Monday

The Nostradamus Kid (1992)

The Nostradamus Kid is an Aussie coming-of-age film about a kid raised as a Seventh Day Adventist who struggles to adapt to a secular world when he enters the university in Sydney, and must find his place among atheists and Presbyterians. Given his intellectual curiosity and his natural state of randiness, he is more than willing to move into a more mainstream belief system, but like the rest of us he is never able to shake his childhood faith completely. The entire "end of the world" concept is so deeply embedded in his subconscious that the Cuban Missile Crisis sends him into a tizzy, whereupon he drags his girlfriend into the interior, in search of a fallout-free zone.

Writer/director Bob Ellis is the author of more than a dozen books, a syndicated columnist, and a regular raconteur on Aussie TV chat shows. He has acknowledged that this film is essentially an autobiography, and has offered the very specific estimate that 93% of it consists of his own life experiences. (What, no decimal points? Such imprecision.) "I had several adventures with the possibility of the end of the world. The first was during the Suez Crisis of 1956, when I thought the Bible proved that...et cetera. The second was the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, where I took the daughter of David McNicoll to the mountains in her own father's stolen car, and found to my amazement the world hadn't ended. There wasn't a mushroom cloud over Sydney, and I had to bring her back and face down David. And I had this plan that we would marry in Broken Hill and slowly cough ourselves to death with the radiation, after long hours of making love."
 

The film has the usual lessons and epiphanies of the genre, and some laughs along the way. I found myself interested in Bob's unusual youth, but I'm afraid that I'm just not as interested in his life as he seems to be. That's understandable, of course, but I still had to endure the two hours of running time along with him, and I'd have been much happier with about a 90 minute overview. Or even the Cliff's Notes. It's actually a fairly enjoyable movie, but could really have benefited from more economical storytelling. As it stands now, one must endure the author's self-centered ruminations and mental masturbation in order to experience the worthwhile insights, and he is very much in love with the sound of his own voice. (He narrates the film looking back from the present, and recites the voice-over in the sing-song tone of an undergraduate reciting poetry.)

One element that eases the passage of the two hours is some modest nudity from a young Miranda Otto, the Aussie actress who would become Peter Jackson's Eowyn in Lord of the Rings. Miranda was 25 when she made The Nostradamus Kid, but looked younger and played a younger character.

 

Miranda Otto

 

The DVD is an all-region PAL disc from Australia. (The box says it is Region 4, but I played it on my Region 1 drive with no problems.) It is available from an American importer. Click on the pic below for info.

The Nostradamus Kid DVD Miranda Otto (1993)

 

Hollow Man 2: (2006 STV)

Haven't seen it yet. Comes to DVD tomorrow (Tuesday), and I'll look at it then. In the meantime, you can enjoy the nudity in these two zipped .avis from third parties.

 

Conversations with Other Women (2005)

I haven't seen this one either, but it was quite a hit at Telluride. The important thing for now is that this film clip (zipped .avi) shows Helena Bonham Carter and Nora Zehetner minus some essential elements of clothing.

 

Other Crap:

 
The 25 worst movie sequels

French voted rudest, most boring people on earth

  • Whoa - there's an upset, eh?
  • Actually, my experience with the French has been mixed. Outside of Paris, I have generally found them fairly nice, and even in Paris, the French have always been pleasant to me when I traveled with children. But if you're alone in Paris and don't speak French, expect to get a rasher of shit.

Cannes Report: Kelly's follow-up to Donnie Darko

  • "Southland Tales imagines a Los Angeles on the brink of apocalypse in 2008, when the Internet is under government control, gasoline is replaced by something called 'fluid karma' and the Democratic Party has splintered into neo-Marxist cells."
  • "There's even a musical number where Justin Timberlake, who plays an Iraq War veteran, lip-synchs to a leg-kicking chorus line of Marilyn Monroe look-alikes."

A new international trailer for Superman Returns

Holly Woody reviews The DaVinci Code

Over the Hedge, as reviewed by The Filthy Critic

Demolition video: the Grand Casino's beachfront hotel in Biloxi, MS, goes down to make room for a new Grand development in the wake of Katrina

Pujols: 22 home runs in St. Louis's 44 games (Including homers in the last three games.)

Weekend Box Office Results, May 19-21

  • The weekend was down about 3% from last year, but that is actually a positive sign, not a negative, because last year's comparable week included the incredible debut of the final Star Wars movie. It was a major achievement that this week's two major releases managed to offset the second best opening weekend of all time!
  • DaVinci Code opened about where analysts originally thought it would - $77 million. (They started revising their estimates downward after the Cannes debacle and the bad reviews.)
  • Over the Hedge also fell within the expected range.
  • That was only the surface of the good news. Last year's Star Wars film set the all time record for foreign box office receipts in one weekend, and The DaVinci Code managed to break that record!!

Historical Box Office > DaVinci has 12th best opening day of all time.

  • It beat such blockbusters as The Phantom Menace, The Two Towers, and The Passion of the Christ, all of which finished in the all-time top twelve
  • Every film which has opened with a $25 million day or better has gone on to at least $200 million. 60% of them have gone on to exceed $300 million.

