Sunday

Tuna
"White Men Can't Jump"

White Men Can't Jump (1992) stars Woody Harrelson as a former college basketball star who hustles money games in local parks in Santa Monica. Part of his con is his race, and the rest is his appearance. As he says, white men would rather win than look good. When he arrives in LA, his first hustle is Wesley Snipes, who is equally talented and as much of a hustler. After each hustles the other once, they form an uneasy partnership. Rosie Perez is brilliant as Harrelson's Puerto Rican girl friend from Brooklyn, who spends all day memorizing an almanac to prepare for Jeopardy. The tone of the film, and the cleverness of the dialogue, starts during the opening credits when you hear someone say, "Presbyterians are God's frozen people. They wouldn't swing even if you hung them." The magic of this film is more in the clever dialogue and repartee among all of the characters as they try to psych each other out than it is the plot. The characters interact naturally, making the relationships seem believable. The B ball sequences are also highly entertaining. It is written and directed by Ron Shelton, who also did many of my favorites -- Bull Durham, Tin Cup, The Best of Times and Blaze. There is a similarity in style, and he clearly understands how to do sports films.

Snipes hustles basketball to support his wife and kids. He has other jobs, but they are not doing well due to a slump in the economy. Harrelson, however, has a gambling problem at the root of his hustling. Both love "b" ball. Perez, and Snipes' wife Tyra Ferrel would like their men to be a lot more mature than they will probably ever be. Maltin gave the film an enthusiastic 3 stars, and Berardinelli agrees at 3.5 stars. IMDB readers were less kind, having it at 6.2/10. Made on a budget of $14.7m, it was a financial success at $76.253m gross. Not much in the way of extras on this DVD, other than trailers, but the transfer is good. Perez and Harrelson had two dark sex scenes, and showed breast flesh frequently in loose night clothes. This is at least a C+, in large part due to great dialogue, chemistry betwe4en Harrelson and Snipes, and a great performance from Rosie Perez.

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  • Rosie Perez (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17)

    "XChange"

    XChange (2000) starts as a near future Sci Fi, but quickly disintegrates into a thriller. Corpies (corporate officers) are now the cream of society, and everyone else is lower class. The premise of the film is that it is now possible to travel instantly anywhere by exchanging bodies with someone else. This is reserved for corpies, and also for clones to do heavy labor. Putting cast to character name is nearly impossible here due to the body switching, but Stephan Baldwin "floats" from New York to San Francisco, something he has never agreed to before. It is an emergency meeting, as one of his clients has been assassinated. After the meeting he travels to attend, he goes to a club frequented by floaters, and gets laid with fellow floater Amy Sloan. He returns to XChange to find that his body has been stolen, and he will be transferred to a clone with a 5 day life expectancy while they track the corporate espionage expert that stole his body.

    He escapes and returns to New York to hunt for his body, and, with the help of ex girlfriend Pascale Bussières, uncovers the entire plot to merge XChange to another corporation. Part of the plan was the assassination that had already take place, and more are planned. To the film's credit, it takes advantage of the sexual possibilities of this body swapping, and we have lots of nudity. Pascale Bussières, Lisa Bronwyn Moore, and Janet Kidder shows breasts, and Amy Sloan shows breasts, buns, and maybe a hint of bush.

    IMDb readers have it at 5.4 of 10. The plot seems to invent new rules everytime it is backed into a corner, and I lost interest half way through. Even opening with scrolling exposition, they frequently had to tell the story rather than show it, which often turns me off. There was the basis for a good film here, and the cast was fine, but a better script could have been written. Low C-.

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  • Amy Sloan (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20)
  • Janet Kidder (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)
  • Lisa Bronwyn Moore (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)
  • Pascale Bussières (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)

    • Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy)

    Deep in the Woods (2000):

    (Complete spoilers)

    Deep in the Woods is essentially a French director's tribute to the Italian Giallo sub-genre, slasher films which use high style and an offbeat artistic presentation of semi-graphic murders.

    No question about it, this film nailed the style portion of the requirements. You know the drill. Spooky close up of a bird's eye, followed by a cut to the bird's POV as he flies. Mysterious minor characters who linger too long fondling their knives. Spooky children. A dark, spooky, isolated location. Rooms full of stuffed animals and/or dolls that seem to be staring at the innocents.

    You know, the usual Argento crap.

    I have nothing against this style. In fact, I think it can be very involving in the best work of Argento and Brian de Palma and others, but no amount of art design and dazzling visual invention can cover up an incoherent plot, or a lack of tension and character development. In order to make a scary mystery movie work, one must do the following:

    • make the audience care whether the victims are murdered
    • keep the narrative and the behavior of the characters logical, or at least plausible
    • provide some scares
    • have the explanation make sense, or at least allow the audience to understand what the explanation is

    Without those elements, all the style in the world is not sufficient to make an interesting movie, and this film fails across the board in those areas, and throws in some bad acting, and ludicrous dialogue to boot. Not to mention pretension! It's one of those movies where one person delivers a line, then the director switches to the face of the next character to speak, but that character does not actually say anything for some time, then responds with something only vaguely related. Then there is another long pause until the first speaker says, "You never answered my question". Then there is yet another long pause while the second speaker completely refuses to answer, but just does some insouciant gestures with a cigarette or something.

