Sunday

Tuna
"Paris, Texas"

Paris, Texas (1984) is a joint German French film directed by Wim Winders and written by Winders and Sam Shepard. It came about because the two wanted to collaborate on a film. They started with an idea about a near catatonic who wanders into a small Texas border town, mute, and not remembering who he is or how he got there. His brother is found based on a card he had in his wallet, and comes down to bring him home to LA after being missing for years. This was as far as they got before casting, as they felt they needed to know what the characters really were all about before finishing the story.

We slowly learn that the man has a son who has been raised by his brother and his brothers wife (Aurore Clément), and that his wife is also missing. Turns out the missing wife has been sending a monthly deposit into an account for their son from a Texas bank. After being rehabilitated by his brother, and making friends with his son, he takes his son to go find his wife. He finds her working in a rather unsavory job in a peep booth. Finally, we are treated to a lengthy expository scene, where he tells the wife exactly what happened and why.

The film has a European pace, in other words, it creeps along. The photography is spectacular. The acting is superb, and Nastassja Kinski as the missing wife is absolutely gorgeous, but keeps her clothes on. The only exposure is a brief side view of Clément's right breast. The man, played by Harry Dean Stanton, does not speak for the entire first act. The score is eerie bottle neck guitar played by Ry Cooder. It is a highly acclaimed film, sitting at 7.6 at IMDb. Although it has a thin plot and little pace, it is riveting as a character driven drama. I was disappointed by the use of a long monologue at the end, but, overall, remained involved the entire running time of 147 minutes. Even if you don't normally like character driven drama and slow pace, you might also enjoy this one. B-.

  • Thumbnails

  • Aurore Clement (1, 2)

    "The L Word" (2004) Episodes 9 and 10

    Nine is the worst so far for nudity, with the exposure limited to two unnamed nude dancers at a lesbo party. Jenny (Mia Kirshner) is still struggling with her sexual identity, but finds herself with no lovers, male or female. Dana the tennis player (Erin Daniels) comes out to her conservative parents.

    Episode 10 includes a sex scene between Kirshner and her estranged husband. We see her breasts afterward, as he is telling her that it was a mistake, and he wants no part of her. Shane (Katherine Moennig) has become hairdresser to the stars, and one woman is offering to set her up in her own shop in exchange for their sexual relationship. Moennig shows breasts in a sex scene. The main focus switches to Jennifer Beals, who is being attacked on all sides. She and Laurel Holliman are attending group therapy for expectant parents, and one lashes out at her for not acting black enough to suit her. Holliman loses the baby, and she is under attack at work from a Christian right organization for booking a controversial exhibit. There is also nudity from an unknown as part of the art exhibit.

    There is no longer any doubt that this is a soap, but peopled with lesbian characters having lesbian problems. Some are common to people regardless of gender or sexual orientation, but most are uniquely lesbian. I am afraid that my lukewarm reaction to the series is changing to dislike.

  • Thumbnails
  • Thumbnails

  • Katherine Moennig (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)
  • Mia Kirshner (1, 2)
  • Unknown episode 10 (1, 2)
  • Unknown episode 9 (1, 2)

  • Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy)

    Good-Bye, Lenin (2003)

    Cameron Crowe was so impressed with the Spanish film Abre Los Ojos that he remade it into Vanilla Sky. It turned out OK, I guess, but I've never been much enamored of the idea of taking European films out of their own context. I mean, can you imagine a re-make of The Seventh Seal with Tom Cruise as The Knight and Christopher Walken as death? Well, now that I think about it, it would be kind of cool to re-make The Seventh Seal, just because Max Van Sydow could play death this time around! There is a certain poetic closure in that.

    The change of context wasn't the big problem with Crowe's Vanilla Sky, however. The real problem was that people went to it expecting to see a Cameron Crowe movie and ended up sitting through an M. Night Shyamalan movie. If Vanilla Sky had ever been seen by the Shyamalan audience, they might have liked it. It just wasn't a Cameron Crowe movie.

    If only Crowe had waited to do an English-language re-make, because Good-Bye, Lenin would have been the perfect project for him.

    1. It is a great movie, with broad audience appeal, that will never be appreciated widely in America because it is in German with English subtitles. In fact, it is trapped in a foreign film version of Catch-22. It is too mainstream for the people who normally like subtitled European films, but the same language barrier will keep mainstream audiences from seeing it. I believe it would be a monster hit in America if it were in English.

