Wednesday

The Tuna Watch:

Tuna slacked off last month with a mere 1,155 caps. To place that in perspective, it's more than Hugo has done in his lifetime, although Hugo has been around for nearly a decade and is one of the most prolific cappers in history.  Anyway, that brings Tuna's lifetime total to 97,856 in the countdown to six figures. To look at it another way, it is approximately four times as many as I have done, even though I'm probably in second place, and have been at it longer!

 

Beer League (2006):

John Goodman once pointed out that he knew he was too fat when they told him he had to lose weight to play Babe Ruth. Well, the character of Artie De Vanzo in Beer League is an obese slob who plays softball. He makes Babe Ruth look Nicole Richie.

Looks like Artie Lange lost about fifty pounds to play the role.

There's been a trend in the past few years among lowbrow films. The brow keeps getting lower and lower. Think of it as a limbo contest for guys who can't even bend over to tie their shoes.  This flick has its brow down there about as low as a brow can go, down there in the Moose Skowron brow range.

It's also pretty damned funny.

But I gotta warn ya, it's only funny if you appreciate a certain type of humor. Up in the Northeast there's a kind of no-holds-barred, crude, obscene, obnoxious, raunchy, politically incorrect, insulting kind of banter that goes on between jocks, tough guys, and would-be tough guys. And that's when they really like each other. We used to call it ball-busting. Maybe they still do. I don't know, because I left the Northeast in 1972, but it seems to me from watching this film that the guys still bust balls exactly the way we used to 35 years ago. Maybe even a little rougher. If you cut away all the stuff that doesn't matter in this film, it's all about ball-busting.

The disposable plot of the film is a New Jersey twist on the traditional "root for the underdog" sports comedy. It's Caddyshack reworked for slow-pitch softball. Most of the time this formula pits "slobs versus snobs" but the whole "snobs" concept doesn't really fit into the North Jersey blue collar softball scene, so the formula had to be tweaked a little bit into "slobs versus jerks." Even then it's hard to tell the difference. The only real distinction between them is that the jerks comb their hair, and maybe the slobs have a little better sense of humor.

Is an unforgettable cinema experience? Hell no. I have to write the review now, two minutes after the film ended, because I won't remember it tomorrow. But even so, I enjoyed it. It brought back a lot of memories of old friends and rowdy times from my youth in the New York area. Come to think of it, I never remembered those times the next day either.

Hell, I laughed out loud a few times. That's worth the time I invested to watch it. Oh, sure, the film also strikes out a lot, but so did Babe Ruth. Taking a good cut is part of hitting homers, and it's part of writing jokes. When you nail one, as this film does occasionally, people forget about the K's. Your mileage may vary, of course. If your favorite author is Jane Austen this might not be for you. And you might want to take a pass on this film if your favorite radio memories have all occurred on NPR. On the other hand, if Howard Stern and his gang crack you up, you should get more than a few laughs here.

Here's the Scoopy test. Watch this clip (zipped .wmv). If it makes you laugh, rent the DVD. If not, skip down to the naked stuff.

Here's the film clip of the entire bachelor party (zipped .wmv), which includes 100% of the film's nudity. The woman playing the "human pitching machine" is porn star Keisha. The other women are unidentified.

Keisha
 

 

THIRD PARTY VIDEOS

  • As much as I hate to admit it, given the presence of Hugh Grant, Love Actually is really my kind of movie. Lots of laughs, big open-hearted sentiment, and plenty of nudity. These five zipped .wmv clips feature Joanna Page (four clips) and Laura Linney (the other one)

  • Here's something different. Markie Post in a bikini on The Fall Guy (zipped .avi) Girl had a helluva body on 'er.

  • A zipped .avi of Laura Ramsey in The Covenant (sample caps in the collage below)

Laura Ramsey
 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

Love and Human Remains (1993)

Let's see what I can manage in the way of a plot summary:

Thomas Gibson and Ruth Marshall live together. They are former lovers, but now that he has entered a gay phase and given up acting in favor of waiting tables, she is looking for a new relationship. She finds two possibilities. The first is a bartender who ends up being married, the second is a teacher she meets in her gym class who happens to be a woman, Joanne Vannicola. The other four major characters belong to Gibson. There is Mia Kirshner as a domainatrix/psychic/hooker, his under-age busboy who thinks he is straight but is hot for Gibson, a sometimes gay lover he knows from a night club, and his best friend who seems to have intimacy issues. Of course, Gibson is the poster child for intimacy issues, frequently stating that there is no such thing as love. While all of these characters are playing the dating game, a serial killer is harvesting local women at an alarming rate.

