Saturday


Professor T

s1e4, 720p

Marie Roennebeck




SI Swimsuit Edition

2018

Barbara Palvin in a see-through slideshow (from Instagram)







Strike Back

These first appeared about two months ago, but have been upgraded to 1080hd.
More important, the clip of Alin Sumarwata is an expanded version of her sex scene. Well worth a look.

Alin Sumarwata in s6e6


Fanny Mueller in s6e7








Der Alte
"Das perfekte Glueck" (s47, e2) in 720p

(last night's episode)

Franziska Petri





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



All or Nothing

2002, 1920x1040

Sally Hawkins, back in the days when she had sex with humans.






The Lone Ranger

2013

There's No nudity in The Lone Ranger, but Helena Bonham Carter’s boobs are well pushed up.



"Altered Carbon"

season one

Lexi Atkins



Brainscan's comments:

I've not seen the series but I have noticed from the clips the show has a certain style in which a semi-clothed gal goes from enticing to sorrowful at the drop of no one's hat.  I get why they seductive and why they should be unhappy, but none of them gives a sign of being under duress until they fall apart completely, as though someone threw a switch from OFF to ON, or perhaps the opposite.  Lexi indeed starts out more than sort of eager to see a man in uniform and then instantly descends into fear and tears.



Becks

2018, 1080hd

Isabella Farrell film clip (sample below)



Johnny's comments:Becks is a lesbian drama where Becks (Lena Hall) is very much in love with bandmate Lucy (Hayley Kiyoko). When Lucy goes to Los Angeles to be on a music reality TV show, Becks decides to leave New York and follow her, but when she gets there, she finds Lucy with another woman. Broke and nowhere else to go, Becks ends up back home with her mother Ann (Christine Lahti), who reluctantly accepts her sexuality. She also catches up with her former friend/lover Dave (Dan Fogler), who now runs a bar in town and lets Becks play a few songs there for tip money. She also offers guitar lessons and that is how she meets Elyse (Mena Suvari), who married the boy who cruelly outed Becks as a lesbian at high school. Over time, they become friends, but Elyse seems more than interested in Becks and after Becks convinces Elyse to sing a song with her at the bar, they begin an affair that is never going to end well, particularly with Becks desperate to get back to New York.

Pretty good movie. I had no idea what it was about as I got it a month or so back and had completely forgotten about it until I look at the list of new movies I had and was surprised to find out it was a decent lesbian drama with a few familiar faces. Being trying to work out where I'd seen Lena Hall before and found out she was in an episode of Girls also playing a lesbian who attempts to have sex with Hannah at some retreat. And she's quite good here, probably cast for her musical abilities, but she's a charming presence throughout. Not a bad little movie.







Julia Faure in J'ai 2 mours (2017) in 1080hd

Angela Gregovic in Brand: Eine Totengeschichte (2011) in 720p


Gwyneth Paltrow in Sylvia (2003) in 720p



Before I saw this film, I was not particularly knowledgeable about the poetess Sylvia Plath. I knew that she was an unlikely 20th century poet - not the expected wild-eyed Bohemian, but a bourgeois middle-American who looked like she would have been more at home in a Betty Crocker cook-off than in a Greenwich Village coffee shop. I knew that she tried to commit suicide several times, starting when she was ten years old, and coming very close to success in that endeavor between her junior and senior years at Smith. By her own count, as detailed in "Lady Lazarus," she tried to kill herself three times unsuccessfully. She finally succeeded at ending her life on the fourth attempt, when she stuck her head in an oven shortly after the unhappy dissolution of her marriage to poet Ted Hughes.

I know that many people consider her a great poet. I don't know about that. I don't like her work, but I'm not really interested in any 20th century poetry after T.S. Eliot, and I don't really get into morbid self-absorption, so that's just my taste kicking in. Let's assume she was top-drawer. But I'll tell you this. She sure wasn't much of a novelist. I read The Bell Jar and I found it to be completely without merit of any kind.

I also know that nobody really knows what the hell was wrong with her head. She was not abused or tortured in childhood. She never had much hardship in her life. She didn't experience the tragic death of any of her children. No major traumas like that. She was a brilliant student, an attractive woman, and a successful author. She had two beautiful children.

She was said to be a happy child until she was about ten, at which point her father died, and she gradually took on more and more manic-depressive behavior characteristics, and an increasing morbidity. In her life, and in her work, she talked about death so much that she made Jim Morrison seem as life-affirming as Zorba the Greek.

The death of a parent and the dissolution of a marriage are difficult circumstances, but similar things happen to most people, and they do not spend their lives sticking their heads in ovens or popping sleeping pills. Clearly she was messed up, and one naturally wonders if there is some explanation, some insight, perhaps to be found in her own words.

That is what I knew before I saw the movie. That is still all I know.

No further illumination, in fact not even that much illumination, will be found in this film, which simply hits upon some biographical highlights chronologically. It can't use her poetry to illuminate her mental condition, because Plath's estate would not allow her poetry to be quoted in this film.

In fact, the script really didn't capture the nature of her mental illness. Ron Howard has taken some flack in his life for being a pedestrian, mainstream director, but he did quite a good job at demonstrating the nature of the mental illness in A Beautiful Mind, by using visual devices and by keeping some of the delusions hidden temporarily from the audience. These tactics allowed the audience to see through the eyes of the deranged mathematician, and to live in his reality. Sylvia accomplishes none of that. Whenever a depressive or paranoid episode is coming on, it alerts us and then suffocates us with the usual movie cliché - tragic and dissonant violin music.

