6 to 9 (2005) is a soft core direct to vid from Peach DVD, and is a spoof of 9 to 5. At least, that is what the infinitesimal plot content suggests. Mr. Ballcock of Ballcock realty is a total jerk, and hires nothing but women with enormous after-market tits as agents, then treats them like shit. He fanaticizes about two of them, and then all 6 girls decide to get even. They lure him out to a remote property, then work in pairs, tying him up, stripping and engaging in light lesbo action. Follow each episode of girl/girl with about 45 seconds of plot advancement.

From the above, it is obvious that the DVD has a great deal of flesh. All told, six women show absolutely everything. This led to way too many images for one night, so we have Tylene Buck as Sugarbritches and Rachel Elizabeth as Goodhead this evening. Tomorrow, the other four women.

ivans xtc. (2000)

(Some movie sites list the date as 2002, since that is when the film finally received an unenthusiastic two screen trial.)

Super-agent Jay Moloney was a Hollywood legend who became a Hollywood mystery. Starting as a student intern and mail room clerk, he gradually rose at CAA until he represented the biggest of the big, and moved in the fastest lane Hollywood had to offer. At various times, his client list included Steven Spielberg, Sean Connery, Martin Scorsese, and Dustin Hoffman. His girlfriends included Sherilyn Fenn, Gina Gershon, and Jennifer Grey. His "conversions" (people he convinced to switch from other agencies to CAA) included Mike Nichols and Tim Burton. He was so powerful that in the Spring of 1995 he announced to a table full of celebrities that Mike Ovitz was about to leave CAA to take the presidency of Universal Studios, leaving Moloney to run CAA. Such was his reputation that nobody at the table doubted him for a moment.

One of the people at that table was the British director Bernard Rose, himself a Moloney client at one time, and the classic Hollywood outsider who always felt himself to be watching the proceedings with a slack jaw. Rose gave the matter no additional thought at the time, busied himself with a project in the next year and a half, and lost track of Moloney until December of 1996, when CAA suddenly announced that Moloney had been fired.

What the ...? He fell from the role of heir apparent to complete unemployment in less than two years? That's tragic hero country, right there. Rose started to think that Moloney's story might have great promise for a screenplay.

Another two years passed, and Rose started to wonder what had happened to Moloney since his fall from grace, so he called his own agent at CAA and asked the question directly. Nobody knew. Moloney had fallen completely off the earth, eventually resurfacing as a janitor at a Caribbean resort. If you or I had been making a million dollars per year while still in our late 20s, we could easily have survived being fired, and probably could have lived comfortably for the rest of our lives without ever working. Moloney was not you or I. He spent money as fast as he made it, perhaps faster, knowing that the money would keep rolling in indefinitely. He was in his twenties, and he intended to start saving at some time in the future. That future never arrived. He had a massive cocaine habit, and his possessions were mortgaged. He could not make the payments on anything, and lost it all.

When he heard of Moloney's complete disappearance from the industry, and even from basic respectability, Rose was completely convinced that the agent's fall would make a great story, and he resolved to write and direct it himself. He needed a basic structure for the film, and he felt he had already found the right one. In the interim between the Spring of 1995 and the period in 1998 when he started to construct his fictional version of Moloney's story, Bernard Rose had directed a film inspired by one Tolstoy story, Anna Karenina, and had become interested in another, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Rose saw a strong connection between Tolstoy's Ilyich story and Jay Moloney's life. The fictional Ivan Ilyich was an unrepentant social climber in the complex Russian civil service system, and he had cast aside any concepts of warmth, loyalty, and love in order to advance his career at all costs. When he found out he was dying, he realized that he had nothing to show for his life, no spiritual roots, and nothing to comfort him in his agony. Although he had fancied himself as an important man, neither the system nor any people would truly miss him. It was only on his deathbed that he felt "ecstasy" (xtc. - get it?), as a release from the burden of his cares and fears.

Updating the story of Ivan Ilyich, using Jay Moloney as a vehicle, became the focus of Rose's efforts. The two stories were blended together to form a single fictional life. Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich had been an abstemious, almost anhedonic man, but Jay Moloney had lived a wastrel's life, so in that case the film drew from Moloney's life. On the other hand, the film's central character was not merely fired, but found out that he was to die, so in that case, Rose's fictional agent suffered the fate of Ivan Ilyich, not the fate of Jay Moloney.

