Under Seige (1992) is described on the package as Die Hard on a ship. The ship is supposedly the Battleship Missouri. Bruce Willis is played by Stevan Seagal, who is a cook on the ship, due to a little misunderstanding over rearranging the face of his commanding officer. Of course he is really a Navy SEAL, expert in whatever is needed to get through the plot. A chopper full of entertainers and caterers arrive, supposedly from Pearl Harbor, to throw the captain a birthday party. Included in the guest list is a centerfold, Erika Eleniak, to jump out of a cake.

The group is actually led by a turned CIA agent and the executive officer, and their aim is to take over the ship, offload some nuclear equipped missiles to a submarine they happen to own, and sell them to a high bidder. This is all the more ironic as the Missouri is on her final voyage to be decommissioned. Of course it is up to Seagal with the help of Eleniak to stop the bad guys.

Eleniak shows breasts and buns jumping out of a cake long after the takeover. IMDb readers have this at 6.1. It was nominated for Oscars for Best sound Effects and Sound Editing. It earned $156M against a $12M budget. I enjoyed it. The Navy policies and procedures won't stand much scrutiny here, but it was a good, faced paced yarn, and Seagal, whom I usually find irritating, was better here than usual. C+.

Poodle Springs (1998):

Poodle Springs is the last of the Philip Marlowe stories from Raymond Chandler. In fact, it came so late in Chandler's life that he died while writing it in 1959 and it was not completed until 1989, when Chandler's estate hired Robert B. Parker, the creator of Spenser, to finish the work. Chandler wrote four chapters and a plot outline, Parker fleshed out the rest.

The work occurs not only late in the author's life, but in the character's life as well. The Marlowe we are most familiar with is a lonely guy in his 30s, wearing a cheap suit, walking by himself through the seediest parts of L.A. in the 1930s and 1940s, a cigarette perpetually dangling from his lips. That was the Marlowe of The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely. The Marlowe of Poodle Springs is barely recognizable. He's in his 50s now, married to a rich young woman, wearing a flower print shirt, living in a ritzy house in Palm Springs (aka Poodle Springs). He doesn't want to spend his life living off his wife's money and feeling useless, so he gets himself a local office and hangs out his P.I. shingle.

His case load begins with missing purses but, as you can probably guess, by the time the movie is over he will be involved with the Nevada mob, the California land swindlers, blackmailers, junkies, rich men with insane daughters (a favorite Chandler motif), pimps, gigolos, hookers, junkies, and a trail of dead bodies. As is typical in the genre, the plot is so labyrinthine that I'm not even sure I can describe it, but it all leads eventually to a high level conspiracy involving President John F. Kennedy and Marlowe's own father-in-law. Needless to say, the ever honorable Marlowe wants no part of all these high-powered cons and swindles, and by the time the dust has cleared and the case has closed, our intrepid P.I. has slipped on his gum-encrusted shoes, squeezed back into his cheap suit, snapped the brim of his trusty fedora, and made his way back to the lowlifes and crooked cops in L.A., where he understands the rules.

It's a little heavy on plot and a little light on noir atmosphere, but I guess a lot of that can be explained by our hero's move to the air-conditioned upper class suburbs of the 60s. It was interesting for a while to see a suburban Marlowe portrayed as an old, rich, married man who does the "yes, dear" thing with his wife and picks up his cigarette butts from the squeaky-clean sidewalks of a rich community, but after a while I reacted to the whole deal the same way Marlowe himself did. I missed the city streets and the sad saxophone music.

As always, HBO did a first class job with the project. They hired Oscar-nominated Bob Rafelson (Five Easy Pieces) to direct the film, and they hired the brilliant Oscar-winning playwright Tom Stoppard (Shakespeare in Love, Brazil) to adapt the Chandler/Parker novel into a screenplay. I'm not really convinced that those two guys were the right men for the job, but one cannot fault HBO for bad faith. They definitely pulled in some high powered talent to work on it.

Production values aside, this is a Fun House classic in at least one respect. It features both celebrity nudity from Dina Meyer and a short appearance from our old favorite Joe Don Baker. What more does a movie really need?

• Dina Meyer collage
• Dina Meyer (zipped .wmv)
• Dina Meyer (zipped .vob) This is the actual DVD stream. Since the nudity lasts only a couple of seconds, it is reasonable to download that portion of the original .vob file. If you have any software on your computer to play DVDs (like Power DVD, for example), you can just unzip the .vob file and click on it. Your DVD software player will fire it up. If you don't have a DVD drive or any DVD software, you will probably be wasting your time to download it.

Dervla:

Dervla Kirwan is an Irish actress who is one of the BBC's favorites. She is seen here in the Michael Winterbottom film With You or Without You. (Winterbottom also did Code 46, Jude, Welcome to Sarajevo, Butterfly Kiss, and others)

• Dervla (zipped .wmv)

Keira:

I think you know who Keira Knightley is. She is seen here fully clothed, but on a very cold day in London, if you catch my drift.

