Erotic Survivor (2001) is a Seduction Cinema takeoff on survival contests. It pits Misty Mundae, Darian Caine, Ruby LaRocca and Jade Duboir against three guys, a Christian, a drunk, and a drug addled wasteoid, joined by a woman who works as a film censor. She wanted to make sure nothing naughty happened. They have to survive three days on what is supposedly an uninhabited island that looks strangely like the New Jersey estate many of their films use. There are also a set of trials, such as a dildoe relay race, opening a can with no tools, and a sex trivia quiz.

All of this is an excuse for the girls to get very naked and have lesbian sex in the outdoors. Everyone except the girls is way over the top, and even they are playing it all for laughs, but all four show everything repeatedly. Darian Caine does a masturbation scene, and all except one possible pairing of the four girls is explored, and there are two four ways. IMDb readers have this at 2.2. They obviously missed the point. This is not even trying to be a movie. It is an excuse to show naked women having lesbian sex outdoors, and it does that very well. Joe Bob Briggs saw it the same way and awards two stars. The DVD also contains some behind the scenes footage, and a very personal interview with Darian Caine. It lives up to its promise, and is therefor a C.

Easy (2003):

This is basically a chick-flick, a perspective on modern dating in the middle class, as written and directed by a woman.

Jamie is a beautiful and smart person, but she is a self-described "jerk magnet" who has carved a niche for herself as the girl with an "easy" reputation - the sexy girl who has sex on the first date, then either fails to see the guy again or gets enmeshed in a doomed short-term relationship. The film shows her trials and tribulations, and catalogues her path to enlightenment. The film could be a forgotten episode of Sex and the City, except that Jamie is a bit quirky - we see her making a stoned riff on a TV show, giving an enema to a turtle, and fantasizing about sex with Homer Simpson.

The comedy is rarely funny (unless you guffaw at Sex and the City), but the characters seem like real people, and are generally likeable and dimensional people facing authentic and complicated choices. There are no saints or Snidely Whiplash villains. The individual situations and relationships do seem authentic in the moment, but some of it would sound very contrived if I described it. For instance, Jamie's job is "product namer," and she works at home, so she's one of about three of those in the world, but her employment is no rarer than her dream man's. He is a successful professional poet.

Is there "male appeal"? Well, the film does have quite a bit of topless nudity in several sex scenes which seem quite authentic, and Marguerite Moreau (of TV's "Life as We Know It") is tres cute. Apart from that, there is nothing here which will appeal to you unless you have a minimum of one vagina.

• Marguerite Moreau (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4, 5)

Boccaccio '70 (1962)

I have a special connection to this film. As you probably know if you are reading this, I spend most of my time these days writing about, cataloging, and generally apotheosizing film nudity. This would come as quite a surprise to those who knew me in the twenty five years when I was busily impersonating a straight--laced corporate executive, but in fact it is a return to my roots. Watching Boccaccio '70 brings it all around to a full circle for, you see, this movie represents the first time I ever saw a naked woman on screen.

The year was late 1962 or early 1963, and nobody was naked on screen in American movies then. Later that year, Elizabeth Taylor showed a part of her bum in Cleopatra, but I didn't see that movie then. I don't think I saw any loose flesh in an American movie until about a year later when The Pawnbroker truly broke the nudity barrier and received for its efforts the dreaded "condemned" rating from the Catholic Legion of Decency. I think that meant you would go straight to hell if you died between seeing that film and your next confession. Boccaccio '70 somehow managed to sneak in under the radar of controversy, perhaps because the nudity was minimal and the audiences small in number, or perhaps because it was an acclaimed foreign film in three unrelated segments, each directed by a screen legend: Luchino Visconti (Obsession), Federico Fellini (La Dolce Vita), and Vittorio De Sica (The Bicycle Thief).

My friend The Duck heard through the official teenage guy grapevine that this film had some nudity in it, so he resolved to see that nudity, and he persuaded me to join him in his wanton pursuit of screen flesh. I was happy to oblige. We soon found, however, that it wasn't all that easy to pull this off. We were fourteen at the time and could not drive ourselves there, so we conceived a fairly elaborate plan to dupe my mother into chauffeur duty. Here's how it worked. There were two theaters about a block apart. One was showing an innocuous film. My memory tells me it was Darby O'Gill and the Little People, and that's how I've always told the story, but a double check of the release dates at IMDb doesn't seem to confirm that. Darby would have been out for four years at the time Boccaccio '70 came to Rochester. Oh, well, let me use Darby in my anecdote, although it was probably something else.