    2. It is a Cameron Crowe movie waiting to happen. Crowe's best work is all about maintaining one's humanity and decency in a dehumanizing environment: high school cliques, big-time rock, big-time sports, etc. This movie is about maintaining one's humanity under dehumanizing East German communism, and then again in the crazy, dehumanizing shock-therapy that the East went through in the reunification of Germany.

    The premise is very simple. A dedicated, idealistic woman really believes in The Glorious Worker's Paradise. She makes the crazy system work on a small scale, with her volunteer projects, letter writing, and citizen activism on behalf of worthwhile socialist and humanitarian causes. Then she has an accident; goes into a coma. While she lies unconscious, the whole world changes. The wall comes down, Germany reunifies, and Western values obviously triumph completely. When she comes out of her coma, virtually nothing is left of the culture of East Germany. Her doctor sends her home from the hospital, but with a warning to her children that any major shock could be fatal to her. Her loving son determines that the fall of her beloved East Germany would be such a shock, so he resolves to keep East Germany alive for her inside her apartment, and he enlists all of mama's old friends and colleagues to help him preserve the illusion.

    His project gets more and more complicated when he begins to realize how much things have changed. His mom wants an old brand of pickles that was produced under socialism. Long gone. The dreary old socialist stores are being replaced by shiny new markets with brands from West Germany, France, the U.K., and the U.S.A. He finds an old discarded jar from the socialist days, and fills it with a new kind of pickles, then resumes his scavenger hunt for those old pickles and the other forgotten treasures of the East. Although only a few months have passed since his mother's accident, it might well have been decades, so rapidly and completely has East Germany been consigned to the scrap heap of history.

    The final complication occurs when his mother looks outside and sees the old buildings festooned with Western-style advertising, especially for that ultimate symbol of capitalism, Coca-Cola. How can the son explain this? Serendipitously, he has a friend who wants to be a filmmaker, and the two friends see this as a perfect opportunity to practice filmmaking and deceive mama at the same time, by making nightly news shows which explain all the sights mama has seen of the reunified Germany - except that explanation always involves some triumph for the East over the corrupt forces of capitalism. (Which arouses no suspicion, since it is pretty much how East Germany spun everything anyway!)

    That main plot alone would be enough for a great movie. (The false news broadcasts and their inherent lies are hilarious.)

    But there is so much layering, such a rich tapestry of lives woven together by the fall of Communism. The film's writers obviously know the subject matter first-hand, and they bring in all the elements which reflect that time and place perfectly, while the director realizes all of the images necessary and appropriate to the task.

    • Mama's husband is still alive. He was a doctor. He fled to the West and prospered under capitalism. He abandoned his family in the East when the kids were very young. We are led at first to think that he was a monster for doing so, but the explanation is anything but that. He loved his wife, and would have loved to bring her out of East Germany, but she really believed in socialism. He waited and waited for an opportunity, prayed for reunification, then finally gave up started a new family. Mama never really told the whole story to the children.

    • Most of the people who fled to the West, in fact virtually all of them, were able to escape with only what they could stuff in their pockets as they made a surreptitious border crossing. They left their entire lives behind: photo albums, love letters, books, all of the things we humans consider our most precious personal belongings, not to mention vast stocks of food hoarded when the opportunities arose. As pictured here, the East Berlin of this time period is filled with apartments that still include people's entire lives.

    • The son's boyhood hero, the first East German astronaut, is still alive, now working as a cab driver. The son eventually manages to find a way to bring his faded idol back to glory, if only in a false news report.

    As in many great movies, some of the best background material is never discussed at all. It is just there, behind the actors, revealing the character of the transition period, the likes of which we will never see again.

    I lived in Eastern Europe in that Gorbachev era just after the wall came down, and was amazed by how rapidly the East assimilated the new ways. I was stunned by how easily people could jump from 1917 to 1990 in a matter of months, and I felt their great sense of sadness in knowing that some of the precious elements of their former lives would be lost instantly and could never again be captured, especially for those who genuinely believed that socialism might have produced a compassionate society if only it could somehow have by-passed the Stalins and Honeckers of the world, who turned their countries into Kafkaesque and/or Orwellian nightmares. I lived for many years with a woman whose retired parents had their lives unraveled by Glasnost. (The transition was especially difficult for pensioners in many parts of the old Soviet bloc, although the Germans dealt fairly well with this problem.)

