The Holy Land (2001) is an Israeli tragic love story and coming of age story set in Jerusalem. Were it set anywhere else, I wouldn't have enjoyed it as much as I did. Mendy is son of a Rabbi, himself a rabbinical student, but is too obsessed with sex to study. His Rabbi gives him a bit of advice from an obscure Talmud to go to a strange city, find a prostitute, get it out of his system, then come back to his studies. Mendy goes to the red light district of Tel Aviv, and falls for a Ukranian hooker (the adorable Tchelet Semel). He also meets Mike, who owns Mike's Place, one of the few bars in Jerusalem. Mike tells him that the way to get close to her is to see her when she isn't working. Note that many of the characters and events are taken from writer.director Eitan Gorlin's own life, including Mike's Place, where he did, in fact, tend bar.

Mendy goes to Mike's Place, as she is due to show up for some kind of party, and ends up staying and working for Mike, while trying to get close to Semel. This is almost cliched, young kid falls for hooker with a heart of gold, except for where he comes from, with the conflict between his moral upbringing and his youthful lust. The thing that made the film for me, however, was the portrait of The Holy Land, and all the Jews and Arabs who inhabit it.

Semel shows breasts in several scenes, and Julia Galinski, as another hooker/stripper, shows everything. IMDb readers have this at 7.0 of 10. Critical response was generally favorable. It earned a little over $.5M in a limited US release, and won some festival awards. While it is primarily in English, you hear a lot of Yiddish, Hebrew, Arabic and some Russian, making it a treat for the ears as well as the eyes. Some of the photography was wonderful. The DVD includes a full length commentary with director and cast, a featurette, and a narrated photo album. This is not for everyone, but if you tend to enjoy looks at other place and cultures, you might also find much to enjoy here. C+.

From 1981 to 1984, Valerie Kaprisky was one of the most discussed actresses in the world, all because she made about a half dozen movies without wearing a lot of clothing.

Hoo, boy, was she hot!!!

In this film, she probably achieved a record for the second most nudity done by one female star one film. The record, which I presume will last forever, is Emmanuelle Beart in La Belle Noiseuse. Beart's nude scenes (about two hours on camera) in that long film (about four hours) actually last longer than most entire films!!!

These last two Kaprisky clips - both long downloads - consist of nothing more than Kaprisky hanging out stark naked. In the first one, she dances to music while a guy photographs her - similar to the first clip we saw two days ago.  In the second one, she admires herself in a mirror, then loves somebody long time.

• Kaprisky. (1, 2)

Iron Jawed Angels (2004):

This is basically a docudrama which looks inside of a pivotal time in American history, the era of the last group of suffragettes who marched, spoke, picketed, and otherwise campaigned for the right of women to vote.

To bring the issue in clearer focus, let's review the circumstances. Black men received the right to vote after the Civil War (in theory at least), but women were still disenfranchised at the time of WW1. The general legal consensus was that the situation could not be changed by an act of Congress, but would require a constitutional amendment, and thus the approval of 2/3 of the states.

Nothing is ever simple in politics. President Wilson thought it politically inexpedient to support the vote for women, even though he was supposed to be the idealistic social liberal. The suffragettes thus directed much of their protest activity in his direction. Wilson was also a wartime President, and many people felt that it was inappropriate, even treasonous, for the women to picket against him. Furthermore, liberals, who would normally have supported the women, were appalled that the picketers were embarrassing the liberal Wilson and driving voters toward the Republicans.

There were more sub-plots and divisions among the women, split along racial and age lines. The white, educated suffragettes were divided into various warring factions among the older women who wanted to work within the system as good liberal Democrats, and the more radical younger women who advocated activism against anyone who failed to support the. Furthermore, the white women were asking black women to march in the back of their parades, so as not to antagonize the racial separatists, because they needed every supporter they could get.

This story is told with a clear, simple narrative, so that the issues and personalities are clear. Your reaction to the movie will hinge entirely on your interest in the topic. If you wonder about the struggles women had to go through to get the vote, a right which is universally recognized today, but was highly controversial only 80 years ago, or if you are interested in American politics and history, Iron Jawed Angels is a painless and moderately entertaining way to learn all about the matter. If you are studying this topic in school, you should by all means watch this movie, since it will enable you to understand the topic on an emotional level and in context, rather than as dry facts written in a textbook. Many of us alive today can remember the great struggles which black people have faced since WW2, and the great victories which they have won, but there is virtually nobody still alive who can recall the passage of the women's suffrage amendment, so this is one way to get "inside" of the history. I found it fascinating and edifying. Iron Jawed Angels is, as always from HBO, a handsomely mounted production.

If the topic does not interest you, my advice is to skip it. Although I found it interesting, you probably will not. It's basically an "educational" film, gussied up with a few cheesy moments of romance and fluff. There is no action. There is minimal plot development and virtually no dramatic conflict, since you know how it all came out. The film basically consists of people long dead talking about issues long since resolved, and the character development is not deep enough to carry the film as a stand-alone work of entertainment.

