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"Play it to the Bone", from Johnny Web

I guess this must be an OK movie, because I liked it. Why do I say that? Because if I had to name my five least-favorite things to include in a movie, they would be

boxing Hugh Grant Antonio Banderas Rosie O'Donnell Woody Harrelson

Now this flick has three of the five, plus a cameo from Kevin Costner. Now that sounds like a recipe for a total disaster, but I actually enjoyed most of it.

It's a Double Rocky movie. By the strangest of coincidences, two fighters are incapacited on the same day they were scheduled to fight each other in Vegas on the Tyson undercard. The promoters need to do something in a hurry, to find two guys who can fight that same night, so they hire two has-beens who stay in shape in the hope of a comeback. Bingo - Banderas and Harrelson are in. They two fighters are also close friends, one one is the protege of the other. The first hour of the movie just consists of them driving from LA to Vegas, then the boxing match. The drive is quite entertaining, and the dialogue shows us three people (their mutual girlfriend, Lolita Davidovich, does the driving) with real quirks and flaws and a lot of likeable characteristics.

The plot is both implausible and uninteresting, and I don't much like or understand boxing, but I liked the character study and the dialogue. In a way, it is sort of disorienting, because they make the characters as real as possible, in a setting as unreal as possible. The script and direction both come from sports specialist Ron Shelton ("Cobb", "Tin Cup", "White Men Can't Jump", "Bull Durham"). He's the guy who actually played minor league ball with the legendary Steve Dalkowski, and later turned Dalkowski into Nuke LaLoosh in his script for "Bull Durham". I suppose he knows minor league baseball better than anyone in the world who has the skills to write about it, but I don't know if he has the same grasp of boxing. But, real or not, I though it was pretty cool. I did fast forward through the actual match, which I thought to be impressively staged and filmed, but overlong.

The nudity comes from extras. Davidovich did demonstrate some impressive cleavage.

Hookers (1, 2) Ring Card Girls (1, 2, 3) Davidovich (1)

"Mercy", from Johnny Web

Warning: spoilers

This movie is an odd bird. This is the one I talked about yesterday. It was made with a good budget, by professionals, and features some decent names. It is well photographed, often showing a touch of genius and artistry even in the most perverted scenes (see Crewson collage, and Peta #4). It is absolutely filled with nudity - many different women, often in excellent light, often full frontal. (How often do I do 27 images from one movie?) And it is completely depraved, featuring a descent into underground lesbian and s/m groups -a lot of the full-frontal nudity is corpses. BUT

and this is a big BUT

the movie is held together on the thinnest of threads. The murder mystery itself is totally lame. You won't care who did it, and when you find out, you won't be completely sure where she came from in the plot development. And, needless to say, the victims' common shrink is a complete wacko himself, so he is the #1 suspect, and a red herring.

Ellen Barkin is a detective who investigates the grisly murders of women who have some things in common - they are all into a secret lesbian group, they all have the same shrink, and they are all into painful sex.

What makes the movie different is that Barkin comes to identify not only with the victims, but with the killer as well, because she starts to understand what makes them the way they are, and she realizes that she herself is only a hair away from the same circumstances. She is hetero, but she is attracted to women, she enjoys painful sex, and we think maybe she had some of the same childhood traumas as the victims. This identification leads to a near-lesbian encounter with one of them (see Barkin collage #1 with Peta), and a bizarre climax wherein Barkin kills the killer with a knife in an obviously erotic scene - the stabbing looks like sexual thrusting (see Young collage #4). Then, as the woman dies, Barkin takes her hand! The identification is so complete that the wounded Barkin and the slain killer look like twins (look at Young collage #5 - at first you can't even tell which one is Barkin). OK, it can be pretty heavy-handed symbolism, but it is symbolism, and it's surprising to see such wonderful attention to detail in a junk movie.

So is the movie good? No, not really. It's too slow and meandering and obvious. But it sure has some great moments and some great touches, and tons of nudity. I enjoyed it. A guilty pleasure, to be sure, but keep the FF button handy to ease you through the purple patches. Lots of nudity from Peta Wilson.

One totally weird element. The last two minutes have almost nothing to do with the movie, and are delivered in a different tone. After the case is solved, and the killer slain, the movie spends a couple of minutes in a anti-climactic scene crusading against child abuse, which was the cause of the womens' problems in the movie. It's completely dignified and serious in this portion, after 92 minutes of sordid erotic entertainment. It's almost as if they were searching for some redeeming social importance to avoid an obscenity charge.

I couldn't identify two of these women. Unknown 1 is an anonymous woman from an S/M club. Unknown 2 is the woman that Barkin caught with her husband, and she's a fox. All four unknown images are quite nice.

Ellen Barkin (minimal nudity, but I love #1. That's Peta with her) (1, 2) Peta Wilson (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) Karen Young (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) Laura Daans (1, 2, 3, 4) First Unknown (1, 2) Second Unknown (1, 2) Wendy Crewson Claire Burton Ellen-Ray Hennessy

"Desperately Seeking Susan", from Tuna

This is another movie that seems to have three contradictory properties:

It has Madonna in it It's a comedy I like it

Now it doesn't seem like those things could all be true and yet, mysteriously, they are. In this 1985 film, Madonna plays the part of Madonna, although her name is Susan. She doesn't actually have that much screen time, but does well with what she has. Rosanna Arquette is a bored young suburban housewife with a yuppie-nightmare husband. Through a plot device, Rosanna ends up living Madonna's life instead of her own.

Here is a good review of the film which supplies much detail, and with which I agree prety much completely.

thumbnails Madonna (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) Rosanna Arquette (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)