Monday


Shameless

s8e11, 1080hd

Ruby Modine






Unite 42
s1e1, 1080hd

Angelique Vercray

Maureen Merchiers





Souviens Toi
s1e4, 1080hd

Lygie Divivier





Les Innocents
s1e4, 1080hd

Barbara Cabrita




Naked News

Jan 19th, 1080hd

Chantal auditioned

and Laura Desiree delivered the Hollywood XPress segment




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Check Other Crap for updates in real time, or close to it.



"Big Little Lies"

s1e5, 1920x1080

Reese Witherspoon's body double




Pope Joan

"La Papesse Jeanne"; 2016; 720p

Agathe Bonitzer


Bientot Les Jours Heureux

2016; 1080hd

Sabrina Seyvecou


Asphalt

2016; 1080hd

Celine Martine Sisteron




Lovelace

2013

Amanda Seyfried is topless in Lovelace (2013),

while Debi Mazar

and Juno Temple look good.



Rebecka

s1e6

Ida Engvoll





Professor Marston And The Wonder Women

2017; 1080hd

Bella Heathcote and Rebecca Hall film clip (Heathcote collages below)






Lena Lauzemis in Stille Reserven (2016)

Josephine de la Baume in Road Games (2015) in 1080hd

Salma Hayek in Ask the Dust (2006) in 1080hd



Here is what those scenes would have looked like without the day-for-night filter

(No links. That's as big as I could make them without drowning in noise.)





John Fante's 1939 novel "Ask the Dust" is revered by those who love gritty stories about the less glamorous aspects of California's place in 20th century history. Set in Depression-era Los Angeles, it chronicles the relationship between a scholarly young Italian-American from Colorado who moves to L.A. to write the Great American Novel, and a beautiful and troubled young Mexican immigrant. Although there is an obvious mutual attraction, the consummation of their relationship is impeded by the fact that he's a virgin who's terrified of sexual failure, and she has a major drug problem. Not to mention the fact that she's in love with another guy!

Fante's novella has long been considered too literary, too elusive, and generally too emotionally unsatisfying to translate into a good movie, but if anyone was capable of transforming that vision into cinema it should have been Robert Towne, who wrote Chinatown. Towne wrote and directed Ask the Dust, and he started off with some perfect hiring decisions. He enlisted Caleb Deschanel, one of the greatest cinematographers on the planet, to man his cameras, and he brought in Dennis Grassner to do the kind of production design he has always done for the Coen brothers. Those moves paid off in spades. The working class portions of L.A. look sleazy, brown, and hazy. The attention to period detail creates memorable scenes for Deschanel to film, and he does his usual brilliant job filming them.

Great screenwriter, great cinematographer, great production design, great source material ... so, it's a great movie, right?

Not if you ask the critics, the majority of whom panned it. Not if you ask IMDb voters, who score it a tepid 5.7. Not if you ask ticket buyers, who bought fewer than a million dollars worth. The film didn't connect with people.

So what went wrong?

Well we should not ignore the possibility that the cynics were right about this book being a poor candidate for a commercially viable movie, but we'll get back to that. There may have been other problems as well.

First, I wasn't very comfortable with the casting. The part of Arturo Bandini, the author's surrogate, first-person narrator of the story, a book-smart dreamer, was played by Colin Farrell ... because when you think of virginal, bookish, inhibited Italian-Americans, you automatically think of Colin Farrell. And then the part of Camilla, the 20-year-old Mexican waitress with a mercurial disposition, too much attitude, and a heavy dope habit, was played by Salma Hayek. Nice, reasonable, bright, sensible 40ish Salma Hayek. I kept wondering how she could work a hard job on her feet all day in the heat of summer, while also dying of consumption and smoking dope, and still look perfectly manicured in every way at the end of her double shift. Salma is one of the most beautiful and appealing women in the world, and she looks better now than she ever has, but maybe she was just too glamorous, too sophisticated, and too well-spoken for this role. Salma and Colin are both big stars and solid talents. I like them both, and I can see that their star power was intended to help the film, but they just didn't fit very well into these roles. Of course, Robert Towne's screenplay took some liberties with the book, and that allowed him to make the characters somewhat more suitable for Hayek and Farrell, but there was only so much he could do without losing the essence of the story.

