Basic Instinct 2 (2006):

Just for the sake of completeness, I rounded up all the deleted scenes from BI2

 (These are zipped .mov files, so you need the basic Quick Time player.)

• The threesome

• The orgy

• The rough sex

• A regular girl-on-top scene, with lots of nudity

• The office sex scene (passionate sex, but no real nudity at all)

Deadly Strangers (1974):

Hayley Mills topless! It's small, and the quality of this zipped .wmv is mediocre at best, but this is the one movie where Hayley whipped 'em out. (She also showed her bum in The Family Way).

Here are some of Herr Haut's collages from those two films:

Deadly Strangers
The Family Way

The Dying Gaul (2005):

A Hollywood producer just has to obtain a hot new script called The Dying Gaul, which is a tragic love story about how a devoted homosexual relationship ended with the death of one partner, as scripted by the other partner. Only one problem - he wants to produce the film as a tragic hetero love story, and the author is opposed to making the change. With a combination of charm and lots of money, the producer manages to convince the author to play ball. And then they start playing much more than that. Turns out the producer is bi-sexual, and was already in love with the author after having read his brilliant, soulful script. Turns out that the producer's wife is also just about in love with the author who, after all, did have a wife and kids himself, so he must have some interest in women, right?

The wife, a brilliant and bored housewife who used to be a screenwriter herself, decides to engage in some safe cybersex with the author, all the while hiding behind a male identity. Of course, as the author confides ever more intimate secrets to his new online pal, he eventually confesses that he's having an affair with a certain producer. This comes as shocking news to the wife, who had no idea that her devoted husband was either unfaithful or bi-sexual. Rather than confronting the two men with the secret, she decides to fuck with their heads.

All of that is merely the set-up. Many twists follow.

Man, this is an unpleasant movie.

It is also quite good.

• The direction is creative, if a touch on the arty side.
• The acting is excellent. It's essentially a three character play, and all three actors have plenty of time and the necessary talent to develop their characters. Campbell Scott, Patricia Clarkson, and Peter Sarsgaard are all top-notch actors, and all three were cast perfectly.
• The script is not as good as the execution. The dialogue is interesting, but the plot seems to have a couple of small loopholes in its logic. No biggie, though. There's nothing so illogical that it distracts from the flow of the drama.

Yes, it is quite competent, but it is nas-ty! What makes it so deeply cynical is that all three characters are basically decent human beings. Very decent. One might even say that they are all principled, reasonable, and compassionate. They are virtually drawn with "decent" signs on their foreheads. This makes it all the more alarming that they are so willing to hurt one another so deeply, and that they all suffer so greatly. We are used to seeing evil behavior from conniving ice-queens and greedy scumbags, and we normally have no sympathy for the evildoers when they get what's coming to them, even when it is operatically excessive, but it shocks us to see three of the nicest people we have ever seen go to the extent of destroying one another over matters that should never have gone so far, which they should all have talked out, and which all of them would have been decent enough to regret greatly in the long run.

In other words, the script carries the message that we are all, even the most decent of us, capable of hurting the people we love most when we are hurt. And not just hurting them in the sense of uttering a few unkind words, but really hurting them in the sense of completely destroying their lives in the worst ways you can imagine.

The subtext of the film is the Buddhist concept of karma. You get back what you have coming to you. Ye shall reap what ye have sown. I don't have any problem with that, but it seems to me that the characters in this film consistently harvested much more pain than they had sown, and that the harvest kept escalating constantly until an ending which was downright depressing and over-the-top.

Yup. It's a very sound movie. And I wish I had never watched it.

At one point, the producer character says to the author character, "Nobody goes to movies to have a bad time." Good advice. The people who made this film did not heed it. Unsurprisingly, it did nothing in its theatrical run. The distribution maxed out at 24 screens, and it grossed only $342,000.

Critical reaction was mixed. 48% positive reviews. Ebert assigned it 2.5 stars, which seems like the right score to me. I've always felt that 2.5 out of four means "Too good to pan; but not recommended, either." That summarizes this film perfectly.

What about Patricia Clarkson at 45? Has any woman ever done what she has - becoming a sex symbol after so many years as the next door neighbor? There are other women who have played sexy roles at age 45, but they were sexy when they were young - Sharon Stone, Kim Basinger, Barbara Hershey. Beautiful women are expected to start out sexy, and then the ones with real talent start to play the character parts as they age. But Clarkson somehow went from the Eve Arden roles to the Kim Basinger ones, and Eve Arden is not supposed to turn into Kim Basinger! Throughout Clarkson's youth she was always the dependable gal-pal with the sensible shoes and a husky voice which always sounded best delivering wisecracks and sarcasm and compassionate, well-grounded advice. Now, she appears in the credits in a white bikini with a semi-transparent top, stays in that bikini for several minutes of screen time, and does topless sex scenes. Our Miss Brooks isn't supposed to do that!

