Uncle Scoopy's Fun House

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Thursday

Providence

I could be wrong, but it sure looks to me like the lovely Melina Kanakaredes showed a bit of aureola in "Providence"

Sid and Nancy and Sid and Nancy

Did you ever hate a movie so much that the question of whether it was a good movie never even entered your mind? I know a lot of people felt this way about Blue Velvet, for example. I felt this way about Sid and Nancy. I was curious about it, and never saw it when it first came out, so I picked up the DVD and watched it. I just hated every minute of it, and couldn't wait until it was over. I guess it's an OK movie, but it seems to me that it really missed out on a great chance to offer some insight into the culture. After all, Sid and Nancy personally were two complete losers, strung out junkies with minimal IQ's and almost no talent. Vicious himself was a bass player, and not much of one. If you took 100 people off the street at random, you could probably train more than half to be better bass players. We're talking mammals trapped somewhere between homo sapiens and a lower order. What can you say about them? They shot up, they nodded out after making some incomprehensible attempts at verbal communication. Pretty lively stuff. They spent most of theri lives in bed, and not making love. Just nodding away. Their real story lies in the culture. How in the hell did we ever become a world in which two people like this could be come famous, and Vicious could get his picture on t-shirts? But the movie just accepts all that at face value, and tells the Sid and Nancy story accurately, and they are completely unlikeable. Here's Chloe Webb as Nancy

Chloe Webb. I'm rusty at vidcaps. Haven't done any in ages, and I didn't do too well at creating one of those Realist-style collages, but you'll get the point, anyway.

Chloe Webb

Here's something I did find kind of interesting on the DVD. The movie "D.O.A." is highlighted as a bonus feature, and it featured nudity from the real Nancy Spungen, shortly before her death, as well as some looks at Vicious. Oldman and Webb got them exactly right, unfortunately. Vicious fell asleep repeatedly during the interview.

Grim Reaper

The Reaper sent me these caps with the comment that "The Idiots" was the second movie done within the Dogme Rules. I asked him what the hell those were, and he explained that four Danish directors drew them up in 1995, with the intention of creating a special kind of naturalism. No costumes, no elaborate camera perspectives, no special effects, no background music. Only the camera interacting with real people in real-life settings. Oh, boy. Shows you how crazy these artistic theories can get. You guys know that I'm a big fan of European cinema, but it's always seemed to me that its weakness is on the technical side, not in the artistic integrity. If anything, it usually has too much artistic integrity, maintaining it at the expense of communication with the audience. And of course, the problem with the Dogme theory is that a camera doesn't pick up the same thing as your eye, so if you want to create a truly natural effect - showing the same thing you see with your eyes - you have to do it artificially, to allow the camera to do what your eyes do naturally. If I were going to write a prescription for European filmmakers, it would be pretty much the opposite of what these guys decided. I'd tell them: (1) start with nature films, not art. When you can make the lions and dolphins and insects and plants look the same on screen as they look to your eye, then you are ready to make movies (2) go to Hollywood and learn to use cameras, film and lighting. You think Spielberg is a non-intellectual boor. Well, maybe so, but I'll tell ya what. When he shoots a man falling down, he can show it as your eye would follow it. The guy doesn't have to fall out of the frame. You don't have to pull back and shoot it from 100 yards away. You don't need abrupt camera cuts. You don't need a shaky hand-held camera. These are things that can be learned. (3) When you have learned these things, then leave Hollywood, go back to your own country and produce the intensely honest movies you want to produce, but do it with the skills necessary for your profession. By the way, the Frenchman Luc Besson has so far followed my prescription to a tee. He hasn't gone back to France to make his honest masterpiece yet, but he's mastered the technical side (you may not like 5th Element, but there's nothing wrong with it technically or visually) and I'd love to see what he could do with the right script, assuming he hasn't gotten too Americanized. Anyway here's Anne Louise Hassing in "The Idiots"

I haven't seen this movie, and I probably never will because bad lighting and shaky cameras drive me crazy. Personally, I don't have any artistic theories. I just want to lose my own consciousness and let the movie draw me completely in. This is a social satire which looks at the lives of a bunch of people in small Danish town who pretend to be retarded in order to bring out their "inner idiot". Most of the reviews pointed out that the Dogme Rules must also call for a total lack of plot and script, because the actors apparently just improvised a bunch of stuff until the director ran out of film. Anne Louise Hassing in "The Idiots"

Anne Louise Hassing in "The Idiots"

Trine Michelsen in "The Idiots"

Trine Michelsen in "The Idiots" (Quite graphic exposure)

Trine Michelsen in "The Idiots"

Louise Mieritz in "The Idiots"

Anne Grethe Riis in "The Idiots"

ICMS

I guess it's European movie day here. ICMS captured a couple of Dana Vavrova in "Ich wuensch Dir Liebe" (I copied the title exactly out of IMDb, even though the grammar and capitalization don't seem right to me).

Dana Vavrova in "Ich wuensch Dir Liebe"

Astrid Veillon in "La femme du boulanger"

Lady J from AP

I never heard of this one. AP, the Cologne Comet, has capped something called Lady J. from these first few caps it looks like an x-rated Tarzan movie. Here's Selen in Lady J.

Selen in Lady J

Maria Swalloy in Lady J

Gabriella Vinze in Lady J