The film's Ivan, called Ivan Beckman, came to grips with death by dealing with it all alone. He could never bring himself to tell his artistic father and sister, who disapproved of his soul-destroying lifestyle. His relationship with his regular girlfriend was not a spiritual connection, and he chose not to involve her in his agony. When he was asked to bring a friend to a doctor's appointment, he realized that he had nobody he wanted to bring. Even his admiring secretary was too busy. So he struggled for ways to cope on his own. He read a bunch of humbug books about homeopathic medicine. He buried himself in a cloud of drugs. He told nobody he was dying, except a couple of anonymous coke whores. When his death was announced at a staff meeting, nobody really believed it. When they were told he died of cancer, they assumed it was a "cover story." When his cynical fellow agents finally became convinced of the harsh reality, they declared a few seconds of silence, then quickly started to scramble to take care of Ivan's clients. Reflection, after all, generates no profit and therefore has no place at a staff meeting.

The story of how this script was created has one last chapter. On the very morning in 1999 when Bernard Rose prepared to screen a first cut of ivans xtc., he received a startling message from his agent: "Jay Moloney hanged himself today."

Rose later contended that the death of Moloney killed his film, because it caused the people at CAA to close ranks. Rose told an interviewer about the situation:

The director alleges that while CAA had previously helped with the movie, even allowing him to film its weekly staff meeting, things seemed to change after Moloney's death. He says the agency began a campaign against the film that prevented it from securing a distributor for a few years. In the aftermath, he says, he lost his house, his car and assorted possessions. "We don't even have a couch," he adds, gesturing around a living room that is bare save for some old furniture and posters of Rose's films. A CAA spokesman denied Rose's allegations.

I liked ivans xtc, and was fascinated by it in many ways. Yet, despite a great lead performance, the film is not entirely successful.

The cinematography is inconsistent. The movie was shot entirely in digital video. I have seen other digital video movies that look every bit as good as film (Species III is not a good movie, but the digital video looks spectacular), but parts of ivans xtc. look more like a home movie, poorly lit and even blurry. I can't tell you whether this can be attributed to a poor DVD transfer or Rose's failure to master digital video. I'm pretty sure that it must be the latter because some scenes look quite good, a fact which tends to exonerate the guys who mastered the DVD. To tell you the truth, I think it looks like a home movie because it pretty much is a home movie. Rose's live-in love, Lisa Enos, also acted as producer, star, and co-author. Many of the performers (or non-performers, in some cases) came from the ranks of Rose's circle of friends and relatives of friends. Even the one truly brilliant performer in the film, Danny Huston, is Rose's friend, having met Rose when Danny's wife (Virginia Madsen at the time) was working on Rose's Candyman.

The music is very heavy-handed. I suppose Rose felt that the Aristotelian fall of his tragic hero and the story's provenance from Tolstoy required him to slather on the somber classical music. Chopin and Wagner, especially Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, dominate the score. A certain very wise man once wrote, "Most of the worst music ever composed was written in the 1970s. It was the worst single period in the history of music, with the possible exception of Wagner's lifetime." Given a contemporary Hollywood setting, and no horned helmets, even a little bit of Wagner is probably too much to avoid pretentiousness.

The acting is equally inconsistent. Because I expect professional actors to do their jobs, and they usually do, I don't comment on the acting unless it is either very poor or very good. Ivans xtc. has a bit of both. There are some performers in the film who are obviously not actors at all, so there is not much sense in noting who they are, or repeating that they delivered amateurish performances. They know who they are, and what they've done, and they will probably never get a chance to repeat their mistakes.

On the other hand, Danny Huston is absolutely tremendous in the lead role. The trick in playing this role is that the film is not a satire of the film industry. It is the film industry, at least as Bernard Rose sees it, portrayed without irony. Ivan the agent, therefore, must be a real person. He cannot seem to be like Basil Fawlty, the kind of transparently sycophantic scumbag normally pictured in satirical films, because men like Sean Connery and Steven Spielberg do not get fooled by people like that. The Ivan of this film had to be a man with so many inherently pleasant qualities that he could convince Hollywood's biggest players, who represent a wide range of different personality types, that they should spend time with him. Yet he also had to be a man ruthless and conniving and connected enough that the big Hollywood names could look at him and say, "I have to have this guy working for me, not for my competitors." Ivan treats everyone with respect, not just the big players. He is gentle and considerate with his secretary, with his dog, and with hookers. He is unfailingly polite to garage mechanics, waiters, and store clerks. His weakness is not that he is a bad person, but that he is a person untrue to himself. He is always acting and he knows it. As a result, he has told his inner self to disappear, and has turned his life over to his work personality. In essence, Ivan has no opinions nor personality of his own. He becomes whatever his clients want and need, whether they are coke-addicted homophobes or teetotaling orthodox Jews, whether they are insecure NYU intellectuals or old-time Hollywood party boys. He admits to his artistic father that he lives a silly, meaningless life, but it is his life, and he is committed to it. And how do you walk away from a million dollars a year?

