Down the Barrel (2003 video) is waiting for 5 votes at IMDB. It is also waiting for a cast list, plot description, reviews, and anything else there. It is the story of a young woman, Tara Price, who escapes an abusive step father and comes to Hollywood to become a star. Her first day, a street bum steals her suitcase with everything she owns. A starving, tortured artist, Matthew Grant Godbey, offers her a place to stay. He is not without problems of his own, which include gambling debts, and a former lover from his days working as a gay prostitute, who is powerful, connected, and wants him back. One of his creditors owns a strip club, but is in debt to the former lover, who applies pressure on him to get Godbey back. Eventually, Price is forced to work at the strip club. She narrates the story from behind jail cell bars. Also look for Luke Perry of 90210 fame as Godbey's best friend, and a gay male hooker.

This is a real stinker start to finish. Price eventually warms to the role, but Godbey won't ever let her close to him, and is a sleaze, such that you can identify with and root for him. Jade shows breasts and buns as a hooker in the strip club. The 4/3 transfer is nothing special, and I found the ending especially irritating. D.

Great uncensored stuff!:

One of our contributors, Tomscaps, came up with some astounding stuff - X-rated uncensored versions of music videos

• Here's Trailer Ras, Long Beach Dub All-Stars (rated x to xxx) (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)
• Here's Molotov, Rastaman-Dita (rated r) (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

29 Palms (2002):

Not a good movie, but a fascinating DVD.

This film has some problems, but you might like 29 Palms if you're really into the whole Tarantino thing. It's basically a Tarantino clone set out in the middle of nowhere - the desert between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. There is the germ of a good movie here - some capable performers, some bizarre humor and characters, and some really imaginative uses of desert locales - run-down motels with lawn chairs in the swimming pool, breathtaking views, rinky-dink jails, shabby casinos, and a remote bus station which has neither passengers nor buses.

A law clerk finds out that his judge is about to alter his position on an important ruling. Instead of ruling in favor of some Indian casino rights, the judge will rule against them, despite the fact that the Indians have paid the judge handsomely for his co-operation. Obviously, the Vegas gambling interests paid him more to change his mind. The judge can't afford to have the clerk tell the Indians what he's discovered, so he takes pre-emptive action. He goes to the tribal chieftain with a ludicrous story that his clerk is an undercover FBI agent about to spill the beans on their racketeering. The Indians then try to kill the alleged agent, but end up killing his girlfriend instead, so they decide it is time to call in a professional hit man to finish the job. The Indians give the hitman an athletic bag filled with money, and the REAL film begins - following what happens to the bag.

The rest of the plot seems to come straight out of Tarantino or a Guy Ritchie movie like "Snatch" or "Lock, Stock ... "

The hit man is robbed by a security guard. The security guard is robbed by a crooked cop, who sends the money to a backwater bus station in the town of 29 Palms. The judge's clerk, running away to 29 Palms after having narrowly avoided the attempted hit by the Indians, ended up with the bag by accident, not knowing what it was. Yeah, I know, that coincidence was a bit too much to believe, but the film is basically a black comedy. Flush with his new-found cash, the clerk then buys a car, and two more bags which look exactly the same as the original and fills them with books, so that he can use them as decoys. He picks up a hitchhiker.

From that point on, the film is a violent and often incoherent chess game between the security guard, the crooked cop, the Indian gangsters, the clerk, the hitchhiker, and the hit man, with the three bags changing hands several times and all of the characters coming together, separating, then coming together again.

The reason I found this DVD interesting is not because of the movie itself, which has some good elements and demonstrates a lot of talent, but is just too confusing. The best part of the DVD package is the story behind the filmmaking. There is a full-length commentary by four of the producers, which is surprising for a movie that (to my knowledge) never played any commercial theaters. There are also two very long summaries, obviously written by somebody intimately involved with the film, which explain the complicated plot and the equally complicated dream scenes. By reading these two synopses, it is possible to get a better understanding of the plot, and to distinguish between the film's reality segments and its flights of imagination.

But there's a problem - and a lesson. The plot summary in the "bonus features" is not the same as in the actual movie. The written synopsis includes many additional elements which were obviously trimmed to make the film's running time more economical, to make the plot more coherent, to eliminate some unnecessary additional confusion, to get rid of a political agenda which ran through the sub-text, and to remove some elements which just plain didn't work.

The cuts provided some benefits for the film. For example, the film lost a completely silly plot twist in which the hit man turned out to be the real FBI agent. That didn't work. Even in a comedy, it wasn't plausible to claim he was a good Fed after some of the things he did earlier.

The cuts also created some continuity problems, as cuts often do. For example, there is a lame sub-plot about the security guard having become impotent from an incident portrayed in the movie. In the DVD version of the film, the dirty cop calls the security guard "limp dick over there" when they first meet. Huh? We get the joke, but how could the cop know about that so that he could make the joke in the first place? Obviously, a transitional scene was cut.

