The Last Word (1995) is billed as sort of a romance/crime thriller, and while those are elements in the story, it is really more about ethical choices made by fledgling screen writer Timothy Hutton. He is a journalist working in Detroit, specializing in tales of shady underworld characters introduced to him by his childhood friend, Joe Pantoliano. Pantoliano is into the mob for 100 large. He has just published a collection of these stories in a book. Her marriage is basically over, they just have yet to make it official. Hutton meets stripper Michelle Burke, and decides he has to do her story. After he publishes it, the two become an item, and she decides that she is not comfortable with her story after all. Seems she has a dark past. We will find it is much darker than Hutton even suspected.

Pantoliano secures a deal for him to write a screen play in Hollywood, which he hopes he hopes will get him out of debt, a give them both a golden future. The two head for tinsel town with Burke in tow. The studio, it seems, was especially enamored with the stripper story, and insists that it be included in the screen play. Hutton resists, but discovers more about Burke's background.

That gets the ball rolling, and since I did not find this 100% negative, I will leave the rest of the plot for you to discover. Act one was passable, as they set up the plot and introduced the characters. Act three contained some very powerful and surprising revelations. The problem was act two, with basically showed Hutton's inner struggle. While this was necessary to the plot, it was very slow going. Had the upped the nudity and sex content in act two, it might have gotten around the problem.

Burke shows breasts and buns in her strip act, and is naked, but with crossed arms and carefully staged positions in a sex scene. Brittany McCrena, as "massage girl," shows breasts in a sex scene with Hutton. Two unknown strippers also show breasts. IMDb readers have this at 4.3 of 10. The acting was fine, and the act three payoff was nearly worth the time, if you are able to stay awake through act two. If you decide to try this relatively obscure film, I suggest keeping the remote close for some fast forwarding. Strong D+.

Untamed Heart (1993):

Untamed heart is an offbeat fairy tale of a love story aimed for the female tween and young teen market. It isn't a cool movie. If you are only into hip neo-violence, you will find that this film is about as far as possible from Pulp Fiction and Leon: the Professional and The Boondock Saints.

It is a quiet, sad, reflective story about two unlucky working class stiffs in Minneapolis. She works as a waitress in a diner. He is the dishwasher/busboy. She is not interested in him at first because she's a regular good ol' gal, and he seems kind of creepy. Nobody seems to think he can speak. Everyone generally assumes he is "slow," or perhaps that he is missing a few face cards from his mental deck. To everyone in the crew, he's just a fixture, part of the diner's furniture.

The story begins by focusing on her. She's the kind of good-hearted Midwestern gal who is looking for love in all the wrong places, giving her heart to a steady succession of guys who don't appreciate her, and end up dumping her. It's not that she's a loser. She's generous, and attractive, but she's looking for true love, and doesn't know a worthwhile prospect when she sees one, so she dates the wrong guys until they move on.

Our two heroes don't have much contact until one day when she is attacked by two rapists while walking home, and the busboy comes to the rescue and carries her home, as if he were a medieval knight and she a damsel in distress. She is ambivalent about the rescue, grateful to have been saved, but filled with questions. How the hell did her knight happen to be there, far from their diner, and how did he know where she lived to carry her home? Had he been following her constantly? Was he somehow in league with the rapists?

Suffice it to say that she answers all the questions to her own satisfaction, and finds out that he is not creepy at all, and in fact can speak very well. There is nothing slow about him. In fact, his apartment is filled with books. He is, however, every bit as strange, and asocial, and naive as everyone thought. Moreover, he is walking around with a time bomb of a diseased heart. She ignores all the negatives. She even finds his negatives to be charming and gallant and refreshingly innocent. They fall in love ...

To say more would be spoiling.

This film an odd one. On the surface, it could not be more mundane, filled with everyday life in Minneapolis. The denizens of the diner have long discussions about the cigarette machine and fishing lures and the weather, always the weather. Indeed, the weather plays a significant role in the film, casting a dreary pall on many scenes which take place on old urban neighborhoods covered with patches of ice and snow, sometimes in snowstorms, and sometimes in bitterly cold rains on days when people gasp for breath.

The kind of conditions that native Minnesotans call "July."

Kidding. It's Christmas time.

Beneath the everyday exterior, the film is at heart a fantasy, because the busboy is not like the others. He is not a normal person who ruminates about his ice fishing techniques. He is an angel sent to teach us a lesson, or perhaps he is a fierce warrior with the heart of a baboon as he says, and as he really seems to believe. The existence of this frog-turned-prince of a character lets the waitress escape from her humdrum world into his extraordinary life. At least for a while.

I think that's pretty much the essence of what a "young chick flick" is supposed to do, and this film does it quite well, moving slowly, tantalizing, pulling back, circling, scoring, then letting everything play out the way it really would have if a mortal woman loved an angel with a diseased baboon heart.

Some trivia from IMDb:

A hot property before it went into production, stars like Geena Davis, Demi Moore and Brad Pitt were all vying for roles. Madonna had been particularly interested in the film, lobbying hard for Jason Patric to land the male lead. However, she finally quit trying when the studio decided to go with William Baldwin instead, although ironically Christian Slater has the part in the finished film.