And she is just fine in that role. She looks great in that bikini. Her tummy is flat and her whole body looks young, slim, and well-exercised. Her face is not a young woman's face but, hell, she didn't even have a young women's face when she was young. It was always one of those "faces with character." Yet her face is beautiful in its way. She looks much better in moving pictures than in stills because she's pale and fair-haired and from a distance she seems to have no eyebrows, so we need to see how she moves her facial muscles to appreciate the humanity which underlies her beauty. Her eyes are compassionate, and her face is exceedingly expressive. It's surprising to me that she has never become a recognizable name. Then again, given her astounding reverse career path, she may yet make it.

 

Patricia Clarkson. These are all different frames, but many are quite similar. The changes in brightness and color are caused by my tinkering.

 

Other Crap:

Weekly World News: "THE 'BUZZ' ABOUT EVOLUTION ... 'We came from insects not from apes,' says expert!

Press Briefing by Scott McClellan That is Actually a Wonderous Fantasmo-Magical Dream Induced by Eating Spicy Tacos (WHITEHOUSE.ORG)

Firefighters respond to blaze at their own firehouse

• "Assistant Chief 'Skippy' Hipp says it's unusual to have a fire at a fire station, but mistakes happen."

"Pregnant Angelina Jolie and boyfriend Brad Pitt have taken refuge in a remote Namibian game lodge where wild lions will help protect them from the media"

A new clip from "La Mujer de Mi Hermano"

"Rowan Atkinson has announced his intention to sign on the dotted line for upcoming horrorshow Mr Bean 2: The Drivel Continues."

• "There’s always a certain sadness when it comes to watching Rowan Atkinson ‘do his thing’. There’s always an inevitable mental cast-back to the beautifully observed performances he gave across four BlackAdder series. And now? Watching Atkinson play Bean is just like watching Chaplin star in Dude, Where’s My Car?"
• We "can only assume that something untoward has happened - that Atkinson has placed a big-stakes wager with Ben Affleck, Cuba Gooding Jr. and David Icke, simply to see which one of them can amass the biggest number of staggeringly bad career choices over the course of their lives."

Here is the full list of the Writer's Guild's 101 Greatest Screenplays

• Do today's writers really believe that Hannah and her Sisters is one of the 100 greatest scripts of all time, and The Big Lebowski is not? No wonder today's movies suck.
• They did make some good selections of under-appreciated films. I don't know if Groundhog Day is really among the best thirty scripts ever written, but it is nice to see that professional writers acknowledge it to be a great script, even though it was never nominated for an Oscar.

Kiefer signs up for three more seasons of pulse-pounding, high-camp hijinks

Man Gets $218 Trillion Phone Bill.

•  Man, he really shouldda switched to MCI. He coudda saved ten trillion dollars! That's, like, enough to buy England. Maybe they will feature him in a commercial, standing in front of Buckingham Palace, dreaming of what might have been.

Thanks to Dave Barry's blog for being tasteful enough not to provide a link to this man's web page

The trailer for Stolen

• "In 1990, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston suffered the largest art heist in American history, resulting in the loss of 13 of the world's most famous artworks, worth $300 million, including pieces from Degas, Rembrandt, and Vermeer's masterpiece 'The Concert.' Not a single work has been recovered. With an eccentric cast of characters including a reformed fence nicknamed Turbo, cunning art detective Harold Smith, and Isabella Stewart Gardner herself, we journey into the mysterious world of stolen art where conspiracies abound, rumors are left unhinged, and a painting can change your life forever."

Hi-Res pics of the Martian surface

ABC to Offer Four Shows Online for Free, including "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost"

Bollywood star jailed for poaching rare Indian gazelles

• "Bollywood superstar Salman Khan was sentenced to five years in prison after he was convicted of poaching endangered Indian gazelles almost a decade ago"
• In addition to being jailed, he was (I'm not kidding) fined $560.

CBS RENAMED "COURIC BROADCASTING SYSTEM"

"GEN Y ACCESSIBLE" REMAKE OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS STIRS CONTROVERSY ... Scene of Moses posting Commandments on MySpace angers religious groups

Brick, as reviewed by The Filthy Critic

• "Somewhere, a film school is missing the kid who sits alone in the first row and wears the turtleneck. Holy shit, has there ever been as academic and masturbatory a movie as Brick that escaped from a university's film festival? What a boring, pretentious and pointless hunk of contrived crap."

