Misty Mundae: The Girl Who Shagged Me (2004) is a joint British/Seduction Cinema spoof shot in London. Although Misty had top billing, and played to parts, she didn't have much screen time. She played a secret agent, and also Dr. Hannible Letcher. Yes, the movie was full of homages, including Silence of the Lambs, Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters and the Honeymooners. Misty was hilarious as Dr. Letcher, and I didn't even recognize her. The story is about an ancient lesbian (Anoushka) who had been frozen in a cave in the Scottish Highlands, and was freed by some adventurers. Mundae is ordered to stop her after she was stolen by a mad scientist intent on cloning her to supply his sultan. His assistant, played by Rachel Travers, who also does a porno film within the film, ends up being Anoushka's first conquest. A. J. Kahn appears in a Mundae masturbation fantasy, and also as Ralph Norton in a Honeymooners parody. Sally Huxley also appears in the masturbation fantasy, in the Honeymooners parody, and as Anoushka's mother.

This is pure silliness, but with lots of body parts. All the women show everything, except Mundae, who doesn't show her buns. The best line of the movie was from an expert on the ancient lesbian, who says, "Imagine the worst parts of the bible, but with tits. This is too new for an IMDb score. The DVD incudes a blooper real, and interviews. Mundae does a reasonable English accent as the secret agent. The photography is rather nice, although there was a little too many boob closeups with no face. This is a C, exactly what you expect from Seduction Cinema, with lots of naked lesbians having simulated sex, and decent production value.

Our culture treasures originality. Perhaps every culture does. We always remember the first of this or that, and that "first" person or event becomes a cherished part of our heritage. Nobody really cares about the second. George Washington is the Father of Our Country. The second President - who the hell was it again? Most people think it was Jefferson, but he was number three. If you're really into such things or still in school, you know the answer, but I'm willing to bet that 90% of Americans can't name the second President. As for the second person to make a solo flight across the Atlantic ... who the hell cares? History only cares about the first. We believe that originality has intrinsic value over and above the difficulty or merit of the task itself. It is originality that we often equate with the magical word "genius."

Which brings us to I ♡ Huckabees, an offbeat comedy which isn't very funny or even very interesting to most people, but is dazzlingly original. In fact, it is so original that it could well be the raving of an insane person, and provides some clear evidence of truth in the old saw about the similarity of genius and insanity. Which is it? Beats me. Maybe some of both.

It's about Albert Markovski, an environmental activist whose life is going poorly. One of his recent projects resulted in the destruction of an entire micro-biosphere except for one rock, upon which he sits to meditate and mutter. His entire environmental group is in danger of being co-opted by a slick, charming corporate huckster whom Albert originally asked for help. At the moment we join his thoughts, Albert is obsessed with the coincidence of having seen the same very tall African man three times in three separate places. Since he can't determine whether the coincidence has any significance or meaning, he does what I think any of us would do ...

... he enlists the services of an existential detective agency.

And that was some of the more normal activity going on in this film!

It is not entirely impossible to make something entertaining out of material like this.

• Woody Allen forged entertainment out of philosophy and the big questions in Love and Death and in several of his short stories. He scored by going for the belly laughs, by finding absurd humor in the absurdity of the universe. Huckabees does not do this. In fact, rather than making semi-respectful fun of philosophy, Huckabees takes the philosophy seriously and makes fun of those who deprecate it! (Yeah, plenty of laughs there. Those philosophers were some zany motherfuckers, as you know if you've seen Aristotle's definition of comedy. Funny, funny guy. Always cracked up Plato with the Groucho glasses.)

• Michael O'Donoghue made philosophy funny by finding humor in the process of intellectual engagement. In fact, the rabid genius known as Mr. Mike once started a National Lampoon piece with a very similar premise to that of I ♡ Huckabees. Anybody but me remember Critique of Pure Murder? The philosopher detective Jean-Paul Sauvage was a hard-boiled, hard-thinkin' dick who wasn't afraid to ask all of the tough metaphysical questions, and finally managed to unmask a false intellectual as the real murderer, because the pretender owned a copy of Will and Ariel Durant's History of Philosophy! Huckabees does not take this kind of approach either. The detectives in this film actually work like psychologists, not like detectives. Their only detecting is to find the deceptions posed by the conscious mind, and ultimately to strip them away.

