Henry & June (1990) is the film that pretty much caused the MPAA to invent the NC-17 rating, and was the first recipient. I can't for the life of me figure out why this particular film upset them so much, unless it was the whole idea that Anaïs Nin and June Miller both enthusiastically enjoyed sex. The nudity is not that extensive, the sex is not that kinky, and there is no violence at all. It is the story of the love triangle among Nin, Henry Miller and his wife June in 1931 Paris. Despite the title, it is really more about Nin's transition from fantasy and voyeurism to living out her sexual desires. The story was long in hiding, at Nin's request. She asked that that portion of her diary not be made public until everyone involved was dead.

The film runs 136 minutes and was only nominated for one award (an Oscar for cinematography). I can't imagine that most kids would sit through it even if it were rated PG-13. All of the principles gave great performances, and the film showed 1931 Paris bohemia in all its glory. While the story is pretty heady, I ran out of interest long before the end of the film. Writer/director Philip Kaufman (Quills, The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being) and his wife researched the story carefully, and we can assume that the story was told reasonably accurately.

Maria de Medeiros plays Nin, and shows breasts and buns several times, including a lesbian scene with Uma Thurman who played June. Thurman looks sexy, but showed nothing other than cleavage. Brigitte Lahaiie, as a prostitute, shows breasts and buns. Maite Maille also shows breasts as a prostitute. Several other women show breasts and or buns as hookers, or in a street party. Fred Ward nailed the Henry Miller part, and Richard E. Grant was also good as Nin's International banker husband.

IMDb readers have this at 6.2 of 10. Ebert awarded three stars, but mostly talked about the rating. The film is just over 50% positive at Rotten Tomatoes. If a Long, leisurely period character piece about arguably the two most important writers about sex in the 20th century is your kind of film, there is much to admire here. Many will find it slow going. C+.

Updates:

• Charlie's French Cinema Nudity Site is updated. Charlie begins his summer vacation. His next update will be August 21st.

The Bourne Supremacy (2004):

I've been trying to find someplace where The Door in the Floor is playing, in order to report on the allegedly extensive nudity. No luck in Austin. Hence, a look at The Bourne Supremacy.

I suppose that there will be or already has been a lot of carping from critics who have read the book and are disappointed that this movie has just about nothing in common with it. So it goes. Interesting point, I suppose, but just not relevant to whether this is a good movie. Let's get all that out of the way. The first film in the series, The Bourne Identity, had something like a 50% correlation to the eponymous book. Both sources started with the same premise, a secret agent of some kind with amnesia, on the one hand hoping to regain his memory, but on the other hand afraid to find out just how big a scumbag he really was. That basic premise was pretty much all the film retained from the book. Compared to the book's Jason Bourne, the film's Bourne found out quite different things about his past. It is true that the film lost some of the very best elements in Bourne's search for his identity, and I'm not sure why the scriptwriter chose to change some things which I found to be fascinating and even moving, but it was his call, and the new elements worked just fine for those capable of evaluating the movie as an entity independent of the book. (And, indeed, the things Bourne finds out about himself in the book, or some very similar things, could still come out somewhere later in the movie series, which has no reason to end here.) In the second film, Jason Bourne is no longer a character acting in a Robert Ludlam plot. He is simply a character originally created by Robert Ludlam, as the recent James Bond movies have simply featured a character originally created by Ian Fleming. OK, do we have that out of the way? This movie has almost nothing in common with the book of the same name. That's sort of interesting, but irrelevant. Let's move on, shall we?

The Bourne Supremacy is a very good movie. It is not without its flaws, which I'll discuss momentarily, but it works and it works well. The key reasons are as follows:

1. Most important, the audience identifies with Jason Bourne. We feel his sense of loss when he loses his beloved. We feel his sense of outrage at being something that other people have created. We feel his frustration when he can't figure out just who the hell he is in the first place. We feel every bit of his anger when he encounters betrayal and unwarranted attacks when he's just trying to be a peaceful hippie living in India, trying to build some kind of life, trying to mind his own business. Screenwriter Tony Gilroy and the two directors who have helmed this series can take credit for a portion of our bond with this character, but Matt Damon can take the biggest chunk of the honors for bringing a special quality to the character. He has forged an everyday guy trying to figure out why the hell he knows how to be a killing machine, an apparently decent guy who is really scared and ashamed of what he once might have been. The humanity of the character, and our empathy with him, are what really lift the film toward greatness. We're not just rooting for Bourne, we're inside of him. He manages to kill half the innocent population of Berlin and Moscow in this movie, but we're still with him all the way.

