Prozac Nation (2001)

The saga behind the release of this film is probably more interesting than the film itself.

Although that would not be difficult to achieve.

The history of yoghurt would probably be more interesting than this film. Listening to old people discuss their lumbago would probably be more interesting than this film, particularly if, unlike me, you know what the hell lumbago is.  By the way, St. Lawrence is the patron saint of lumbago, and a damned fine Seaway to boot. See, you old people, I was listening!

Ah, yes, enough of the more interesting matters. Let's return to Prozac Nation. It is the film version of Elizabeth Wurtzel's self-portrait which focuses on the battles she fought with depression in her school years. The film zeroes in on her years at Harvard as a scholarship student, during which she apparently managed to alienate everyone she came in contact with, including her family, her suitors, her roommate, and even her shrink. The film was lensed in 2000, and had various release dates come and go, having been postponed about once or twice a year until the film finally by-passed North American theaters altogether and went to cable and DVD in 2005. One of the few people who got to see it was Elizabeth Wurzel, which is fitting since it is supposed to be her autobiography. She pronounced it "horrible." On the other hand, that may not be meaningful, because if she is like the character who represents her, she gets really depressed and pronounces everything "horrible." In fact some industry insiders said that one of Wurtzel's public outbursts managed to abort the 2001 release single-handedly. The film was shown at the Toronto Film Festival on September 8, 2001. Three days later, al-Qaeda hijacked the airliners and Wurtzel promptly made some offensive public comments. Let's just say that the promotional plan for the film probably never included any Tonight Show appearances for Ms. Wurtzel.

Is the film truly "horrible"? Nah. The problem with this film is not really its quality. It was directed by an excellent helmsman, the Norwegian Erik Skjoldbjærg, who took this on as his next project after his highly acclaimed Insomnia. It features a competent central performance from Christina Ricci and a solid support cast: Jason Biggs, Anne Heche, Michelle Williams, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, and Jessica Lange. That's a lot of talent. So if quality isn't the problem, what is? Well, to be blunt, it is a boring story about a totally unlikable person, and thus fails miserably to clear the Gene Siskel Hurdle. If you aren't familiar with that term, Siskel would often get right to the point in his reviews and ask himself if he would like to have dinner with the film's characters as they discussed their interests. If the answer was "no", then why, he wondered, should he spend the same two hours with them in the theater. The central character in Prozac Nation is egotistical, condescending, whiny, antagonistic, unreliable, depressing, and depressed. Moreover, she lacks a sense of humor. Is that the kind of person you would like to have dinner with? Of course not. She would be a conversation-deadening force even if she had something interesting to say, but here she does not.

Let's face it, we can tolerate "boring" and "annoying" separately in small doses. Ben Stein? Boring as hell, but not annoying, so potentially droll and entertaining in small doses. Dick Vitale? Annoying as can be, but not boring, so able to hold our attention in bursts. But if you place boring and annoying together, they form a lethal combination. For example, how long can you listen to Bob Novak? Well, this movie is like two hours of Bob Novak.

Although if Novak looked like Christina Ricci and did his shows naked, I could tolerate him a little longer.

A little.

Not only would the Ricci character make a poor choice as a dinner partner, but she is not even the kind of person who really moves you to care about her fate at all. Even if she faced a life-threatening situation in the film, which she does in the form of suicide, the outcome wouldn't draw in your involvement because you wouldn't really care whether she lived or died.

So why release such a film?

It is a professionally crafted and performed movie, but the real problem with it, as was obviously noted by the studio execs who kept postponing its release, is that one cannot imagine why anyone else would want to watch it. One might argue that it has some artistic or educational merit, but it is completely non-commercial. I don't know if the book Prozac Nation could have been made into a watchable movie, but this review of the book gives a clue:

"By turns emotionally powerful and tiresomely solipsistic, her book straddles the line between an absorbing self-portrait and a coy bid for public attention."

A film, of course, must reduce a complex book to a two hour condensation. Perhaps the film could have worked if it had pared down the running time by discarding the "tiresomely solipsistic" and featuring the "emotionally powerful." Unfortunately, it took the opposite tack.

Christina Ricci
	Here is a zipped .wmv of Ricci's nude scene. If you really want the full monty, here's a zipped .vob  (Anamorphic DVD file - to be played by a pure software DVD player like Power DVD). Big file - 31meg - but perfect quality.

My Name is Tanino (2001)

My Name is Tanino is an Italian coming-of-age comedy which never reached the States and is not available on North American DVD.

So why the hell am I watching an Italian DVD and writing about this film?

The primary reason is that it features topless nudity from a young Canadian starlet named Rachel McAdams who was virtually an unknown when she did this movie, but is now on her way toward A-list stardom after a string of successes like Mean Girls, Wedding Crashers, Red-Eye, and especially The Notebook.

