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"Fall"
Fall (1997) is a romance story between cab driver Eric Schaeffer and world famous super model Amanda de Cadenet. To make it even more unlikely, she is married. Nonetheless, he is able to ride his writing ability (he wrote a best seller, then gave up fame to become a cab driver) into her bed, and nearly into her heart. There were some interesting minor characters, and some interesting moments in the film, but it was basically the rise and fall of an affair. One of Schaeffer's friends is becoming an Episcopal priest, and has some unique outlooks on life, and a few good lines. One of the more interesting ideas involved the couple's first two meetings. In the first, he seduced her to orgasm by suggesting that she fuck him with a dildo. In the second, they actually do it.
Schaeffer showed the full Monty twice, while de Cadenet only showed her left breast briefly in an after sex scene. I liked both of the main characters, but tired of the story, especially the endless voiceover of his letters to her. I was also less than thrilled with the ending. IMDb readers have this at 5.0 of 10. This is a low C. It will probably satisfy romance fans, but nobody else.
Thumbnails
Amanda De Cadenet
(1,
2,
3,
4,
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Pauly Shore is Dead (2003)
Don't let the title get your hopes up. Pauly is very much alive,
having spent some five years of his life writing and directing this
semi-fictional account of the decline and fall from his inexplicable
career peak. He weaves real events and an honest appraisal of his
modest talent together with a fictional story about how he once
faked his own death in order to gain a 16th minute of fame.
He may not have been Woody Allen in the talent department, but it is
obvious that Pauly made lots of friends in his brief period of fame,
because some very big stars came in to do a line or two for this
movie: Sean Penn, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Chris Rock, Bill
Maher, Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn all showed up to make fun of
Pauly or his movies. They were joined by an eclectic group of lesser
celebrities like Heidi Fleiss, Tom Sizemore, Charlie Sheen, Michael
Madsen, Snoop Dogg, Andy Dick, Pam Anderson, Tommy Chong, Jerry
Springer, Carson Daly, Tommy Lee, Carrot Top, Screech, Mini-me and
many others, who comment on Pauly's real life or fictional death.
Occasionally the stars rip on themselves or each other. Michael
Madsen and Tom Sizemore admit that they don't know which of them is
which, just like the rest of us. Cattro Top and Kato Kaelin rejoice
that no matter how bad their lives seem, they are still better off
than Pauly.
In general, I thought this movie was a lot of fun. It is really a
pleasure to kick back, turn off the ol' brain, and see the stars
make fun of themselves and Pauly, and its amusing to think that that
Pauly is one sucky celebrity who is completely aware that he sucks.
I was sort of disappointed by the commentary, because it turns the
whole thing around and makes one think that Pauly isn't really a guy
who knows he sucks, but is rather a guy who is pretending to agree
with the general assessment that he sucks in order to make this
film. That isn't nearly as cool.
Still and all, I got a kick out of the movie, which is pretty
amazing considering that it was written and directed by Pauly Shore.
Isadora (1968)
This is a long biopic of the eccentric free spirit Isadora Duncan.
(IMDb lists it as 131 minutes, but the VHS linked below is the one I
watched, and it runs 153 minutes.) Duncan is considered to have the
same relationship to modern dance that Picasso had to modern
painting. She rejected the stuffy, highly conventional constraints
of classical ballet and defined expressive dance in her own image.
The film follows a structure somewhat similar to the well-known
Chaplin biopic with Robert Downey, Jr, using a framing device in
which an aging Isadora dictates her autobiography to her amanuensis, and this structure sets the stage for a
series of flashbacks to the key incidents in her life. (Isadora
Duncan's "Ma Vie" is a real book. See the Amazon links below)
The film hits all the high points ...
Duncan not only flouted traditional concepts in dance, but she
flouted traditional concepts of morality as well.. One of her lovers
was the theatre designer, Gordon Craig; another was Paris Singer,
one of the many sons of Isaac Singer the sewing machine magnate, who
gave her lavish gifts, including her own dancing school; she bore a
child by each of them, and both children were tragically drowned in an accident on the Seine River in 1913.
She spent a considerable time in Russia in the period just after
the revolution. That country embraced her as a fellow
revolutionary, and gave her an old palace to use as a dancing
school. Although Isadora had sworn never to marry, she finally broke
down in 1922 and wed a drunken, insane Russian poet named Sergei
Yesenin, who was 17 years younger than she. Yesenin later
accompanied her on tour but his frequent destructive rages, similar
to the hotel room rampages of today's rock stars, caused them both
much negative publicity. Of course, those incidents may have been
more acceptable in the United States than their pro-Marxist
politics. In Isadora's last U.S. tour in 1922-23, she managed to
combined "immorality" and Communism in a stage performance in
Boston, by waving a red scarf and baring her breast, proclaiming,
"This red! So am I!" The following year, Yesenin left Duncan and
returned to Moscow where he was institutionalized for mental
illness, and eventually committed suicide as soon as he was
released.