    I could never articulate all the feelings that I had in those days, nor would I know how to communicate those feelings to other people, Fortunately, the people who made this film knew everything I knew, felt everything I felt, and more, and they had the artistic vision and talent to make it come alive in an interesting, touching, and funny movie. It's a movie which captures an era perfectly, in a way that allows the rest of us who were not there to understand all the complexities of the time, yet it is also just a simple movie about a guy's love for his very deserving mother.

    I laughed out loud several times during the fake news reports in this film, and I'm not ashamed to say that there were times when my eyes were blurred from emotion, especially when the kid brought the old astronaut out of retirement to give East Germany a proper send-off. Then I watched it all a second time! This is a great movie, so rich, so compassionate, so human. And the kid's voice-over narration is absolutely eloquent, pure poetry, but delivered perfectly in character, matter-of-factly, not rhetorically. The film won just about every award that a German film can win in Europe. (Of course, the people in Germany and elsewhere in Europe felt the emotions of this film in a way that most of you cannot, but you'll still like it.) If you have any tolerance at all for subtitled films, this should be #2 on your list, after Amelie.

    • Random women (1, 2). These two scenes are actually in the film. (There is also full-frontal male nudity, but nothing from the female stars.)

    • But there is good news! Although Chulpan Khamatova does no nudity in the theatrical release, there are lots of deleted scenes, and this is one of them. Because her nurse uniforms disguise her chest, and because she looks so much like the small-breasted Canadian actress Molly Parker, I never dreamed that Chulpan had this kind of chest. My jaw dropped about to floor level when she flashed (too, too briefly) one of those Mimi Rogers lookin' mofos.

     

    Other Crap:

    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:

    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.

    Shiloh

    Words from Scoop.

    .avi's from Shiloh.

    .wmv files made by Scoop from Shiloh's .avi's.

    NOTE: because of a unique combination of circumstances with the Windows media player and some substantial bandwidth theft, we will have to do all of our movie files in zip format. Left click on the files as you normally would to view a picture. When you get a choice, click on "save", and put it on your hard drive in the directory of your choice. UnZIP and play from there.

    I know this is not especially convenient, but it allows the film clips to continue. I can protect .zip files from hot-linking in the same way I can protect still images. For some reason, if I protect .avis and .wmvs from hot-linking, they will not play in the Windows media player, and I can't get a satisfactory work-around. Perhaps I will find a better solution, but for now this new policy allows you to continue getting the movie clips you want to see, which is much preferable to my abandoning the clips altogether.

    My Tutor (1983) (day 3)
     

    Male fantasy premise - horny and sensitive teenager, gorgeous young tutor. The co-stars, Matt Latanzi and Caren Kaye, had short-lived careers. Caren attracted a lot of horny stares for many years, but couldn't translate her "favorite nude scene" status into lasting fame. It seems that she was always on Battle of the Network Stars or Love Boat, but not much else.

    The caps of Caren Kaye can be found in the Funhouse Thursday and Friday. Here are the others.

     

     

    Perhaps these tips will help if you have trouble with the codecs for these movies:

    Shiloh says:

    FYI when I hypercam vids to make the file size smaller I use DivX MPEG-4 Fast-Motion for the video compressor, then I use virtualdub to compress the audio. The properties for the vids says the video codec:  DivX Decoder Filter & audio codec:  Morgan Stream Switcher which I'm not familiar with. When I compress the audio with virtualdub I use MPEG Layer-3.  A friend of mine told me about compressing the audio about (6) mos. ago. Like I said previously, only been capping for a year & a half & I'm no expert. Hopefully this info will help members with the proper codecs for my vids.
     
    When I cap big brother's I use hypercam mostly & sdp & asfrecorder if the set up allows me. I stopped using camtasia cause the file sizes were always too big, could never figure out the process, over my head lol, plus it cost too much to buy in my opinion.

    A reader says:

    You mentioned that some users were having trouble with the videos on your site. There is a tool designed to determine what codec is needed for a video. http://www.headbands.com/gspot/ Hope this is useful to you or your users.

    Scoop says:

    I made the .wmv versions of each video. The codecs for these: Windows Video V8, Windows Audio 9. The upside of these is that you know the codecs, and they'll play in the Windows Media Player. The downside is that they are slightly larger, and slightly lower quality.

