Erotica (1994) is an Atom Egoyan film, which means you can make some assumptions about it knowing nothing else. The cast will include his wife, Arsinée Khanjian. The story will be revealed in layers, with a very non-linear time frame. A major theme will be how people deal with the loss of a loved one. Exotica is a strip club, and many of the characters have that in common. Arsinée Khanjian is the owner, Mia Kirshner is a star performer, Bruce Greenwood is her biggest customer. He is auditing an exotic pet store owner, who is also a smuggler of illegal bird eggs, and a homosexual. We eventually learn that his daughter was murdered. Kirshner, and the DJ at the club, Elias Koteas. Koteas and Kirshner were an item until she discovered that Khanjian contracted with him to make her pregnant.

There is more, but in case you haven't seen this film, I will leave it to you to discover. This was Egoyan's best film to date at the time it was made, and he followed it with an absolute masterpiece, The Sweet Hereafter. In Exotica, I always found myself wanting to get on with the story, whereas The Sweet Hereafter, which used the same tools of non-linear time and unraveling layer after layer, held my interest too well to want to jump ahead.

Kirshner shows breasts and buns briefly table dancing in very dark lighting. Several unknowns also show body parts in the club. While these might not be the best images I have ever done, I think they are among my best work with difficult photography. This was the film that got me interested in Atom Egoyan, which made the Sweet Hereafter a slam dunk. Ebert and Berardinelli both awarded 4 stars, and IMDb readers have this at 7.2 of 10. It is least popular with the under 18 crowd, and most popular with the 18 to 29 group. It is not a cliffhanger, but is a masterfully crafted character study of a group of seemingly unrelated characters that end up being so inter-related that loss of one would make them all collapse. It has amazingly little nudity for a film that takes place mainly in a strip club. The proper score is B-. This is a character driven drama, but will appeal to many who don't usually enjoy them due to its interesting narrative style.

OTHER CRAP:

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

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MOVIE REVIEWS:

Words from Scoop.

.avi's from Shiloh.

.wmv files made by Scoop from Shiloh's .avi's.

NOTE: because of a unique combination of circumstances with the Windows media player and some substantial bandwidth theft, we will have to do all of our movie files in zip format. Left click on the files as you normally would to view a picture. When you get a choice, click on "save", and put it on your hard drive in the directory of your choice. UnZIP and play from there.

I know this is not especially convenient, but it allows the film clips to continue. I can protect .zip files from hot-linking in the same way I can protect still images. For some reason, if I protect .avis and .wmvs from hot-linking, they will not play in the Windows media player, and I can't get a satisfactory work-around. Perhaps I will find a better solution, but for now this new policy allows you to continue getting the movie clips you want to see, which is much preferable to my abandoning the clips altogether.

Futon-related amusement

Jennifer Rubin in A Woman, Her Men, and Her Futon. Not much of a movie, but Jennifer looked delicious then:

• Rubin. (.avi - zip) (.wmv - zip)

Perhaps these tips will help if you have trouble with the codecs for these movies:

Shiloh says:

FYI when I hypercam vids to make the file size smaller I use DivX MPEG-4 Fast-Motion for the video compressor, then I use virtualdub to compress the audio. The properties for the vids says the video codec:  DivX Decoder Filter & audio codec:  Morgan Stream Switcher which I'm not familiar with. When I compress the audio with virtualdub I use MPEG Layer-3.  A friend of mine told me about compressing the audio about (6) mos. ago. Like I said previously, only been capping for a year & a half & I'm no expert. Hopefully this info will help members with the proper codecs for my vids.

 

When I cap big brother's I use hypercam mostly & sdp & asfrecorder if the set up allows me. I stopped using camtasia cause the file sizes were always too big, could never figure out the process, over my head lol, plus it cost too much to buy in my opinion.

A reader says:

You mentioned that some users were having trouble with the videos on your site. There is a tool designed to determine what codec is needed for a video. http://www.headbands.com/gspot/ Hope this is useful to you or your users.

Scoop says:

I made the .wmv versions of each video. The codecs for these: Windows Video V8, Windows Audio 9. The upside of these is that you know the codecs, and they'll play in the Windows Media Player. The downside is that they are slightly larger, and slightly lower quality.

• Elizabeth McDonald and Tara Carroll show their breasts in dark, inexplicit sex scenes from "Cruel Intentions 3"

• Connie Nielsen baring breasts and bum in scenes from the incredibly incoherent "Demonlover" (2002). Click here for the scoopy.com review.

Be sure to pay Graphic Response a visit at his website. www.graphic-barry.com.

