If you are a fan of Jenny Agutter, then these clips should bring
back pleasant memories. Here's Jenny stark naked in Equus.
(Zipped
.avi) The movie, unfortunately, is soporific and features
Richard Burton at his very hammiest. (Movie
House Comments)
Ghosts Never Sleep (somewhere from 2003 to 2006):
If you review the outline of the facts available at IMDb and
the film's official site , you would conclude that Ghosts Never
Sleep is absolutely atrocious:
1) The director and the author of the stage play could not
originally agree about how to adapt the story to a screenplay.
2) The film was made in 2003. In the next three years, it
managed to get screened only at some of the smaller film
festivals. It doesn't seem to have won any awards or attracted any
distribution deals from those screenings. It finally came to DVD
in the late summer of 2006, some three years after it was lensed.
3) It is rated 2.7 at IMDb. A score below 3.0 qualifies a film
for the infamous "Bottom 100" list at IMDb, so this film lacks
only the minimum number of votes to qualify for a place in the
Pantheon of Dishonor beside Spice World and The Beast of Yucca
Flats.
Well, guess what? This is actually not such a bad film. It's a
film that treats some very serious themes in a mature way, without
any preaching, by letting the themes come through the plot
development of a mystery/thriller. The dark-themed play wasn't
quite good enough or marketable enough to attract any interest
from the big name directors; the pitch wasn't quite strong enough
to attract enough money to do the film right; and the final film
was trapped in limbo between the worlds of art and commerce. But
if the film's creators had been a little more experienced, and the
budget had been a bit higher, this might have been a successful
project. As it is, it provides a lesson in how thin the line is
between success and failure.
Tony Goldwyn plays a writer whose screenplay is being shopped.
In the course of its coming to light, it exposes a family secret
which the author has never told his wife (Sean Young) about, and
which his mother (Faye Dunaway) wants to keep a secret.
The screenwriters chose to tell this story in a very
complicated manner, ala Adam Egoyan. It starts out with the author
running away from a police pursuit, although it does not reveal
precisely why the police are chasing him. It then takes that story
forward chronologically, but also eventually includes a flashback
to explain why the author was fleeing. While it is telling that
story, the script intercuts three additional stories featuring the
same characters. One of the stories takes place when the author
was a child, and involves the gradual revelation of the family
secret. A second story takes place four years before the police
pursuit, when the author was first shopping his script. The final
story takes place four years in the future, as the author's wife
tries to heal from the trauma of the events which happened around
the time of the police chase.
The multiple time-shifts make it sound like the script uses an
excessive convoluted way to develop the plot, but it doesn't. It
is always clear when each set of events is happening, and the
complex structure allows the film to maintain audience interest by
involving viewers in three mysteries at once. First, the audience
wonders what the childhood secret is. Second, the audience is
curious about what the author did to warrant a police chase.
Third, one can't help but wonder what will happen to the troubled
author after his stand-off with the police. Furthermore, the
script is clever enough to fool the audience completely about the
nature of the critical childhood secret which drives the plot. The
facts of the case make it seem ever clearer that the secret must
be one particular thing - and then it turns out to be something
quite different. One character who seems to be lying turns out to
have been telling the truth all along, but we never believed her
because of her constant shuffling and equivocating. It turned out
that she was being evasive to avoid revealing a completely
different secret! Adam Egoyan himself might be impressed with the
way that is handled, although he might suggest eliminating the
portion of the film which takes place after the stand-off. There
is no value derived from intercutting the "four years later"
scenes with the other three stories, and the scenes with the wife
and her psychiatrist are completely superfluous. Showing the
ultimate fate of the author is necessary to satisfy mystery #3, of
course, but could have been (and actually is) handled in a brief
epilogue.
In addition to having some enthusiasm for the positives of the
screenplay, I also feel that Tony Goldwyn did an excellent job as
the emotionally unstable author, so I just can't understand the
low IMDb score. I won't contend that the film is without
negatives. It's inability to secure any distribution deal in three
years tells you a lot about it. The production values are shoddy,
several scenes need a few more lightbulbs, there are weak
performances in a couple of the smaller roles, and it is just too
dark to attract any box office. But those factors certainly don't
qualify this serious, ambitious film to have an IMDb score like
Leonard, Part 6. The IMDb score should actually be in the fives or
sixes, a C- on our scale.
Oh - and the film also has some pretty durned good nudity from
Shea Alexander.
"The Ground Truth" stunned filmgoers at the 2006 Sundance and Nantucket Film Festivals. Hailed as "powerful" and "quietly unflinching," Patricia Foulkrod's searing documentary feature includes exclusive footage that will stir audiences. The filmmaker's subjects are patriotic young Americans – ordinary men and women who heeded the call for military service in Iraq – as they experience recruitment and training, combat, homecoming, and the struggle to reintegrate with families and communities. The terrible conflict in Iraq, depicted with ferocious honesty in the film, is a prelude for the even more challenging battles fought by the soldiers returning home – with personal demons, an uncomprehending public, and an indifferent government. As these battles take shape, each soldier becomes a new kind of hero, bearing witness and giving support to other veterans, and learning to fearlessly wield the most powerful weapon of all – the truth."