    ICMS

    Words, pictures, and vids from ICMS

     

    Whose Life is it Anyway? (1981)

    First there's two clips from the 1981 movie "Whose life is it anyway?" starring Richard Dreyfuss. The film deals with the still controversial issue of euthanasia. Richard Dreyfuss plays the part of a paraplegic man who doesn't want to spend the rest of his life in that state and therefore would like to end his life in a way he considers dignified. 23 years later there are still only a couple of places in the world which allow people to end their own lives under those conditions (given certain criteria). That's the reason why I think the topic is still controversial and the movie still isn't outdated. In this film that rates 7.2 in the IMDb and is still only available on VHS, Richard Dreyfuss's character has a vision of Janet Eilber dancing naked in a triple B performance. Surprisingly enough I couldn't find anything of her in the back issues nor the Encyclopedia.

     

    Internal Affairs (1990)

    Secondly I've got one clip of Faye Grant in 1990's "Internal Affairs". Faye is probably best remembered from the series "V" and back then she seemed to be facing a bright career. For some reason, however, this didn't happen and that is how we find her handling Richard Gere's stick shift while he's checking out her "gear" box. Sorry, but I couldn't resist the pun here, how obvious it may be. Faye bears a breast during this process.

    Brainscan
    'Caps and comments by Brainscan:

    Just a quickie today.

    I found some raw frames of Italian babe Pamela Prati in "Io Gilda" on usenet. She's a personal favorite, so I edited these together for the Fun House.

    • Pamela Prati. Topless in all, rear views in #3 and #6 plus full frontal nudity in #7. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)

    Crimson Ghost
    NOTE: We currently have to do all of our movie files in zip format. Instead of viewing them online, save the zip files to your hard drive in the directory of your choice, un-zip and play from there.


    Trying to keep up with the Ghost's output....

    First up today, 'caps and vids from small budget comdey and semi-cult favorite, "Sol Goode".


    Next up, scenes from the direct-to-vid movie "Shelter Island", starring Stephen Baldwin, Chris Penn, Patsy Kensit and Ally Sheedy.


    Next the Ghost takes a look at the 1996 movie "House of the Damned", starring "Baywatch" regular Alexandra Paul and one of the "My Two Dads" dudes, Greg Evigan.

    • Mary Kate Ryan is topless in two love scenes. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
    • Mary Kate Ryan zipped .wmvs (1, 2)

    Hankster
    'Caps and comments by Hankster:

    Scoops,
    Today we venture off and take a look at a tittie movie called "Behind Bedroom Doors".

    What do we get to see? Just three attractive women showing off their boobs at every opportunity.

    So here's a look at Brook LaVelle, Monique Alexander and Nicole Sheridan. Folks may recognize Alexander and Sheridan from some of their hardcore movies.

    • Brook LaVelle and Monique Alexander. Both ladies are topless, Alexander bares a little bum and there is some mild lesbo stuff too. (1, 2, 3)

    • Brook LaVelle aka Amber Karney, toplessness. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

    • Nicole Sheridan, also topless.

    DeadLamb
    Bree Turner The über-cute babe from "Deuce Bigalow" showing a little cleavage in scenes from the movie "Whacked!" (2002).

    Catherine Zeta-Jones The "Ocean's Twelve" star showing a little cleavage on Leno.

    Debra Wilson
    (1, 2)

    The former "Mad TV" cast member nekkid in scenes from "Skin Deep" (2003). In #1 she's wearing see-thru lingerie that reveals her pubes. In #2 she shows off her big'uns while riding a dude.

    Drea de Matteo The former Sopranos babe showing tons of cleavage on a recent episode of "Joey".

    Tara Reid Tara showing off plenty of robo-cleavage at the Billboard Music Awards.

    Heather Stephens
    (1, 2)

    Excellent thong views in scenes from the indie film "Clubland" (1999).

    Variety
    Chloë Sevigny
    (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)

    More 'caps of Sevigny topless in scenes from the Vincent Gallo movie "The Brown Bunny". Links 3, 6 and 7 feature Chloë taking on two dudes at once in a sex scene.

    Catherine Zeta-Jones
    (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)

    The Oscar winner topless (and wearing a sea-shell bikini) in scenes from her first movie "1001 Nights" aka "Sheherazade".

    Milla Jovovich Coming to DVD December 28! Here's Milla topless in scenes from "Resident Evil: Apocalypse". Thanks to LC.