xx/xy (2003) is a story of three college students who start their relationship with a menage et trois. None of them felt it went that well, but all also enjoyed it. The three become inseparable, but Mark Ruffalo and Maya Stange become an item, and live together. Stange is getting serious, but Ruffalo is the sort of man that is never faithful. His infidelity ruins the relationship. Cut to 10 years into the future, and a chance meeting reunites them. Seems nobody has learned anything in the last 10 years.

Stange shows her breasts several times in the menage, and Kathleen Robertson shows her buns. IMDB readers have this at 6.4 of 10. What I saw was a drama where none of the characters grew or learned anything, and so were the same at the end as they were at the beginning. In other words, they all three could have just skipped the ten years. Not only didn't the characters grow, but they were not very likable people. I can't help but think that I could have skipped the 10 years as well, and not missed anything. C-.

The Price of Milk (1971):

This may the film for you if you are looking for something very odd, but gentle.

Rob and Lucinda are a blissfully happy unmarried couple who are running a dairy farm somewhere in New Zealand. They have many spontaneous romantic interludes, take outdoor baths together. etc. Rob is also the world's nicest guy. He loves his cows and knows them all personally, and he refuses to put down his agoraphobic pet and instead allowing the pet to live permanently under three sides of a a cardboard box.  Rob proposes, Lucinda accepts, and their life seems to exist in Eden.

Enter the serpent.

Lucinda's putative friend, Drosophilia, says that Lucinda needs to test Rob to see if he really loves her. She ought to do this before marrying him, because anybody can be sweet and adorable and loving during the good times, but Rob might be a real jerk when he is tested, and its better to find that out before marriage. Of course, since Rob is not only the nicest guy in New Zealand, but the ONLY guy living within hundreds of miles, Drosophilia's real intention is to break up the happy couple and get Rob for herself.

So far it sounds like an episode of I Love Lucy, right?

Well, it won't stay that way, because Lucinda goes to rather extreme lengths to see if Rob loves her. For example, she cuts off his nuts and feeds them to the wild dogs, but Rob just says "oh, honey, you little kidder", and smooches her.

OK, I made that up, but the stuff she does is pretty much just as bad. For example, she starts by taking a bath in some of his milk, thus destroying his finances and causing him to waste days of labor , but he just smiles, chucks her chin, and jumps into the milk to make love to her. After ol' Robbo passes that test, she decides to trade all of his cows for a quilt.

Say what?

This winds together with a sub-plot involving an old Maori magic woman of some kind and her very well-dressed golfing nephews. Lucinda ran the old woman over with a car while driving at full speed along a rural highway. The old woman wasn't even bothered by the car thing, except that she really needed to keep warm, so she had her nephews steal Lucinda's quilt ...

And that brings us back to the main plot. So Rob now has a dairy farm with no cows at all, thus no way to make a living. All he has to show for it is a quilt.

Oh, jeez, I just can't do any more of this, and I guess it would be a spoiler if I told you more. The film is actually quite cute if you like magic realism, but you better not be one of those people who insists on a logical progression of events, because the swap of a more than a hundred cows for a quilt, a cardboard box with legs, and an old woman who cannot be killed are actually some of the more earth-bound and sensible events in the film. It is magical realism, and there is far more magic than realism. In fact, now that I think about it, it is magic realism without any of that pesky realism.

• Danielle Cormack (who was Ephiny on Xena, Warrior Princess. The film's star played Julius Caesar on Xena, and the film's director was Isildur in The Fellowship of the Ring. And you thought the same actors appeared in every Spanish film! Compared to New Zealand, the Spanish movie industry is teeming with performers.)

A Good Night to Die (2003):

Like Tuna, I didn't much like this movie, but I watched all the way through, so it couldn't have been all bad.

The surprise ending was kind of cool, and it was kind of fun to see the Karate Kid and Ally Sheedy making complete fools of themselves as a garrulous hit man team named Donny and Marie.

This film is kind of a shameless Tarantino rip-off. You can tell that Pulp Fiction is the director's favorite movie:

• It uses a strange time-warp narrative.

• It's all about hit men who spend most of their time talking about mundane things like fast food and 80s hair bands.

• It features plenty of obscure and trivial cultural references.

• It's filled with grotesque, stylized, often comical ultra-violence.

• It features some forgotten and underappreciated actors who would like to resuscitate or jump start their careers. (I'm sure Macchio was not unaware of what a very similar role in Pulp Fiction did for John Travolta.)

