Inside Out III (1992) day two. The final two shorts are among the better of this set.

Within Ten Minutes shows two women bored in their apartment, when a news flash informs them that a nuke will destroy them in ten minutes. Hilary Morse chooses to break her diet as a final act, while Elizabeth Burr decides to have sex with the first man who knocks on her door. Burr shows breasts.

The Wet Dream stars busty Alex Datcher as a woman with a thoughtless boyfriend, and Olympic diver Greg Louganis as the tropical fish who loves her. We see her breasts throughout the entire segment. It is almost worth he price of the 4 DVD set to see Louganis with a row of fins on his back, and having sex with a woman.

To repeat last night's summary, "This is a D+. Only a genre addict would find anything of interest here."

The Last Kiss (2001)

If the official French movie involves a woman in mid-life who is unsatisfied by her boring bourgeois life, the official Italian movie must focus on guys who want to hang with the guys instead of tying themselves down with a wife and babies. It seems like all movie Italian Guys want to hang out with their friends forever, whether the movie is serious or silly. When you get down to it, even The Godfather is about a bunch of guys who have families to cover up the fact that like to hang out with the guys. That's basically what The Last Kiss is all about as well, although it is a comedy. Sort of. It's a "late coming-of-age" film about the crisis that men go through when they realize that they are about to say farewell to youth forever.

In this case, the lead character finds out that his girlfriend is pregnant, and his life seems to be taking a settled, predicable, boring shape. He's talking about diapers, buying a house, and choosing the wedding caterers, while his friends are planning to back-pack though Africa, or sleeping with a different woman every night, or otherwise holding on to their carefree youth. His hand-wringing is intensified by the fact that his friends have failed in their own attempts to settle with a single woman.

So he does what all men of all races do in such a case. He heads down to the local Catholic girls' high school, picks up a hot senior, and beds her for hours.

Unfortunately, this does not solve his problem. (Does it ever?) In fact, it makes it worse. (Doesn't it always?).

I liked the movie all right, I guess, but I didn' think it was anything special. The Italians know how to do this kind of calculated angst-laden tragicomedy, so it's a slick production which got some real critical praises, but before you go out to rent it, be advised:

1. It's in Italian, with sub-titles.

2. There's not enough humor and what there is, well, it is not handled that deftly.

3. The main characters are jerks.  It's difficult to form an emotional identification with any of them. They are superficial and their problems are the kind that don't evoke sympathy from everyday people. I mean, why are these guys so miserable? They have only the trivial preoccupations of sheltered lives. You know, like a rich guy who thinks, "How do I rid myself of the incredibly gorgeous 18 year old girl who loves me, so I can get back with the incredibly gorgeous twenty-something girl I got pregnant." Oh, spare me such anguish and suffering. The Grapes of Wrath it ain't.

4. Portions are quite sentimental, perhaps even maudlin.

 

• Ines Nobili
• Martina Stella

Bruce Almighty (2003)

In The Player, the Tim Robbins character described most movies with a hybrid formula. "So, it's knd of a Casablanca meets Francis the Talking Mule ....?"

That works perfectly here. This film is a formulaic hybrid.

It's The Mask meets Groundhog Day.

• The Mask. A meek, long-suffering bank clerk finds an ancient mask which gives him the power of the god Loki. At first he uses the powers to get money and revenge, and to pick up chicks, but he eventually finds that he can be happier as himself than as the god of mischief.

• Groundhog Day. A frustrated, bitter local reporter achieves a painful immortality when forced to re-live a single day again and again. This gives him god-like powers, because he can remember everything he learned on his previous trips through the day, and can use that knowledge to manipulate people. At first, he uses his powers childishly and selfishly, but eventually he reconciles with his fate and learns to make his one day a beautiful one by doing selfless things.

• Bruce Almighty. A frustrated, bitter, meek, long-suffering local reporter is given all of God's powers over the area covered by Buffalo, New York. At first, he uses his powers childishly and selfishly, but eventually he comes to realize what a self-centered person he has become, and does selfless things.

IMDb viewers rate Bruce exactly the same as The Mask, which somehow seems to validate the IMDb system, since it's pretty much the same freakin' movie.

Bruce Almighty re-unites the director/star team of Tom Shadyac and Jim Carrey, who created Ace Ventura and Liar, Liar together. These two guys definitely have the gift for laughs. Carrey knows how to do it, and Shadyac knows that he knows, and therefore lets him do it.

Like many people, I found the humor excellent and the sentimentality cloying. Carrey has no gift for subtlety at either. His unsubtle humor is easy to forgive because he's creative, and he brings such youthful energy and passion and complete abandon to his clowning, but his unsubtle, mawkish sentimentality can sometimes be a high price to pay for the laughs he delivers. He sometimes veers off the comedy highway and onto Robin Williams Lane.