In other words, this is a film about a mentally unhinged poet, yet it offers no insight into her mental condition, and never uses her poems. Sylvia Plath without the poetry and without some insight into her mental illness is about as interesting as "Oklahoma!" without the songs.

Some feminists have found Plath to be a symbolic victim of woman's inferior role in modern society, and they often claim that she was destroyed by devoting her life to, and giving up her own work for, a cheating, insensitive man. The film did, at least, give the axe to that theory, since it clearly shows that Plath's mental condition was just as bad before the failure of her relationship with Hughes, and that Hughes did everything he could to get her to stop playing housewife and start writing. Of course, his leaving hastened her decline, and was the direct cause of her final sayonara, but it was merely the straw that broke the camel's back.   

This film was supposed to be the great return of Gwyneth Paltrow to serious, respectable cinema, after having been slumming in junk flicks for some time. Gwyneth does bear a certain passing resemblance to Plath at the same age, and her performance is fine, but the movie is so insignificant that I don't expect her to get any award nominations, and very few people will ever get to see the performance in order to evaluate it. And to tell you the truth, she was overshadowed by a charismatic performance by Daniel Craig as Ted Hughes, just as Sylvia Plath was overshadowed by the real Hughes. In other words, Gwyn will have to wait a while to re-ignite her career, because this film won't do it
 
(By the way, it was quite nostalgic and appropriate to see the part of Sylvia Plath's mother played by Gwyneth's own mother, Blythe Danner.)
Ines Baric in Stahlnetz (s8e2; 1999) in 720p

Angelina Jolie in Pushing Tin (1999) in 1080hd




How do you determine "cool"?

A good rule of thumb is the "James Bond rule."

  • If it is a guy, he's cool if he could he play James Bond. Fred MacMurray doesn't play James Bond.
  • If a woman, she's cool if James Bond would try to seduce her, or consider her a worthy adversary. James Bond doesn't hit on Tonya Harding.
  • If it is an activity, it is cool if James Bond would do it. James Bond does not belong to a bowling league. James Bond plays chemin-de-fer, not slapjack. James Bond would have an old dueling scar, not  an ingrown toenail.
Some people are just plain cool. Dean Martin and Cary Grant and JFK and Bogart are cool. Mr Rogers and Dick Cheney and Mr Garrison and Wally Cox are not. Nothing can change that. You can't become cool through great acting. You either are or you aren't. Kenneth Branagh is not cool, despite the best acting skills on the earth. George Clooney is cool without even trying.

Which brings us to this movie, which was was hamstrung by a very strange casting decision. The Russell Bell character has to be really cool, so cool that he intimidates the cock of the walk in the air traffic controller world just by being himself, so cool that if you met him you'd make plans not to introduce him to your wife.

So who was cast in this role?

Billy Bob Thornton

Let's face it. BB is not cool. Billy Bob may be the best character actor in the business today, and he can do many different things, but cool is not one of them. Billy Bob is a little skinny geek who who used to be a little fat geek, and is afraid of old furniture. If you were a high school bully in Billy Bob's school, you would not beat him up, because you would never even notice him. Years later, he would come up to you at your reunion and say, "Remember me? I was in your Chem class." You would not. Because he is a nobody. That is precisely what makes him so effective as a character actor. He is a genius at being a nobody.

So how did the script try to convince us that this little weasel is a cool, big penis kind of guy? He sings "Muskrat Love" on a karaoke machine.

I think that pretty much says it all.

Alex Kingston in Croupier (1998) in 1080hd



"The world breaks everyone. And afterwards, many are strong at the broken places. Those that will not break, it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave, impartially. If you are none of these things it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry."

If I tell you that this is a movie about an aspiring author who takes a croupier job and delivers first person voice-overs, you probably already know that it's one of those "loners with integrity" movies. Authors, after all, practice to be detached objective observers, and croupiers can't get involved either with bettors or with other members of the casino staff. Of course, despite his practiced lonership and alleged integrity, our hero manages to get involved with everyone. He's got more women undressing in front of him than Warren Beatty. His harem includes both staff and bettors. He not only dates bettors, but conspires with one to participate in a scam to rob the casino. Or does he?

Near the end of the film, just before the heist, Croupy figures out that he is being scammed, but he simply doesn't care. That is pretty cynical and world-weary, even by noir standards. In fact this guy is so world-weary that he makes Stephen Rea look as enthusiastic as Mike the Sweater Guy from those Amazing Discoveries infomercials.   

After the heist, however, he finds out that he has been scammed in yet another way he had not foreseen. There is a final "gotcha" that pulls the rug out from under him, and does finally break down his indifference. Yup, the loner with integrity gets conned for a change, despite his cynicism.

Of course, the whole experience just prepares him for even world-wearier soliloquies in the future.

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Director Mike Hodges is the guy who directed the original Get Carter way back about twelve minutes after the Big Bang. I guess that isn't so completely absorbing unless you realize that he pretty much did nothing noteworthy in the thirty years between these two good movies. He was close to seventy years old when he did this one.

The film was a critical darling (97% positive reviews), but was disqualified from Oscar consideration because it first appeared on Dutch TV. Clive Owen's performance was so highly admired that he was immediately being mentioned as a leading candidate to replace Pierce Brosnan as James Bond. I was less enthusiastic about thew film. I think Croupier does what it does quite well. It is cool and dripping with atmosphere, and sexy, and the dialogue is interesting and witty and poetic. But all that the critical praise might lead you to expect a taut and tense thriller, which it is not. And don't expect a slick Hollywood look. It looks low-budget and it is low-budget. It is even sloppy in spots. There is a ham-fisted editing error at about 58:40, and they just left it in!

But go into the film with reasonable expectations, and you may be pleasantly surprised.