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| Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy)
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The Tulse Luper Suitcases: Part 1. The Story of Moab (2003)
The Tulse Luper Suitcases is an ambitious multi-media project from
auteur Peter Greenaway, which essentially summarizes and comments on
the entire 20th century by creating an alternate parallel version of
it, and following the life of one man named Tulse Luper, who lived through it. He was born in 1911 and disappeared in 1989, but may still be
alive in that parallel plane of existence.
Here is Tulse's apocryphal biography from a website which is part of the
project. When the project is completed, it will encompass three films,
a TV series, and many CDs, DVDs, books, and web sites. Probably some trading
cards and commemorative plates, too, for all I know, and maybe even a low-carb
Tulse Luper Diet.
Here is a page dedicated to the project, which has links to
trailers, flash animations, and more. It even tells you what is inside each
of the 92 Tulse Luper Suitcases.
Here is the official site. If any of that helps you figure out what the
hell is going on here, be sure to let the rest of us know.
I sure as hell don't know what is going on here.
Greenaway has all but abandoned any sense of traditional narrative in this
project, but it does seem that the mysterious Mr Luper made an effort to
eradicate all records of his having lived, thus leaving us to reconstruct his
life from clues hidden in the aforementioned 92 suitcases which he deposited
in various places around the world. Why 92? Well, you big silly, because 92
is the atomic number of Uranium! I'll thank you not to ask any more foolish
questions, my good man! Uranium, you see, is the key to the century, so the
tale must be woven by a 92-thread loom. (BARITONE VOICE-OVER: Yes, 92, it's
not just for counting suitcases anymore!) There are also 92 objects of
special importance in human existence, 92 characters in the story, and maybe
some other 92-centric bric-a-brac that I'm forgetting. A data screen, looking
like a PowerPoint slide, appears in the film from time to time, keeping us
posted about the official number for a new character, suitcase, or critical
object. (E.g., Suitcase #38: Water.) To maintain the numeric symmetry, there
will eventually be 92 DVDs in the project, or so goes the current claim.
The three films will undoubtedly contain about as much content as we would
normally expect in ten films, because the screen always seems to have much
more going on than a simple image accompanied by sound. There are overlays,
superimpositions, dissolve effects, additional frames appearing inside the
screen, more frames within those frames, scoreboards, grids, split screens,
fancy calligraphy, overlapping sound, characters appearing from nowhere to
explain what other characters are doing, and so forth. Some of these things
seem to add weight to the story, while others just seem aesthetically right
to Mr. Greenway, I suppose. The film does look and sound beautiful. His
aesthetic sense is too cluttered for my taste, but all that clutter has
always, in one way or another, been part of his distinctive oeuvre, and
Greenaway is possibly the most artistic of all filmmakers.
Cutting to the chase ...
Is the film good? Yes, I believe so. It is very good in many ways, and it
is certainly original and ambitious. It is also completely non-commercial. It
is even too arty to attract paying customers to the arthouse. I don't know of
anyone by Peter Greenaway who could raise more than ten million dollars in
public funds to underwrite a project with no hope of recapturing any but the
tiniest portion of it. The national film boards treat Greenaway's works as
art treasures, and seem happy to subsidize them.
Is it something I enjoyed watching? Sometimes. My reactions ranged from
being amused to being impressed to thinking "get on with it!" I did watch
some sections of the film a second time, pausing to read the omnipresent
verbiage, or to freeze a particularly striking image.
Do I want to see more of the films and other elements of this project? Not
on your life. Peter Greenaway seems to live entirely in his own world, and it
is not a world that particularly interests me. On the other hand, I've
probably said the same thing about all of his movies, but I always seem to
come back for the next one.
Are many of you likely to want to see it? For the film: 1%. For the
Caroline Dhavernas nudity: 100%. One reader chided me that if I liked
Caroline Dhavernas so much, I should have made some videos of her when I did
the collages for this film. He was right, especially given the fact that this
is not available on Region 1 DVD. (I bought the Spanish Region 2 DVD, which
has soundtracks in English, Castillian, and Catalan.)
Here are five videos from Peter Greenaway's strange, complex, surreal, artistic,
and sometimes silly movie. I think this just about covers all of Caroline's
nudity.