Duncan's own life ended no less tragically than those of her
children or her crazy poet. She always wore scarves which trailed
behind her, and this caused her death in a freak accident in Nice,
France. She was killed when her scarf caught in the wheel of her
friend's Bugatti automobile. As the driver sped off, the long cloth
wrapped around the vehicle's axle. Ms. Duncan was yanked violently
from the car and dragged for several yards before the driver
realized what had happened. She died almost instantly from a broken
neck.
The unconventional socialist actress Vanessa Redgrave was a good
choice to play the unconventional socialist dancer, and she was
rewarded for her performance with Oscar and Golden Globe
nominations, as well as the Best Actress award at Cannes. Unfortunately,
the director made all the usual biopic mistakes. The story is too
long and rambling and pointless, and tries to pack her entire life
into its running time instead of focusing on some important thread
or some key portion of her life. We sit back and watch Isadora trot
around the globe, apparently abandoning in succession each of the
projects she had been extolling the virtues of.
The film could have compensated for its unfocused
script with some great musical numbers, but the dancing scenes are
mostly repetitive. If you watch this film without knowing anything
about Duncan's contribution to dance (which places you in the same
boat with me), you will conclude that Duncan's entire schtick
consisted of prancing about like a twelve year old dreaming of being
a dancer, wearing flowing gowns, trailing a diaphanous scarf,
bending her knees, pointing her toes, waving her arms, and acting
"free". I'm sure that must have been some of what Duncan did, but
surely not the whole shebang! I guess I could have handled watching
this once, but the process of prancing around the room must have
occupied close to an hour of the film's running time, and it looked
exactly the same every time. (One of her lovers actually said "will
you stop prancing around the goddamned room" just as I was thinking
the same thing!) I did, however, enjoy the prancing a lot more on
the one occasion when she did it naked.
Although the film doesn't cohere very well, there are
some great individual scenes. I liked some of the Russian material
quite a bit. The one dance scene that is
significantly different from the others is Duncan's first
performance in Russia. The lights go out while she performs, and the
night seems doomed to be a failure, but everyone there improvises,
and they end up having the most memorable night of their lives.
Someone in the Russian audience provides a lantern, then the
audience members gradually start to sing to provide musical
accompaniment. One man manages to produce a squeezebox. Several men
join Duncan on stage for traditional Russian dancing, and the film
managed to capture the whirlwind of the moment. This scene got me. I
was clapping along, completely drawn in.
Unfortunately, it takes the film nearly two hours to get to that
point, and that wait could be excruciatingly boring, and I got the
impression that Ms Duncan was both pretentious and mentally ill. If
the rest of the film had been as invigorating as the Russian part, I
might have enjoyed spending 153 minutes with the characters and
their repetitive eccentricities, but it wasn't and I didn't.
- Vanessa Redgrave (1,
2,
3)
Other Crap:
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:
Here
are the latest movie reviews available at scoopy.com.
- The yellow asterisks indicate that I wrote the
review, and am deluded into thinking it includes humor.
- If there is a white asterisk, it means that
there isn't any significant humor, but I inexplicably determined
there might be something else of interest.
- A blue asterisk indicates the review is written
by Tuna (or Junior or Brainscan, or somebody else besides me)
- If there is no asterisk, I wrote it, but am too
ashamed to admit it.
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'Caps and comments by Oz:
Wednesday is Australia Day, which celebrates the day the English first landed a fleet of convicts in Sydney in 1788. I guess it's similar to America's thanksgiving but without all the rigmarole. To celebrate, this weekend's contribution is an all-Aussie contribution.
"Alvin Purple"
Alvin Purple was a randy bloke who women found irresistible. He takes up employment as a window cleaner, water bed salesman and a sex therapist. This provides plenty of reasons for naked ladies. There's a lot of nudity shown by Abigail, Lynette Curran, Anne Pendlebury, Jenny Hagen, Jacki Weaver, Christina Amor, Shara Berriman, Kris McQuade, Debbie Nankervis, Elke Neidhardt, Ellie Maclure and an unknown tram passenger.
"Alvin Rides Again"
This is the sequel to Alvin Purple and is in the same vein. Nakedness shown by Judy Stevenson, Candy Raymond, Abigail, Briony Behets, Chantal Contouri, Joy Thompson and Kris McQuade.
"Alvin Purple (TV series)"
There was also an Alvin Purple TV series with more naked women. From the episode Like Son, Like Father we have an unidentified lady starkers and Carol Lane shows her underwear. Briony Behets shows a lot of cleavage in an episode called The Hustled.
"Hotel De Love"
Raelee Hill is topless in Hotel De Love and Saffron Burrows almost is, she is wearing nipple patches. Pippa Grandison is topless by facing the wrong way.
"Horseplay"
Horseplay is a mediocre comedy. There's no nudity just lots of cleavage and underwear by lots of actresses including Amanda Douge, Abbie Cornish, Christina Collard, Krista Vendy, Elizabeth Sandy, Natalie Mendoza, Tushka Bergen and Alyssa McClelland.
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