2003 Miss Black Nude Pageant (2003) is exactly that. The contest was in its 10th year, and they filmed a documentary at Club 55 in Jamaica, where it was held. First, the interviewed the girls. We find out one at a time that they are strippers, mostly from LA and DC, that they are supposedly representing a foreign country so the promoters can call it International. One woman is actually from Brazil. We also learn that each one of them considers their personality their best feature.

Next, we have highlights of the competition, including swimwear, evening gown, lingerie, and stark naked for each of the girls, one at a time. Every girl shows everything, front and rear, and most show labia. There is a lot of skin art and pierced body parts. The contestants are Venus, Covergirl, Angel, Jasmine, Vegas, Brazillian, Dark Passion, Pleasure, Baby Doll, Star and Israel Cash.

The photography is not at all good, with a lot of focus problems, and many blown out areas due to lighting. Evidently, they gave it a lot of air time on skinemax, and I don't know of too many DVDs full of completely nude black women. The genre is naked beauty pageant coverage, roughly like the making of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue and other documentaries of naked woman events. IT has a very high naked woman count, so it is properly scored a high C. Better camera work would have earned a C+.

High Art  (1998)

If you want to be a filmmaker, I can tell you exactly how to get good reviews for your first movie.

Mind you, you won't make a penny as a result of it. Your film will probably never make it to the box office at all. If it does, it will play in about three theaters in New York and California. And even those few small theaters will be deserted. But you will get good reviews.

Here is how:

Find a halfway decent, sensitive, unproduced script about a tragic love triangle between a man and two women - the kind of sincere film from a first-time screenwriter that would pull in a 5.5 or a 6.0 at IMDb if it could ever get made. Buy the rights from the author, who has certainly despaired of ever seeing his script produced, and will sell to you willingly and cheaply, just to get the exposure. Change the man to a woman and make it a lesbian love triangle. Do not change one word of the script, except the necessary personal pronouns. Do not even change the name of the male character. It if was a guy named Hank, it is now a lesbian named Hank. No problem.Voila! Instant lesbian classic. In fact, some people may rave that it is the greatest gay movie ever made.

Think about it. What is the competition? Have you ever seen a really great movie with a central gay romance? Your script would seem mediocre, probably on the low side of mediocre, if you directed it as the author wrote it, but in comparison to other gay films, it will seem to be genius.

But it's even better than that. Because you didn't  change one word from the original script (excepting "him", "his" and "he", of course), people will praise the fact that you avoided all the gay stereotypes and showed gay people simply to be people, with problems and dreams indistinguishable from anyone else's. You will not be guilty of casting the bad characters in a condescendingly good light, nor will you be guilty of creating a halo effect around your sympathetic characters. You will have a subtle, nuanced, portrayal of gay life that shows how similar we all really are. You will pick up some great reviews and possibly win some film festival awards. As I mentioned earlier, you will not make one cent on the film, so pinch your pennies. Your hope is that somebody with money will be impressed, will recognize your genius, and will hire you to direct another movie. That's where you will make your money if you prove to have some sense of what is marketable. That is a very good thing, because there are about a gazillion people wandering around the film industry who simply want a chance to show what they can do, and this is your short cut.

So it is with High Art. The director here wrote her own script rather than buying an unproduced one, but the Ally Sheedy character, a photographer, could have been filmed as a man without changing one word of dialogue except the personal pronouns. If the director had done so, however, it would not even be a watchable film. You would find it to be a typically pretentious NYU/Columbia-style bit of indulgent pseudo-intellectual New York Bohemianism. Most of the main characters spend their time wasted on heroin. If you've ever been around nodders, you know that their actions do not make for much of a spectator event. To make matters worse, the characters not on heroin also seem to have the same energy level, or lack thereof.

In fact, the entire project is even a cut below a film school project, because nobody involved in the set bothered to check some simple things which were necessary for the characters to stay in character, and which good film school students would have caught. For example, a German woman is speaking on the phone and mispronounces a German word that ends in - platz. She pronounces it to rhyme with "bats". For another example, two of the supposed Bohemian intellectuals in the film - not one, mind you, but two - mispronounce the word "sycophant" - pronouncing it "psycho-phant", as if it represented not a hanger-on or a self-seeking flatterer, but rather a very disturbed pachyderm. (The director also wrote the script, so presumably did not know how to pronounce the words she herself wrote.)

By using the technique of making the central character a woman, however, the film garnered some solid praise from those who review films by assessing their political correctness rather than their quality or entertainment value.

To be honest, the film did have one very strong redeeming factor. In the center of it all, Ally Sheedy, the nexus of the love triangle, was gritty and real and multi-dimensional, and turned in a powerful performance as the doomed artist. She was strong enough to carry the film to a high enough level that it could at times be both effective and affective, so many critics overlooked the endless, boring, drugged-out scenes and one-dimensional minor characters, choosing to talk instead about the things that moved them. I found those good moments to occur too infrequently, and couldn't wait for the film to end.

The film opened on four screens, and ended up grossing about two million dollars in a twelve week mini-arthouse run.

• Radha Mitchell (1, 2)
• Ally Sheedy
• Patricia Clarkson (1, 2)

The Name of the Rose  (1986)

In case you are curious, here is the entire three minute sex scene between Christian Slater and Valentina Vargas. The visual quality is good for a three minute clip that is only 11 meg in size, but I had to strip out the sound to keep the file size more modest. That had no significant impact, since the characters did not speak.

