Video clips: Charlize Theron, Part 3 of 3

I got ambitious and finished off Charlize Theron's career:

• Reindeer Games was a notorious bomb. A thriller made by acclaimed director John Frankenheimer and budgeted at $42 million, it was so unpopular with test audiences that it was pulled from its original Christmas release and re-cut. It was finally released on the last weekend of February when its various Christmas-themed elements were completely irrelevant. It opened in a disappointing third place against weak competition (Snow Days actually moved up two spots from the previous week and beat Reindeer Games!), and grossed only $23m in its theatrical run. Critics hated it.

  Tuna and I both watched the "director's cut," which included all the sex and violence that were removed after the test screenings, and ...  what the hell? We kinda thought it was fun to watch.  (Movie House Review). There are two good nude scenes:

  • Clip 1, Charlize and Affleck get it on. (Zipped .wmv)
  • Clip 2, Charlize takes off her top in the pool for Sinese, and they go at it a bit while Affleck watches and realizes he's been had. (Zipped .wmv)

• 2 Days in the Valley is a lurid piece of pulp cinema in the Tarantino mode. Most critics liked it. I liked this one as well, but I always seem to like this director's movies much better than anyone else does.  (Movie House Review). This was Charlize's first credited role, and her first nudity. Although we associate her with the "girl next door" roles in mainstream studio movies, she played the bad girl in this one! The two nude scenes are together here, since the first one only is about two seconds long - just a photograph of Charlize nekkid. After that, we see Charlize and Spader go at it for quite some time.  (Zipped .wmv)

• The Yards is a realistic movie about real gangsters doing real gangster shit, as opposed to the usual movie-style gangsters. Since the real world stuff usually involves lots of bribes and threats of exposure, as opposed to machine guns, torture, and dramatic shoot-outs. I liked the movie for trying to tell the truth, but both Tuna and James Berardinelli reminded me of my own axiom that the truth is highly overrated when it comes to movie entertainment. Point taken. I suppose most objective observers would conclude that it's a pretty freakin' boring movie.. (Movie House Review). Just a brief flash of breasts from a love scene with Johnny Cash (Zipped .wmv)

• If I say that this is the nudity from Waking Up in Reno, I will be doubly misleading, since there's no real nudity, and this scene was not actually in the movie. It's from the deleted scenes. Nonetheless, one may see almost all of the Theron bottom, so it makes the cut for our recap. (Zipped .wmv)  As for the movie, I wrote that it "... starts out as a not-too-funny redneck farce comedy, but eventually makes a major tone shift and becomes a not-even-tryin'-to-be-funny soap opera, then takes another left turn into a Hollywood romantic comedy with a sappy-happy ending. Dabbling in everything, it doesn't really stay with anything long enough to establish cred." Miramax gave up on it and released it in 200 theaters, where it didn't gross enough to pay Thornton's bar tab.
  • Two strange elements about it: (1) an A-list cast agreed to do this movie about two white-trash couples traveling to a "monster truck" show (2) Penelope Cruz, at the nadir of her career, had about three lines as "Spanish hooker in bar."  (Movie House Review).

 

 

Third party video clip ... Liv Ullmann

Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow may be the two biggest stars in the history of Scandinavia (although Stellan Skarsgaard and Peter Stormare are certainly contenders who are better known to us in recent decades), and Ingmar Bergman is certainly Scandinavia's most important director. Bergman directed 1968's Skammen, which starred both Ullmann and von Sydow, thus making the film a bit of a historical landmark for the frozen north. More important, 29-year-old Ullmann walked around with her jubblies hanging out, something which was not a common occurrence. (Zipped .avi - sample below)

 

Survival Island (aka Three) 2005

I'd like to know how many times commercial filmmakers are going to remake The Admirable Crichton. I, for one, have been sick of these desert island class-reversal films since before many of you were born.

You never heard of The Admirable Crichton? I suppose I never would have either, had I not I majored in English Lit, with a specialty in Modern British and Irish Drama. (Very useful for making a living, right? Of course, that was the late sixties, when making a living was considered a sell-out.) At any rate, it is a play written by the same odd little man who wrote Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie, and the two plays were written at about the same time, just after the turn of the century. You can read the play online if you really care to, for it is in the public domain.

The plot was essentially this:

Rich couple gets shipwrecked with their butler. In the new social dynamic created on the island, the butler becomes the leader, because he is the only one with the grit and intelligence for survival. The aristocrats take orders from him. When everyone is saved, the Lords and Ladies return to their high station, and Crichton goes back to being a butler.

