Happy Memorial Day to our readers in the States.
TV Round-Up
The sex scene in Game of Thrones, e7 is awesome.
Esme Bianco and Sahara Knite get it on for about 4 1/2 minutes
while Littlefinger talks dirty. I noticed the the people on the HBO
bulletin board complained that this sex scene was unnecessary and
too graphic for a non-porn cable series. In other words, it's
perfect for us. Full frontal and rear nudity. Good lighting.
Cedar Rapids
Ed Helms plays a naive small-town boy who has never been on a plane
and is dating his former 7th-grade teacher. He's an insurance agent,
not a cutthroat high-pressure salesman, but an idealist who believes
the best of people, and believes that his profession can be a
tremendous source of good in the world because insurance
representatives are the ones we turn to to get us back on our feet
in the very worst times of our lives. When an embarrassing fatal
accident (think David Carradine) takes the life of his agency's
senior spokesman, it falls upon Ed to go to Cedar Rapids and make a
critical presentation at the big annual regional convention. He
becomes more worldly in many ways, and his maturity is not without
some compromises, but ultimately he figures out the difference
between right and wrong.
Cedar Rapids is a raunchy "slobs vs snobs" comedy, although it is a
lot more complicated than the typical film in that genre. Although
it includes the genre's usual one-dimensional antagonist, the script
develops its humor within the context of believable characters and
plausible situations, and it carves the hero's triumph out of his
own genuine, credible personal development rather than from the
unrealistic one-time achievement which usually provides the climax
of a slob-snob movie.
Like all films in this genre, Cedar Rapids has an underlying serious
point, which goes something like this: the best people are those who
care about others. They are simple, direct, humble, sincere, and
fun-loving, and are "winners" even when they have small pecs and
smaller bank accounts. The effort made by a "slobs vs snobs" author
to develop the serious point depends, I suppose, on his or her
personal emotional involvement in the story. Sometimes the plot
satisfies the genre requirements in a perfunctory manner simply by
letting the underdogs get the girls or end up as the unlikely
winners of a competition, but this film takes a different path. It
spends a lot of time developing the eventual morally superiority of
the underdog, ruminating about which ends are really worth pursuing
in life, and questioning whether one should cut moral corners, even
in pursuit of one of those worthwhile ends.
In fact, the film spends enough time on serious ruminations and
soul-searching that it doesn't always find as much time for comedy
as I would like. The three main "slobs," played by Helms, John C.
Reilly and Anne Heche, are carrying around a lot of emotional
baggage that has nothing to do with the "snobs." There's a lot of
existential ennui and loneliness inside of the dick jokes. Imagine
if Animal House had been made by Ingmar Bergman, and you'll be
getting close to what's going on here.
That last paragraph doesn't make the film sound very appealing, or
at least I would not find it so if it had been written by somebody
else, and yet I liked the film quite a bit. Cedar Rapids is a good
comedy, but not because it is extremely funny. It's a movie with a
big heart which also happens to be pretty funny from time to time.
Other people reported that there was no nudity in the film. That is
quite incorrect. Perhaps the Blu-Ray version if different from the
theatrical. There's quite a bit of male nudity, and
Anne Heche has a
clear, if brief, topless scene in 1080p. Some lower-res samples below.
Hangover II
Speaking of male nudity, there's a ton of it in this film. There are
some breasts as well, but if I'm not mistaken the titties all belong
to people with penises. As in the film's predecessor, the raunchiest
stuff is in the still photos which run over the end credits, and you
will see some breasts there, but I think they are all attached to
the same trannies who appear in the film proper. The only 100%
woman, so far as I can tell, is the one who shoots ping-pong balls
out of her coochie, and you really can't see much of her because of
the careful selection of camera angles. Anyway,
here's the whole
deal, if you want to see it. (Poor quality. its a cam.)