Second, this was a very tricky story to adapt. The first half of the movie tracks closely with the written page, but then Towne ran into an inherent problem caused by the book's giant gaping flaw. Although author John Fante is supposed to be one of those experts at chronicling the seedy side of life, ala Charles Bukowski, the fact of the matter is that he made the character of Camilla a pot-head without knowing anything at all about the effects of marijuana. He clearly didn't do any scientific research, and if he based his character on actual dope smokers, it's obvious that they were junkies who also happened to smoke some pot, thus leading Fante to draw some inaccurate conclusions. Fante's entire concept of marijuana use was based upon the now-laughable ignorance of his own time. (Reefer Madness came out in 1936, and this story was written circa 1938 with the same fundamental misconceptions.) Presumably without having done his homework, Fante basically wrote the Camilla character as a junkie, except that he called heroin "marijuana."  Since Fante's uninformed perceptions could not credibly be assimilated unfiltered into a modern film, screenwriter Towne had to make a difficult choice. He could leave the story the same but simply change the name of the drug with a search-and-replace, thus making Camilla a full-fledged heroin addict (which was consistent with her behavior), or he could severely soften the importance of her drug habit in the focus of the book. He chose the latter. The movie's Camilla smokes dope, but the effects of marijuana are only those which we now know to be realistic.

Once that decision had been made, Towne was left with a gaping hole in the narrative. The book's story ends tragically for Bandini and Camilla because of her increasingly erratic behavior brought on by her ... um ... pot habit - that is to say by the economic and psychological toll exacted by substance abuse. Towne thus had to make another decision: get rid of the tragedy and bring the lovers together, or find another cause for Camilla to leave Bandini's life. He really couldn't dispense with the tragedy and give the story a happy ending, because that would have destroyed the true noir essence of the story, hence the element that would inspire anyone to deem it worth filming in the first place. Therefore he had to find something else to cause the tragic ending. If chronic pot use wasn't to be the cause of Camilla's ultimate disappearance, what would be? Towne solved the problem by choosing to recombine Camilla's characteristics and that of another character, the bartender, Camilla's lover, who was dying of consumption in the book. As Fante originally wrote it, the bartender ends up alone in a shack in the desert, coughing his way to death. In Towne's adaptation, the bartender owns the shack in the desert, but it is Camilla who ends up dying of tuberculosis in that rickety bed.

Towne's decisions resulted in an emotionally unsatisfying story. Bandini (Colin Farrell) and Camilla (Salma Hayek) dance around one another for the first two thirds of the movie, seeming to be mean to one another just for the joy of meanness, even though we can see that they will eventually have to come together. Farrell and Hayek seemed to be movie characters mouthing movie dialogue rather than human beings acting with genuine motivations. The two of them kept asking each other why they were being so ornery to one another, but I never did hear either of them give a convincing or heartfelt explanation, and I found their fake contempt for one another to be both irritating and lacking in credibility. Later in the film, when the lead characters finally seem to be acting believably, and Salma was starting to look genuinely sick, the film finally seems to draw the audience in, but by that time my apathy had already caused me to pause the film twice. The narration just rambles and rambles, and spends a lot of time with eccentric secondary characters. Then, when the film finally goes somewhere, it goes straight into "dyin' woman" melodrama. That's right, Salma's character bickers with Farrell's for most of the film, then spends the last third dying of Ali McGraw Disease. Looked at from Bandini's point of view, he spends the first two thirds convinced he's not in love and pushing her away (although we can see that he's actually just in sexual terror of an aggressive and experienced woman), then he admits his love, and she immediately starts coughing. There's not a lot there for an audience to hang on to. Zero catharsis.

If I had been writing the screenplay, I would simply have replaced the word "marijuana" with the word "heroin," thus allowing Fante's story to remain completely intact. I'm convinced that would have worked better in terms of credibility and in terms of fidelity to the source material. On the other hand, I am not convinced that it would have made the movie successful, not even with a re-casting of the major roles. I have given some thought to Towne's screenwriting decisions, and I don't think they were the deal-breakers in this movie.  Let's face it, the story would still have been emotionally unsatisfying either way. This source material is just not the grist for a commercial film.

I said we'd get back to this.
The best one can hope for from this story is a great film noir for the movie geeks and the arthouse crowd. And Towne already did that, or at least came close, so it doesn't really matter whether those decisions I discussed were right or wrong. Oh, I don't know if if would call it a "great" noir, but I have no trouble with calling it a "very good" one. When the film was over, many scenes haunted me and I wanted to see them again. And I'm not just talking about Salma's nude scenes (which are very nice indeed). I watched nearly the entire film a second time and, relieved of the responsibility to follow the story, paused to admire many details of the film's execution, as well as the ambitious way in which it addressed racism and the nature of being a true American. I disagree with those critics who called it a failure. Maybe they were correct, but even if so, I found it a noble attempt. It really left some lasting impressions with me, and in the final analysis I'm glad to have seen it.