It's not a cool film, but is a very sweet one, basically a variation on Beauty and the Beast. Marisa Tomei and Christian Slater play the working class lovers very competently. Slater understates the role appropriately, acting from the heart and using none of the ultrahip faux-Nicholson mannerisms that would later stereotype him. Tomei does a complete job with her character, including quite a convincing Minneapolis accent. (Slater and Rosie Perez don't even try the accent, not that it matters. People living in Minneapolis could be from anywhere.) Granted, this film is not for dad or junior, but the women in your family might find that it hits the spot if they are into tragic, sweet, and odd love stories requiring a full box of Kleenex.

• Marisa Tomei (1, 2, 3, 4)

Kyra:

A couple of zipped .wmv files. Kyra Sedgwick has not been liberal with the nudity in her career. Now here she is, 39 years old, with nudity in back-to-back flicks. Whoda guessed?

• Kyra Sedgwick in Cave Dweller
• Kyra Sedgwick in The Woodsman

Other Crap:

• Rumor: "Yahoo is all set to buy Ludicorp, the company behind the hot photo blogging web service Flickr, for an undisclosed amount of money."
• Scientology loses Dutch appeal. The judge ruled: "under certain circumstances freedom of speech prevails over copyright," especially when the copyright holders are complete buttbonnets.
  • The Church of Scientology accuses Karin Spaink of copyright infringement for making parts of their course material available on her website. She rebuts that they are shameless con artists, and only by publishing this material can she truly reveal the dangerous nature of their cult.
• "Garden State Colon Hydrotherapy" was really ... umm ... "fronting" ... a house of prostitution. "Police said they became suspicious because they would see only men entering the back door of the clinic. There was also no office waiting room in front and no medical waste removal container outside." Whoa. I knew it. Sherlock Holmes is real, dude!
• Proof that the times really are a-changin' ... Black woman to play Bob Dylan.
• "Tens of thousands of Japanese cell-phone owners are poring over full-length novels on their tiny screens." Brilliant. It makes the entire novel read like a continuous cliffhanger. "Call me ..." Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? ... {scroll} "... Ishmael!"
• Pot clinics just keep growing / Third dispensary planned for same street in S.F.'s Ingleside district. They have names like The Happy Days Herbal Relief Center. Oh, man, I am really feeling some glaucoma coming on. I don't want to be in the medical marijuana business. I just want the pastry concession on that street.
• Here's the trailer for DOWNFALL. (Bruno Ganz as Hitler. Looks like a powerful movie.)
• Urban Legend: Photograph shows a moose poking its snout into a McDonald's drive-through window in Maine. Status: Real photo, but it was taken in Alaska.
• Showest Convention: Lucas screens Star Wars 3-D and the first eight minutes of Revenge of the Sith.
• The Early Report for March 20, 2005 Detailed coverage of all films scheduled to be released in the upcoming four weeks, including screen counts, running times and ratings, plus as much info as is available for future films.
• Check out your NCAA bracket.
  • Two Wisconsin teams in the Sweet 16! The Badgers got there without beating anyone (N. Iowa and Bucknell), because Bucknell knocked off Kansas. Amazingly, they now have another "easy" game against NC State, which was thoughtful enough to knock off Connecticut. If Wisconsin wins that game, the Badgers will have made it to the elite eight without having played any team seeded higher than 10th!
  • Wisconsin-Milwaukee took the opposite route. They had to beat Boston College and 'Bama, and it ain't gonna get any easier! They drew the tournament favorite, Illinois, in the next round.
• U.S. Lied to Allies About North Korean Nuclear Exports. Yawn. Wake me up when there is evidence that the USA told the truth about something.
• "These are the kinky bondage pics Kim Cattrall wanted to keep under wraps." Thay ain't all that kinky, but Kim does show her stuff.
• MovieJuice! reviews The Ring Two - "Ringy Dink"
• N.C. State ends the season of the #2 seeded and defending champion Connecticut Huskies. It wasn't a great day for New England, because the Vermont Catamounts ended their Cinderella story when they were handed their slipper-walking papers by the Michigan State Evil Stepmothers.
• "black market access to filtered (web) pages in Saudi Arabia runs anywhere from $26 to $67 per Web site."
• Lisbon fashion show. Bare breast. 'Nuff said.
• Thanks to tabbed browsing, the Mozilla Firefox web browser lets you have more than one homepage come up at startup.
• Car developer John DeLorean will no longer go back or forward to the future
• Cartoon 'Crank' R. Crumb Bears All in Autobiography
• After finally managing to bring sex out of the closet, Bollywood's dalliance with steamy cinema seems destined to be short-lived
• All You Need Is Love - by Jewelle St. James: "The incredible true story of one woman's search, discovering her past life with John Lennon." Gives new meaning to the word "true."
• The Reverend Ethan Acres seeks "to defeat the Devil in all his evil forms" and strives to put the "fun" back into "fundamentalism."
  • "The Reverend Acres embraces the beast of fundamentalist religion without irony, as Kiefer embraces the beast of German Romanticism, but with more ludic flair." Whatever, dude.
• The Ring Two tailed off a bit after an excellent Friday, but still won the weekend box with $36 million.
  • Disney's Ice Princess bombed. It battled Hitch for fourth place, despite the fact that Hitch is in its seventh weekend.
  • Allen/Costner's Upside of Anger did quite well in a trial run.
  • Far down the list, Martin Scorsese finally had a $100 million picture, as The Aviator passed that milestone.
  • Next week: two comedies. Sandra Bullock vs Ashton Kutcher.
• Borowitz: BUSH OFFERS RETIREES OPTION OF SERVING IN IRAQ. Social Security Participants Given Wide Choice of Iraqi Cities to Patrol.
  • Mr. Bush added that the average retiree serving in Iraq would earn approximately $1500 a month, which would be boosted to $1800 if the retiree should stumble across weapons of mass destruction.
• Saving Terri Schiavo: Presenting Incontrovertible Proof that Every Life Has Worth, President Bush Announces "66 Uses for Persistent Vegetards" - WHITEHOUSE.ORG
• Kudos to Yahoo for an exclusive 11 minute featurette about Sin City.
• As linked beneath, Jordan Matter has been photographing topless women in downtown New York. Here are his pictures