    You know, the usual French crap.

    The premise is fairly simple. A troupe of young actors has been invited to a lavish castle deep in the woods to provide an entertainment for a young boy's birthday party. They will perform The Big Bad Wolf. As for the birthday boy, the li'l nipper has not spoken or smiled since the day he saw his mother killed, or some such malarkey, and he basically just stares straight ahead at all times. He's like a ten year old entered into a Robert Stack impersonating contest. The little rascal does pop in from time to time in the oddest, most unexpected places, just to stare at the actors ...

    Say, maybe he is the killer ...

    Or maybe the killer is the creepy gamekeeper. Or the owner of the castle. Oh, wait, the owner can't be the killer. He's the first victim, and is in a wheelchair to boot. Or is all that a trick?

    Or maybe the killer is the guy who says he's a cop, but looks like a homeless man. A heavily armed homeless man.

    Well, somebody is the killer, because the young actors start to get killed. And not only is there a killer, but somewhere out there in the woods, the cops are looking for a rapist as well.

    I guess you might assume that the killer and the rapist are the same maniac, or you might assume they are two different menaces. I wasn't clear on this point at all. The actors clearly think they are two different people, because the surviving actors were blaming one another rather than assuming it was the work of a local, but the rapes had been occurring long before the actors arrived, so that couldn't have been one of them. But since the actors are wrong about the murderer being one of their own, perhaps they are also wrong about the murderer and the rapist being two different people. Beats me.

    At one point the incredibly creepy cop, who makes Lieutenant Columbo seem to be as dapper as Yves St Laurent, comes in to say that the rapist has just struck again, not far from the castle, and that the kids should stay inside. In the very next scene, they are walking through the impenetrable woods - and splitting up to travel alone or in pairs instead of staying together. Was that scene transition supposed to be funny? It seems as if those two scenes came from two different movies, or were edited together in the wrong order.

    Later, when the killer was unmasked, I didn't know whether he was the wheelchair guy or the wheelchair guy's twin brother, or what.  I say this because:

    • The gameskeeper, who had been with Mr. Wheelchair for years, seemed to think that his boss really needed that wheelchair. Given that fact, if the owner was the murderer, he had been pretending to be crippled for years, just waiting to invite some unsuspecting actors to the castle for a good slaughter some day. Man, that is one dedicated maniac.
    • Before the unmasking, that we think the owner is dead. That's because we saw him killed - from the murderer's POV! In that scene, he was saying stuff like "please, don't hurt me". He was not putting on a show or feigning his death for the benefit of the actors, because nobody could hear what he was saying in that scene  except the owner, his assailant, and us.
    • When he is unmasked, the killer refers to the castle's owner in the third person. "Poor, stupid Axel"

    So I guess the murderer had to be the castle owner's evil twin, because if it was the castle owner himself, then who the hell was he talking to when he was begging for his own life in the earlier scene?

    But they never actually said it was a twin, the credits do not indicate a dual role for the man who played Axel, and I think the two surviving members of the acting troupe seemed to think that the man who confessed to them was the owner himself, simply referring to himself in the third person as an example of his psychological dissociation. But maybe they were just plain wrong again, as they were when they suspected that the murderer must be one of their own troupe. After all, they did not see the scene where the castle's owner was begging for his own life, so they have no reason to doubt that he simply faked his own murder. On the other hand, we the audience did see that scene, and have every reason to ask that question.

    In other words, I still don't know who the hell the murderer is,  I don't know why he committed the murders, and I didn't care when the three actors were killed, because they were complete douchebags to begin with.

    So a dazzling clone of Dario Argento's style added up to absolutely nothing because of an illogical and incoherent script filled with victims that we were perfectly happy to see dead.

    Net result of a stylistically brilliant film: an abysmal 3.6 rating at IMDb.

    There must be a lesson in there somewhere for you youngsters. Something about priorities.

    Our correct grade is a C-. It was a very hard watch for me, and other mainstream movie reviewers, because who cares about style when the movie is gibberish? I'd be tempted to say E, but it has to be a C-, because some of the genre guys really loved it.

     

    Honest (2000):

    There's nothing much to say here. I haven't seen the movie. I just made .wmvs from somebody else's enormous files. The important thing is that it represents the only film made by those two All Saints sisters, the Appletons, and they got their shirts off in the process. Their Uncle Crabby stayed clothed.

     

     

    OTHER CRAP:

     

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    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.

    Shiloh

    Words from Scoop.

