¿De qué se ríen las mujeres? (1997) is a Spanish musical comedy with roughly the same style of humor as I Love Lucy. The English title is What Makes Women Laugh. The tale is narrated by a 17 year old boy. He father is a writer, his mother and three aunts comediennes, and his grandfather has just married a girl of 20. His father is run over by a car trying to pick up a chick a the wedding. His mother is crestfallen and carries his ashes everywhere, speaking to his ghost. The ghost is encouraging her to find someone else, but she will have none of it until she finds his little black book, and realizes what he had been up to. Se resolves not only to find someone new, but to learn how to have sex without love.

One of her sisters is having a long term affair with a married man, and the other is a man hater and wants to be a stage actress. Verónica Forqué, as the mother, shows a breast trying to seduce a man. Yolanda Ventura, as the 20 year old grandmother, shows breasts at the beach. IMDb readers have it at 6.0. It is well photographed, and has pace, but I didn't much like the style of comedy, and the plot was not all that interesting either. It is in Spanish with optional English subtitles. The letterboxed transfer was well done, but there are no special features. It seems to have had a theatrical release in Spain, but I could find no reviews, and there are only 31 votes at IMDb. This is a C-. If you enjoy this style of comedy, it is technically sound.

The basic premise of the film is not too difficult to describe for those who know films. Imagine a re-make of SE7EN in which John Doe kills people not because of the imagined "sins" they have committed, but because they have committed crimes of unimaginable magnitude, like the serial killing of lost children. As in SE7EN, we have two cops chasing after a criminal who is deranged but also much smarter than they are. As in SE7EN, the criminal leaves behind convoluted or cryptic clues that lead the cops on a chase to other victims or to the master criminal.  As in SE7EN, the cops discover grisly details by using flashlights in dark rooms. As in SE7EN, the psychotic criminal mastermind is played by a distinguished actor (in this case Sir Ben "Gandhi" Kingsley).

Simple enough. Our master criminal seems to be the garden-variety movie psycho when we see him assembling long lists of seemingly random numbers and bizarre sketches of brutal crimes, but he differs from the guy in SE7EN in two critical ways.

First, he is not merely smart, but also has some super-human powers. He is one of five people who were recruited by the FBI in a top secret program to harness the power of ESP in apprehending serial killers. You never heard of it? Hey, I told you it was top secret. In fact, Gandhi has more than simple psychic abilities. We see that he seems to be able to place some thoughts into the mind of a receptive FBI guy, and in a few instances we see that his charcoal sketches predict the future. This makes the premise much harder to buy into than SE7EN's. In the Fincher movie, we only had to believe in a crazy guy who was very smart. Not that much of a stretch. In this movie, we had to believe in all sorts of pseudo-science and supernatural humbug which took Suspect Zero out of the plane of grotesque crime thrillers and into horror film territory.

Second, our killer may be crazy, but he is a genuine do-gooder who is demonstrably helping humanity. After all, he is a serial killer of serial killers. If you think about it, we probably could use more guys like this. One of the FBI guys doesn't even want to bring him in, and the baddie, in turn, leads that agent to the all-time career plum - a single-handed collar of the ultimate serial killer, a guy who has kidnapped, tortured, and killed hundreds of innocent children.

Frankly, the film gets a bit convoluted around the middle of the film. There are regular serial killers, then the master serial killer called Suspect Zero, then the serial killer who only kills other serial killers. Even with a straightforward narrative style this film could have been confusing, but as told here, with all sorts of gimmicky shifts in POV represented by different types of non-traditional visuals (certain scenes are in red and white, other scenes are deliberately grainy), it could get irritating. The camera lingers on demented drawings, or on visions inside Gandhi's head, or maybe the FBI agent's head. There are gothic camera angles, purposefully underlit scenes, fast cuts, surreal visions, and just a whole lot of stylized stuff which didn't advance the film forward. There were a lot of times when my mind was wandering and I was just plain uninterested in the static way the story was being revealed. I didn't really snap in and start to get involved until the film was down to its last ten minutes. In other words, the story offers none of the traditional pleasure of a crime mystery, of solving the crime along with the detectives, because everything is deliberately obfuscated by a baffling use of a technique so hip and aloof that it simply forces the audience to wait until everything is explained. I guess they call this "over-directing" in film school. I'm now pretty sure that I understand who was killing whom and why, but I was confused as the story unfolded. That is to say I was confused when I wasn't just plain bored.