When Heather Graham was 20 she made a movie entitled "Shout." It should have been a breakthrough experience. The cast included John Travolta in the period of his first, Looks-Who's-Talking comeback, the always reliable Linda Fiorentino, veteran character actor Richard Jordan and a very young Gwyneth Paltrow. Heather's character was written into well over half the scenes in the final cut and she was cast to play an exquisitely beautiful young woman with a heart of gold... which is akin to casting Michael Jordan as a tall African-American with some basketball talent. So what went wrong? By which I mean, why had I never heard of this movie and why is it in the low 4's on IMDb?

What went wrong started with the writing. The screenplay is 40% Dead Poets Society, 30% Cool Hand Luke, 20% Dirty Dancing and 10% that movie about the town in the Southwest where dancing isn't allowed. The idea is this:

1) Start with a home for wayward boys set in Texas in 1955. One boy, played by Jamie Walters is sent up the river for ringing the town church bells way early on a fine morn that wasn't Sunday.

2) Add a Nazi director of the home, who seems to be absolutely, positively the only adult supervision in the place.

3) Mix in a music teacher with a dark past, assigned to train the boys for the upcoming Independence Day celebration.

4) Flavor with Heather, who plays the Nazi's daughter, sent from a-far to live him.... at a home for wayward boys...where, I repeat, her dad is the only adult supervision. Even in '55 that was a dangerous mix.

Travolta is supposed to be cool. You know that 'cuz he plays rock n roll recorded by black artists and goes to the local club catering to black folks, where he dances with Linda, who is the town sherrif's ex-main squeeze.

Shit happens and in-between or before the shit, Heather's character and Jamie's character meet, fall in love, kiss a lot and finally do the nasty. Recall, again dear reader, Jamie is in a home for wayward boys and he is supervised for not one minute of the day even though Heather plays the daughter of the guy what runs the place. WTF! I'd have had my daughter locked behind one set of bars and all the boys in the place locked behind a second set... with the open policy that the first boy of touch her loses a hand and his minerals.

Travolta's character is written as a anti-hero's hero, Jamie's character as a sweet mixed-up kid with sooo much potential, Heather's character... well, I already told you about her. None of them is the least bit authentic. It all sucks so very hard, and so very deep.

And then you get to the ending where a band without a single brass instrument is supposed to play Sousa marches but breaks into rock n roll when Travolta's character strides forward to be arrested (don't bother to ask why... it is neither important nor interesting). All the kids in town, a couple hundred of which suddenly appear, start to dance... professionally, with panties a-showin' and bodies a-movin'. At that point you realize you've seen a movie descend from really bad into truly and monumentally... historically... awful. Wretched. Atrocious. From boring to painful, from an uninteresting mess to an act of torture approved for use only by Donald Rumsfeld.

But as my mama used to say, it is a dark cloud indeed that has no silver lining.

Boys and girls, the silver lining here could hardly have been brighter. It is Heather Graham in one scene of about 20 frames in nightgown so thin it is almost transparent. In the scene, Jamie's character bursts into the house Heather shares with her dad, flings open the door to her bedroom, strides over and kisses her... then leaves, without anyone stopping either his ingress or his egress. If I ran the place, I'd have put he egress in a bottle and shipped it home to his parents.

So I grabbed all 20 frames and used 9 of them to mix with other frames of Heather's perfect face.. shot, I might add, well, perfectly... to make 4 collages. At least the DP knew what he was doing.

Let's review. Great cast, awful writing, criminally putrid direction: a movie with a 1.5-second scene worth watching. The one review I read on IMDb had many positive things to say about Shout. I have only three, all of which belong to Heather Graham, one of which is her face.

• Heather Graham (1, 2, 3, 4)

• Here is a Heather Graham video clip (divx encoded .avi) from "Shout". Probably the only interesting 2 seconds in the whole frigging movie.

"No Small Affair"
A 16 year old amateur photographer accidentally takes a photo of a 22 year old singer, and falls in love with her, in this 1984 comedy featuring a young Demi Moore, and an even younger and very talented Jon Cryer.

The story's fairly lame and predictable and Demi is pretty stiff in this role, so the most notable thing about it is Cryer's performance. His scene with Judy Baldwin as a prostitute is funny and well done.

An sometimes amusing not-so-bad effort that's worth watching for historical value if nothing else.

• Demi Moore
• Judy Baldwin

• "The O.C" babe Amanda Righetti doing the 'arms covering boobs' thing.

• "Not Another Teen Movie" star Chyler Leigh stuffed into some very tight clothes and looking great. (1, 2)

• "Club Dread" babe Elena Lyons showing some cleavage and wearing a bikini.

• Nikki Deloach, more bikini exposure. (1, 2)

PORN REALITY SHOW A NEW LOW
Define "Private" - In what critics are calling a new low for reality TV, Britain's Channel 4 is launching a show on cable and satellite called "Private Stars." Five average guys will be locked in a house with five female porn stars, and viewers will watch as they make a porn movie. The producers say the sex will be real, and the guys will be judged on how well they perform. The poorest performers will be voted out one-by-one, and the last one left wins a contract with a porn producer.