What does Huckabees do to engage an audience, exactly? Frankly, I don't know. There were a few interesting ideas, but if there was any point, I missed it. Does it need a point? Well, no but it needs something. Writer/director David O Russell (Three Kings) is a talented guy and a fresh thinker, but I found almost no laughs in this film, no insights at all, and made no emotional connection to it at any time through any character. It seemed like a lot of babbling. All the characters speak very quickly, often repetitively, sometimes simultaneously, and usually in a very clipped manner, as if Jack Webb were suddenly to be transported back into the 30s to find himself competing for a word edgewise among Carole Lombard, Moe Howard, and Jimmy Cagney. (Dustin Hoffman even went for Moe Howard's hairstyle.)

The British critics generally despised this movie. American reviews were mixed, and Ebert panned it, but there were those who absolutely loved it, and there is now an incredibly comprehensive special edition DVD which will be treasured by that group. Why did those people like it so much? Well, the damned thing is odd, and tries to deal with weighty issues. There will always be people who like it for those reasons alone. And it is certainly original, and just about everyone treasures originality.

But after watchin' this movie, I'm thinkin' that originality may be overrated.

No real nudity, but a very nice look at Naomi Watts's rather scrawny but cute bum.

• Naomi Watts

Spanglish (2004):

It was an unusual day for me. I watched two recent releases and neither of them was aimed at the core moviegoing audience. The primary targets for movie marketers are (1) the male 17-39 market (2) the 17-39 date market. A film can be profitable and/or successful outside these hardcore ticket-buying groups, but these two cool and culturally savvy segments are holding the bulk of the purchasing power.

Spanglish is a sentimental film that seeks its primary audiences outside the cool market. Its primary appeal will be to the youngest female moviegoers who go to films alone, and the oldest filmgoers who are generally burnt out on the ugliness and brutality of what today passes for hip. It also has some appeal as a date movie or a film for the family to attend together.

It is about the members of a prosperous California family and the Mexican maid who affects their lives. The story is told as a flashback, within the framework of an essay written as part of the Ivy league admission process. Applicants are asked to name the person who most influenced their lives and to defend their choice. The voice-over tells us that the Princeton applicant is the maid's precocious daughter, who was about twelve when the flashbacks took place. Her point of view is naive, and her admiration for her mother is boundless, but she is also smart and insightful. (The girl who played this role is a very gifted young actress who had to handle the trickiest parts of the dialogue - when she was translating accurately for her mother even though she disagreed or would end up for the worse personally.)

The white family is troubled, mostly because of a self absorbed bitch-from-hell of a wife and mother. The rest of the family consists of your standard sitcom characters: the feisty but benign old granny who offers great insights amid drunken profanities, the overweight underachieving daughter, the dickless dad ...

... you know the drill

The IMDb scores

I don't mean to imply that the film is somehow worse than others, or for that matter better, because it is unhip. In reality, I'm just trying to fix it in the universe so you can better determine whether you will like it. I'm a little bit embarrassed to confess that I did kind of like its gentle point of view, its syrupy attitude toward the maid (Paz Vega), and its fairy-tale Platonic love relationship between Paz and the dad, even though the dad was played by the antichrist himself, Adam Sandler.

My hero, the Filthy Critic, could not have disagreed more. He said:

Sanctimonious claptrap. Not much more to say. Writer-director James L Brooks made a movie of such stupendous self-absorption, shallowness, and of interest to so few that it hardly needs discussing. Rich, stupid Californian sitcom characters (like a sassy mother-in-law and a ball-busting clueless mother) discover goodness through the eyes of a hot, saintly Mexican maid. It's a story that will appeal only to wealthy assholes in LA with guilt complexes about their immigrant servants, and who think that deifying them is better than giving them Christmas bonuses. The characters are too broad and their problems are too fucking foreign to any normal person. The Mexicans are portrayed so politically-correct and simplistically I can't imagine any Mexican wanting to see it. Crap on a doily. Lame.

It is not really possible for me to defend the film intellectually. It is not a realistic script, nor is it very intelligent, and it is a bit condescending. The uptight wife (Tea Leoni) was irritatingly stereotypical ands I wanted to shake her and say, "no, act like a person, not like a movie character." Spanglish is a sappy, unsophisticated, middlebrow movie. In any objective sense, Filthy is right, as usual.