If your girlfriend wants to drag you to this play, don't count on any hot butler-on-girl action. This was not a predecessor of Red Shoe Diaries, although the condescending Lady did eventually find herself falling in love with her dynamic, ingenious butler - but only until they were rescued. J.M. Barrie was not much interested in sex, if at all. Although he married, some of his biographers have suggested that his marriage was never consummated and that he died a virgin. The relationship between Barrie's life and his most famous concept, a juvenile frozen in boyhood, would certainly have been an interesting topic for the analytical skills of his contemporary, Dr. Freud, because Barrie himself never grew up in many ways. He stopped growing in boyhood (he was about five feet tall), and apparently never developed any adult sexual capability. "Boys cannot love" is how he was said to have explained his impotence to his wife Mary, shortly before she divorced his tiny ass. In other words, he wasn't anything like Johnny Depp in that movie.

The Admirable Crichton itself has been made into several eponymous motion pictures, the first one coming out of the silent film era, and the most memorable starring Kenneth More as Crichton. As the twentieth century progressed and the leisure classes developed an ever-increasing interest in sex, various filmmakers with a healthier libido than Mr. Barrie started to realize that the entire dynamic of The Admirable Crichton really ought to have a sexual component. After all, as the "dominant male" on the island, wouldn't Crichton also get the hottest babe(s)?

Enter Lina Wertmuller and her "Swept Away ..." in 1974, in which the guy from the lower classes asserts his complete domination over the Lady when they get shipwrecked. He knows she can't survive unless he provides for her, and she knows it too, so he uses this advantage for his amusement, beating her, abusing her, raping her, turning her into his menial slave, and so forth. Swept Away was remade by Guy Ritchie into a notorious stinker in 2002. Ritchie chose unwisely to feature a certain non-actress named  Madonna as the rich bitch. I doubt if he had many options, since he was married to her.

The most recent version of the story was called Three in the theaters for its European release, or Survival Island in the Region 1 DVD release. Here's how it told the tale:

A rich couple (Billy Zane and Kelly Brook) take a private yacht into the South Seas. It sinks. What is the deal with Billy Zane and boats? This is the fourth film in which he has been on a sinking ship! (Dead Calm, Titanic, Cleopatra). At any rate, Zane is nowhere to be seen when Kelly washes ashore on L'isle D'Gilligan with Manuel, the hired hand. The usual Admirable Crichton dynamic takes over. Manuel is the one with survival skills, and he's a horny guy, so she becomes dependent on the handsome hunk. This actually seems to be working out quite well until the scriptwriter remembers that the Gilligan's Island theme song mentions "the millionaire and his wife." Enter the millionaire, who washes up on the same island. Oh, you know it's gonna get nasty in a "two men enter, one man leaves" kind of way, except that this island thunderdome involves Zany Bill instead of Mad Max.

Zane goes mad imagining his wife shagging enthusiastically with the other guy, so he hatches a very convoluted revenge plot. First he finds the hull of a boat, and seems to be planning to leave alone, so the other two steal the boat and leave Zane behind. As it turns out, that was exactly what he wanted. He is the only one of the three who knew that the boat was not seaworthy, and it sinks! The plot twists continue in the same vein when Brook and the other guy swim back.

North American distributors were afraid, very afraid. Not only did the film seem to be yet another rehash of the megabomb Swept Away, but writer/director Stewart Rafill had previously created two of IMDb's all-time bottom 100, and a near miss!

• (3.48) - Tammy and the T-Rex (1994), written and directed by Rafill.
• (2.85) - Mac and Me (1988) - #74 on the bottom 100, written and directed by Rafill.
• (2.67) - Mannequin: On the Move (1991) - #55 on the bottom 100, directed by Rafill, scripted by others.

Those distributors were right to be frightened. It is, as expected, a very weak movie. Rafill didn't even seem to try on this film. Not only is it too similar to Swept Away, but it's missing even the most fundamental elements of continuity. In the very first skinny-dipping scene, for example, Kelly Brook takes off her bikini bottom, and we see her naked bum as she enters the water. As she leaves, only a minute or two later, it is clear that she is still wearing the bottom - even though the servant - on camera in the background - is yelling "nice ass, senora!" (You can see this exact moment in collage #5 below, as well as the entire sequence in the "daytime skinny-dipping" scene.) Oh yeah, and there's a voodoo curse involved as well, prompting various irrelevant cutaways to frenzied, drum-driven island rituals, all of which seem to be from a completely different movie. (You can see some of this in the sex scene between Zane and Brook.)

