Junior is moving. I am filling in for the Friday and Saturday pages, and he will return with the Sunday page.

Lady Chatterley (1992):

Ken Russell's take on the D.H. Lawrence novel was not actually a movie per se, but a four-part miniseries on British TV.

D.H. Lawrence is pretty tedious reading today, and not an especially good writer. He attracted a wide audience in his own time because of his obscenity trial. He achieved the backing of the entire literary world because he fought against censorship, and that notoriety gave him the immortality that his writing never really merited. To demonstrate that Lawrence was no simple pornographer, people of great talent and reputation swore that he was one of the giants among them, thus paving the way for the controversial elements of his work to be accepted as the license of literary genius, ala James Joyce.

His work no longer needs to be defended against obscenity charges, it is no longer especially controversial by today's standards, so the shock value is gone, and his characters now have to stand alone, unsupported by sensationalism, revealed in all their tedious mediocrity and complete lack of realism. (There were far more things to consider than mere class issues. Do you think a real Lady Chatterley, raised in cleanliness, would have been able to get past the stench of the gamekeeper, or the unhygienic plumbing-free living conditions in his hut, or his undoubtedly poor dental care? I saw plenty of beautiful poor girls in the villages of the third world, but I wasn't about to have sex with any of them.)

Ken Russell specializes in literary adaptations and biopics, although his work always seems to have more to do with Ken Russell than with Liszt or Tchaikovsky or Huxley. To his credit, Russell kept his flamboyant imagery and his daffy dream sequences to a minimum in this effort, and did a pretty solid interpretation of Lawrence's work, catching the essence of the class struggle as well as the sensuality which made the work so controversial in early part of the past century.

I don't know if you'd sit through this if it were a version edited for network TV, but it's an easy enough watch in the uncensored version, with plenty of full-frontal nudity from Joely Richardson.

• Joely Richardson ( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13)

Updates:

• Charlie's French Cinema Nudity site is updated

OTHER CRAP:

• Star ego department: CAMERON Diaz has blue eyes - but in "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle," premiering next week, she has really really blue eyes. Sources say the star asked Columbia Pictures to spend an extra $200,000 on top of the movie's ballooning $120 million budget to digitally enhance her peepers.
• First two episode of this season of Sex and the City will be wild
• Energy giant Powergen says it has no connection to a porno site - the unfortunately named Italian website www.powergenitalia.com. Now that's a corporate press conference.
• Forbes Magazine picks Jennifer Aniston as the world's most powerful celebrity. Huh?
• Kate Hudson is preggers
• girl marries a dog. Her mother in law is a real bitch.
• Time Magazine picks the 50 best websites, which is roughly like Siegfried and Roy picking the 50 best NASCAR drivers, or Dick Cheney picking the 50 best haute couture designers. Oh, well, you may find something useful.
• US State Department demands an explanation of  what "Beckham" is. While relations between Britain and the U.S. have never been warmer, their close ties could be torn asunder by their differences over Beckham, experts fear. “In America, almost no one knows who Beckham is, while in Britain, he is considered the most famous person on the planet,” said Dr. Roger Cranepool of the Institute for Foreign Relations at the University of Minnesota. “This is a recipe for disaster.”
• The Queen of England practices her Vince McMahon facial expressions

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 Lawdog or Junior or C2000 or Realist or ICMS or Mick Locke, or somebody else besides me)
• If there is no asterisk, I wrote it, but am too ashamed to admit it.

Come Play with Me (1977) is a British sex farce/tittie flick. There is a certain amount of confusion over this film, but I have no reason why. Bare Facts lists it as a German film, with un-reviewed nudity from Brigitte Lahaie, who is not in the film, and Mary Millington, who is in the film, her first screen appearance. There are no reviews on line, and the comments at IMDB a rather misleading. They describe it as a terrible sex film/comedy, with bad male comedians, a weak plot, awful songs, and almost no nudity. I will give them most of that, but if this is their idea of no nudity, I have got to get access to their film library.

