Some more great film clips:

This zipped .avi is the great sex scene between Billy Bob Thornton and Halle Berry in the role that won Halle her Oscar in the ambitious and depressing drama, Monster's Ball.. (Movie House Review)

Speaking of depressing, here are two zipped .avis (1, 2 - nudity at the end of each) of Lena Olin in another serious movie, which I have been more or less avoiding, called Enemies: A Love Story. It's probably a pretty good movie. It was directed by Paul Mazursky from a novel written by Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. The plot description will tell you that it's not exactly the feel-good hit of the past millennium: "Set in 1949 New York, a Holocaust survivor (Ron Silver) who makes a living as a ghostwriter for a Jewish rabbi, finds himself involved with three women - his current wife (Margaret Sophie Stein), a passionate affair with a married woman (Lena Olin), and his long-vanished wife (Anjelica Huston) whom he thought was killed during the war and suddenly reappears. The film concentrates on the views of the Jewish survivors, who no longer abide by religious morals and question a God who could let the Holocaust occur." I will get to it one of these days, when I'm feeling fortified against depression by plenty of riboflavin. Whatever that is.

Amy Madigan and Keanu Reeves in The Prince of Pennsylvania. (Zipped .wmv) Tuna reviewed this about a week ago, and wrote, "This is a 'rebellious youth' comedy set in a mining town in Pennsylvania. Ruport (Keanu Reeves) dropped out of high school, because he just didn't fit in. He is not very happy to be living at home, but then how could he be? He's a high school drop-out, his mother (Bonnie Bedelia) is sleeping with her husband's best friend, and his father makes no effort at all to relate to him. The only person Ruport does relate to is a local hippy (Amy Madigan), the owner of a seedy drive-in. He fancies himself in love with her. He concocts a scheme to kidnap his dad and force the sale of some property to a mining company, then take the money and run away with Madigan. As you might imagine, things don't quite work out as planned. Roger Ebert was highly incensed that they took honest, hard-working characters and legitimate acting talent and put them into such a silly plot. Critics were uniformly unkind. While I did get a chuckle or two, I have to agree. The plot was rather far-fetched to begin with, and the development and details made it worse, not better. This is a D."

This zipped .wmv is a VERY brief flash of Franka Potente in Blueprint. (Sample capture below in Catch o' the Day)

This zipped .avi is Zita Gorog in Den of Lions. (You also saw her flawless body naked in the straight-to-vid sequel to 8MM.) See the review and collages below. This is, by a wide margin, the best two minutes of the film.

Den of Lions (2003)

Den of Lions is a modestly budgeted straight-to-vid espionage thriller set in Eastern Europe, of the type that usually star Steven Seagal or Wesley Snipes. In this case the star is Stephen Dorff, the second-tier Kiefer Sutherland,  and he is an American agent working undercover to infiltrate the Russian mob in Budapest.  Making the job really complicated is the fact that the undercover agent falls in love with the daughter (Laura Fraser) of the mob's kingpin (Bob Hoskins).

Why would America get involved? Well, it seems that those crazy mobsters are not just pushing prostitution and drugs this month, but are having a Veteran's Day sale on weapons of mass destruction as well. They've figured out a way to obtain a nuclear weapon through their connections in the former Red Army, and plan to sell it to Middle Eastern terrorists.

Candidly, the film isn't very tight or suspenseful. It begins with a long car chase which is virtually irrelevant to the rest of the movie. Following that is a period of narration in which Stephen Dorff tells us the back-story about the development of the Russian mob in Budapest, as related in the manner of a typical Dragnet introduction - "I was working the day-watch out of bunco" - with a little bit of Sam Spade thrown in - "It was a cold night in a cold town. It was black, but nothing is every really black or white." While we hear about the agent's personal history and the history of the mob boss, some vaguely related visuals show us around Budapest a bit. All of that is followed by a sub-plot which lasts almost an hour, in which the agent convinces the kingpin's daughter to free a woman who was separated from her family and kidnapped into involuntary prostitution. All of that doesn't make for very compelling story-telling, and tends to distract from the real point of the film, which is the nuclear threat. Unfortunately, when all the back-story and sub-plots are finally concluded, the story gears up, but all it has to offer is the usual staple diet of the genre: gunfights and chase scenes.

Bob Hoskins still stars in plenty of good movies. Just last year he made Danny the Dog and Mrs Henderson Presents, in which he played very different roles, both very professionally, as always. The fact that he occasionally appears in crap like Son of the Mask, Maid in Manhattan, and Den of Lions is not scaring me yet, but I hope that Hoskins, always a personal favorite, is not yet getting ready to join the Ben Kingsley Club of actors who never pre-read their scripts as long as the paycheck meets their requirements.

The most entertaining part of the film's denouement is a long bit of completely gratuitous nudity from the gorgeous Hungarian actress Zita Gorog. When the mobster's house/headquarters is finally besieged by the Hungarian police, with only a few minutes left in the film, Gorog (playing, I suppose, a gypsy prostitute) is sleeping inside, wearing only a tiny thong. As the gun battle begins, she gets out of bed and wanders around the house in that state of nudity, ostensibly drugged-out, until she finds the mobster's lifeless corpse, which she proceeds to strip of valuables! She was naked for about two minutes of running time, and I don't think she had any lines! She does have a spectacular body. To be honest, I don't know if I should even call that scene gratuitous because, although it was certainly irrelevant to the development of the plot, and came in out of left field, it did add some interesting texture which the film generally lacked in other scenes. Let's just call it a guilty pleasure, and just about the only pleasure in the film.

Unfortunately, viewers have to wait about 90 minutes for it!

 

Zita Görög

 

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Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe). White asterisk: expanded format. Blue asterisk: not mine. No asterisk: it probably sucks.