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-.

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:

• Depressing films about euthanasia, abortion and the hardships of immigrant life bagged the top prizes at the 17th European Film Awards, just as they have at the first sixteen, and every other European film award show in history. The Europeans matched the L.A. film critics in one key category: Briton Imelda Staunton took the best actress statuette for her turn as a working-class mother who performs illegal abortions in the harrowing drama "Vera Drake."
• L.A. Film Critics Pick 'Sideways' as Year's Top Movie, Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby finishes second. Britain's Imelda Staunton was named best actress for her portrayal as an abortionist in "Vera Drake," and Irish actor Liam Neeson was handed the best actor honor for playing U.S. sex researcher Dr. Alfred Kinsey in "Kinsey."
• Here, at last, is an uncensored version of Chloe Sevigny obviously kneeling uinder the ol' mistletoe in The Brown Bunny
• Maim That Tune - Detune your head: "Are you plagued by Stuck Tune Syndrome? Do you have a tune stuck in your head you just can't get out? Take heart friend, for your suffering is over. The Maimograph Machine, through complex analysis and calculation, will find an even catchier tune to counter-act the one you already have."
• Rich New Yorkers give birds the bird, inspiring bird-lovers to give the bird to bird-evicters.
• Danny Ocean kicks vampire ass. The new Soderbergh film opened with a $14 million Friday, and took in not only more than Blade:Trinity, but more than the next five films added together!!
• The red-state warriors and blue-state battlers are at it again. This time, the goal isn't the White House. It's the Oscar. In one color-coded corner: Conservative Bible-thumpers pushing for nominations for The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre. In the other color-coded corner: Proud liberal Michael Moore pushing for nominations for his own religious act of faith focused on an earlier part of the bible - the Burning Bush. (Is Fahrenheit 911 the temperature at which a Bush burns?)
• The trailer for Ong Bak, the new Thai chopsocky film with the hopeful new prince of the martial arts, Tony Jaa. It's made with no wire work or CGI.
• Casting a porno film? Need to choose your cast by looking through some nekkid pictures of models?
• Future leading man roles for Tom Arnold? New operation can boost the size of a micro-penis.
• The trailer for Nobody Knows : "Hirokazu Kore-eda, the director of 'Maborosi' and 'After-life,' presents this exceptional story of a makeshift family of children left to survive in an urban Tokyo jungle. "
• The trailer for Beautiful Boxer. I know it sounds like I made this up, but this is the real summary: "Based on the true story of Thailand's famed transgender kickboxer, 'Beautiful Boxer' is a poignant action drama that punches straight into the heart and mind of a boy who fights like a man so he can become a woman."
• RUMSFELD DEMANDS FULL BODY ARMOR FOR NEXT MEETING WITH TROOPS. Felt Unprotected, Defense Secretary Says
• Jean Claude van Damme has described himself as a 'superhero in bed'. "I would always go for a muscular woman rather than for a skinny one but on one condition - her brains have to be as developed as her muscles."
• Sexy Video of Jessica Simpson as Daisy Duke
• Eiffel Tower Opens Elevated Skating Rink It is 18 stories above the ground.
• Geek of the day award. Man builds full-scale grandfather clock from LEGOs.
• Hustler Magazine warms to the U.K. with a 2005 Calendar.
• Dioxin poisoning caused the mysterious illness that scarred the face of one of those two Ukranianian Weird Vic Yankovic guys. I think it's the one that the West likes.
• Fishermen catch 1000 pound Mako shark. You are not gonna believe the size of this sucker.
• Here's one we missed in Japanese corner - an obscene MTV-style video. Pretty good, but not one friggin' octopus. I guess these are non-coastal Japanese people.
• The ultimate Christmas gift for that really strange kid on your list: The Christopher Walken - King of New York- 12 inch action figure
• Kate Beckinsale checks into hotels under the name 'Sigourney Beaver'.
• Nicole Kidman has dropped out of Mel Brooks' new film version of THE PRODUCERS
• A stone carving that was used as a cat's headstone has sold for 200,000 pounds at auction. Hey, it was a really cute cat. Actually, the stone turned out to be a Saxon-era stone cutting.
• Jon Stewart talks about the military terms of duty being extended unexpectedly.
• Jon Stewart talks, or maybe I should say "rants" about Donald Rumsfeld.
• The trailer and a new featurette from White Noise: "Michael Keaton plays a successful architect, Jonathan Rivers, whose peaceful existence is shattered by the unexplained disappearance and death of his wife, Anna (Chandra West). Jonathan is eventually contacted by a man, who claims to be receiving messages from Anna through EVP, the process through which the dead communicate with the living through household recording devices. These extraordinary recordings, captured by people all over the world, seem to confirm what many of us have dared to believe: it is possible for the dead to communicate with us. At first skeptical, Jonathan then becomes convinced of the messages' validity, and is soon obsessed with trying to contact her on his own. His further explorations into EVP and the accompanying supernatural messages unwittingly open a door to another world, allowing something uninvited into his life. "
• The fleshy filmmaker Michael Moore is back on the campaign trail trolling for votes - this time, for the People's Choice Awards.  

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 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.

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.

Words, pictures, and vids from ICMS

Whose Life is it Anyway? (1981)

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)

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".

• Katharine Towne, shows partial breast views. (1, 2, 3, 4)
• Katharine Towne zipped .wmv

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

• Mimi Langeland, shows a brief side breast view.
• Mimi Langeland zipped .wmv

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)

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.