Danny Huston brought that guy to life. According to Bernard Rose, Danny is a reluctant actor. I'm not sure why, but damned if he isn't quite brilliant at it. He is capable of throwing something totally unique up on the screen. He has a lightweight charm which seems to conceal a gravitas which, if unleashed, might equal that of his famous father, the legendary John Huston. It's a shame that Danny waited until he was 40 before deciding he was really meant to be an actor.

Made for $500,000, this film has a lot of rough edges, and yet it has a very substantial elemental power which springs from its sincere vision of modern Hollywood, and the complexity of the Ivan character, as acted by Danny Huston, and as written by Bernard Rose (and, I suppose, Leo Tolstoy).

DVD INFO:  This film is not available on a Region 1 DVD. There are two Region 2 versions. The one you want is the Finnish one. The one available in the U.K. has 14 extra minutes of "party footage", but the Finnish version has more than 42 minutes of unused footage from that orgy, including about a half an hour of former Playmate of the Year Victoria Silvstedt topless. The transfer itself is a mediocre, letterboxed widescreen version, but the raw uncut party footage makes it all worthwhile.

The Finnish DVD info (in English) can be found here. The U.S. distributor's home page can be found here. WARNING: This is a Region 2 DVD in PAL format. If you are thinking of buying DVDs from outside your region, read this first.

• Lisa Enos (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)

• Victoria Silvstedt from the movie (1, 2, 3)

• Victoria Silvstedt from the extra footage (1, 2, 3, 4)

Other Crap:

• The cover from every Mad magazine since the beginning of time. (More than 50 years, more than 450 issues. From 1959 to 1993, they did exactly 8 per year.)
• An era is passing: "Dutch cannabis coffee shops and cafe-bars will be extinct within five years"
• Havoc, the film with the intense Anne Hathaway sex scenes, will be released in 2005. (Penultimate paragraph.)
• Friends and family of the late Hunter S. Thompson gathered Saturday night at a luxury hotel to remember the writer with a private party involving obscure drugs, extreme paranoia, and powerful personal firearms.
• Jay Leno uses a surrogate for Jacko jokes
  • "They said this trial will probably last six months, although Michael Jackson asked for some time off to entertain the troops. OK, they're Cub Scout troops, but they're still troops."
• British bad boy smack-rocker Doherty busts up with supermodel Kate Moss

   

  

• Kazaa Assets Frozen in Australia
• VERY funny review. Something Awful reviews: "'Lesbian Commando (Super Sexy Unit)' "
• The Wireless Pill Camera
• "I should like to purchase a bit of cheese".
  • Before I worked in the U.K., I used to think that Monty Python's cheese shop skit was absurdist humor or maybe just pure silliness. After all, no such thing could actually happen in real life! Silly me. The typical isolated American. When I got to London, I realized that the skit was actually social commentary. I worked at the Shell Office on the Strand, and was putting in some weekend hours when I went to a nearby "sandwich shop" (that's what the sign said). This shop was within about a block of Charing Cross Station and Trafalgar Square, so it was not a deserted part of town. It was a Saturday, approximately at noon. The shopkeeper let me keep looking at the menu and ordering things he was out of, until I got ticked off and said, "look, just tell me what you do have, and I'll choose one of those." You guessed it. The things he did have did not actually include any sandwiches! That's right - not one sandwich in the sandwich shop. We virtually re-enacted the cheese shop sketch. This is a completely true story, with no exaggeration of any kind.
  • (There was an explanation, sort of. He only sold sandwiches for the work crowd on Monday through Friday. He had a different menu on weekends for the tourists, which basically consisted of coffee, tea, sweets, and scones. That made some sense, although he might have told me this before I recited the entire menu aloud.)
• Good news! Barry Bonds says his testicles haven't shrunk. I know you'll join me in a more restful sleep tonight, secure in that knowledge.
• Fascinating story. Whatever happened to ... Goodfella Henry Hill? He's only 61 now, still alive and kickin', in North Platte!
• This is the big festival weekend: it's Frozen Dead Guy Days in Nederland, Colorado. Your host: baseball great Ted Williams.
• The Pacifier and Be Cool team up to swamp the holdovers. Between them, they took about half of the total market. The results are almost exactly as predicted by The Weekend Warrior, except that The Pacifier beat Be Cool on Friday.
• Dick Clark is "ready to die"
• Here's tragic news that makes the Tsunami seem insignificant. Mrs Doubtfire sequel may not get made.
• Triumph the Insult Dog goes to the Grammy Awards.
• Triumph the Insult Dog does the weather report in Hawaii
• Obligatory daily Paris Hilton or Russell Crowe item: Paris and Paris keep the other guests awake in an Aruba hotel.