"The short story is that Leonardo's original got as far as the plaster mockup. Sadly, before it could be cast in bronze, it was destroyed in an act of mindless vandalism. The Horse would've made Leonardo great as a sculptor and he never ceased mourning for his horse. Skip ahead a few hundred years and it finally is completed. At 24 feet high it's impressive as hell and the detail work is beautiful. It also give you a good idea of just how impractical the Trojan Horse would have been."
Brant Clarkdale, a utility infielder for the Kansas City Royals who has never hit a home run at the major league level, set off a firestorm of controversy with his negative test results.
He does not think that any of the four new arrivals has enough muscle to knock Talladega out of the top spot.
He thinks that Oliver Stone's World Trade Center will be the rookie of the week, but with a tepid $17 million.
The logical extension of his forecast is that this week will be down slightly from the same weekend last year. If so, this will be a reversal of trend. Ten of the last eleven weeks have been above the comparable week from last year.
He was an imaginative writer, but was there ever anything interesting in Dick's life? I thought he was a nerdy guy who never left his typewriter. If I remember right, he rarely left his house and didn't even learn to drive until he was almost 30!
"A smart, sophisticated comedy about the challenges of love and marriage among modern day New Yorkers, Trust the Man features the romantic escapades of two couples: a successful actress (Julianne Moore) and her stay at home husband (David Duchovny); and her slacker younger brother (Billy Crudup) and his aspiring novelist girlfriend Maggie Gyllenhaal). The film follows these four on their pointed, often surprising and frequently hilarious search for love in the midst of careers, family, infidelity and the ever-daunting search for Manhattan street parking."
Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe). White asterisk: expanded format.
Blue asterisk: not mine. No asterisk: it probably sucks.
Felicity (1979)
Felicity is a classic bit of Australian erotica about a college girl's coming
of age. Director John D. Lamond says Emmanuelle was a big part of the
inspiration, and he filmed some exotic exteriors in Hong Kong, although most
interiors were shot economically in a studio in Australia. According to the DVD
commentary, it was a financial success.
Felicity, played by Canadian Glory Annen, gets a chance to spend her holiday
in Hong Kong as a guest of her father's friend. Prior to that trip, Felicity had
some limited experience with her best school friend, Jody Hanson, but had more
questions than answers. She has been longing to discover the secrets of the
flesh, and this will be a perfect opportunity. Her education starts on the
flight over, when the couple behind her, thinking everyone is asleep, get it on.
Her father's friend, Marilyn Rogers, is not only a gracious hostess, but hip
as well. When Felicity spies on her and her boyfriend, she doesn't mind, and
takes Felicity to buy some big-girl underwear. Good thing too, because Felicity
loses her virginity the night of her first party. While the deflowering wasn't
very satisfactory, her relationship with a local girl, Joni Flynn, is much more
so, and includes a trip to a bath house where a naked Sarah Lee caters to
Felicity's every whim, while Angela Menzies-Wills takes similar care of Joni
Flynn. Felicity eventually finds a young man she cares about, and learns how
good sex can be.
This film had an easy job getting by the UK and Australian censors because
there was nothing really dirty or violent about it. Yes, most of the characters
did full frontal and rear nudity, including a host of unknowns, and everyone had
simulated sex, but it was a charming and believable story. There were no gynocam
shots and no violence or nastiness to object to. On the other hand, I would
imagine that it would have trouble pulling an R in the States today.
I found it a perfectly acceptable example of late 70's soft core. C.
IMDb readers say 4.4 with only 57 votes.
Glory Annen
Jody Hanson
Joni Flynn
Marilyn Rogers
Sarah Lee
Angela-Menzies Wills
Unknown 1
Unknown 2
Other Unknowns
Dann reports on Legion of the Dead:
I
suppose you could describe this 2005 horror/thriller as a B-movie version
of The Mummy, but with a female mummy. Sure, not as good as the
original, but hey, this mummy gets naked so all is not lost.
An Egyptian tomb is found in, of all
places, the California desert. Turns out it is populated by the ancient
Egyptian High-Priestess Aneh-Tet, who was banished from Egypt for being a
very bad girl, so of course she made her way to California. Yeah, right.
The archeologist leading the team has less
than good intentions, and manages to awaken the sleeping priestess, who
now needs to sacrifice 6 virgins in order to attain immortal life. You
bet, people start to die.
Silly but fun, a very typical B-movie but
not too badly done. Worth a watch if you don't expect too much.
Claudia Lynx
An imager named RokWatch offers
Adrienne Barbeau in Swamp Thing
Squiddy spots some see-through
action from Christina Milian