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| Brainscan
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'Caps and comments by Brainscan:
Zero Woman Assassin Lovers is one of the better installments in this Japanese series about a hit woman employed by Tokyo PD to eliminate the riff-raff. As with the other Zero Woman episodes, the key to Assassin Lovers is who plays the mysterious Rei. Here it is former child actress Kumiko Takeda. She looks as good and acts as tough as my favorite of the Rei's, Chieko Shiratori. And she is supported by a nice looking actress named Marie Jinna.
The story is not very complex. Rei is assigned the task of eliminating a major bad guy but she deliberately bungles the job...an attempt to commit suicide...and winds up shot in about ten places but survives, thanks to the efforts of the bad guy's own assassin. The two fall in love but, in a plot twist predating that Brad and Angelina movie, they are each assigned the task of elminating the other. He can't do it when he gets the chance. She, however, has no problem at all pulling the trigger.
We get to see Ms. Takeda's upper superstructure. And super it is. The gal weighs less than 100 pounds, but sports a pair of hooties worth spending some serious time with. All the nekkid scenes are dark but there are a few nice frames. Marie Jinna's scenes are also dimly lighted, which meant some light manipulation and that brought out the noise and since the transfer is pretty awful, THAT meant we have way more noise than we would like. Oh well, them's the breaks.
This is the last of the Zero Woman movies that I've been able to find and it may well be the most approchable. A good place to start if you are interested in this funky series.
Marie Jinna
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| Hankster
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'Caps and comments by Hankster:
Today it's a return to that really bad movie "Compelling Evidence".
One more scene and then we burn this DVD!
She's basically an unknown, but here is Doris Ragsdale showing off some really nice T&A. This scene was a movie within a movie featuring her removing her blouse to bandage the wound of the so called action hero star. She gets a bullet in the head for her efforts.
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| Crimson Ghost
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| Bari Buckner showing off some decent toplessness in scenes from an episode of the late night cable series "Erotic Confessions".
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| Here is UK actress Kim Thomson topless in scenes from "Stealing Heaven" (1988).
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| Salma Hayek didn't get nekkid in "From Dusk Til Dawn", but she sure did look sexy doing that snake dance!
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| Naturally, no complete breakfast would be complete without a daily dose of high quality, name brand Skinemax nudity! Here is Gabriella Hall in scenes from an episode of "The Pleasure Zone"
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| Variety
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| The paparazzi catch UK babe Sadie Frost wearing a very see-thru dress while out and about in London.
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| Vejiita 'caps of Rae Dawn Chong buck nekkid in scenes from on of her first films, 1981's "Quest For Fire".
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| The Skin-man's turn to serve up a heapin' helpin' of very impressive nudity from Rosario Dawson. Here she is in the big stinker of a flick, "Alexander".
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| Movie Reviews
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MOVIE REVIEWS:
Here are the latest movie reviews available at scoopy.com.
- The yellow asterisks indicate that I wrote the
review, and am deluded into thinking it includes humor.
- If there is a white asterisk, it means that
there isn't any significant humor, but I inexplicably determined
there might be something else of interest.
- A blue asterisk indicates the review is written
by Tuna (or Junior or Brainscan, or somebody else besides me)
- If there is no asterisk, I wrote it, but am too
ashamed to admit it.
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| Other Crap
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"Google representatives have instituted a policy of not
talking with CNET News.com reporters until July 2006 in
response to privacy issues raised by a previous story"
The irony is that the supposed privacy violations were
all found by CNET reporters doing a Google search!! The
whole point of the first article was to demonstrate that
Google represents a threat to privacy, and the reporters
demonstrated that by publishing private information they
Googled up about Google's CEO!!
"BUSH'S SHOCKING SECRET TATTOO"
- One disgruntled former White House aide told
Weekly World News the President "most likely got it in
1972 when he was AWOL from the National Guard. He was
a party animal back in his Guard days and he probably
got it when he was hopped up on liquor and cocaine,"
says the source.
- The source wanted to tell Bob Novak, but the
number was busy, so he called Weekly World News
instead.
The Straight Dope:
"How do you have lucid dreams?"
