Mailbag:

Hello. I'm a subscriber looking for a certain film I saw when I was much younger. I don't know anything about it other than the sex scenes - can't remember actresses name or anything. I'm pretty sure it was made in the 70s.  I think it was a film about a young girl's walk on the wild-side, kind of thing. It might have just been a made-for-TV film, I'm not sure.

The sex scenes I remember: One scene where the girl lies on her back, on bed, masturbating while wearing purple or blue panties. Towards the end of the film, she is raped while wearing school uniform. Another man takes pictures for a pornographic magazine. The scene ends with the guy throwing a  blanket down to cover her naked body.

If any of this sounds familiar, I'd be very grateful for any info on a  possible title.
 

Scoop's note: anyone able to identify this for us?

Rocky Balboa (2006)

Since there are no pictures for this film. If you are curious, check out the review at The Movie House.

THIRD PARTY VIDEOS:

• Immoral Tales: Part 3 in a series of 4 film clips from Walerian Borowczyk's famous multi-story milestone in the history of Euro-sleaze. Here's Florence Bellamy  (Zipped avi)

• Claire Skinner in Perfect Strangers. Never seen it, don't know anything about it.  It's rated 8.6 at IMDb, which says it's a heart-warming family drama. Ya gotta love it when those include plenty of tits! That certainly assures several extra degrees of warmth in my heart. Be that as it may, Claire is adorable. (Zipped avi) This is available on DVD and seems to be a decent movie, so maybe Tuna will cap it for us. (Hint, hint.) I really want to capture Claire's full-frontal scene in A Dance to the Music of Time, but the DVD is only available used, and doesn't sell for less than sixty quid (about three trillion U.S. Dollars or, for our Italian readers, so many Italian lire that mathematicians don't know how to represent it) , so I'm waiting for a re-issue.

BEST NUDE SCENES of 2006:

Balloting is finished

• See the numerical results here.

• See the pictorial here.

OTHER CRAP:

Catch the deluxe version of Other Crap in real time, with all the bells and whistles, here.

MOVIE REVIEWS:

Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe). White asterisk: expanded format. Blue asterisk: not mine. No asterisk: it probably sucks.

FACTOTUM (2005)

Factotum is based on the Charles Bukowski novel of the same name.  The plot here is simple, he goes through several jobs, two women and several apartments while pursuing his two loves of booze and letters. The title comes from the Latin expression "fac totum," which means "do everything," and the English word refers to a jack of all trades and/or day laborer.

Bukowski wrote from extensive first hand knowledge about being a skid row derelict and drunk, and this is the fourth attempt to bring him to the silver screen. This is the first such film made after his death. Scoopy felt it was the worst of the four at capturing the essence, or should I say odor, of the real Bukowski. I disagree, and think this the "best Bukowski" of the four. I was only able to find one excerpt from the novel on line, but the excerpt was faithfully shown in the film. Scoop felt this version was too clean and not disgusting enough. I agree that it didn't wallow in the mire as much as, say Barfly, but I don't see that as a bad thing. We are, after all, talking about a man who was not entirely unsympathetic. A specific example will illustrate my position. Bukowski's Chinaski wakes up next to LIli Taylor, obvious disheveled and seriously hung over. He staggers to the commode and vomits, then reaches for a beer. Then Lili does the same. There is no sound of flushing. I did not need to see the actual vomit to get the point. In fact, I could almost smell the second hand booze and stale smoke they both reeked of. A drunk is never more repugnant then first thing in the morning after a night before.

I appreciated the way director Bent Hamer showed me Bukowski's world from a distance, and with a little levity. It did not make him any less a shiftless drunk, but also made him believable as an educated writer who, despite a lifetime of alcohol abuse, still had enough mental faculty for brilliance.

 

Scoop's notes:

Given the fact that Bukowski wrote the screenplay for Barfly and worked on the production as a consultant, I'd have to say that was a more faithful interpretation!

The real point I made in my review, besides ridiculing the preposterous casting of pretty-boy Matt Dillon as Charles "ugliest guy in the history of the world" Bukowski, is that this film decided to focus on only one aspect of Bukowski: the humor. Although it sanitized Buk's environment, and did the worst job of the four films at capturing the disgusting world in which he lived, it did the best job of all the Bukowski films of extracting his humor and portraying it on screen, so in that sense I agree with Tuna.

As a comparison, take the two filmed versions of Lolita. Lolita is a sad and funny book. Kubrick's version focused in on Nabokov's humor, Lyne's version narrowed in on the sadness. Both are good Nabokov in a certain sense, even though the two films could not be more unalike. Barfly and Factotum are not very similar, yet both good takes on Bukowski - but in very different ways.

By the way, the modern English expression "jack of all trades" is nearly a literal reinterpretation of a Latinate term which was used in the English of Shakespeare's time "Johannes factotum" - more directly translated as "johnny do-all."

Marisa Tomei

Lili Taylor

Emily Hynnek

The Big White (2005)

This film is funny, with slapstick and moments of off-beat humor. It also has some real drama and a gentle sweetness running through it. Robin Williams stars as Paul Barnell, an Alaskan travel agent who is married to Margaret (Holly Hunter) and they a make a lovely, if rather dull couple. He's doing his best to make life as good as it can be, given that Margaret suffers from a combination of undiagnosed mental illnesses that none of the experts seem to be able to identify. Paul is struggling to pay the bills, so desperate for money that he claims his missing brother Raymond should be presumed dead, if only to collect on his life insurance. Giovanni Ribisi is Ted, the insurance man assigned to the case, who promptly turns him down. Down but not out, Barnell gets a bright idea when he finds a dead man in the dumpster outside his office -- he'll claim the body is his missing brother in an accidental death settlement which will net him a million dollars. It's not so easy, as Ted is ruthlessly skeptical and tenaciously vigilant in proving Paul is scamming the insurance company, resulting in a test of wills that is only further compounded when the hit men responsible for the unknown cadaver want their body back.

It's a gentle farce, which works because the characters are so nicely conveyed, you do hope things will work out. And it's fabulous listening to a foul-mouthed Holly Hunter delivering her lines with aplomb: "Say hello to your slut mother" she tells the paper boy with a sweet smile when he collects his money.

 

Alison Lohmann

Claire Plaut in 24/7: The Passion of Life