But - unlike Bryan Singer and Guy Richie, directors who brought some creative vitality to the basic Tarantino format, this director offered more or less a lower budget re-hash.

• Tanja Schwedt
• Penelope Fortier (1, 2)

UPDATES/INFO:

Tuna's image count is now approximately 43,900! Brainscan and some colleagues reported the following analysis (in Brainscan's words):

"You know there is a guy in the shop who keeps a database of vidcaps.  He has more than 14,000 performances tallied up and so he did a little analysis that I thought would amuse you:

The median number of artists to cap a film is 2, but a plurality of films is capped only once (27.8% versus 23.1% capped twice).  That means more than half the caps he has collected are from movies capped either once or twice.

The artist who has provided the most once-only caps?  Some guy named Tuna has been the sole source of caps for something like 700 performances, whereas the next highest (Charlie) has around 400.  Imagine how much poorer all of out here in cyberland would be without you.

Once a movie is capped three times, a threshold is reached that launches it into feeding frenzy territory.  So, many more performances are capped 5 or 6 times than are capped 3 or 4 times. The top five capped movies he has collected are the following:

5) The Hotspot & The Gift (tie)           (12 artists)
4) Fast Times at Ridgemont High         (14 artists)
3) Embrace of the Vampire                  (17 artists)
2) Showgirls                                        (19 artists)
1) Killing Me Softly                             (23 artists)

Four of these benefited from an initial wave of VHS caps and a second wave of DVD caps by a partially overlapping group of artists, whereas Killing Me and The Gift are DVD stand-alones.  Having done them myself I am surprised that everyone who owns a PC with a DVD player doesn't cap them.  Or maybe they have.

The most commonly capped performer is Julie Strain, but Jennifer Connelly with fewer than 1/10th of Julie's performances is in a solid second place.  Each of her nude scenes has been capped at least 9 times.  Again, that surprises me not at all.  Jennifer with six films in which she appears uncovered even tops Monique Parent with 38 films. If Heather Graham appears in one more film as popular as Boogie Nights (capped by 11 artists), she will break into the top ten performers.  If she does something closer to Killing Me, she'll be number 3 (From Hell and Say It Isn't So have been capped four times each, even though there is no real nudity).  I'd say Heather is the current-day Jennifer Connelly.

Well, that's the skinny on things. Oh, one last bit.  Take a guess how many folk have posted caps somewhere on the web at one time or another.  I figured maybe 200, but The Gimp tells me its closer to 500.  Sheesh, where did all of them go?"

OTHER CRAP:

• AT the ripe old age of 42, Daryl Hannah is finally baring all for Hef
• Is Marlon Brando Courtney Love's grandfather?
• Hollywood's Version Of Caller Waiting - you can talk to obscure and washed-up celebs like Rerun for twenty bucks a minute.
• Eric Idle is currently writing a Broadway musical, entitled Spamalot, based on the cult hit film Monty Python and the Holy Grail and incorporating other bits from the BBC television series Monty Python's Flying Circus.
• President orders air strikes against jackass with leaf blower next door
• Fark.com's photoshop contest for the best Schwarzenegger campaign poster
• need a gift for the man who has everything? - how about a motorized bar stool?. Goes up to 28 mph
• Apocalyptic preacher Jack Van Impe is claiming that he was contacted by Condoleezza Rice’s office and the White House Office of Public Liaison for an “outline” of his take on world events". Sure, that's believable.
• CNN.com - Genome hunt shows humans closer to rats than cats. Especially Michael J Pollard and Elisha Cook, Jr.
• After the Fox lawsuit, Franken's formerly obscure and unimportant book jumps to #1 on the Top Sellers List. Those guys at Fox News are some real geniuses, eh? Why don't they just empty out some bank accounts, hire a dump truck, and dump the money on Franken's lawn?
• Vince Gallo says maybe he didn't give Ebert cancer.
• Noisy Bob? - KEVIN Smith, aka Silent Bob, director of the upcoming Ben Affleck-Jennifer Lopez flick 'Jersey Girl,' has blasted the New York Times on his Web site, claiming the paper misquoted him. He actually didn't say that Affleck and J-Lo had "poor chemistry". He just said they "sucked royally".
• Just kidding. Here's what he really said: Movie Poop Shoot - Jersey Girl Diary - That's a Wrap! Kevin Smith's complete re-cap of the Jersey Girl experience.
• Fart News --- your one-stop source for all fart-related entertainment and fast-breaking fart news.
• A sad story about a basically nice guy. The short, wild life of Long John Daly. I never noticed it before, but Daly bears a strong resemblance to Babe Ruth. This picture could be the Bambino playing golf.
• Butler 'needed Viagra for affair with Liz Taylor
• J.Lo Says No To Ben's Stag Plans: "Jennifer Lopez appears to have banned fiance Ben Affleck from having a stag night "
• Bombs Away!: "The top 10 biggest box office failures "
• WBCN is offering 'I Survived Gigli' t-shirts to anyone left in their seats when the lights come up after the final showing at a Boston theater this Thursday
• Mug shot of the 91 year old bank robber
• Mini-me dumps boring tall chick. The li'l fella should set his sights on J-Lo. He has the perfect vantage point to admire her best assets.