Cops arrest crusader, who tries to go medieval on their
asses. Literally.
Roger Ebert reviews the Dukes of Hazzard
- He hated it. Nothing unusual there, but I linked
it because it is an amusing article.
- "The movie stars Johnny Knoxville, from 'Jackass,'
Seann William Scott, from 'American Wedding,' and
Jessica Simpson, from Mars. Judging by her recent
conversation on TV with Dean Richards, Simpson is so
remarkably uninformed that she should sue the public
schools of Abilene, Texas, or maybe they should sue
her. On the day he won his seventh Tour de France, not
many people could say, as she did, that they had no
idea who Lance Armstrong was."
NASA - self-portrait during a space walk , and
another great picture.
"Francis Ford Coppola has made Walter Salles an offer he
can't refuse.
The Godfather mastermind has
tapped the Brazilian filmmaker, best known for last
year's critically-praised indie hit, The Motorcycle
Diaries, to direct a long-awaited big-screen version of
Jack Kerouac's Beat classic, On the Road"
Every word of this is quoted from the headline and
story:
"Eel kills again."
- "A GIANT killer eel has roused from the murky
waters of the Yarra to claim its second victim. Eddie
the giant eel, named after its first victim -- a Jack
Russell dog -- reportedly claimed the life of an
unsuspecting goose on Wednesday night."
- (Soon to be a minor motion picture.)
PACERS, GREMLINS, AND MATADORS! ... THE BRILLIANTLY
WEIRD CARS FROM THE 1976 LINEUP FROM AMC MOTORS
This might be a bit too real, even by Russian
standards.
Key West confirmed for next Real World.
Production will begin during the final months of
hurricane season, but if a hurricane does come, the cast
“will uproot their world and leave real fast, with
camera crews capturing the chaos every step of the way.”
The latest Hollywood power couple: Rose McGowan and Al
Pacino . Rose is 31, while The Godfather is
65.
The trailer and a TV spot for Undiscovered
- "Set in the world of up-and-coming artists,
'Undiscovered' is a heartfelt and comic film that
tells the story of an aspiring model who falls in love
with a struggling musician when they suddenly cross
paths on a NY subway train."
This is for real:
The Clown Code of Ethics
Astronauts Take Out the Trash . Two
and a half tons of it!
Daily Show: Jon makes fun of the little Douchebag of
Liberty, Robert Novak
Mortimer says no more nude scenes :
"English actress Emily Mortimer has decided to stop
shedding her clothes after jibes about her full-frontal
scene in hit indie film Lovely and Amazing."
Mr Chekhov, set phasers on .. sell.
Vegas, baby! Sin City hoops. The 2007
NBA All-Star Game is headed to Las Vegas, the first time
a city without a franchise has been chosen to host the
event. They are considering Paris as the host for the
2008 event! Yes, I mean Paris, France.
Jessica Simpson says Daisy Duke is "iconish" .
- Funny, she doesn't look Iconish.
- Iconish - and she waits tables? Don't the iconish
women normally just tend to their quilting and
butter-churning?
- Although they live mostly in Vermont now, the
Iconish came here from Iconia, which was once a small,
proud Baltic nation which split off from Estonia in a
typically European argument about the proper angle of
tilt for a feathered cap.
- Like many immigrants to this land, they entered
New York harbor by looking hopefully at the Statue of
Liberty. Unlike the others, they mentally pictured
what Liberty would look like in tight shorts.
Furniture Porn: Enter... unkess you're an enormous wuss.
NCAA tournament bans Indian-themed mascots, nicknames,
or logos. The committee also
recommended that schools follow the examples of
Wisconsin and Iowa by refusing to schedule contests
against schools that use American Indian nicknames. The
team most significantly affected is Florida State, which
can keep Seminoles for the football team, since there is
no NCAA tournament in football, but would have to make
changes to the basketball program. Illinois (Fighting
Illini) is another major college affected by the ban.
(St. Johns and Marquette have already changed, if you
hadn't noticed.)
Jessica Simpson discusses her ass cheeks with Diane
Sawyer
I don't think this Brit ad will ever be playing in the
USA . (Nudity, perversion, and
non-gratuitous ripped limbs.)