Around the corner from the Darby theater was the one showing Boccacio '70. The drop-off was easy. We waved good-bye to my mom and walked around the corner as soon as her car disappeared. The pick-up was trickier because our film got out later than Darby, so we told mom we'd get an ice cream or a hot dog or something after the film, and arranged for her to pick us up a full hour after Darby ended. That way there was no reason for her to question why nobody else was coming out of the theater at the pick-up time. Why so long? An hour, standing outside on a cold Rochester night? Yeah, that was a price we were willing to pay, but we also had adjusted for the fact that my mom was always early for everything, so we had to consider exactly where we would be when she would first spot us - which would occur a half an hour before she was supposed to be there.

Was it difficult for two snot-nosed kids to get into the only film in town with bare flesh and naughty stories? Not at all. In our paranoia and guilt, we had imagined that there might be problems with some officious moral guardians, and we were prepared to go back and watch Darby if necessary, but there were no hurdles of any kind. The MPAA system (version 1.0) wasn't enacted until 1966, so there were no specific rules or guidelines about who could see which movies. Sure, if we had tried to sneak into a porn film we probably would have been turned away because the establishment would not risk a charge for corrupting the morals of minors, but this film was an award winner at Cannes and some of it was directed by the guy who did The Bicycle Thief. Nor were there public protests and outraged editorials to draw attention to the film. Frankly, neither the cops nor the theater owner were concerned about screening out minors. We simply paid for our tickets and walked in. To our surprise, nobody asked our age.

Thus it happened that I saw Romy Schneider offer a very brief flash of her breasts in the Visconti segment, the first succulent forbidden flesh I had ever seen. As it turned out, we also liked the movie, although the Visconti portion was memorable mostly for Romy's flesh. That segment was meticulously crafted, artistic, bittersweet and insightful about the nature of human relationships and the death of love - in other words a whole bunch of crap to 14 year old boys.

We thought the other two segments were magnificent. Fellini directed a crazed, surreal story about a gorgeous woman (Anita Ekberg playing herself) who comes to life from a sexy poster to torment and tempt the pious censor who forces authorities to cover the poster. I have never forgotten the humor of the story, the bizarre carnival atmosphere of the sights and sounds, and the sight of the zaftig Ekberg rolling around on the ground in a dress which barely contained her monstrous breasts. In those days I didn't know Fellini from Frank Nitti, but I determined that I liked him. We also loved the segment by De Sica. Sophia Loren raffles herself off for one night, but then decides to cut a deal with the winner because she is interested in exploring a new relationship and doesn't want to start it off by prostituting herself to a local douchebag. She strikes a bargain wherein she avoids the sex, the winner gets to keep all the lottery money, and he also gets to say he went through with a wild night of any kind of amour he can imagine, which she will verify. The rest of the men in town are so impressed with his yarn that they hold a parade for the sad, homely fellow, and he ends up both honored and rich with the lottery money. Sophia, in the meantime, gets the hunky guy and all ends well.

The idea behind the film was to bring the ribald spirit of Boccaccio to the screen in modern times, using modern characters and settings: one of Italy's greatest writers, as interpreted by three of Italy's greatest directors, starring three of Europe's sexiest stars. Italians responded warmly. Boccaccio '70 became the all-time box office champ of Italy, outpacing Fellini's La Dolce Vita, and eventually taking in a quadrillion lire (about $1.37). OK, I'm kidding about those numbers. It actually grossed $200,000, but that really was the all-time Italian box office champ as of 1962! It was obviously a good idea then, and the whole concept still seems like a good idea to me, given the fact that Boccaccio was not only a famous writer whose stories featured clever and ironic twists, but he was also funny and obsessed with sex. I'm not sure how well this film really captures Boccaccio, but I don't know if that matters. I liked the Fellini and De Sica segments when I was 14 and, unlike most of the films I re-watch 40 years later, I still like them today. I wasn't the only one turning a thumb up. My significant other just happened to walk by while I was starting to watch the Fellini story, and she ended up watching that entire episode. And you have to understand that she liked the story even though she had no interest in the fact that Anita Ekberg was falling out of her clothes!