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

PIRATE COUNTDOWN:

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 Lawdog or Junior or C2000 or Realist or ICMS or Mick Locke, or somebody else besides me)
• If there is no asterisk, I wrote it, but am too ashamed to admit it.

Not that anyone asked, but the following are the four genres nearest and dearest to my movie-loving heart:

4) 1950's sci-fi. From the sacred (Them) to the profane (The Navy Versus the Night Monsters).

3) Spaghetti Westerns. Whether ridiculous (A Fistful of Dollars) or sublime (Once Upon A Time in the West).

2) Submarine movies. Love them all, have seen them all. If there is a submarine in the background of the closing credits, I've seen it.... three times. Even that gawd-awful comedy with Kelsey Grammer. Saw it because they were on a submarine.

1) Adjective-noun, direct-to-video erotic thrillers. You know, adjective-noun, as in Midnight Tease or Dark Obsession or Forbidden Sins. Adjective followed by noun. And sometimes the adjective is redundant. Like Forbidden Sins. Aren't all sins forbidden? Isn't that what makes them sins? Mind you, if there's a book of allowable sins I'd like a copy, but I figure it's just a manuscript squirreled away in an Episcopal rectory.

But I digress. This genre is my fave for all the obvious reasons. Like T and A and B and babes, lots of babes, beautiful babes, oft-nekkid babes. Quality in this genre can be measured by how many babes get nekkid, how well they are known and how much time they are on screen.

Which brings me to the topic at hand, entitled Forbidden Games. This is, in my considered opinion, the very best adjective-noun-direct-to-video-erotic-thriller ever made. Evidence?

2) Beckie Mullen. If Barbie dolls came to life they would all want to be Beckie Mullen. Here, Beckie does a striptease in front of the movie's protagonist, shows off her el primo rumpus and her to-die-for hooties. All in the first four minutes of the movie. That, gentlemen, is the sign of a real winner. Grabbed 150 frames of this scene. Stuck together the best of them in eight collages.

• Beckie Mullen (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)

3) Gail Harris, former UK model, doing a triple B bathing scene, followed by a sport-humpin scene. Lots and lots of slow pans in the bathing scene. Lots. Pieced together three or four of them into montages. What hard work. Suffered mightily. But no sacrifice is too great for the Funhouse.

• Gail Harris (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)

4) Ashlie Rhey in a sport-humpin scene that was hot. Real hot. You get to see Ashlie's robo-hooters and some bum, but none of the third B... unless you count the last collage, where is appears something resides between Ashlie's legs.

• Ashlie Rhey (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)

5) Veteran B movies babes Griffin Drew, Teresa Langley (aka Cory Lane) and Leslie Hunt, all of whom parade around, or lie around with tops cast aside.

• Griffin Drew (1, 2)
• Teresa Langley (1, 2)
• Leslie Hunt (1, 2)

6) Newcomer Alexsandra Kaniak. She's Amy's object of affection and has a more interesting face and a way better set of all-natural mighty-fines.

• Alexsandra Kaniak

So that's why I think this is the best there is in the erotic thriller genre. Oh, and the plot isn't really all that bad, although the acting is and the director should have been shot on the third or fourth day, but who the f*** cares?

'Caps and comments by Spaz:
Riffel goes full frontal for the first time in the Simandl straight-to-video "White Slave Virgins" which is being released in Europe this week.

ONE LAST CHANCE TO SEE "GIGLI"
Worth The Price - "Gigli" is a momentous bomb, but Boston radio station WBCN is giving people one last chance to see it before it slinks out of theaters tomorrow. The station is offering free tickets to 130 "lucky listeners," and anyone who's still in his seat when it ends will get an "I Survived 'Gigli'" T-shirt.