Bomb Iran!!! - to the tune of "Barbara Ann"

RapidShare Video - Maria Bello in A History of Violence

Part 7 of Silent Bob's story of Jay's heroin addiction

It's that time of year again - for the Giant Pink Japanese Penis Festival

• Everyone has his own favorite sign of Spring - The Masters, Easter, the first robin, the streams swollen with melting snow, March Madness ... for me, it has to be the first sighting of the Giant Pink Japanese Penis

Cabspotting

• "Cabspotting traces San Francisco's taxi cabs LIVE as they travel throughout the Bay Area. The patterns traced by each cab create a living and always-changing map of city life."

On The Set Of Silent Hill

Entertainment Weekly's Photo Gallery: Jennifer Aniston movies: Hits or misses? You decide!

"This Boring Headline Is Written for Google"

Ten video-sharing services compared by Digital Guru

Movie Reviews:

Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe). White asterisk: expanded format. Blue asterisk: not mine. No asterisk: it probably sucks.

The Long Good Friday (1980)

The Long Good Friday is the prototypical English gangster movie. A mob boss is about to cement a lucrative deal with the American Mafia when people around him start dying and buildings start exploding just before he is to enter them. He is stumped as to why this is happening, but his first priority is to stop it before the American observer leaves, and before the police can no longer protect him.

Helen Mirren was hired for a part that was written as a brainless blonde bimbo. Before she would take the part, she demanded it be rewritten to make her a mastermind and kind of second-in-command to the boss. Frankly, she seemed out of place in a film that was supposed to be dominated by Bob Hoskins.  This is a one-character film, and a brilliant performance by Hoskins brings that character alive. His Harold Shand makes Marlon Brando's Don Corleone look like a teddy bear. He runs the London docks with an iron hand, but even though he is a scrappy fighter, he's proud that he has brought 10 years of peace to the London underworld, and he is a complex character. He is loyal to his friends, takes care of his mother, and shows compassion for people on more than one occasion.

IMDb readers say 7.7. (Their Top 250 requires 7.8)

Ebert awards 4 stars.

This is a B.

Pauline Melville shows breasts when Hoskins breaks in to question the man she is having sex with.

Monica Schnarre

(Film clips. Zipped. avis)

Here is Michelle Bauer again in Lust For Freedom, a worthy entry into the "women in prison" genre. I figured out how Lifetime could broaden its appeal to include anyone with levels of circulating testosterone above those of, say, Rosie O'Donnell. Get their women in peril out of their clothes. Sure, sure, have the gals win in court or have 'em gun down the guy that done them wrong, but get 'em nekkid first, and we will watch. (Multiple clips zipped together.)

Simple enough.

The woman with whom Michelle Bauer is playing nicely is pornstar Crystal Breeze. She did several straight roles and was also a body double, using the name Lisa Marie Stagno. (Multiple clips zipped together.)

David Holmes, a psychology lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University in England, has developed a formula to determine the perfect female butt: (S+C) x (B+F)/T = V.  That's shape (S) or droopiness + how spherical (C) the buttocks are, times bounce (B) + firmness (F), divided by skin texture (T) or presence of cellulite, equals V, which is hip-to-waist ratio, or butt  symmetry.  He tested the formula on 2,000 women and said that "the perfect female derriere has firmness to the touch and a resilience that prevents undue wobble or bounce, yet looks soft with flawless skin.  Slender thighs and a hip-to-waist ratio of 0.7 will frame the perfect bum, well, perfectly."  One caveat: women still preferred the big, curvy J-Lo butt, while men preferred the tight, firm Kylie Minogue butt.


*  He tested 2,000 women's butts for firmness and touchableness?  What's
the formula to get this guy's job?!

*  Finally, some university research that it's worth spending tax money on!


The Sandwich Counter at Selfridge's department store in London is offering the world's most expensive sandwich for 85 pounds ($148 US).  As you'd expect, it's big, but it's the ingredients that cost you.  It's made with 24-hour-fermented sour dough bread, mayo flavored with foie gras ($52 a pound) and black truffle ($593 a pound), brie de meaux (Europe's finest cheese), and Wagyu, an imported Japanese beef that costs $49 a pound.  A top chef who tried it called it the perfect meal-to-go, if "a bit dribbly," and the perfect hangover food.

*  And mighty tasty, with enough ketchup.

*  You can supersize it for just $200 more.



Thirty prostitutes in Germany have signed up for a church-funded training course to become telemarketers.  A project spokeswoman said competition among hookers is fierce, prices have hit rock-bottom, and "once you hit the thirties," you can't make a decent living at it.  But ex-hookers make good telemarketers ...

*  They can screw anyone without it bothering their conscience.




TODAY'S BIRTHDAYS - Omar Sharif (74).  Trivia: While Sharif is Hollywood's go-to actor for Arab roles, many Arab Muslims condemn him because he kissed Barbra Streisand in "Funny Girl."

*  Muslim lips are not allowed to touch ham.