Tuesday

Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy)

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.

Rachel Mc Adams

 

Here is a large zipped .wmv of McAdams' complete nude scene (More than two minutes long. 22 meg.)

 

 

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)

 

Hankster
'Caps and comments by Hankster:
We kick it off with some "Damsels in Peril" from "Absolute Aggression".

First up: some unknowns all running around topless trying to escape the bad guys.

Then it's Amy Lynn Baxter topless and winding up with a sword to the belly.
Wrapping it up for today: Pamela Anderson in the see-thru top from last week's "Comedy Central Roast".

Brainscan

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:
 

Teri Weigel shows some bum in a thong and wears a pink bikini with some nice see-throughedness to it and she goes topless for a couple of nanoseconds.  Terrific looking woman.  Such a shame  she went all bat-shit and destroyed both her body and her face.
B-movie veterans Laura Albert ...
 ...and Jasae show nice hooties,
as does seldom-seen Christina Cardan.
Another rarely observed bird, Dallas Cole shows off a nice bum and plays swords while dressing in some very interesting underwear. 
 

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.

 

My final thoughts on Glitch! can be summed up in the last two things I put together (right).  Each shows a beautiful woman, but the two could not look much different in terms of skin color and body type.  They are beautiful for different reasons.  Any guy with any sense would have gotten them as undressed as he could possibly manage and he would have shown them off in every third or fourth scene.  But no.  The gals came, they went and not only didn't we see anything vital, we never even learned their names.  THAT is why this movie gets up my nose and stays there.   

Vejiita's tribute to Sophie Marceau

My Nights Are More Beautiful Than Your Days



D'Artagnan's Daughter


Police


Pacific Palisades


Pour Sacha


Variety
Continuing the Rachel McAdams tribute, here's the rest of her career nudity, a bit of dark nudity from The Notebook, courtesy of Senor Piel.


Brooke Burke caught by paparazzi in an unusual bikini


Kitt 5000 does the incomparable cinema classic Night of the Wilding, featuring  Julie Austin ...


... and Kimberly Speiss


Movie Reviews

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.

Other Crap
Some new state quarters.

Six new clips from The Brothers Grimm, Terry Gilliam's new film which opens Friday.

UW-Madison is the top party school. Brigham Young finished last.

Rocker Mick Jagger can't GIVE no satisfaction

Borowitz: BOTH EVOLUTION AND INTELLIGENT DESIGN FAIL TO EXPLAIN BUSH ... Scientists in Oslo Debate Origin of President

President Bush Delivers Statement on the Forced Withdrawal of Israeli Religious Zealots From the Gazarian Strip (WHITEHOUSE.ORG)

Women like R-rated laughs

  • I guess that's obvious, but I never would have guessed that "Women made up 54% of the audience for The 40-Year-Old Virgin, distributor Universal Pictures says. And they have made up the majority of the audience for Wedding Crashers, which has taken in $177.9 million."

The Future of Terrorism: What al-Qaida Really Wants "the organization's master plan."

  • They pretty much want the same things we all want - a good life for their kids, affordable medical care, true love, some decent cable channels, and a painful death to all non-believers.

A very big gallery from George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck, about Sen. McCarthy and Ed Murrow.

Iron Maiden vs Sharon Osbourne at Ozzfest

  • Iron Maiden was "continuously pelted with ice, bottle caps, and eggs."
  • Hey, one thing I don't get. If you're some kind of bad-ass heavy metal pseudo-Satanic dudes, doesn't that kind of audience hatred mean that you're doing your job correctly? I mean that's the way Andy Kaufman always played it when he was Tony Clifton or the woman-wrestler. Or are people supposed to love up Iron Maiden like they do with Steve Lawrence and Edie Gorme?

Film Jerk's Early Report for August 22

Say gals, looking for a way to avoid anal sex? Why not tattoo your asshole to look like a second vagina?

More Nobel Prize candidates! Scientists prove that we are annoyed by annoying people and things!

Conan O'Brien spends an evening as a Security Guard.

The international trailer for In Her Shoes

  • "Alternately hilarious and heart-rending, 'In Her Shoes' is about two sisters with nothing in common but size 8 1/2 feet. After a calamitous falling out, they travel the bumpy road toward a true appreciation for one another -- aided along the way by the grandmother they never knew they had."