Mary Millington shows everything, both in the film, and during a 7 minute retrospective of her career, including a girl/girl scene. Sue Longhurst shows breasts in a lengthy sex and food scene, and more unidentified actresses than I could count showed everything from breasts to full frontal throughout the film. Although Millington was far from the star, she was the most notable cast member. She was hugely popular throughout her 26 year career, which sadly ended when she took her own life.

The plot, such as it is, goes something like this. Someone is counterfeiting 20 quid notes that are nearly perfect, Some minister fears the government will fall if the guilty ones can't be caught. They enlist the aide of a stripper/agent (Longhurst), figuring that a strip joint is a likely place to pass the bills (and see some naked women). Meanwhile, the counterfeiters are holed up in a so called health spa in Scotland which has no business, where they can make a new press run in peace and quiet, but, when the owner's nephew shows up with a busload of strippers, starts ads saying Come Play with Me, and has the girls entertain the guests, the place becomes far from quiet.

The IMDB score is 3.3 of 10, but based on only 17 votes. The film was a huge commercial success when released, running for 4 years straight in London's West End. It claims to be the earliest example of full-frontal nudity in British film. The biggest negative was the audio, which was very mushy. The 4/3 transfer was not bad for a film of that age, with good saturation, and very little dust or dropouts. This is a solid C. The entire purpose was to show naked women, and, as you can see by the images below, they did exactly that. There is a rumor that 4 hard-core scenes were shot, but never shown.

 

Interesting series from the News of the World tabloid. Various pics of celebs without their make-up and glamour, showing their zits, their cellulite, giant feet, poor posture, or whatever.

Liz Hurley with turkey neck

Madonna without make-up

Anna Friel falling out of her blouse, Jordan with cellulite

Jerry Hall - extreme cellulite

J-Lo nip-slip in front of children

Hurley nip-slip, Meg Ryan's sasquatch feet

Gwyneth Paltrow and Britney Spears looking awful, nip-slip from Tamara Beckwith

Kidman nip-slip and some really ugly feet from Liz Hurley

J-Lo cellulite

Lisa Kudrow looking just awful

Courtney Cox cellulite and surprisingly thick legs

Sophie Anderton falls out of her blouse, Baby Spice looks 50 years old and 50 pound overweight

Naomi Campbell forgets her anti-perspirant

A close look at Cameron Diaz's complexion

Michelle Collins nip-slip

Pop diva plumber's crack

Bunions, cellulite, and more

Appleton's apples fall out

Naomi Campbell nip-slip

Jane Fonda looking like Frankenstein's monster

Amanda Holden with "carpet burn" on her knees

Gillian Anderson looking very unglam

Kate Moss falls out

Pop diva unrecognizable without make-up

What you would see if you woke up next to Courtney Love. Kobain suicide explained.

Here are several more to add to the file, from a film called Dragon Fire

• Monique Parent
• Christina Veronica
• Nicola Koerber
• Pamela Runo ( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)

Amy Brenneman in the NYPD Blue pilot ( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 )

Katherine Towne in the Anarchist's Cookbook ( 1, 2, 3, 4 )

Dann captures Isabel Sarli in Fuego. His comments:

"People that follow my work know that I love to do oddball films. This 1969 Argentinean film certainly qualifies. Miss Argentina 1955 Isabel Sarli stars as a nymphomaniac who is sexually insane. She has both a husband and a lesbian lover, yet she still can't get enough. This was directed by Armando Bo (who also wrote and co-starred in it). They called him the "Russ Meyer of Argentina". Sarli made 27 pictures with him, and was also his lover. The film is hilarious, because it's campy, kitschy, and over/badly acted. Everything is exaggerated (including Sarli's huge breasts and nipples). It's a wild film. Apparently, the film master they used for the DVD was in pretty bad shape, because you'll notice tons of scratches, dirt, and artificating on the collages, although I cleaned up as best I could, but even with the poor quality, I thought this was worthwhile to do, because the film was so strange. :-)