Elton John says "fucking, fuckwit" photographers "should all be shot"

A clip from Babel

  • "Armed with a Winchester rifle, two Morrocan boys set out to look after their family's herd of goats. In the silent echoes of the desert, they decide to test the rifle... but the bullet goes farther than they thought it would. In an instant, the lives of four separate groups of strangers on three different continents collide. Caught up in the rising tide of an accident that escalates beyond anyone's control are a vacationing American couple (Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett), a rebellious deaf Japanese teenager and her father, and a Mexican nanny who, without permission, takes two American children across the border. None of these strangers will ever meet; in spite of the sudden, unlikely connection between them, they will all remain isolated due to their own inability to communicate meaningfully with anyone around them. From Alejandro González Iñárritu comes a film that is at once intimate and epic, shot in four countries, cast with actors and non-actors, and concludes his trilogy that started with Amores Perros and 21 Grams."

The Daily Show looks at the new White House press secretary, Tony Snow

 

 

Movie Reviews:

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

 

Don't Tell My Partner (1997)

"Tau ching nam nui" is sort of a soft-core romantic comedy, Hong Kong category 3 style. Wing Lim Cho plays a successful ad executive who is devoted to his photographer girlfriend, with whom he has been living forever. His best friend, hairdresser Piu Kwan Gan, is a confirmed bachelor and ladies man who tries to convince Lim Cho that he needs a little strange. Cho is pushed somewhat farther in that direction when he proposes to his girlfriend, Tak Wai Tong, who refuses  because she wants to concentrate on her career until she makes a go of it.

Enter sex kitten Madoka Osawa, a junior ad exec in Cho's company. She goes after him with a vengeance, and he yields. Meanwhile, his best friend seems to be making time with both Piu Kwan Gan and Madoka Osawa, in addition to his girlfriend, who is the sister to a Triad boss. In the end, the men get what is coming to them. The majority of these Hong Kong category three films do not end happily.

Some scenes had me laughing out loud, such as the first time Gan and Cho went at it in her van, in a no parking zone. The meter maid is about to ticket them when one of them kicks the windshield wipers on, causing the meter maid to suspect ghosts. Wing Lim Cho is naturally funny, and Madoka Osawa is a very convincing sexpot, so there is some good fun, except during the overlong and largely uneventful nude scenes.

This is a C-. Those who, like me, enjoy Hong Kong cinema will probably not regret watching it. IMDb doesn't have enough votes for a rating as yet.

Madoka Osawa does full frontal, and is naked a good portion of the film in two sex scenes and a masturbation scene.

Tak Wai Tong shows breasts in a shower and sex scene.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kelly Brook in "Survival Island" (aka "Three")

 

 

 

 


A Hankster "Grab Bag" today.

Some tittie from Elisabeth Shue in "Cousin Bette."


 

From "The Last Cut," Toni Collette shows breasts ...

.. and skinny Calista Flockhart tries to look sexy (no nudity).


 

From "Tamara" again no nudity, but Jenna Dewan looks really hot. Hope to see more of her in the future and I do mean more.


 

Deborah Harry with some nipple in "Videodrome" and then burning herself with a cigarette. Ouch !

 

 

 

 

Dann reports on Munich:

Based on true events, this thoroughly unpleasant 2005 drama tells of the aftermath of the 1972 terrorist killing of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.

Israeli Prime Minster Golda Meir authorizes the tracking down and killing of everyone involved in the Munich operation. The idea was to prove to the world that Israel could not be intimated, and to stop the terrorism by killing the leaders. The movie focuses on the men sent to do this.

Predictably, as the terrorists were eliminated, retribution followed, resulting in hundreds more innocent people being killed in terrorists attacks, followed by assaults on Arab refugee camps by Israelis looking for terrorists, followed by more terrorist attacks. As Israeli agents continue to hunt and kill the men responsible, new leaders rise up to lead new attacks.

Director Steven Spielberg does a good job of showing the never-ending cycle of violence that continues even today, thirty-some years later. By examining the situation from both points of view, Spielberg shows that there are really no good guys here, since each side is convinced they are right and the other wrong, and each killing, instead of slowing the terror, fuels it to even greater heights. A real downer of a movie, but with a powerful message.

Marie-Josee Croze Lisa Werlinder

 

 

 

 

Kirsten Dunst wearing a see-through blouse (but she seems to have tape over her areolae/nipples)

Anneke Sarnau in Unveiled

Jasmin Tabatabai in Unveiled

Nostalgia: Pamela Tiffin in The Fifth Cord (1971). Old farts like me will always remember her as the 19 year old ingénue in the 1962 version of State Fair. Not long after that, a stalled career convinced her she needed a new start in Italy, where she made movies for about a decade before retiring for good in 1974, when she was still only 31 years old. The Fifth Cord is the only real nudity I've ever seen from her. Everything else was either body doubles or unrevealing "strategic" nudes (even her Playboy spread!) On the other hand, I have never seen Deaf Smith and Johnny Ears, which is supposed to include a shot of her bare behind.

Nostalgia: Pamela Tiffin in another 1971 film, Il Vichingo venuto dal sud (literally: "The viking came from the South")

Elsa Zylberstein in La cloche a sonné