2. Second, Jason Bourne is a cool character. He's kind of a combination of James Bond and Snake Plisskin, always in command, yet always pissed off, and of course always fucked over by corrupt authority. In fact, I like him better than James Bond. When you really get down to brass tacks, James Bond is a glib, show-offy twit. He's Dean Martin with a British accent. He's Hugh Grant with muscles. If Bond is a particularly shallow society character from a Thackeray novel, Jason Bourne, on the other hand, is a character from Dostoevsky or Conrad, a tortured, conflicted soul struggling mightily to sort out what is right from all the world's wrongs, and possibly even to do the right thing after he finds it. If he drinks anything, it isn't a vodka martini, and if you hand him one of those, he won't give a shit whether you shake it or stir it. If he walks into a bar, he'll sit on a stool and ask for "a beer", then get on with his reading, or fall deep into his thoughts. The end of this film sets up a sequel in which Bourne tries to find his real identity. I hope they do more of these films, and I hope they manage to maintain the integrity of the character without jumping the shark, because Jason Bourne is the most interesting repeating character to come around in a long time.

3. The story line and the action scenes are OK. To tell you the truth, they are not great, but I suppose they are good enough that the overwhelming strength of the first two characteristics is not enervated by a gimmicky plot.

I said I would mention the weaknesses.

1. One evil hyphenated word: hand-held. I got dizzy watching some action and exposition scenes. This new director is really into that wacky hand-held aesthetic, and he's got a whole jittery, dark, Blair Witch thing going here. They really need to lose that whole cinema verité feeling, or at least most of it. This is a big budget film, not an NYU film school project, and they can surely afford better more sophisticated camera movement techniques and better lighting. In some of the fight scenes, the audience can't tell who is who, no who is winning. It is simply a matter of waiting until the camera stops spinning, then observing who can still breathe. I guess that a little of this is OK, but there is just no reason for so many scenes in this film to look like the cinematography was done by Katharine Hepburn with a home camcorder. I think the director did a great job on the pacing of the film, which is his main job after all, so I had no trouble with the jittery, frenetic editing. But I nearly heaved from all the superfluous camera movement. At one point, when the audience is looking over Damon's shoulder, they even used a jittery camera and fast edits when they zoomed in on stuff I was supposed to be reading along with him.

2. Julia Stiles is back, as the head of the CIA's crack unit of moon-faced 12 year old girls who over-enunciate their words and act really scared when they talk to Matt Damon. Without that team, well, frankly, America simply could not guarantee your security.

3. I would have preferred more mystery, fewer chase and fight scenes, but that's really just my personal bias showing through. Chase scenes generally bore me, and there are many here.

Bottom line: good flick. No nudity, dammit.

Sideout (1990):

It's an awful movie, but it is now available on DVD, if you are a volleyball fanatic. Skip that. I'm a volleyball fanatic, and I still didn't like it.

The basic plot:

A midwesterner (C. Thomas Ponyboy Soul Man) goes to California in the summer after his junior year of college to earn some tuition working for the law firm of his sleazebag rich uncle. While he is there, he becomes interested in 2x2 volleyball, and ends up paired with a guy he was supposed to evict. Luckily for him, he was supposed to evict the King of the Beach. There are a few plot twists, but all of them are secondary to the meat of the film, which is volleyball, lightly salted with romance. 

Billed as the first major studio film devoted to the subject of beach volleyball, it actually used real beach players like Randy Stoklos as characters in the film.  I wouldn't be surprised if Miller Lite and Jose Cuervo actually financed this film, because I suppose they control the players' contracts (about 20 of the tour players appeared in the film), and their product placements were everywhere.

As marketing experiments go, it wasn't very successful.

