Some more great film clips:

This zipped .avi is all of the sexy stuff of Jennifer Aniston in The Break-Up, including the brief look at her bum. She looks very good in this movie.

The Machinist is the psychological drama for which Christian Bale lost 63 pounds. (Movie House Review) This zipped .avi is an HC film clip of absolutely magnificent quality, superior to DVD. It offers a nice look at Jennifer Jason Leigh and a creepy look at the skeletal Bale.

This zipped .avi is Scarlett Johannson in A Good Woman. It may or may not include a flash of nipple but, damn, that woman has some serious Mimi Rogers levels of cleavage.

The two film clips (zipped .wmv) of Joyce Van Patten in Bone are the aborted rape scene (represented by the first collage below - when else but the early 70s could you get a gyno cam shot from a dowdy TV housewife?), and the lovemaking scene (the other three collages). My thoughts are below. Tuna had a completely different take on it. He liked it. It's a film basically split into two stories. I hated one of the two, and I didn't like the other one enough to make up for it. Tuna's thoughts are here.

Joyce Van Patten

Bone (1972)

Bone isn't Citizen Kane, but it's not a totally awful film either. The problem is that it had absolutely no audience. The film's distributor, Jack Harris, tried to market it in the white suburban theaters - no luck. Then he convinced director Larry Cohen to try marketing it in the "black film" circuit - no luck. Cohen was convinced it could be promoted as a comedy, so he invested a great deal of his own money (he had just sold a script to a major studio) to do a trial market run in New York City, giving first billing to Jeannie Berlin, who played a minor role but had won a N.Y. Film Critics Award (and an Oscar nomination) for her supporting performance in The Heartbreak Kid. That failed. Art film? Failed again. Mr. Harris finally changed the name of the film to Housewife, and re-cut the trailer to make it sensational. ("This housewife will do anything for kicks."). This change allowed him to sell the picture through the drive-in circuit as a second feature in a sexploitation twin bill.

Could this film come from any other era but its own (70s counter-culture)? It's filled with confusing and unnecessary symbolism, sudden acid flashes to the lives of people unimportant to the film, scenes that might be real or imagined, heavy-handed satire of the suburban bourgeoisie, a murder in the sand dunes, classic anti-capitalist posturing, and a woman who prefers her black rapist to the conniving user car salesman she married. The representative of the white American business world is corrupt, materialistic, cowardly, and lacking in human decency. If I didn't already know who directed this, I would have guessed Marco Ferreri. All it needs is Depardieu and a giant plaster ape.

After the first few minutes of the film, the white suburban couple gets split up and the script covers their stories separately, intercutting them until the last few minutes of the movie, when they find one another. The portion of the film with the wife (Joyce Van Patten) and her would-be rapist (Yaphet Kotto) is quite watchable. Their scenes gradually migrate from sexual menace to rapprochement to conspiracy, from melodrama to humor, with both characters developing as they interact. Those scenes can be suspenseful, funny, tender and sexy. The other half of the film, which follows the peregrinations of the sleazy husband, doesn't spark any interest at all. Those scenes seem to ramble pointlessly, and are filled with uninteresting encounters with uninvolving characters, during which the satire always falls flat. Unfortunately, the husband's adventures take far too long to unfold, thus dragging the film to the level of a pretentious arthouse endeavor.

The DVD, however, has lots of good features. There's a full-length commentary, and thirty minutes of footage from the first version of the film, which was shot with a different lead actress.

 

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Movie Reviews:

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