Mr. Shadyac is not the director you would hire to to keep the treacle under control. I need only remind people that when Shadyac was not busy working with Jim Carrey, he also directed Patch Adams.

At its worst, Bruce Almighty has Patch Adams moments, but when Jim is being funny, he can be very funny indeed, and everyday movie goers really respond to his blend of wild humor and "sweet guy" persona. Critical reception was lukewarm, but the people loved it. It was a box office smash around the globe (including the #4 spot for the year in the USA as I write this), and is rated B+ by the voters at Yahoo.

No nudity, but that Catherine Bell has some awe-inspiring knockers.

• Catherine Bell

OTHER CRAP:

• The Museum of Russian Anti-Alcohol Posters

• Scientists need female volunteers to test "Orgasmatron" -instant orgasm machine.

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

• For those who DO want to see his dick, here is the Filmography of Obi-Wan's Light Saber

• Richard Pryor special: 'I Ain't Dead Yet'

• Neil Bush deals detailed in divorce records: "The women, he said, simply knocked on the door of his hotel room, entered and engaged in sex with him. He said he did not know if they were prostitutes because they never asked for money and he did not pay them. "

• HBO cancels Project Greenlight. Bravo Network may pick it up.

• Sports - 2003 Turkeys of the Year

• Canadian neighbours call 911 to report bad singing. No wonder Celine Dion and Bill Shatner moved to America. If bad singing is a crime in Canada, Gordon Lightfoot must be doing some serious prison time.

• NFL Players Vie For Femmiest Touchdown Dance

• X-rated cartoon parodies

• News Askew! You have to love Kevin "Silent Bob" Smith - his website has nekkid pictures of his wife, Jennifer Schwalbach.

• FHMUS.com presents a photographic stuidy of - Jillian Barberie

• The Spiderman 2 trailer will be ready to run with Return of the King

• The Dialectizer - Convert English text to any of several comic dialects.

• URL says it all: Engrish.com

• Seanbaby's Super Friends Page, The comments are fun - each of them a bit of stand-up comedy. Click on The Flash or Lex Luthor or anyone else, and read what he has to say.

• NBA: Timberwolves Dance Team 2003-04

• Scientists find 17 million year old nuts, but won't be able to study them until Wilford Brimley dies, and they are detached from his dick.

• New trojan masquerades as pics of couple in sex act.

• Finished Christmas shopping? Get started on Valentine's Day with a Poop Heart, only six bucks.

• Why wasn't reading the adventures of Dick, Jane, and Sally ever this realistic in elementary school?

• The Internet Encyclopedia of Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena

• Spread "Eagle", get it?

• URL says it all: LeiasMetalBikini.com

• Sarah Jessica Parker uses horse shampoo on her hair

• DVD Jon is at it again. The Norwegian kid who cracked the DVD security system in 1999, has now cracked ITunes.

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

MOVIE REVIEWS:

Here are the latest movie reviews available at scoopy.com.

• The yellow asterisks indicate that I wrote the review, and am deluded into thinking it includes humor.
• If there is a white asterisk, it means that there isn't any significant humor, but I inexplicably determined there might be something else of interest.
• A blue asterisk indicates the review is written by Tuna (or Junior or Brainscan, or somebody else besides me)
• If there is no asterisk, I wrote it, but am too ashamed to admit it.

Aw, the traditions of Thanksgiving Day in America.

1) Eat more food in a couple of hours than most 3rd World countries consume in a week.

2) Watch football before passing out from tryptophan poisoning.

3) Hang out with relatives you see twice a year because you're just too damn busy to see 'em on any other day.

4) Look at a bunch of caps of Hefmates and Pets of the silver screen.

Yep, for the third consecutive year here is a bunch, a mess, an ostentation of Hefmate and Pet caps. In alphabetical order:

Anulka Dziubinska (Hefmate of April '73) in Vampyres (1974. This movie teaches us that life is unfair even for vampire women. The male vampires get to eat great looking women while the female vampires eat one another. Sounds like your average porno flic.

The DVD of this movie is wonderful. Dozens of extra things on top of a weird-ass but entertaining movie. Worth the rental or the purchase.

Anyway, nine collages of Anulka in a triple-B performance. She had a terrific frame and beautiful face... hasn't aged too badly, either, as one discovers from a recent interview on the disc. Last collage is from publicity stills, also in the extras.

• Anulka Dziubinska (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)

Arline Hunter, Hefmate for August 1954, in a short film entitled The Appleknockers and The Coke. Tuna capped this treasure several months ago and sent into a few dozen frames. I sent in a few collages of frames he didn't use a couple of months ago. And these are the last of them. BTW, Tuna's review of the film is a real pleasure to read if you are at all interested in the history of little films like this one.