OTHER CRAP:

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

Click here to submit a URL for Other Crap

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.

Amanda power

• Amanda #1 - Ooms - delivering a full frontal and rear view in the Swedish movie, As White as Snow (.avi - zip) (.wmv - zip)

• Amanda #2 - the ever-weird Plummer - in Eight and a Half Women (.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.

With the most notable exception of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, third episodes in a series suck.

All things being relative, however, it matters greatly which series you are talking about. In the Godfather series, I and II were a couple of the best movies to come out of Hollywood...ever. So when part III wasn't even considered in the top ten of movies made in 1990, you can sorta say it sucked.

To come down a peg and look at the Star Wars triology, Return of the Jedi sucked on both relative and absolute scales. Compared with the first two just about anything would be a let-down but let's face it, Return was the first unmistakable sign that George Lucas had sprung a weak. the size of which sank the Titanic.

So what happens when you start at not so stratispheric levels with parts 1 and 2? Major League 1 was enjoyable because of the cast, 2 blew donkey balls because many of the major figures retired and those who stayed just mailed in their performances.... and 3 is so bad it's the Manos, Hands of Fate of sports movies.

Cut to Smokey and the Bandit. My wife's friends would be appalled to learn I liked the movie and have watched it three or four times. Burt Reynolds was at his charming best and Sally Field was Sally Field. Even Jackie Gleason made the most of a silly role. A good ol' movie.

Smokey and the Bandit, part II still had Burt and a bit of Sally but the magic was gone and the motions were all the folks went through.

Part III leaves us with Paul Williams and Jerry Reed and poor old Jackie Gleason to carry the mail, and it is all so very tired and unamusing. Plot is something about a restaurant and a plastic shark that inspires car and boat chases all over God's Southern creation. Yikes, this one sucks no matter whose scale you are using. Such is the problem starting out with something other than a timeless epic... by the time ya get to Part 3 there is not a drop of water left in the well.

For a PG movie, though, it has better than decent exposure. Veronica Gamba, Hefmate for Nov 1983, plays a nudist at a picnic site... and that means she shows us her hooters and her bum. Most of the exposure is shot from a-far or is presented in very quick cuts, but hey that's not been a problem for about five or six years now.

Made up two collages of Veronica. The first takes you on a chronological trip, from the top left to the bottom row, through each of Veronica's scenes. Collage two focusses on a very short clip where you a get a decent close-up of Veronica's major assets.

• Veronica Gamba (1, 2, 3)

And then there is a collage of other babes giving up top goodies. The top half of the collage comes from a hotel of kinky folk enjoying a host of kinking activities, whereas the bottom shows the rest of the nudist picnic babes (and...mea maxima culpa... the hiney of a naked guy). But take a look at the gal in each corner of the bottom panel...a most bodacious set of tatas.

• Unknowns

Well, that's it, then. For about 11 seconds...maybe 12...Smokey and the Bandit, Part 3 doesn't suck because there are nekkid babes on the screen. But you pay a steep and heavy price of dreadful movie watching just for those brief moments. Wouldn't do it again unless it were Jessica Alba at the picnic.

"The Mother" (2003) is a BBC Films co-production, re-uniting screen writer Hanif Kureishi ("Intimacy") with director Roger Michell - they previously worked together on "Buddha of Surburbia". It stars Anne Reid as a recently widowed Grandmother who rekindles her fires in a sexual affair with a builder half her age (who happens to be also sleeping with her daughter). He is played by Daniel Craig, one of our more "dangerous" young actors. Anne Reid is a revelation - taken for granted through 40 years of homely parts on British TV, she is tremendous in this role, won the London Critics Best British Actress award for it and was nominated for a BAFTA. She was 58 when this film was made, and wasn't afraid to go topless.

• Anne Reid (1, 2, 3, 4)

"The Weight of Water"
This 2000 mystery/thriller based on a novel by Anita Shreve has an interesting plot, somewhat spoiled by a confusing ending. Still, the twisty storyline will keep you interested most of the way, and Elizabeth Hurley does some nice but brief topless nudity.

In 1873, two women are axed-murdered on an island off the coast of New Hampshire, and a man is subsequently hanged for the murders. Switch to modern times as a newspaper photographer, her poet husband, her brother-in-law, and his girlfriend, sail to the island to research the murders. Historians now believe the man hung was not the real murderer, and in fact, evidence points to one of the victim's sister as the real murderer.

The movie flips back and forth between the past and present as we follow the murder, the investigation, and the relationship between the modern four.

Although the ending (which I won't reveal) does expose the real murderer, twists and turns in the modern segment leave things in a somewhat confusing state, and may well cause you to say "I don't get it". Even so, it's a decent enough movie to watch, and I suppose that's why it's called a mystery.

• Elizabeth Hurley

Toni Nero

Linnea Quigley
(1, 2, 3, 4)

Elizabeth Kaitan

DRINKABLE KRISPY KREME DONUT
Mmmm...That's Good Donut! - Krispy Kreme introduced a new frozen beverage that's a drinkable version of its donuts. It comes in original kreme, raspberry, latte and double chocolate, and you can add coffee to them. The CEO said he thought the donut beverages will provide tremendous growth opportunity for Krispy Kreme.