I'm still confused on some details.

• Suspect Zero's bodies. I thought for some reason that his deliberately random method meant that the bodies were scattered through the USA in random places, but at the end of the movie they all seemed to be buried on his farm in offbeat graves marked like Indian burial mounds.
• Suspect Zero's apprehension. I'm not completely sure why Ben Kingsley wanted the FBI to bring in the master serial killer. With all the other serial killers, Kingsley was perfectly content to do the work himself. I guess that he was giving a career back to the disgraced FBI agent in the hope that the agent would, in turn, kill him and release him from the suffering of a life which took place inside the heads of serial murderers. I guess. Frankly, I'm not clear on this.
• The agent's future. It seems that the disgraced FBI agent (Aaron Eckhart) is the same kind of super-psychic as Gandhi, although his ability is not yet full developed. Is this good or bad? Will that, in turn, make him just as crazy as Gandhi in time, or will he now become an FBI super-stud.
• What the hell was Carrie-Anne Moss doing in this film? There was an unconvincing explanation for her presence in the film in the first place. The film starts with the disgraced agent demoted from Dallas to Albuquerque because he failed to follow procedure. Back at the time of that failed collar, he had been teamed with a female agent who was also his lover. All of a sudden, the female agent turns up in Albuquerque to join him on his latest case. Why would the agency do that? They had a sour romantic history and had botched their last job together! So I didn't believe the justification for Carrie-Anne's presence in New Mexico, but then once she arrived she served absolutely no purpose. She did comment once in a while that the other agent was acting illogically, but the bureau chief was already tending to that responsibility, so Carrie was redundant. The love story was never developed, which was just as well, since there was no good way to fit it into the film. If the script had completely cut the female agent from the picture, it would have lost absolutely nothing except one more unnecessary sub-plot in an already muddled script.

You may not know that this film is an important contributor to film history, at least in an indirect way. The original script by Zak Penn (X2) was really the talk of the town back in the mid nineties when it was the object of a studio bidding war. Universal bought it for some serious cash and Tom Cruise wanted to star in it. In fact, this is the very film Cruise was going to do when Kubrick talked him into donating the next two years of his life to Eyes Wide Shut. Cruise still liked the script well enough to agree to produce the film, although it languished in production limbo for years. At various times, the Hollywood rumor mill reported that some real heavyweights like Richard Friedenberg (A River Runs Through It) and Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull) did rewrites. Ain't It Cool News reported that Ben Affleck was asked to do a re-write (remember that in the late nineties Affleck was a struggling actor with a screenwriting Oscar). AICN's version of the story was that Affleck looked at the project and said he would agree to star and co-produce, but that there was no need to do a re-write if Penn's original script was used! AICN's Moriarty also read Penn's script and agreed with Affleck, so two more guys seemed to jump on the bandwagon which should have departed four years earlier when Penn's original version had been one of the hottest scripts in town.

Frankly, I'm fuzzy on the details of the story after that. Tom Cruise is still listed as the executive producer, and the only screenwriting credits go to Zak Penn and Billy Ray. If Penn's original script was so good, it did not manage to emerge unscathed from the effects of Ray's rewrites and the highly stylized direction. The final film is mediocre at best, despite the $27 million production budget. The producers were obviously well aware of the film problems, because after waiting for seven years to film the movie, they waited another two years before releasing it. The script was sold in May of 1995, the re-written film was shot in mid-2002, and the final product finally appeared on 1,500 movie screens in August of 2004, at which time it debuted with a three million dollar weekend, and disappeared soon thereafter.

This film had me stopping the DVD constantly to eat or to work on something else. It was just boring and meandering. Many talented people tried but could not make a good film from this material.