Here is the trailer from Doom which was shown at ComicCon

  • "Something has gone wrong at a remote scientific research station on Mars. All research has ceased. Communication has failed. And the messages that do get through are less than comforting. It's a level 5 quarantine and the only souls allowed in or out are the Rapid Response Tactical Squad - hardened Marines armed to the teeth with enough firepower to neutralize the enemy... or so they think. The research being done at Odluval station has unwittingly opened a door and all hell has broken loose. A legion of nightmarish creatures of unknown origin lurk behind every wall and stalk the countless rooms and tunnels of the facility, killing what few people remain. Sealing off the portal to Earth, Sarge (Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson), Reaper (Karl Urban) and their team must use every weapon at their disposal - and some they find along the way - to carry out their orders: nothing gets out alive."

Clever Movie Title Sequences Designed by Saul Bass

One poll shows the President's job approval rating at a new low, heading for Carter Country.

  • He still has plenty of goals left to reach if he can just get those gas prices up a little more! Four presidents have made it into the 20s. Bush's dad crashed to 29 from his high of 89. Carter, who had the lowest average rating for an entire Presidency (45), hit a nadir of 28. Nixon plummeted to 24 just before he resigned in August of 1974, and Truman set the all time record of 23 when he fired MacArthur.
  • Presidential Approval Ratings, 1953-1999 . (The Truman info can be found in the Gallup "65 years of polling" link below)

Gallup Poll Quiz - trivia about 65 years of polling.

I didn't know that! Can you guess which state has the highest SAT scores? (.pdf format)

Arthouse hotshot Atom Egoyan faces an NC-17 rating for his new movie, over a threesome between Kevin Bacon, Colin Firth, and Rachel Blanchard. The producer says, " It cannot be cut without compromising the central scene of the narrative and thus rendering the mystery of the film incomprehensible."



TRIVIA: the guy who wrote the book upon which this film is based (see below) also wrote the words and music for the Pina Colada Song!

 


 

"Records related to Kennedy's assassination are still being hidden for reasons of 'national security.'"

Damn, I love Norway. Norwegian police have to call a taxi to respond to emergency calls.

Coors pays $60 million per year to be the official beer of the NFL

Wal-Mart Charges Master Thieves $175 for Stolen Sheep Shit

Goalie attends rock concert, Belgian youth soccer team suffers 50-1 defeat. The general manager of the Kansas City Royals is currently trying to book a match against them.

Norwegians behave oddly "when passing sheep in traffic."

  • I'm shocked! You mean Norway now has cars faster than sheep?
  • What they really mean is even sillier. Norwegians are more likely to slow down when they see sheep than when they see children.
  • Well, of course. It's illegal and immoral to stop and have sex with children.

The Straight Dope: Did New York water pressure drop because of toilet flushing after the Super Bowl?

Snoop starts his own youth football league.

  • People in the rival league are complaining because Snoop runs a better program and charges half as much!! Oh no, not that! Why can't he offer poor quality at a high price like everyone else? That no-good S.O.B.! Why does he hate America?

English as She is Spoke
 



The official blurb:
 

  • In 1855, when Jose da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino wrote an English phrasebook for Portuguese students, they faced just one problem: they didn't know any English. Even worse, they didn't own an English-to-Portuguese dictionary. What they did have, though, was a Portuguese-to-French dictionary, and a French-to-English dictionary. The linguistic train wreck that ensued is a classic of unintentional humor, now revived in the first newly selected edition in a century. Armed with Fonseca and Carolino's guide, a Portuguese traveler can insult a barber ("What news tell me? All hairs dresser are newsmonger"), complain about the orchestra ("It is a noise which to cleve the head"), go hunting ("let aim it! let make fire him"), and consult a handy selection of truly mystifying "Idiotisms and Proverbs."
  • According to McSweeney's, Mark Twain read this book, and wrote "Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect."

Claymation. Master Little teaches kids how to live with a small penis.

Make your own Magazine Cover

Coogan says he has not impregnated Courtney Love.

  • The BBC considers it news that somebody denied fucking Courtney Love? I'd like to see them find somebody who'd admit fucking Courtney. Now THAT would be a story. What did they expect Coogan to say? "Oh, yeah. (Blows on nails. Shines them on chest.) I tapped that ass. Fucked her in every one of her needle holes. Fall on your knees in admiration."

How did Jude Law turn into Tommy Lee overnight?

WTF? Salvador Dali story of the day. "Sacha Baron Cohen was dunked in the sea by Pamela Anderson's bodyguards - after rugby-tackling the actress at her dogs' wedding." The only thing that would make this story better is if the dogs wrote their own vows.


Tuna

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

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