But film criticism is not so objective, and regular old film watching is not objective at all. I would never have gone out of the way to see this, but I really liked a lot of the moments in the film. Sandler was actually good for this movie because his unpolished style and clumsiness give it a sincerity that it desperately needed. Sandler is no actor, and he has his clumsy moments here, but the casting process was good. He does seem to have a childlike inner sweetness that he is capable of bringing out on camera, and that was enough to give the this role the spark it needed. In the end, the film left me feeling better than if I had never watched it, even if the whole process did seem as if it had been entirely orchestrated to manipulate my feelings. What the hell. People like this kind of fluff every once in a while. Families watch It's A Wonderful Life every Christmas. We want to believe that life is better than it is, or at least that it could be better. That's the kind of movie this is - not a great one or a smart one, not a film that shows us as we are on the average, but one that shows us in our best moments, or maybe as we wished those moments had been.

Jesus, I can't believe I said nice things about Adam Sandler and Jimmy Fallon in the same week. I hope Patrick Swayze isn't in my in-box.

• Téa Leoni (1, 2)

Other Crap:

• Blog censorship wins overwhelming support from the American public. It's not as bad as it sounds. Americans just want to restrict the right of blogs to publish certain private information (like home addresses) about individuals.
• Letterman's Top Ten Secrets to Winning The Miss USA Pageant - as Presented By Miss USA. This is a pretty funny list!
• Victoria Gotti Performing in a Musical
  • Must ... resist ... temptation ... to make ... Guys and Dolls joke
• The Daily Show's Ed Helms investigates what it's gonna take for Muslims to like us.
• The Daily Show reports: "Just because you think the UN shouldn't exist doesn't mean you can't be its ambassador. "
• The Daily Show thought it was kidding about this: Negative campaigning enters papal election!
• Nostalgia: Classic comic book ads. Grit, Sea Monkeys, Charles Atlas - all your faves.
• Tom Delay Proclaims, "No Man of Woman Born Shall Harm Me!"