• Keira

Other Crap:

• MPAA Blames BitTorrent for Star Wars Distribution. It doesn't seem that the distribution has suppressed the box office any.
• Dates in the Star Wars Universe
• Das Keyboard - UberGeeks Only
• The Original Dog-Powered Scooter
• Octopus porn story o' the day: SEVEN workers were suspended after being caught ogling internet images of a naked woman with an octopus.
• The remake you've been waiting for: Revenge of the Nerds.
• Weekly World News: "A World War II soldier who was frozen fast in the Arctic on a mission, has thawed out and returned home to Indiana. " Amazingly, Indiana still looked the same as when he left, except it needed a coat of paint.
• Will a horse instinctively mount a woman?
• The full ten minute version of Triumph insulting the Star Wars geeks
• Sex toys, porno stars in New York's Erotic Expo
• The Parade of Unfortunate Star Wars Costumes
• Salma Hayek at the Sin City premiere. They are (mostly) covered, but they're still spectacular. That Benicio del Toro is one weird dude.
• Sith pulls in $35 million more on Friday. That is the eighth highest day of all time.
• Seven clips from The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
• A trailer and a TV spot for Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist
• Tommy Lee Jones: a best actor award and a debut as director
• My take on Star Wars Episode Three: Revenge of the Sith.
  • I was not surprised that it is a beautifully presented movie, although the Padme funeral scene went beyond my wildest expectations, but I was surprised by the fact that its politics are so much subtler than I expected, and that I could actually understand what drove Anakin to the dark side.
  • I do have to make a suggestion to the Empire, however. They need to hire a P.R. firm and set the spin doctors on the project of giving the Dark Side a new name. I mean shouldn't Anakin have suspected that something called The Dark Side was actually evil? Even the assertive Ann Coulter is not bold enough to call her neo-con philosophy "The Dark Side of Democracy."
  • Instead of referring to it in conversations with Anakin as "The Dark Side" of the Force, Emperor Palpatine should simply call it "Neo-Jedism" or "The Passionate Side" (as opposed to the Jedi's "Contemplative Side"). Here's how a Presidential Press Secretary would phrase it: "Yes, lad, the council members are Ur-Jedi, while we Sith are Neo-Jedi. We prefer to use the entire Force, also including its untapped passionate resources rather than just the weaker contemplative side."
• Today in Uncle Scoopy's Guest House: Alison Pill's topless flash in Dear Wendy
• The Blade Runner law: USA says "No billboards in space"
• "Illegal movie and software downloaders could have an edge over anti-piracy operatives thanks to a new feature in the BitTorrent file-sharing software." "However, Sawney pointed out that BitTorrent files could still be identified. "BSA has traditionally sought the assistance of those hosting the actual pirated files. With or without the tracker sites, someone still hosts the infringing files," he said.
• President's Surprise Late-Night Meeting With the Ghost of Minority Filibusters Past: Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina - (Whitehouse.org)
• This summer's concert list
• The Straight Dope: Was there really genocide in early 20th century Armenia?
• White Babe in Beijing
  • "Columbia-honors-grad Rachel DeWoskin reveals what it was like playing a sexy American vixen on a hit Chinese soap opera."

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

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.

"Birds of Prey" (1985)
Thriller involving a cop chasing a female assassin (Linda Elder) and hooking up with a hooker with a heart of gold (Suzanne Tessier).

• Linda Elder: triple B performance in shower.
• Suzanne Tessier: bush in see-through panties, then full dorsal nudity.

"Mr. Headmistress" (1998)
Disney movie about a felon who hides in an all girl's school dressed up like a headmistress. Strictly PG-13 fair.

• Lori Hallier: tight t-shirt making headmistress in drag nearly pop his girdle.

"Blood & Guts" (1978)
Gritty drama about a smalltime travelling wrestling troupe in the days before cable television and Vince McMahon's WWF/WWE.

• Micheline Lanctot: revealing costume, then boobs and bush getting raped (looks like she's wearing pantyhose but with no underwear)

"Powder Heads" (1980)
The first English-Canadian ski comedy completely misses the mark with endless ski sequences but no sex or nudity. The first movie for Catherine Mary Stewart.

• Catherine Mary Stewart: bathing suit in hottub.
• Suzanne Tessier: kind of sexy.

Show Me Yours II: episode The F-Word
No (female) nudity this week.

• Carla Collins: nice leg.

Today from the Ghost, another batch of assorted video clips. Zipped .wmvs as usual.

• Moira Kelly, showing off some lovely toplessness (and getting seriously groped) in this well lit, but odd sex scene from 1994's "Little Odessa".

• Danielle Brett showing brief breast views in #1 and #3 and all 3 B's in clip #2. Scenes from "Jill the Ripper" aka "Tied Up". Starring my brother's personal B-movie hero, Dolph Lundgren. (1, 2, 3)

• Nina Richardson, tied up, topless and tormented in 'Hankster Approved' video clips from her one and only film, "Night Vision" (199). (1, 2)

I went to see Episode 3 yesterday, and despite a few overly-elaborate scenes, some poor "tone" choices at times, some unnecessary scenes and characters added simply to sell more toys, remnants of the horrible "I love you soooooo much" dialogue bewteen Padmé and Anakin, and of course the fact that Hayden Christensen is possibly one of the worst actors ever...it's actually a pretty good movie.

As a member of the Star Wars generation, I must say that this is how the prequel story should have been told from the beginning. Finally...when I bring home a prequel DVD, I won't need to hit the fast forward button!

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