Compared to what I saw on the DVD, I have read some grossly inaccurate plot summaries written by authors on the internet, and I have to believe that's because different versions of the film were seen by those authors between the Spring of 2001, when the film was first made, until now, some two and a half years later, when the film is finally seen by the general public on DVD.

So there you have it. Tarantino gone wrong. An excessively complicated plot and a bunch of trims. A crazy conflict between producers and their director that resulted in a $1.5 million dollar film costing $4 million and never getting a theatrical release.

The result: a film that looks like it might have had some real potential, but got lost along the way.

The cool thing: the complete DVD package allows you to study how it all unraveled.

It is really interesting to see all the different options that the filmmakers had in front of them, and to second-guess them on the final cut, especially on the last five minutes of the film, which confused and disappointed me. Could they have done better? Maybe. I don't know. But it is fascinating to watch the movie, then to read the summary (thus realizing which decisions they made), then to hear how the decisions got made, and to think about the result. Whether or not they could have done better with the footage they had, I'll bet you the writer and the director have had a lot of time to think about it, and wish they could do it all over again. What they ended up with is not  a very good movie, but I'll bet they could make one if they had another chance.

No major reviews on line. There is an interesting review at filmcritic.com that degenerated between some ugly words between the reviewer and the film's producer. It's clear to me that they must have seen two different versions of the film, because their conflicting versions could both have been correct at one time, depending on which cut was screened.

C- for the movie, but a hearty C+ for the total DVD package.

I wish there had been some real nudity instead of this tease crap. Sorry.

• Rachel Leigh Cook (1, 2, 3)

• Gail Monians (1, 2)

• some stripper (Maybe a nipple. Maybe not.)

Chicago (2002):

I've done this movie before. It was nominated for millions of  Oscars, winning about a hundred. (The real numbers are 13 and 6, respectively. ) You know I'm gonna hate it, because it is practically a love-poem Bob Fosse. I fell asleep more than once.

I just wanted to get a couple of frames I missed the first time around. No nudity.

• Zeta (1, 2)
• Queenie, before she got those puppies clipped.

OTHER CRAP:

• Our favorite mouseketeer seen in a lip-lock with another woman?
• former fat chick Carnie Wilson talks about sex
• "A G.I. Joe-like action figure depicting President George W. Bush as an Elite Force Aviator was recalled today by its manufacturer after consumers discovered that the $39.95 toy did not include the weapons of mass destruction pictured on the toy's packaging."
• OnTheIssues.org - rates Arnold Schwarzenegger to the left of Gray Davis. (Find their profiles by clicking on their names.) Arnold is also to the left of Bill Clinton.
• Paris ex-boyfriend Rick Solomon is telling friends that he has a pornographic home movie of him and Hilton having sex, and plans to sell it on the Internet.
• which five languages are spoken by the most people?
• German game shows are a mite easier than ours
• I couldn't find a large picture of Daisy Fuentes on the cover of Stuff, but here's a small one. She looks mah-velous.
• Playboy Survives Its Midlife Crisis, and is making a comeback
• a spokeswoman for AAA Arizona, said one gas station near downtown Phoenix was charging $3.89 a gallon
• nice action shots of Kournikova
• Teacher works as hooker during summer. I woudl like to see what kind of homework she assign.
• GQ mag to portray Dubya as Jesus
• The Matrix Revolutions - the new hi-res QT trailer is gorgeous
• Jodi Ann Paterson -Playmate of the Year in 2000 - Free Nude Gallery Courtesy of PlayboyPlus.com!

The one good thing about this movie...completely gratuitous nudity from a blonde with big robo-hooters.

• Odessa Munroe (1, 2, 3, 4)

"Summer Lovers"

It's Girls Gone Wild Greek style, circa 1982.

A very young and beautiful Daryl Hannah and her boyfriend go to the Greek islands for a summer vacation and find uninhibited people and breathless beauty. They wind up in a menage with a French archaeologist also there for the summer.

It's lightweight fun with some decent 80's music. Daryl's nudity was brief and limited, but Valerie Quennessen was much less modest. In addition, there were plenty of nude beach babes which so I made a "Various" collage.

• Daryl Hannah
• Valerie Quennessen
• Assorted Nude babes

Maui Taylor
(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16)

ASHTON AND DEMI POSING NUDE?
Dude, Where's My Pants?! - Britain's Daily Star tabloid reports that Demi Moore is planning to pose for another nude photo shoot, and this time, she's talked her boytoy Ashton Kutcher into posing with her. They quote an anonymous "pal" as saying that Ashton isn't inhibited about showing his body, and he doesn't mind his girlfriend doing it as long as he's with her. However, the tab also claims that Demi's ex, Bruce Willis, is furious about it, and thinks Demi should concentrate on being a mom and reestablishing herself as an actress and keep her clothes on for a change.