  In other news: Scientists baffled by apparent migration of Birnam Wood

• The theoretical thinker trading cards. I don't know if these will replace baseball cards. Jung was a pretty smart guy, but he never could execute the hit and run.
• GMs New Giant Hummer Starts At $140,000. It weighs 7600 pounds and holds 52 gallons of gas.
• Chris Klein, 'American Pie' Actor, Arrested For Drunken Driving in February - and nobody noticed! That can't be sayin' good things about his career! It's a tough time for Chris. About a month later, he also lost his long-time flame, Katie Holmes, after a five year relationship.
• The trailer for The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse
• Here's a second trailer for the Tony Yaa actioner, Tom Yung Goong
  • "A young fighter named Kham must go to Australia to retrieve his stolen elephant. With the help of a Thai-born Australian detective, Kham must take on all comers, including a gang led by an evil woman and her two deadly bodyguards."
• The international trailer and six clips from It's All Gone Pete Tong
  • " ... begins as an irreverent look at the life of a world-famous dance party DJ -- with the requisite wild parties, excesses and pitfalls that accompany fame and power. The story then takes an unexpected turn, and ends up a redemptive study of a music pioneer who, against fate, finds a whole new rhythm for his life."
• The French trailer for "The Bridge of San Luis Rey."
  • This Thornton Wilder book was must reading on our summer reading lists when I was in prep school, and was universally considered to be the most boring book on the list.
  • It has a monster cast, featuring DeNiro, Keitel, and ol' F. Salieri himself.
  • "It opens in the aftermath of an inexplicable tragedy--a tiny foot-bridge in Peru breaks, and five people hurtle to their deaths. For Brother Juniper, a humble monk who witnesses the catastrophe, the question in inescapable. Why those five? Suddenly, Brother Juniper is committed to discover what manner of lives they led--and whether it was divine intervention or a capricious fate that took their lives."
• Here's the trailer for the Japanese horror film, One Missed Call.
  • "A college student fails to answer a cell phone call because she doesn't recognize the caller's ringtone. Later, when she plays the message, the time stamp is three days in the future and she hears her own voice as she's being killed."
• Tyra gets medieval on some contestants during Top Model judging.
• Trivia question for the day: "What classic board game, created in 1979, is on the decline?"
• The arty new Adidas commercial directed by Spike Jonze
• We love this headline: "Ben looking for actors." "Ben Affleck is looking for two actors to take the leading roles in his big screen directorial debut. Affleck is adapting Dennis Lehane's best-selling book Gone, Baby Gone into a screenplay, as well as directing."
  • I reckon his problem so far is that he does not actually recognize acting when he sees it, so he keeps trying to hire morticians and grocery baggers.
• Ewan McGregor has criticized the film industry for placing more importance on movie promotion than his theatre work. McGregor also criticized
  • the fast food industry for being more interested in food sales than his theater work
  • the Bush administration for being more interested in the Middle East than his theater work
  • the entire scientific community for being more interested in those stupid and insignificant microbes and electrons than his theater work ...
  • ... except for that one astronomer at Stanford who proved conclusively that Ewan's theater work was the center of the universe.
• Because Dodgers baseball was Brooklyn's "State Religion" "The 1955 World Series championship banner captured by the Brooklyn Dodgers _ the only one the team ever won _ was unveiled Wednesday following a $16,000 restoration by experts at the Textile Conservation Laboratory at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine."
• The promo reel for Larry Clark's Wassup Rockers
  • "'Wassup Rockers' is set in South Central Los Angeles and follows a group of largely Hispanic teenagers who, instead of conforming to the hip-hop culture of their neighborhood, ride skateboards, listen to punk rock and wear their clothes tight. Constantly harassed, they take buses to Beverly Hills, Santa Monica and Hollywood, where they skate and catch the attention of the local rich girls, inevitably leading to trouble with parents, police and boyfriends. "
• The international trailer for Last Days
  • "'Last Days' is filmmaker Gus Van Sant's meditation on the inner turmoil that engulfs a brilliant, but troubled, musician in the final hours of his life. "
• Three clips from House of D, directed by David Duchovny
• A long behind the scenes look at Kung Fu Hustle
• The first clip from Hitchhiker's Guide
• Eight clips from The Interpreter, the thriller with Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman
• Ten clips from Kingdom of Heaven
• "The 40 Year Old Virgin is the new Universal Studios comedy starring Steve Carell,"
• The trailer for Save the Green Planet
  • "Save the Green Planet is a tilt-a-whirl genre-blender from Korea that turns film history against itself to create one of the most savage, affecting and inspired anti-violence movies ever made. This is a movie that defies all marketing labels and is exactly what it wants to be: like nothing you've ever seen before."
• 'French Elvis' loses song battle
• The Daily Show notes that the spirit of harmony the pope sought to bring forth in his lifetime didn't last through the funeral.
• The Daily Show's Stephen Colbert discusses the election of a new pope - and reveals the latest negative campaign ad.
• The Daily Show's Lewis Black explains the basic rules of a successful (read: televised) protest.
• Borowitz: BOLTON VOWS TO USE MOUSTACHE TO SCARE AMERICA'S FOES
  • "Elsewhere, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said that a Wisconsin proposal to hunt feral cats may be unconstitutional, but said that under certain circumstances it may be permissible to detain the cats and torture them."

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

Email Scoopy Jr. with more nominees, comments or suggestions.

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
The Top 20 Best Sex Scenes

Today the Ghost takes a look at the Skinemax flick, "Sexual Boundaries" (2005). One thing I've notice lately as porn babes make more appearances in softcore is that the sex scenes are starting to look a little more realistic. At times they may even really be going at it! If they aren't at least they certainly look as if they are much more often than in the past. For my money, it's a much needed late night cable improvement.

• Adult star and part-time lady of late night Keri Windsor. Here she is baring all and gettin' it on in several scenes. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)
• Keri Windsor zipped .wmvs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)
• Venus. Another triple B performance, including a gyno view in link and vid #1. (1, 2, 3, 4)
• Venus zipped .wmvs (1, 2, 3, 4)

• Venus and Keri Windsor team up for some lesbo/3-way lesbo fun. Once again we see all the fun part including another gyno view from Venus. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

• Venus and Keri Windsor zipped .wmvs (1, 2, 3)

• Wendy Rice shows mostly breasts and pubes as she takes her turn doing the deed a few times. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11)
• Wendy Rice zipped .wmvs (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

• Jessica Drake and Jessica Drake get it on lesbo-style. (1, 2, 3)
• Jessica Drake and Jessica Drake zipped .wmvs (1, 2, 3)

MICHAEL JACKSON TRIAL UPDATE
Miami Vice - Wednesday, the mother of Michael Jackson's accuser took the Fifth so she wouldn't have to testify about taking welfare benefit she wasn't entitled to. But she did testify that during a flight home from Miami, after everyone was asleep, she snuck to the back to find out what was going on, and saw Michael licking her son's head "over and over." She tearfully admitted that she didn't say anything about it at the time.

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