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.

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
Best Nudity in an Oscar-winning performance.
Email Scoopy Jr. with nominees, comments or suggestions.

"Woundings" (1998) aka Brand New World
Weird British movie available on DVD in North America and Europe but not the UK. Although this movie is noted for Emily Lloyd showing her boobs what was overlooked is a lesbian relationship between Julie Cox and the supermodel Twiggy.

• Emily Lloyd (1, 2, 3): topless showing her milk jugs.
• Julie Cox (1, 2): upskirt with no underwear, breast flash.
• Sammi Davis: having sex on dance floor.
• Twiggy Lawson: soldier grabbing her crotch, lesbian kiss with Julie Cox.
• Kate Whithers: one-timer nude having sex.

"Piranha" (1978)
Classic b-movie horror and Jaws spoof.

• Heather Menzies: tight blouse and jeans by the former Louisa von Trapp.
• Belinda Balaski: breast flash, bra-less pokies.
• Melody Thomas Scott: soap actress in tight t-shirt, bathing suit.
• Janie Squire: topless, far bush.
• unknowns: bikini girls.

"House of the Rising Sun" (1987)
Dreary drama about a reporter turned undercover hoe.

• Jamie Barrett: partial boob.
• Tawny Moyer: soap actress showing cleavage in bathing suit.
• Deborah Wakeham: bikini.

"Home Movie" (1992)
Light comedy about some method actor and actresses taking a movie script too seriously.

• Venus Terzo: very nice bra and panties.
• Suki Kaiser: partial boob.
• Kerry Sandomirsky: acting out lesbian scene with Suki.

"Linzi Drew's Striptacular" (1991)
Bargain basement video featuring UK Playbird magazine model and sometimes stripper Marie Harper (Playbird is not associated with hefmag).

• Marie Harper (1, 2, 3, 4, 5): topless, hamstercam, then beavercam.

"Who is Cletis Tout?"
Corinne Jenneer is a topless stiff in Who is Cletis Tout? but it could a prosthetic.

• Corinne Jenneer

"Henry Fool"
Melanie Vesey and Denise Morgan are topless strippers in Henry Fool, although I don't know who is who. Dina Ruppe drops her pants and gets vomited on, and there's some interesting caps of Maria Porter and Parker Posey.

• Melanie Vesey and Denise Morgan (1, 2,
• Dina Ruppe (1, 2)
• Maria Porter
• Parker Posey (1, 2,

"2 Fast 2 Furious"
No nudity in 2 Fast 2 Furious. However, lots of cleavage and bikinis by Eva Mendes, Devon Aoki and some unknowns.

• Eva Mendes (1, 2, 3)
• Devon Aoki (1, 2, 3)
• Unknowns (1, 2, 3)

"Gothic"
Lots of topless nudity in Gothic, particularly by Myriam Cyr and Pascal King. A bit of cleavage by Natasha Richardson.

• Myriam Cyr (1, 2, 3, 4)
• Pascal King
• Natasha Richardson (1, 2, 3)

"Return of the Killer Tomatoes"
No viisble nudity in Return of the Killer Tomatoes. There is some see-though nipple shown by Teri Weigel and (almost) by Karen Mistal. There are also some pokies and bikini shots of some unknowns. Of course, we also see George Clooney with his pre-fame 80's hair.

• Teri Weigel
• Karen Mistal (1, 2, 3)
• Unknowns (1, 2, 3)

"Borderline"
Pokies and cleavage by Gina Gershon in Borderline.

• Gina Gershon (1, 2, 3, 4)

"Blue City"
There is stray nipple shown by Ally Sheedy in Blue City

• Ally Sheedy (1, 2, 3)

"Red Rock West"
In this 1992 Nicolas Cage we see Lara Flynn Boyle in black undies.

• Lara Flynn Boyle (1, 2)

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