McAdams plays Sally, an American student who is vacationing in Italy when she encounters a helpful young Italian teenager. They spend some time together and exchange a brief kiss, all of which is just casual for her, but is built up in his mind as a great romantic opportunity, to the extent that he leaves Italy to track her down in America, with comical consequences. She is embarrassed to see him on her doorstep and tries to get rid of him as gently as possible, but a concatenation of circumstances leads to his being invited to stay with her family. This creates even more outrageous circumstances which lead Sally's father to assume that Tanino is the long-suspected lover of Sally's mother. Poor, clueless Tanino ends up fleeing the house at rifle-point.

Tanino, who is a film student back in Italy, then spends the rest of his American holiday making a pilgrimage to see the great director "Chenowsky," during which he passes through various Italian-American households and experiences more comic misadventures and cultural misunderstandings.

It seems like a good movie. I enjoyed the situations, and I could follow the movie in a general sense, but only a small portion of it is in English and there are no subtitles. (Well, to be more precise, there are Italian subtitles during the English portions!) Even Rachel McAdams performs most of her lines in Italian, even in the American scenes, because Tanino's grasp of English is as bad as my grasp of Italian, which is to say somewhere between zero and rudimentary. McAdams speaks to Tanino in Italian, and also has to translate her family's English for Tanino. I therefore can't offer much in terms of analysis since I couldn't enjoy the dialogue, or understand the jokes, and I didn't even look at the second disk full of special features because I knew I'd be lost.

Stripes (1981)

You all know what this is. (If not, here are my comments, and Tuna's.)

The special edition DVD features the charming and funny P.J. Soles nude scene which was shelved for a quarter of a century, so I suppose we should take another look at it! (Zipped .wmv)

Words and poictures from Brainscan:

Glitch! is a Nico Mastroakis movie made in 1988,  It really gets up my nose.  Now, why is that?  Well, I have seen From Justin to Kelly.  Yes I have and that makes me part of a very small community since all of eight people have fessed up to either buying or renting that turkey.  Seems Justin/Kelly was made in 2 weeks for $1 million. Well, Glitch has the feel of a movie that was made for one-third that amount in half that time.  It looks like a porn film.  But that isn't what bothers me, bunky.

Glitch! (gotta remember to put in the exclamation point) has girls in it.  Dozens of them.  Lots of them naked.  And, in the end, that is what bothers me. Despite all the gals and the opportunity to make a real winner of a nudie exploitation film, ol' Nico must have figured he could just flash some tits and have a whole bunch of gals wander around in bikinis and that would be enough. What kills me is that quite a few women wore thongs, but there seems to have been no real attempt to exploit that fact. And yep some women do get nekkid but they are on screen for times shorter than the half-lives of most trans-uranic elements. He even cast Teri Weigel in the year she started to make porn films and yet he shows off her topless bod for exactly three frames. And a lot of the gals he hired for this silliness went on to do lots and lots of nudity in lots and lots of other films, so it isn't as though they were dead set agin' it. 

So WTF was Nico thinking?  Did he not know the screenplay was an utter disaster and that all the flesh he could shoot was all the flesh he was going to need to save this thing? And why didn't the editor rescue poor Nico and cut out all that scenes with that awful purile humor and just show us more of the gals? The answers to these questions are really very simple: Nico wrote it, Nico directed it and Nico edited it. The boy even produced it.  We have no one but him to blame and he had no one with any sense to rescue him.

In the end we have a film that really does have a lot of great looking women parading around in bikinis. And maybe that was the problem.  Nico coulda used the money to hire fewer gals who woulda taken off their clothes but that, he figured, would detract from the simple sweetness and clever dialogue of an award-winning film.  Too bad he didn't make one.

BTW, the IMDb score for this thing is about par for the Nico course ... around a 3.4, much like the majority of films.  He has a couple of sub-3's and a couple of 5's but most sit a tad above 3, in a land of toxic waste dumps.

So about the nekkidness:
 

Finally, uber-cutie Julia Nickson wears a bikini you can sorta see through when it is wet. The scene is shot with her head above water and her body below so it looks all weird and stuff, but she is such a honey I had to cap that puppy. 

Then you have a bunch of topless gals in a hot tub. The first collage of unknowns makes it look there were a hundred of 'em, but that's just me playing around. Only six gals in the tub, one of whom is Jasae.  There is a topless Asian babe (second unknown collage) and since only one gal with an obvious East Asian name was listed in the credits (ALL the gals are just listed, with no identifiers, even though a couple are named in the film). I am betting this is she. Goes by the name of Meng Duong.

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.
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• If there is no asterisk, I wrote it, but am too ashamed to admit it.

Currently on disability. If you'd like to get in touch with him, his email address is tuna@scoopy.com

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