Three's distribution was further complicated by the fact Billy Zane was rumored to be doing everything he could to block its uncut release after he and Brook became a real-life couple. It seem that there was some dispute about nude scenes in which Ms Brook shows off a nicely rounded bum and a very generous chest! Perhaps Zane's greatest problem was that many of the sex scenes involve Brook loving long-time with a hunky guy from Argentina named Juan Di Pace. Whatever Zane's arguments may have been, they seem to have had no legal merit, and the film is now available on DVD. It never did get a North American run in the theaters, but it somehow managed a theatrical run in the UK, prompting a classic BBC review:

"As preposterous as they come, Three is unremittingly - though unintentionally - hilarious. If you like rubbernecking, this is a five-star shipwreck. Hamfisted, boneheaded, leaden-footed and breast-obsessed, Three encompasses a whole physiology of awfulness. Ms Brook is by no means the worst thing in this picture: her co-star and the pestilent script will battle that one out. Zane plumbs new depths of overacting in a bloated, reeling waddle towards psychopathy that can only be explained as an attempt to make his real life fiancée look good. You can sense that the filmmakers were trying to rev up some kind of archetypal, raw, conflict-driven erotic energy - what they ended up with was Showgirls meets Blue Lagoon. With its hysterical attempts at suspense, its collossally absurd voodoo subplot, and its increasingly flailing efforts at sexual distraction, the dreadful Three represents one hundred of the funniest minutes you will ever spend in a cinema. "

By the way, although the BBC review said it was to be released in the UK on May 5, 2006, the British box office results for that weekend show no sign of it.

Film clips:

• Sex scene, Brook and Zane (Zipped .wmv)
• Sex scene, Brook and DiPace  (Zipped .wmv)
• Daytime skinny dipping (with continuity error.) (Zipped .wmv)
• Nighttime skinny-dipping.  (Zipped .wmv)

Kelly Brook

 

OTHER CRAP:

Movie Reviews:

Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe). White asterisk: expanded format. Blue asterisk: not mine. No asterisk: it probably sucks.

Crystal Cass in The Outer Limits

Natasha Henstridge in The Outer Limits

Tara Spencer-Nairn in The Outer Limits

Linda Hardy in Immoral

Franka Potente in I Love Your Work

It's finally happened: Tom Cruise has become too weird even for Hollywood.  After 14 years, Paramount has severed its deal with Cruise's production company and ordered them off the studio lot.  Viacom CEO Sumner Redstone told the Wall St. Journal that the studio thinks Cruise's recent behavior - jumping on Oprah's couch, denouncing psychiatry, promoting Scientology, having a mysterious, unseen baby with Katie Holmes - was "unacceptable," alienated fans, and contributed to the disappointing box office for "Mission Impossible III."  Also, Cruise reportedly refused to accept a less-lucrative renewal deal. 

*  So, if he'd been a bizarre, off-putting, zealous loon who worked cheaper, they would've kept him!


A National Cancer Institute study of more than 500,000 Americans age 50-71 found that being just a little bit overweight increases your risk of death.  A recent CDC study claimed that a few extra pounds seemed to make no difference, but experts say it was flawed because it included people with preexisting health problems that make you skinny. But this newer, much larger study found that otherwise healthy non-smoking Baby Boomers who were just a little pudgy were 20 to 40 percent more likely to die than normal weight people. 

*  Of course, by American standards, Ruben Studdard is "just a little
pudgy."


Today on CBS' "Early Show," the producers of "Survivor" will announce the new twist they've come up with to keep the show fresh, and it might be controversial.  According to the reality TV show website RealityBlurred.com, an Internet rumor has been "pretty much confirmed" that the contestants will be divided up into tribes by race, with whites, blacks, Asians and Hispanics competing against each other.  Donald Trump reportedly considered something similar for "The Apprentice," but decided against it.

*  Because everybody would know that the Asian was gonna win.

*  They'll be given nearly impossible tasks...For instance, the white tribe
will have to dance, and the black tribe will have to hail a cab.


Iran had said it would give a reply to the world on August 22, and many
claimed that was a major Islamic date that signaled the worst, even nuclear
Armageddon.  But it turned out to be an announcement that Iran is now ready for "serious talks" with the UN about defusing their nuclear
standoff

* It was hailed as a major victory for the illusion of peace!


P. Diddy and his girlfriend announced that they are expecting their
second child

* Proving that Kevin Federline does share one talent with a famous rapper


Barbara Eden is 72 today, although her TV character from "I Dream of Jeannie" was born on April 1, 64 B.C.

* So "Jeannie" is actually the same age as Cher.