In order to show actors playing successfully against pros, the director had to rely on lots of close-ups of spikes, so the audience can't see the difference in talent. Unfortunately, that also means the audience doesn't get a feel for the flow of 2 man volleyball, which is a great game. 

And then there is the cast. I guess you can imagine how poorly Stoklos read his lines, but the real actors in the film weren't that much better. A list including Soul Man, supermodel Kathy Ireland, and that blond guy who looks exactly like Bjorn Borg  (Peter Horton is his name) will give you a representative sampling. The best actor in the film was that guy who played Bernie the Dead Guy, and even his performance was somewhat hamstrung by the fact that he wasn't dead.

Of course, I don't know why I'm whining. If it had been acted by the Royal Shakespeare Company, it still would have stunk. If Kenneth Branagh could play volleyball like Karch Karaly, his presence would still not make this watchable.

Let's just say that future plans for the micro-genre of beach volleyball movies are not expected to require any massive hiring of personnel in the studios. Don't look for "Side Out 2, the wrath of Sinjin".

• Harley Jane Kozak (1, 2). A clear shot of Harley Jane's very minimal exposure in this film was about the only thing accomplished by this disk. As Tuna would say, the rest of the disk would have been better used as an AOL promo.

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.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969)

When I think of this film, I always think of Titanic and The Bodyguard. My mental association is based on "Movies with irritatingly overexposed theme songs". The song "Jean" was one of those awful sappy things that was played so often that those of us who remember it will never get it out of our heads. I've just caused a bunch of grief to some old guys merely by reminding them.  I guess I will have to break down and watch Jean Brodie again, given nice nudity an an excellent 7.6 at IMDb.  I haven't seen it since I was in college -  I think John Quincy Adams was President then. Maybe I can filter out the fucking song.

• Anyway, Pamela Franklin looked great, although her career went straight to the crapper after this film, and she was soon appearing in merde like Satan's School for Girls (one of Satan's less successful entrepreneurial ventures, I would guess. "Say, honey, have you thought about the Satan School? There is no tuition, they have some excellent extracurriculars, and they get 100% of their graduates into the college of their choice. You know, eternal damnation isn't so bad if you can get into Hell with a Phi Beta Kappa pin from Harvard." "Oh, I don't know, dad. My friends say that Mr. Satan is so picky about Latin declensions, and both of his penises are so painful"). (.avi- zip) (.wmv - zip)

Willie and Phil (1980)

The other day, we had this film's brief nudity from the porn actress turned mainstreamer, Kristine DeBell. Here are the two mainstream stars who joined her in the buff.

• Margot Kidder. Lois Lane had some mighty nice knockers on 'er. (.avi- zip) (.wmv - zip)

• Jerry Hall. 24 years later, she's STILL getting naked in public. I saw her on stage recently as Mrs Robinson in The Graduate (.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.

• Here are a few scenes of Eva Green making a fantastic film debut with tons of beautiful nudity in the Bernardo Bertolucci film "The Dreamers" (just released on DVD).

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

• Kelly Preston...young, beautiful and topless in scenes from "Secret Admirer" (1985). (1, 2)

• The very busty Michelle Johnson and pre-implant Demi Moore both topless in scenes from "Blame it on Rio". (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)

• DeadLamb 'caps of Halle Berry showing some cleavage and a little bit of booty-liciousness on Letterman.

• Halle Berry showing off a little more cleavage. This time on Thursday night's episode of "Late Night with Conan O'Brien". (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

• Looks like all the ladies are enjoying "The Con-Zone"...Here is former "E.R." star Julianna Margulies looking lovely and showing some leg on "Late Night with Conan O'Brien". (1, 2)

"GIRLIE MEN" CRACK BOOSTS CALIFORNIA ECONOMY
They Come In An Array Of Pastels! - California Democrats may be crying over Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger calling them "girlie men," but he's boosted the state economy. A San Francisco entrepreneur is selling T-shirts that read "Sacramento Girlie Men," with 20 percent of profits going to the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, the College Republicans are selling shirts that read, "Don't be a Girlie Man. Vote Republican." They say their shirts are cheaper than the Democrats'.