Whatever.

Love and Human Remains is supposed to be a dark comedy, and a score of 6.7 at IMDb would indicate that it is highly regarded, or at least watchable. It even won some Genie awards for the acting.  From the IMDb score and the comments, it is clear that I just didn't get it, or it is not my sort of film. From my viewpoint, changing all of the relationships from gay to straight would take away any interest whatsoever. However, I learned nothing special about gay or straight relationships from this film.

Lets call it a dark comedy/drama with a gay undercurrent, and award a C.

  • Ebert and Berardinelli agree with each other at 2 stars.
  • Nudity: Ruth Marshal shows both breasts, Joanne Vannicola shows her right breast and buns, and Mia KIrshner shows her left breast.
 

Ruth Marshal

 

 

Joanne Vannicola

 

 

Mia Kirshner

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Comments by Scoop)

Another incredible batch from the future. You da man, LC!

Sarain Boylan in Bon Cop, Bad Cop. This film now holds the record for the highest box office ever achieved by a Canadian film in Canada. (It achieved this last year, the first film to pass Porky's after more than two decades.) It actually wasn't that popular in the English-speaking areas. 80% of its grosses came from Quebec.
Zoe Naylor in The Book of Revelation.
Ana Belo in The Book of Revelation.
Odette Joannidis in The Book of Revelation.
Nadine Garner in The Book of Revelation. LC really scooped me on The Book of Revelation. I have a screener sitting around somewhere, and had no idea what the hell it was, so I ignored it! I think it might be time for me to dig it out of wherever I threw it.
Elisabeth Shue in First Born
Audrey Tautou in Hors de Prix
Clare Grant in Masters of Horror, season 2, episode 8.
 

Dann reports on Future Kill:

The two most notable things about this 1985 Sci-Fi are the really cool promotional poster by H. R. Geiger, and the fact that the stars also appeared as the stars of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the original one). Other than that, it's a pretty mediocre flick, bordering on bad

Set in the future, a group of violent protesters calling themselves "mutants" rule the city. They dress like a cross between 70's punk rockers and rabid raccoons, painting their faces with black masks and wearing outrageous outfits to show the effects of toxic poisoning on the planet.

A group of fraternity boys decide to teach them a lesson, and you can guess how well that turns out, especially since one of the mutants, Splatter, is actually a victim of toxic poisoning, and takes out his hatred by killing everything in sight. No non-violence for this guy.

Even Sci-Fi lovers will have a hard time cozying up to this thing, because the script is lame, the acting and production worse, so we're left with two nude scenes that, while not exceptional, manage to be the best things about the movie.

 

Denice Creach Karin Kay

 

 

 

 


Today the Time Machine is off to 1994 for our favorite "Desperate Housewife," Teri Hatcher, in "Cool Surface". Teri was hot and topless in this forgettable B-movie.  

 

 

 

Notes and collages

The Supernatural Ladies

Julie Christie in Don't Look Now

 
...I completely understand the legend that Ms. Christie and Donald Sutherland actually had sex in this film...just look at their expressions...
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More of Jessica Alba at the beach. If I understand correctly, the ones in the black bikini are new and the others are a year old. Not that it matters. The Three Jessicas - Alba with her toned all-American girl look, Biel with her muscles and Simpson with her powerful legs - sure show off the value of physical fitness. I prefer them to the Three Tenors. And they just absolutely beat the hell out of the Three Paulies.

 

Abbie Cornish in Candy

 

A new batch from Hugo:

Kari Wuhrer in Sex and the Other man

 

Lana Wood whips out the giant areolae for some serious Demon Rage

 

Leonor Varela in Americano

 

 

Linda Park in a season two episode of Enterprise

 

 

Sim Garewal in Siddhartha

 

 

Lisa Raines in Fanny Hill

 

 

Kathleen Beller in The Sword and the Sorcerer