teacher and actress; and especially the captain, an American of Polish origin. But a strange threat disturbs the cruise and menaces the ship and the life of its passengers.

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

Click here to submit a URL for Other Crap

MOVIE REVIEWS:

Words, pictures, and vids from ICMS
 

1984 - (1984 - when else?) - part 2

• Hamilton #6 (.wmv zipped, .avi zipped)
• Hamilton #7 (.wmv zipped, .avi zipped)
• Hamilton #8 (.wmv zipped, .avi zipped)
• Hamilton #9 (.wmv zipped, .avi zipped)
• Hamilton #10 (.wmv zipped, .avi zipped)

First up from the Ghost...Margot "Lois Lane" Kidder's niece, Janet. Here is the Canadian actress topless and baring her bum in the shower. Scenes from 2002's "Darkness Falling".

• Janet Kidder (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
• Janet Kidder zipped .wmvs (1, 2, 3)

Next up, a couple of vids of Olivia Williams baring her breasts in scenes from the Kevin Costner movie "The Postman" (1997). Clip #1 also features a very brief bit of pubes as Williams climbs into bed.

• Olivia Williams zipped .wmvs. (1, 2, 3)

Heather Stephens

Nicolette Sheridan

Teri Hatcher
(1, 2)

Sheridan shows cleavage and pokies while riding a mechanical bull.

Hatcher is all dressed up in #1, and doing a silly dance in tight top before trying to ride the bull in #2.

Heather Stephens had a guest spot on last week's episode, and is wearing a tank top and tight jeans in the scene we have here.

Christina Cox
(1, 2)

Thandie Newton

The skin...
No nudity, but Alexa Davalos and Christina Cox both show some sweaty cleavage. Cox also shows off her amazing abs. Thandie Newton also showed a bunch of cleavage and wore several form fitting dresses.

The rant...
I absolutely loved the original "Pitch Black". It was visually wonderful, chock full of sci-fi thrills and it gave us Vin Diesel as Riddick...one of the best anti-heroes we've seen on screen in a long time. Best of all it was decently written and well executed on a budget of only $23 million! By the time it left theaters, it was a profitable movie that had brought in about $53 million world wide. Later it became a big hit on DVD, and apparently that's when the studio execs started seeing dollar signs.

Fast forward to summer 2004 and along comes the sequel, and one more classic example of just how bad the Hollywood Studio system can be. When will Hollywood learn that taking a small, surprise hit and trying make a big budget summer blockbuster sequel just doesn't work! They backed "Riddick" with a budget of $110,000,000, made sure every scene had tons of CG effects, and softened up our anti-hero so he would be more cuddly and marketable enough to get a PG-13 rating.

The result..."Chronicles" didn't even break even, and for good reasons.

The original was a lean, mean sci-fi flick on alien world, that put a hand full of surivors up against man eating monsters. A simple story of survival with a great twist...one survivor was a bad guy who was just as unpredictable and dangerous as the monsters -no heart of gold bullshit.

In the sequel we have an evil empire (yawn). An evil leader who is half dead (which gives him magic powers). Some people with funny haircuts and big plastic armor. Plus they even tossed in some kind of "Minority Report"-like psychics.

The basic plot is that the evil leader is so bad that only another bad guy can stop him and save the universe. (On a side note, I guess this proves Dark Helmet's theory that Evil will always triumph over Good, because Good is dumb.)

This time out, our big twist is that apparently Riddick really isn't that evil after all. In fact he's from a race of people that are genetically ass-kicking, but as fate would have it, the evil leader killed Riddick's people. So he's not really a bad guy, he's just horribly scarred from a childhood trauma. Maybe someone should give him a hug.

The original had a great pace, scenes chock full of nail bitting tension and some genuine thrills. The sequel is just one more predictable, big budget summer action flick. Vin was still pretty cool, and his paycheck was basicially half the budget of "Pitch Black"...so kudos there big guy. However I must say this....Vin, if you really are considering a third movie in this series...please, I beg you, don't do it. Just stop now. There are better projects out there for you.

Stacey Leigh Mobley
(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)