Blue Valentine
2010
I don't suppose this will hold up when we vote for next year's best nude
scenes, mostly since there isn't that much nudity, but it will get my vote for
one of the best of January! I have to be honest and say that I couldn't make
it through the screener for this acclaimed drama because my tolerance for
extremely depressing movies has gotten lower with every year that I age. My
dad once told me that the same thing happened to him. Is it our specific
genes, or just a natural tendency for old farts to avoid unnecessary sadness?
I dunno, but I'm glad somebody else captured these scenes.
Michelle Williams
The Big Bang
2011
I did watch this one all the way through. Before I start rambling, let me
clear up the ID problems from yesterday:
- THIS is Sienna Guillory,
who once placed in the annual top nude scenes when she played Helen of Troy.
No nudity here except her butt in a stripper thong. A MODEST thong.
- This is Autumn Reeser,
of course. I don't know if we will remember this come December, but it is
surely the current frontrunner for nude scene of the year. Hot woman; great
sex and nudity.
Superficially, The Big Bang follows all the rules and clichés of the of the
"tough L.A. detective" genre that first became popular in the old
black-and-white days. As in the Spade and Marlowe stories and the endless
string of films created in the spirit of those novels, the poor but honest
private eye is hired for what seems like a simple case with a good payoff, but
he eventually finds himself enmeshed in a tangled web of lies and conspiracies
involving the highest levels of wealth and power. Along the way, he does a lot
of narration, gets lied to constantly, runs into some sexy dames, interrogates
some reluctant bartenders, gets sideswiped by crooked cops, gets roughed up by
some big galoots, flashes his roscoe, and runs into some rich people with
powerful strains of mental illness in their family histories. Everything is
complicated, and nothing is as it first seems. That's a pretty accurate
description of both The Big Bang and The Big Sleep.
Antonio Banderas plays the private dick who is hired by a gigantic ex-con
to find a stripper who wrote to him while he was in the joint.
After a series of misadventures and red herrings in L.A., Banderas ends up out
in the New Mexico desert because the missing stripper turns out to be the
wife, and virtually the captive, of a crazy billionaire who is executing a
wild scheme out there under the sands. The
crazy rich dude without limits is a stock character in noir detective films,
but this particular one, played by Sam Elliott, is richer and crazier than
usual. He's not just trying to corner the market on water or something. He
wants his own personal universe. Obsessed with metaphysical concepts developed
during some LSD trips, he is literally trying to re-create the big bang by
building a particle accelerator in some abandoned military facilities beneath
the New Mexico desert.
As befits such a crazy premise, the film comes up with a climax that is
truly over-the-top, and Banderas ends up using a souped-up power car to drive
away from what seems like the end of the world. The lesson here: make sure you
have plenty of gas in your tank at all times, in case you need to speed away
from Ragnarok. And also because that vintage convertible could be completely
unique and highly valuable if you can somehow squeeze it into the newly-formed
universe which emerges from the destruction of our own. But you'll have to
drive your car there, because Mayflower charges an arm and a leg for
interdimensional moves, and they calculate the charge by the pound, so you can
guess how much a convertible would cost.
As similar as the two films might be on the surface, The Big Bang is not The
Big Sleep, which took itself quite seriously. I was never sure whether The Big
Bang was supposed to be a noir detective film or a straight-faced parody of
same. Maybe a bit of both. One thing is certain: whether it is supposed to be
an tongue-in-check action film, a genre parody, or a black comedy, this film
is "out there." It is a strange, strange
film in may ways. I have barely scratched the surface of it in these
paragraphs.
It's not just the premise which is outlandish. The characters are universally
exaggerated and the visuals can be completely surreal. And if you don't really
care for the elements already mentioned, let me add one more thing: Autumn
Reeser's sex scene is fantastic, in every sense of that word. Best of all,
it's completely gratuitous. Not only is the sex and nudity irrelevant and
unnecessary to the plot, but Autumn's entire character should theoretically be
nothing more than an incidental extra. She was just a waitress in a run-down
dive of a coffee shop out in the desert. Banderas asked her if she had seen
the woman in a photo. She had not. That could easily have been the last we saw
of her, except that she and Banderas seemed to like one another, and promptly
agreed to a rendezvous, which is my way of saying they fucked non-stop for
three and a half minutes. The only purpose of that scene is to entertain you
with a hot sex scene! As the Good Lord intended.
I'm writing this before the film has been released in North America, and I
haven't heard anything about the distribution plans for this movie. I guess
The Big Bang will go straight to DVD in the USA. It's not an especially good
film, and it's not the kind of film that will pack the theaters with
mainstream viewers, but it's so downright loony that it can be fascinating. If
you have a taste for the unusual, this might be your cup of tea. I'm not
saying that you will definitely like it, but I guarantee that it will meet
your minimum daily requirement for odd stuff in a good old-fashioned
exploitation film.