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.

Of the Best Actress Winners who showed nudity in their award winning roles, who gave the best nude performance? I think I've included every actress to show Oscar some skin. If I missed anyone, let me know.

There are a couple on the list that push the definition of nudity, (Hunt's scenes were see-thru and partial, MacLaine's nudity was very brief, and Christie's was rear only) but it's my poll, so ppphhhtttt :-p

Here are the results of our most recent other polls...
The Top 20 Nude Scenes of 2004

The Best Nude Film Debuts of the 80s

The Best Nude Film Debuts of the 90s

Which actress has been the most convincing playing a stripper.

Who has the best bum in Hollywood?

Best All Time Television Comedy

Email Scoopy Jr. with nominees, comments or suggestions.

Today from the Ghost, part 3 of his tribute to Skinemax babe Ashlie Rhey. Today it's 'caps and vids from an episode of "Erotic Confessions".

• Ashlie Rhey (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20)
• Ashlie Rhey zipped .wmvs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

"Wishmaster 4: The Prophesy Fulfilled" (2002)
The only reason to watch this direct-to-video sequel is to catch Tara Spencer-Nairn of the Corner Gas tv-series in the buff.

• Tara Spencer-Nairn: boobs in 1-3, underwear in 4-6. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
• Kimberly Huie: cleavage and soap-covered boobs.
• Mandy Hochbaum: sexy as busty shopper.
• stripper: robohooters and buns. Either Cara Bisiak or Janice Tetreault.

"Out of Order" pilot
Six-part Showtime miniseries with alot of swinging. However only the two-part pilot is available on a fairly pricey DVD. And in the further four parts there's a nude threesome involving Eric Stoltz with Sarah Deakins and Karen Holness. I'll take a pass on that.

• Kim Dickens: beavercam having underwater sex.
• Justine Bateman: nice mammaries. Off-set she was lactating after recently having a baby.
• Felicity Huffman: partial boob in hottub.
• Karen Holness: boobs in hottub, nude skinnidipping.
• Sarah Deakins: nude skinnidipping, full frontal doing the backstroke.
• Christine Chatelain: nice bikini.
• unknown: uncredited bra-less woman.

"Pieces of April" (2003)
PG-rated drama about a wayward daughter played by Katie Holmes. The only nudity is from some naughty b&w photos.

• Katie Holmes: skivvies, fully-clothed sex.
• Alison Pill: underwear changing.
• photos: the only nudity in this movie.

"Live Bait" (1995)
Typical pretentious Canadian aahht-house flick: shot in black & white, weird sex, male frontal nudity only, and actresses who make love in their underwear.

• Kathleen Duborg: bra and panties.
• Laara Sadiq: ditto.
• Michelle Beaudoin: ditto.

"Half Baked"
Lots of star cameos and lots of laughs highlight this 1998 pot comedy.

One of a group of pot smoking friends gets busted after accidentally killing a diabetic police horse by feeding him munchies. His bail is a million dollars, and his friends must get him out before gangster Nasty Nate gets to him. They decide to raise the money selling medical grade marijuana that one of the group can get at his job as janitor in a pharmaceutical lab.

The fight scene where the henchwoman's breast pops out is just one example of the craziness in this movie. Totally goofy, and lots of fun.

• C.J. Fidler

"Kissing Jessica Stein"
Some nice pokies by Jennifer Westfeldt and Heather Juergensen in Kissing Jessica Stein.

• Jennifer Westfeldt
• Heather Juergensen (1, 2)

"Red Dragon"
Breast exposure by Marguerite MacIntyre in Red Dragon and some nice caps of Mary Louise Parker.

• Marguerite MacIntyre
• Mary Louise Parker

"Capital City"
Leslie Bibb is topless in Capital City but we only see the view from the rear.

• Leslie Bibb (1, 2, 3)

"Untamed Heart"
It's the same thing with Marisa Tomei in Untamed Heart.

• Marisa Tomei (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

"My Kingdom"
Lorraine Pilkington has sex through her underwear in My Kingdom and there are some topless women running around.

• Lorraine Pilkington
• Unknowns

"Murdered Innocence"
Not a lot of nudity in Murdered Innocence. Jacqueline Macario is topless but we only see a very blurred view.

• Jacqueline Macario (1, 2, 3)