    .avi's from Shiloh.

    .wmv files made by Scoop from Shiloh's .avi's.

     

    Women you've heard of  - in films you've heard of!

     

    Perhaps these tips will help if you have trouble with the codecs for these movies:

    Shiloh says:

    FYI when I hypercam vids to make the file size smaller I use DivX MPEG-4 Fast-Motion for the video compressor, then I use virtualdub to compress the audio. The properties for the vids says the video codec:  DivX Decoder Filter & audio codec:  Morgan Stream Switcher which I'm not familiar with. When I compress the audio with virtualdub I use MPEG Layer-3.  A friend of mine told me about compressing the audio about (6) mos. ago. Like I said previously, only been capping for a year & a half & I'm no expert. Hopefully this info will help members with the proper codecs for my vids.
     
    When I cap big brother's I use hypercam mostly & sdp & asfrecorder if the set up allows me. I stopped using camtasia cause the file sizes were always too big, could never figure out the process, over my head lol, plus it cost too much to buy in my opinion.

    A reader says:

    You mentioned that some users were having trouble with the videos on your site. There is a tool designed to determine what codec is needed for a video. http://www.headbands.com/gspot/ Hope this is useful to you or your users.

    Scoop says:

    I made the .wmvversions of each video. The codecs for these: Windows Video V8, Windows Audio 9. The upside of these is that you know the codecs, and they'll play in the Windows Media Player. The downside is that they are slightly larger, and slightly lower quality.

    Graphic Response
    • Jennifer Connelly showing a see-thru nipple view plus a very quick glimpse of her bum in scenes from "House of Sand and Fog" (2003).

    Be sure to pay Graphic Response a visit at his website. www.graphic-barry.com.

    Vejiita
    'Caps by Vejiita from the Spanish movie "Cosa de brujas" (2003).
    • Lidia San José...beautiful toplessness plus some rear views. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

    • Manuela Arcuri, the gorgeous Italian babe is topless in all 4, and shows some thong views in #1. (1, 2, 3, 4)

    • Susana Segorbe, excellent rear nudity in both plus partial breast exposure in #1. (1, 2)

    Dann
    'Caps and comments by Dann:

    "Blaze"
    Great stars don't always guarantee great movies, and this 1989 drama about the relationship between Governor Earl Long of Louisana and stripper Blaze Starr is just too erratic to be great, but Paul Newman and Lolita Davidovich as the principles did their best, and the movie is interesting because it's based on a true relationship between the two.

    Long in his later days was flamboyant and sometimes nutty, and after losing a re-election for governor which may have been lost partly because of his relationship with Starr, went on to win election to Congress, but never served. This tumultuous time is chronicled in the movie, but the movie is often confusing, at times focusing on Long, at other times Starr, so you're never sure if it's a movie about Long or Starr. Still it was an fascinating glimpse into 1950's Louisana.

    Oz
    'Caps and comments by Oz:

    "Revenge of the Ninja"
    Revenge of the Ninja is a run-of-the-mill martial arts movie. Two ladies go topless, Ashley Ferrare and some unidentified woman.

    • Ashley Ferrare (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
    • Unknowns (1, 2)


    "Red Skies"
    Red Skies is in a similar vein but there's no nudity, only some unidentified sexy eye candy.


    "The Circuit"
    Continuing in the fight category we have The Circuit. We see some see-through action by Gail Harris' voluptuous breasts and Susan Midnight is down to her underwear.


    "Fashion TV "
    Audrey Cock is a model who appeared in Sports Illustrated. We see some see-through nudity of Audrey in a Fashion TV segment. Likewise, we have some see-through views of Julia Stegner as she struts her stuff on the catwalk. Finally, we have some pokies by Kristy Hinze on the catwalk. Kristy is an Australian model, more well-known by older Aussies as the grand-daughter of an overweight, corrupt Queensland politician in the 60s and 70s. Fortunately, she didn't inherit his genes.

    • Audrey Cock (1, 2, 3)
    • Julia Stegner (1, 2, 3, 4)
    • Kristy Hinze (1, 2)


    "Presumed Innocent"
    Next we have some brief nipple exposure by Greta Scacchi in Presumed Innocent.

    • Greta Scacchi (1, 2, 3, 4)


    "Young Einstein"
    Continuing things Aussie, we have Young Einstein written by and starring Yahoo Serious, who suddenly appeared on the scene and disappeared just as quickly. We have some brief see-through views of Odile Le Clezio.

    • Odile Le Clezio (1, 2)


    "The Adventures of Pluto Nash"
    The Adventures of Pluto Nash is the Eddie Murphy movie that cost 100 million to make, sat on the studio shelves for almost 2 years, then only made 4.5 million in theaters. But I've heard that Scoopy Jr. likes it anyway :-) No nudity, just nice caps of Illeana Douglas, Lana Underwood and Rosario Dawson.