Sunday

Tuna
Tuna, our main contributor and the most energetic video capper ever known to man (as all of you well know) is currently indisposed. He is in intensive care in a hospital in the San Francisco Bay area. It doesn't make sense to send him any well-wishes at this point, since he is not checking his e-mail, and it would not make sense to call him, since ICU is not the place to do that.

He is in good spirits, and said he that he hopes to back on the job by next week! (Because the 70-75,000 collages he has already made just aren't enough!)

We'll continue to keep everyone posted and let you all know when he's ready to get e-mail and/or calls.

Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy)

Updates

  • 24 new volumes added to section B of the Encyclopedia. 214 new pics.

 

A few zipped .wmv clips:

  • Uma Thurman in Dangerous Liaisons. Very ripe, very young, very busty, and completely topless. I'm not sure why Uma stopped doing nudity, but she really looked great there for a while.
  • Toni Collette in Lilian's Story. This is a short one, featuring one of her many frontal nude scenes in this curious film.
  • Dervla Kirwan in A Time to Dance. I just plucked this one out of Usenet.

 

 

He Got Game (1998)

A man is serving jail time for the murder of his wife. There could be a way for him to get out of prison early because he may have something the governor wants. The prisoner's son is the top prep school basketball player in the country, and the governor is both a huge basketball fan and a loyal alumnus of Big State University. The prisoner is given one week of supervised release to persuade his son to attend Big State. That simple and clear premise is the setting for a film that wanders off into some complicated psychological territory. The prisoner will not have an easy time persuading his son of anything because, after all, he killed the boy's mother!

The prep star has problems of his own even before the unsolicited and unwanted appearance of his father. He faces the temptations of pro contracts and easy money, as well as all the pressures placed on him by having to choose from a seemingly infinite number of colleges that want him to attend. He also has to deal with scheming friends and relatives who see him as a meal ticket. He Got Game is rich with details about the life of a star high school athlete, and enhances the realism with cameo appearances from dozens of real figures in the worlds of professional and college sports, ranging from Shaq to several famous college coaches to ESPN's Robin Roberts.

The film does not follow any of the sports movie formulas. There is no convenient happy ending. There is no big game at the end. In fact, there is no real competition shown at all, except playground games and a climactic one-on-one between the convict and his son. Although this film takes place in the context of basketball, and was directed by Spike Lee, who is the Knicks' #1 fan and pal to many pro athletes, it's not really a film about basketball at all, but rather about what basketball means in the lives of young men and their families, and a story of an estranged father and son on the path toward reconciliation. For both of these extraordinary men, the dramatic conflict revolves around whether they will learn to do the right thing.

I think Spike made some mistakes here.

  • Ray Allen, a real NBA stud and one of the greatest pure shooters in history (check out his free throw and 3-point shooting percentages), plays the young basketball superstar, and is distractingly stiff in some scenes.
  • The ending is inappropriately symbolic when the rest of the film has taken place in the real world, and it's sloppily sentimental as well.
  • Parts of the premise are lacking in credibility.

I don't want to dwell on the weaknesses of He Got Game because it's an exceptionally good film which develops both the father's and the son's story in depth and with compassion. The story is imbued with real passion for New York, for basketball as a cultural icon, and for film itself. Spike Lee demonstrates great mastery of film as an art form, and blends the elements of color, composition, and music magnificently. Musical montages are a cliché in most films, but Spike used them to perfect effect in He Got Game to advance the mood and meaning of the film.

Spike shares the honors with his ol' reliable #1 actor, Denzel Washington. What a team they have been! Spike can stray here and there from realistic dialogue, and in the hands of lesser actors that can cause a problem with the audience's commitment to the customary suspension of disbelief, but Denzel is a writer's dream. No matter how bad a line of dialogue may be, Denzel can come up with some way to deliver it so that it seems authentic. If a line seems stilted or artificial, Denzel finds a way to hide it in the character, with irony or posturing or something else that seems genuine in the moment. Man has a gift.

Denzel and Spike? They got game.