The film was originally conceived as a four-parter, with the additional segment directed by Mario Monicelli (La Grande Guerra). Monicelli's segment was seen in the original Italian release, but was cut from the version screened at Cannes, as well as from the American release. The DVD is the original Italian print, as digitally remastered from the vault interpositive, with all the original Italian titles at the beginning, end, and between segments. (The four part film ran 210 minutes and was shown with two intermissions), and with Monicelli's segment restored. It is a perfectly good story, but I can see why producer Carlo Ponti decided to cut it. It is not especially humorous, and it basically consists of two newlyweds talking together in a single room. At any rate, you can now see it for the first time outside of Italy, and you can choose either English dubbing or English sub-titles.

The package also includes some extras. For each segment there are several black and white photos taken during filming or backstage. There are pictures from the American premiere. There are the original Italian and American trailers. There is a brief bit of archival film footage from the set. The best extra in this two-disk set is not on either of the disks. It is a re-print of the original American press kit!

There is one other DVD feature which I had hoped for. Fellini originally submitted his story at eighty minutes, and later cut it back below an hour. I was really hoping to see it as he originally conceived it.

That's quibbling, because that original footage may no longer exist, but he's Fellini, so we can dream!

Overall: nice package!

Minimal nudity, but still worth a look

• Romy Schneider (1, 2, 3, 4)

• Anika Ekberg (1, 2)

• Sofia Loren (1, 2)

The L Word:

• Zipped .wmv clip of Mia Kirshner's topless scene in season two, episode ten (this past Sunday)

Other Crap:

• iowahawk: Ask The OTHER Imam
• CowChipShirts Make It Into Ripley's Believe It or Not!
• The Daily Show: "Colin Powell re-enters the public arena by driving around in circles."
• Jon Stewart talks to Floyd Abrams about his book, "Speaking Freely: Trials of the First Amendment."
• The Daily Show demonstrates that taxes are for douchebags
• The Daily Show discusses the battle over the environment and Alaskan drilling
• Welcome to Doggles - doggie sunglasses (Real product)
• Astronomy Pic o' the Day: A Martian Dust Devil Passes
• The Daily Show's latest installment of "Great Moments in Punditry" - Chris Matthews vs. Jerry Falwell! (I like the Daily Show, but as far as I'm concerned these skits are for the birds)
• The Daily Show teaches about Pope Benny Hex, named for the patron saint of putting hollandaise on poached eggs.
• The author and Jon Stewart discuss, 'No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam.'
• The poll results are in: The Top 10 Best Lesbian Scenes in Mainstream Cinema!
• "The Worst Porn Ever"
• Republicans used to hint that he might be gay. Now they rip on 44 year old Dan Mongiardo for his hot 19 year old girlfriend. Do you remember Sen. Jim Bunning's opponent - the guy who supposedly looked like one of Saddam's sons? (He nearly defeated Bunning.) This is the same guy!!

Other Crap archives. May also include newer material than the links above, since it's sorta in real time.

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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.

Today from the Ghost, a few vids from the late night cable series "Women Stories of Passion". Plenty of toplessness and pseudo-sex.

• Daisy Hall (1, 2)
• Leslie Kay Sterling (1, 2, 3, 4)

"Post Impact"
While it may be a B-movie in the classic sense, 2004's Post Impact is also a very good post-apocalypse Sci-Fi that you may have already seen on the Sci-Fi channel (minus most of the nudity, of course). Good story, good effects, a good acting job by a decent cast, all just pretty good stuff.

It's 2010, and an asteroid is passing near earth. When it suddenly veers off course, Europe is hit with little warning, setting off an ice age that kills most of the inhabitants.

Years later, a dormant satellite equipped with an advanced microwave transmitter suddenly comes to life, threatening the rest of the world. It is apparently being controlled from the devastated center of old Europe, and a team is sent in to investigate.

I expected a lot less from this movie than what I got: a very well done Sci-Fi adventure that was well worth watching.

• Joanna Taylor

"A.I." REJECT CLAIMS ABDUL AFFAIR
Appalling! - The Globe tabloid reports that "American Idol" reject Corey Clark is shopping a tell-all book. Clark, who was dropped for failing to disclose that he faced charges of assaulting his sister, claims he had "wild, drunken sex" with Paula Abdul in her guest house, and that she promised to invest $2 million in his singing career but warned him not to tell anyone. He claims Paula said, "Don't screw me, or you'll be sorry."

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