And yet I can't help thinking that there was a good film buried somewhere deep inside of it ...

 ... perhaps in that neglected original script?

'Tis a mystery to me because if Penn's script was so good in the first place, why did so many people keep insisting on rewrites before it could get produced? Subsumed within that major issue was the question of why anyone was willing to commit $27 million to the script in its current condition, because it had so many obvious problems (the completely unnecessary Carrie-Anne Moss character, for example).

• Chloe Russell

Bound by Lies (2004):

This is a routine by-the-numbers STV "erotic thriller" with Kristy Swanson as a potential murder victim and Stephen Baldwin as the cop assigned to protect her. Baldwin has a beautiful wife at home, but you know how it is. He ends up having sex with Kristy anyway.

The actual murder mystery is solved about five minutes in! The main suspect is in custody, breaks free and proves that he is the psycho killer. End of mystery. The only real suspense, if I may use that word generously, involves whether the psycho can get to Kristy while she has a 24 hour police guard. There are a few half-hearted red herrings, but they seem totally irrelevant given that the murderer is already identified. Frankly, I don't know why Baldwin was getting suspicious of other people. What the hell was he suspecting them of?

I know what it must have been. It reminds me of one time in Utica, New York when a police officer was threatening to arrest me and my friend because he received a complaint that two suspicious looking men were walking through town (we were looking for a good place to hitchhike). We didn't look all that suspicious. We were wearing suitcoats and ties! We asked him what our crime was, and he said he would arrest us "on suspicion". "Suspicion of being specious characters?", we asked. Boy, did that guy get mad when we started making fun of him. Anyway, I think that officer has now retired and is acting as the consultant to Stephen Baldwin.

Since Kristy Swanson stays fully dressed in her big sex scene with Baldwin (she has gained a lot of weight), this film would be a complete waste of time except that someone had the foresight to get Gladise (Gladys) Jimenez to do her first nudity since 1999 in the thankless part of the wife at home. The beautiful Puertoriquena has been working on soap operas and "Tremors" since then, so she's had everything covered up for years. She's ba-a-ack!

• Gladise Jimenez (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)
• Kristy Swanson (1, 2)
• unknowns in the closing credits (1, 2, 3, 4)

Other Crap:

• MrTwig now has the new SouthPark episode: "The Death fo Eric Cartman".
• Tom DeLay says the GOP's 'Contract With America' ranks right up there with the Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights among the 'great documents of freedom.'
• Very HQ pics of Jessica Simpson in a pink bikini (as Daisy Duke).
• "Bono would make an excellent candidate for pope." Ya, know, I think I'd be a great Pope. I have a really large head and a thick neck, and could easily wear those giant hats. Plus, I'm a big fan of the Cardinals.
• Three newly-discovered species of slime mold beetles named Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld.
• Elle Macpherson caught topless by paparazzi.
• Urban legend: "In accordance with a requirement of their original Royal Charter, the Hudson's Bay Company of Canada makes annual payments of elk and beaver pelts to the Queen of England. " Status: False, but with an interesting back story:
  • "Actually, the Hudson's Bay Company's original charter did call for them to provide two elk heads and two beaver pelts to royalty, but only when said royalty came to the Rupert's Land area of Canada, not as an annual payment. This "tradition" has been observed on three occasions when royalty travelled to Canada, all of them in the twentieth century: a visit by King George VI in 1939, and visits by Queen Elizabeth II in 1959 and 1970. On the last occasion, however, the queen was not presented with any heads or pelts but with live animals, which she donated to a Winnipeg zoo. "
• Letterman's "Top Ten Good Things About Turning 58"
• Applications to the top MBA programs have dropped almost 30% overall since 1998, with some schools experiencing declines of 50% or more
• Collect Britain presents 90,000 images and sounds from the British Library
• Discography - lyrics to all the songs of that beloved, sentimental band, Anal Cunt. No worry about these guys being too PC.
• Glass Curtain Gallery Archives. An art exhibit in Chicago features mock-ups of U.S. stamps - including one with a gun to the President's head!
  • Here's the Sun-Times article about the exhibit, which elicited some interest from the Secret Service.
• This week's movie reviews: The Amityville Horror. There are only seven reviews in so far, but they are quite positive!!
• This week's theater count - no major releases this week except The Amityville Horror, which will be on more than 3000 screens.
• Teenage boy desperate to get head. "A 17-year-old Morrisville youth was being held on $100,000 bail after police said he raided a tomb in a cemetery and removed a head from a corpse."
• Harvard Professor Accused Of Trying To Steal Manure From Farmer
• Here's the trailer for Apres Vous. bas/haut debit means low/high bandwidth (literally "flow"), bande annonce is the French expression for trailer.
  • French Comedy: "Antoine saves Louis from hanging himself, though in his attempt to get Louis back on his feet, Antoine gets caught in a romantic triangle."
• Headline of the day comes from from CNN: Alex Trebek sued over missing horse. Trebek claims the missing horse is pushin' up the daisies. Story itself is kinda boring. Talk about beating a dead horse.
• No link here, just useful movie esoterica from my mailbox:

  "I'm not sure if you've reviewed Jet Li's Hero but if you haven't seen it yet, there is something important you should know. The symbol that Broken Sword writes down is very poorly translated. Instead of 'Our Land,' it should read 'All Under Heaven.'

  Reviewers slammed the ending of this movie because the mistranslation makes it look like a defense of imperialism. It is in fact about the choice of Nameless to follow Broken Sword and his choice not to kill. It is this challenge that Nameless lays before Shih Chin Tu'an Ti."

• The website of MST3000's Michael J Nelson, who is one of the funniest writers in the world. I have read and enjoyed his book Movie Magacheese. He has also written two other books which I have not read.
• Something Awful reviews "1 Night in China"
  • "Do I really need to paint you a picture on this one? A giant woman who looks and sounds like a man with breast implants has a three inch long clitoris. I think this one is about as clear cut as it gets barring a snuff film review."
  • We also reviewed this fine film.
• The LED Electronic Scrolling Belt Buckle. With a video demonstration. Good potential to sell advertising:
  • Over six billion served
  • Have you seen SE7EN yet?
  • A taste of paradise
  • Live in your pants. Play in mine.
  • Let your fingers do the walking
  • Reach out and touch someone
  • Keeps going and going and going.
  • Now You're Playing With Power!
  • It takes a licking and keeps on ticking.
  • Sometimes you feel like a nut.
  • Where's the beef? Right here.
  • It's not just for breakfast anymore.
  • Race for the honey-nutty taste
• Jackson Accuser's Mother Pleads the Fifth. Jackson's attorneys tried to prevent this, but I disagree with their reasoning. This actually does them a great favor. Having a witness plead the fifth has a completely different meaning in terms of legal technicalities than it does to juries. To legal scholars, it is a way of protecting one's right and avoiding the possibility of admitting guilt. To a jury, it's WORSE than admitting guilt. It says to a juror, "I am a complete scumbag guilty of far worse things than even the opposing attorneys can imagine, and anything I say should be completely discounted."
• IDAHO HOUSE CONCURRENT RESOLUTION NO. 29 - commending Napoleon Dynamite This is for real - at least in the sense that it is really on the website of the Idaho Statutes and Constitution. Excerpts:
  • WHEREAS, tater tots figure prominently in this film, thus promoting Idaho's most famous export
  • WHEREAS, Uncle Rico's football skills are a testament to Idaho athletics
  • WHEREAS, the prevalence of cooked steak as a primary food group pays tribute to Idaho's beef industry
  • WHEREAS, Napoleon's tetherball dexterity emphasizes the importance of physical education in Idaho public schools
  • WHEREAS, any members of the House of Representatives or the Senate of the Legislature of the State of Idaho who choose to vote "Nay" on this concurrent resolution are "FREAKIN' IDIOTS!" ...
• Randy Quaid and Jack Nicholson may team up again for a sequel to 1973's The Last Detail. The sequel, "Last Flag Flying", will pick up with the characters 30 years later. The article says that the author of the novel The Last Detail has already written the follow-up novel, but it doesn't seem to have been published yet.
• Justin Timberlake's latest movie is set for a series of reshoots, because it's based on a real-life fugitive - and he has now been arrested. Or at least that's the reason they are giving for the re-shoots. Either that, or they finally watched what they had shot.
• Jennifer Lopez has revealed that she loves cleaning house. I don't know. She doesn't do that good a job on my house, but maybe that is a different Jennifer Lopez.
• Joaquin Phoenix has checked himself in to a rehab clinic for treatment of alcoholism.
• Weekly World News: "HOW TO HAVE UNINHIBITED OUT-OF-BODY SEX WITH ANYONE YOU LIKE -- WITHOUT THE MESS . . . IN THE PRIVACY OF YOUR OWN MIND! " I'm pretty sure that all teenage boys already know this technique.
• Bruce Willis was made an officer in France's Order of Arts and Letters and, interestingly enough, this also makes him commander-in-chief of their armed forces, so their surrendering days are over.
• German Cardinal emerges as favorite in Papal Pageant. But I think it's all going to boil down to the swimsuit competition.
• Jon Stewart reveals new political gigs in 'Where are They Now and Who Were They Again?'
• The Daily Show's Stephen Colbert explores a new kind of prejudice against a new kind of 'person of color' - tattooed people.
• Byron York talks to Jon Stewart about 'The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy,' revealing that a press pass can get you a long way.
• President Bush's iPod: The Complete Playlist (Dude, it's a joke)
• Is "www" in Hebrew equal to 666?
• A previously unpublished poem by Tennessee Williams, described as having been 'written out of absolute, complete despair,' has been discovered in his "blue book" from a college course examination in 1937.
• Celebrities go for 'esoteric' books: "Annual 'Who Reads What' list released"
• Borowitz: "KIM JONG-IL AGREES TO GIVE UP NUKES IN EXCHANGE FOR ANGELINA JOLIE." Bush Blasts Proposal as "Indecent"
• "You have reached what we think is the Internet's largest gallery of before and after images of breast surgery"
• A SIGNED photo of Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, was beaten at a charity auction by a pile of DUNG. (And it wasn't close!)