He Got Game is rated the #4 basketball movie of all time at IMDb, and is within a tenth of a point of the #2 spot, which is probably where it belongs. That impressive ranking is largely a result of the lack of quality competition. I mean no disrespect to He Got Game because I think it is underrated at IMDb, but when it comes to sports films, basketball is the forgotten sport. Hoosiers is the only basketball film rated over seven at IMDb. The rest of the herd is thin indeed, and the top ten goes all the way down to 5.2/10, and therefore includes some films which really aren't good at all. (Space Jam??)

The top ten (excluding documentaries):

Title Rating
Hoosiers (1986) 7.5
Love & Basketball (2000) 6.7
Coach Carter (2005) 6.7
He Got Game (1998) 6.6
The Basketball Diaries (1995) 6.6
O (2001) 6.3
White Men Can't Jump (1992) 6.2
BASEketball (1998) 6.1
Above the Rim (1994) 5.8
Space Jam (1996) 5.2

 

 

  • Milla Jovovich (1, 2, 3)
  • Rosario Dawson (1, 2)
  • Chasey Lain (1, 2)
  • Jill Kelly (1, 2, 3, 4)

 

Other Crap:

Other Crap archives. May also include newer material than the links above, since it's sorta in real time.

Click here to submit a URL for Other Crap

 

 

MOVIE REVIEWS:

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 Junior or Brainscan, or somebody else besides me)
  • If there is no asterisk, I wrote it, but am too ashamed to admit it.

Brainscan
'Caps and comments by Brainscan:

Scoops-
As promises...here are a couple more gals from the Mystique Lingerie disk.

These two are slender and all-natural and as pretty as can be. I like them... a lot. Both Anouk Pascale and Elle Williams do the triple B thing...very impressively.

Hankster
'Caps and comments by Hankster:

For the "Hankster Light" portion for today we return to "The Dreamers" for some more of luscious Eva Green baring all of that lovely body.


Then I fired up the ol' Time Machine and took her all the way back to 1970 for our "Babe in Bondage". Here is the late Sandra Dee tied down to be sacrificed in "The Dunwich Horror". Nothing much showing but some nice leg. The former teenage heart throb was a real cutie.

  • Sandra Dee (1, 2)

Spaz
'Caps and comments by Spaz:

The Outer Limits: 6 disc set
Recently released DVD box set with four brand new volumes. These are the uncut episodes and some contain very rare nudity not shown since the original Showtime run.


"Moving Target" (1997)
Another Canadian action featuring strippers.


Naked Josh season II: episode Baring It All
First episode of the new season.

Dann
'Caps and comments by Dann:

"Hellraiser: Deader"
The seventh of this horror franchise featuring the evil Pinhead, 2005's direct-to-video Hellraiser: Deader, while not the best of the series, is also definitely not the worst. It is a decent horror flick, plenty bloody, which actually doesn't have much screen time for Pinhead, because the script started out as a non-Hellraiser horror flick, and then was changed to make it part of the series.

Kari Wuhrer, sans implants, does a very good job as an investigative reporter who views a snuff film where the victim is shot in the head and obviously killed, then brought back to life by a cult called the Deaders.

As she investigates, she finds a connection between the Deaders and Pinhead's cenobites. Naturally, as is the norm for the series, she endures hallucinations including waking up with a knife in her back, as the evil groups resist her snooping around.

Good enough horror flick will probably also please Hellraiser fans.

Variety
Tatum Adair
(1, 2, 3)

Flautista 'caps of the newcomer going topless in a couple of scenes from the direct-to-vid flick "Ghost Lake" (2004).

Lindsay Lohan Lohan stopping by the Tonight Show. Seriously, someone needs to give this girl a sandwich.

Selma Blair
(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14)

The boobs are prosthetics, but 1)they are very good prosthetics and 2)big'uns are always fun to look at. Thank the cinema gods for John Waters! If for no other reason, there simply aren't enough raunchy and silly movies these days! Skin-man 'caps from "A Dirty Shame" (2004).

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