• Arline Hunter (1, 2, 3, 4)

Azizi Johari, Hefmate of June 1975, in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976). Self-consciously 70's movie without a lot to recommend it except the nekkid babes. In my opinion, Ms. Johari was a goddess... the woman I would have cast to play Athena had I been asked to make a movie of Greek mythology.

• Azizi Johari (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

A couple of non-nude but sexy former Hefmates who occupy entirely different ends of the happy life spectrum.

Dorothy Stratten, Hefmate for August 1979, in Galaxina. Dorothy wears some interesting clothes in her protrayal of a robot, which result in an acre of cleavage, some real nice pokies and the pedal digit of a dromedary.

• Dorothy Stratten (1, 2)

Jeana Thomasina is my personal favorite Hefmate of all time. She was Miss Nov 1980 and looks yummy in her brief appearance in 10 to Midnight (1983).

• Jeana Thomasina

Jean Manson (Hefmate of August 1974) is much less clothed in 10 to Midnight. Three collages worth of hooter exposure, to be precise.

• Jean Manson (1, 2, 3)

Now a word about these caps. For years folks have been capping the movie and claiming this woman is Jean Manson. Tuna and I disagreed and thought it was a second actress, named Cynthia Reams. I, myself, thought it was someone other than Jean because I remembered something odd about the role. In the credits, Jean is credited as playing the role of Margo, and I was certain that had not been the name used by the hooker in these caps. It did not make sense to me, in addition, that after a successful singing career in France, Jean Manson would play a minor role that involved taking off her top

Yet other capping artists insisted this was Jean Manson. So I grabbed the DVD and watched this stinking pile of doggie poo just to be sure. And it turns out I was confused because at no point in the movie is the woman in this scene identified by name. Not Margo. Not nothing.

But, no one else is identified as Margo, either. And no one else even remotely looks like Jean Manson. Another hooker does have a speaking part and I assume that is Cynthia Reams. When I compared caps of Jean from Young Nurses made more than a decade earlier and these caps I was convinced that everyone else had been right, I had been wrong. Not the least bit sorry, either, because it means another nekkid performance by a former Hefmate. I'm figuring the part was much bigger at some point (there are a couple of odd jump cuts) and that attracted Jean Manson to the role. Most of her performance, including a scene where she is named, must have hit the cutting room floor.

A former Pet and a former Hefmate in Watchful Eye (2001).

Juliet Cariaga (Pet of the Month for Dec '97) plays a murder victim. She has no speaking parts, but who the f*** cares? In these caps she gets real friendly with a character played by pornstar Nikki Fairchild. Typical of such movies, she gets it in the very next scene.

• Juliet Cariaga (1, 2, 3)

Julie Lynn Cialini (Hefmate for Feb '94) plays a bad girl in this movie, although she looks perfectly good to me. A beautiful woman in a kick-ass triple-B performance.

• Julie Lynn Cialini (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)

Two Pets who went on to dominate B movie nekkidness are Julie Strain (Miss June '91) and Monique Gabrielle (Miss Dec. '82).

Julie's caps come from Sex Court: The Movie, including the home movie included as a DVD extra.

• Julie Strain (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)

Monique's are from Flashdance, in which she plays an uncredited topless dancer.

• Monique Gabrielle (1, 2)

Ola Ray (Hefmate of June '80) shows off her perfect, recreational body in 10 to Midnight. The scene is longer but she acts the part of a very frightened young woman, and there is nothing remotely attractive about that.

• Ola Ray (1, 2)

Last up is Zdenka Podkapova, Pet of Month for April '99. She was in one those, no-plot, all-nekkid, explicit-posing DVDs, entitled Hottie of the Year. Didn't win, either. You'll recognize who did when I send in the caps next week.

• Zdenka Podkapova (1, 2, 3)

Allow me to add expressions of thanks to the Scoopies for doing all it takes to make the Funhouse the pleasure that it is, day after day, week after week, year after year. And to Tuna for a million and one things. And to the many others who find the movies, captures the images and send them our way to enjoy.

Elsa Pataki
(1, 2)

Linda Shayne
(1, 2, 3, 4)

• Silent Bob's wife Jennifer Schwalbach poses for the Bunny Mag! Kevin Smith provides a pic and also added a little commentary at newsaskew.com.
• In case that page changes, here's a direct link to the pic.

JACKSON LAWYER ISSUES WARNING
And Tito Will T.P. Your House - Tuesday, a judge barred an air charter company from selling a secretly-made videotape of Michael Jackson on a plane on his way to surrender to police. Jackson's lawyer said his client "would not be a pinata" for everyone who wants money. He said if Michael's privacy is invaded, "we will land on you like a ton of bricks."