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

Today the Ghost takes a look at the teen sex-comedy, "The Girl Next Door". The nudity comes from Amanda Swisten and Sung Hi Lee. Former "24" star Elisha Cuthbert looks very sexy in several revealing outfits, including some thong views and parital side/rear breast views.

• Amanda Swisten and Sung Hi Lee
• Amanda Swisten and Sung Hi Lee zipped .wmv
• Elisha Cuthbert (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)
• Elisha Cuthbert zipped .wmvs (1, 2, 3, 4)

"Malibu Spring Break"
If you're a producer about to make a cheapie direct-to-video spring break chicks-everywhere-in-various-stages-of-undress flick, I have just one request: PLEASE find someone to shoot it who knows how to focus a camera. These flicks are dumb, lame, and brainless fun, but it's so frustrating that they can never come up with a sharp product. With modern digital video equipment, it's pretty much a no-brainer, which speaks volumes for the guys shooting this stuff.

2003's Malibu Spring Break is typical of this genre (including, unfortunately, not a sharp frame in the whole film): Two friends from Arizona come to Malibu for spring break, stay at Uncle's place, and raise hell and party as Uncle goes out of town.

Tons of scantily clad good looking young women, some nudity, no brains, very little script, just plenty of fun except for the crappy movie quality, even on DVD. I hate to think what the VHS print might look like. It's a shame, because cheap doesn't automatically mean a crappy picture, but in this case.....it does.

• Charity Rahmer
• Kristin Novak
• Iva Singer

Natalia Verbeke
(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)

Ariadne Shaffer
(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)

SLOW NEWS DAY LEAD: BRITNEY SPEARS PREGNANT
That Explains The 100-Pound Weight Gain - After weeks of denying rumors and dodging questions, Britney Spears confirmed on her website last night that she is pregnant. She wrote that "the time has finally come to share our wonderful news" that she and Kevin Federline are expecting their first child.

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