Leelee Sobieski in L'idole (2002)
A nude performance that I'd like to see in ultra HD. Leelee never gave us much to work with.




L'Idole is a character-based "slice of life" drama about how the arrival of an Australian actress (Leelee Sobieski) changes the lives of various eccentric and colorful people in a Parisian apartment building. The dialogue is almost entirely in French, which certainly represents an ambitious undertaking for an Australian director (Samantha Lang), an American actress (Leelee Sobieski, who speaks French), and an elderly American actor who looks Chinese and speaks no French at all (James Hong).

James Hong plays a dignified, elderly, Chinese man with whom Sobieski forms an special relationship. Hong offers attention that that is simultaneously grandfatherly and lustful. He watches his beautiful new neighbor and begins entering her open doorway again and again. She has been mistreated by selfish young actors, and he is an old-fashioned gentleman who soon wins Sarah's friendship by cooking elaborate meals and treating her like a princess. We expect their relationship to develop in some way, but the movie is not that simple and the narrative is not that straightforward. It has one of those arty endings where people stare off into the middle distance while the camera captures their heartbreak and shock, while people in the audience wonder whether the movie is over.

Geraldine Pailhas and Maud Le Guenedal in La Chambre des Officiers (2001) in 1080hd

Pailhas

Le Guenedal

Selma Blair in Storytelling (2001)

Another great nude performance that I'd like to see in ultra HD, although there's something kind of creepy about it. Selma was nearly 30 years old, but she looked like she was about 12.

People will laugh at many different things.

I suppose the most sophisticated kid of wit involves a fresh, skewed, cleverly worded way to look at something familiar. Stand-up comics try to do this, with varying degrees of success. The Seinfeld and Simpsons TV shows are good at this. In this form of humor, there is no need for a pre-conceived positions or beliefs for the humor to work, especially if the comic can find some "truth" about human behavior to fuel his jokes. The English Patient debate on Seinfeld is funny whether you like The English Patient or not, because it investigates the nature of people's varying reactions to that movie. Framing the jokes in that context allows the show to captures the "truth" about the gap between people's perceptions of that film.   

People will also laugh at remarks that are not at all funny or original if the remarks reinforce their existing beliefs and denigrate someone they feel superior to. Mort Sahl has eloquently recounted how his comic genius suddenly disappeared when Kennedy was elected. Post-1960, Sahl continued to do what he had always done, which was to use his arrogant intelligence to skewer the foibles and inconsistencies of people in power. When Ike was in power, the liberals canonized Sahl as the new Mark Twain. When Kennedy was in power, the liberals found that Sahl had lost his sense of humor. You could make the same point about Rush Limbaugh. Many people have told me that they find Limbaugh side-splittingly funny, although I've listened to hours and hours of his radio show and rarely heard anything resembling wit. Once in a while he comes up with a comic gem, but mostly he just speaks negatively about people in clichéd ways, using familiar clichéd terms, and the people who agree with him laugh (I guess).

Filmmaker Todd Solondz does the Mort Sahl or Rush Limbaugh kind of humor in the sense that your laughter will be determined by the extent to which you agree with his viewpoint. Solondz' "sense of humor" consists of denigrating people he feels superior to. I wouldn't characterize what he does as humor. So far as I can tell, Solondz has no sense of humor at all. He simply has an innate sense of his own superiority. When he is portraying other people negatively, which is pretty much all he does, this creates situations in which certain stereotypical characters are humiliated, and you may laugh if you share Solondz' contempt for those kinds of people, but he can't quite reach down and find the intrinsic truth in his characters and his situations. He paints them as broad, superficial cartoons, never acknowledging their complexity.

Storytelling centers on a filmmaker very similar to Todd Solondz, who humiliates people by making a documentary about them. His co-worker tells him that he is contemptuous of his subjects, but he insists that he "loves them". Solondz flatters himself by having the screening of the characters' documentary result in raucous laughter. It is a sign of his complete lack of touch with reality that the people in that audience were guffawing away as if they were watching There's Something About Mary. Not likely. For one thing, it would be difficult to get much more than 30 people assembled in one place watching a Todd Solondz film, unless he starts to make them something other than statements of his own superiority to middle class America. This film was shown in less than one theater per state, and was screened commercially about 4000 times altogether (200 theater weeks, at an estimated 20 shows per week per screen). It was seen by about 120,000 people, I suppose, so the 30 person rule holds up fairly well.

And I don't suppose there were gales of laughter drowning out the dialogue.