The reviews are finally pouring in for
The Dukes of Hazzard, and it's not a
pretty picture. 18% positive.
Conan offers some tips for New York tourists
Vin Diesel will star in a movie called The Retriever,
which features Diesel as a one-man army fighting to save
the world from nuclear apocalypse.
One more clip from Broken Flowers
(Bill Murray's latest Sad Sack movie)
Cisco.com has been compromised and customers need to
change their passwords.
- I can't stress this strongly enough, and these
alerts never tell you this: It also means that if you
use the same username and password on other sites as
you use at cisco.com, you should change those as well.
- One of the most common methods of site cracking
works like this: (1) Crackers assemble monstrously
long lists of known combinations of
usernames/passwords. (2) They employ brute force
programs to try every combination on major pay sites.
One day I had a single guy try to log in with 1.3
million different combinations at scoopy.net (I know
because they all came from from a single IP!!) (3) The
ones that work get shared or posted on Warez sites.
- Thus, if you use the combination silver/bullet or
mickey/mantle (two of the most common combos), it is
only a matter of a day or so before the entire
internet knows that those are working at site X.
Therefore, if you use the same username and password
at an unsecured bulletin board site and a major pay
site, it is only a matter of time before some cracker
finds the unsecured list, adds it to his master
cracker list, and finds out that the same combo works
on the paysite.
- Bottom line: use a different username/password for
every site you belong to. It's worth the little extra
time it takes to keep them recorded somewhere.
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Other Crap archives. May also include newer material than the links above, since it's sorta in real time.
Click
here to submit a URL for Other Crap
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| Pat Reeder www.comedy-wire.com
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Pat's comments in yellow...
ACTRESS HAS FAMOUS BREASTS REDUCED
"Weapons Of Mass Distraction 2" - Actress Mimi Rogers has always refused to
get plastic surgery, but she finally had one procedure: a breast reduction.
She had her famously large boobs shrunk from 34DDD to 34D. She explained, "When
I walked into a room, my breasts were always several steps ahead of me...Men
were talking to my chest the entire time, but I couldn't blame them."
They had to stand so far back, they couldn't see her face.
Every man was attracted to them...Except Tom Cruise, for some reason.
Now that they're looking at her face, she may get a facelift after all.
JAPANESE INVENT ROBOT BASEBALL CATCHER
21st Century Handjob - Researchers at the University of Tokyo have created a
robot baseball catcher. They said there's a growing need for a robotic hand
that works in the real world, so they thought the best way to develop a fast,
versatile robot hand was to try to make one that could catch a baseball. It
uses a number of photo detectors to identify the location and trajectory of the
ball and grab it out of the air, even when it's traveling at 300 kilometers
(184 miles) per hour. And they say it never gets tired.
It's on steroids.
And it never goes on strike...Can they make an entire robot league?
They call it "Michael Jackson" because it wears one glove and
never gets tired of grabbing balls.
The robot catcher is nothing; I want to see the guy who throws the ball at
184 mph!
EU BANS BARMAID CLEAVAGE
What Boobs! - The London Sun reports that the European Union may have finally
gone one regulation too far: Brussels bureaucrats have written a directive
banning barmaids from wearing low-cut tops. As part of the "Optical Radiation
Directive" to be voted on next month, bureaucrats added a ban on exposed
barmaid cleavage, because they might increase their risk of skin cancer when they go
outside to pick up empty glasses. Drinkers are threatening to boycott
Munich's Oktoberfest if it passes, and the mayor ranted, "I would not want to enter
a beer garden under these conditions!"
The mayor is willing to personally rub sunscreen on every one of them.
So explain how this applies to barmaids who work the night shift.
Still wondering why French voters rejected the EU?
They're at far greater risk of getting a chest cold.
It'll be impossible to see their breasts anyway, through the hazmat suits
they'll now have to wear.
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| Tuna
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Currently on disability. If you'd like to get in touch with him, his email address is tuna@scoopy.com
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| A quick site note
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Hey gang, we invite you to check out our new affiliate program at Scoopycash.com.
If you have your own site or blog, sign up today and earn some extra cash in 2005 by promoting the Fun House!
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