• Vera Farmiga

• Frances O'Connor

• Jolene Carroll. I can't believe they made this chubby old gal do a nude scene.

Ghost Story was originally a layered best selling horror novel by Stephen King's friend and sometime collaborator, Peter Straub. I read it. Pretty spooky stuff which centered on a race of shape-shifters who live among us. It is quite lovecraftian in its use of isolated New England settings as the battleground for the war between us, johnny-come-lately human beings, and them, an older race embodying what would be unspeakable blasphemies in terms of our Christian mythos. Most frightening of all, they represent an eternal evil which cannot be completely eradicated.

For reasons which I cannot fathom, Universal paid to acquire the rights to Straub's terrifying novel, then ignored it. The book and the film have little in common except a title and some character names.

So what is the film about?

Well sir, it seems that a bunch of old codgers in this New England have a terrible secret. Fifty years ago, in a moment of drunken bickering, they accidentally killed a mysterious foreign women whom they were all sweet on. Panicking, they disposed of her body by pushing her car to the bottom of a pond. There was no reason for them to panic, because the other locals quickly lost interest in the woman's disappearance. She, however, did not take death lying down. Her corpse may have been in that waterlogged car, but her spirit continued to roam the earth. In ghastly form, she continued to haunt the old geezers and their offspring.

Well, to tell you the truth, the son was only there for plot exposition. He continues to ask the old guys if they know something about this women, and they gradually spin their "Ghost Story." In order to reveal the mystery at the appropriate pace, time switches back and forth between the events surrounding her death and the present day.

Blah. blah, yadda, yadda.

It's basically a scareless movie with a facile and too-sudden resolution which will leave you thinking. "That's it? That's all they had to do to defeat her? Meh." Instead of winning a temporary respite from timeless shape-shifting evil, they defeated her soundly by simply opening a car door and exposing her corpse to the light. That's it. End of movie. Done in by the dreaded, feared open car door!

The best part of the movie, at least as far as I was concerned, was the exquisite elegance of the woman, as played by the Borg Queen herself, Alice Krige, as the epitome of cold, sexy beauty, sort of a South African version of Catherine Deneuve.

The film does have an interesting cast. The four doddering old windbags are played by Melvyn Douglas, Fred Astaire, Doug Fairbanks, and John Houseman, so you'll get a chance to see how some of the great screen figures aged. This was Douglas's last movie.

• Alice Krige (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)

Other Crap:

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

Click here to submit a URL for Other Crap

MOVIE REVIEWS:

Words from Scoop.

.avi's from Shiloh.

.wmv files made by Scoop from Shiloh's .avi's.

NOTE: because of a unique combination of circumstances with the Windows media player and some substantial bandwidth theft, we will have to do all of our movie files in zip format. Left click on the files as you normally would to view a picture. When you get a choice, click on "save", and put it on your hard drive in the directory of your choice. UnZIP and play from there.

I know this is not especially convenient, but it allows the film clips to continue. I can protect .zip files from hot-linking in the same way I can protect still images. For some reason, if I protect .avis and .wmvs from hot-linking, they will not play in the Windows media player, and I can't get a satisfactory work-around. Perhaps I will find a better solution, but for now this new policy allows you to continue getting the movie clips you want to see, which is much preferable to my abandoning the clips altogether.

Perhaps these tips will help if you have trouble with the codecs for these movies:

Shiloh says:

FYI when I hypercam vids to make the file size smaller I use DivX MPEG-4 Fast-Motion for the video compressor, then I use virtualdub to compress the audio. The properties for the vids says the video codec:  DivX Decoder Filter & audio codec:  Morgan Stream Switcher which I'm not familiar with. When I compress the audio with virtualdub I use MPEG Layer-3.  A friend of mine told me about compressing the audio about (6) mos. ago. Like I said previously, only been capping for a year & a half & I'm no expert. Hopefully this info will help members with the proper codecs for my vids.

 

When I cap big brother's I use hypercam mostly & sdp & asfrecorder if the set up allows me. I stopped using camtasia cause the file sizes were always too big, could never figure out the process, over my head lol, plus it cost too much to buy in my opinion.

A reader says:

You mentioned that some users were having trouble with the videos on your site. There is a tool designed to determine what codec is needed for a video. http://www.headbands.com/gspot/ Hope this is useful to you or your users.

Scoop says:

I made the .wmv versions of each video. The codecs for these: Windows Video V8, Windows Audio 9. The upside of these is that you know the codecs, and they'll play in the Windows Media Player. The downside is that they are slightly larger, and slightly lower quality.

A real quick one today. Bonnie-Jill Laflin is a former Miss Dallas-Fort Worth, a former Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader, a current Coors Light model and now an ESPN reporter-type person. Gal's made it big. Posed nekkid a lot, too. The Hefmag, for one. And an online source or two, plus an anti-rodeo poster for PETA (arms across the boobs, daisy dukes below with a caption that read, "No one likes an 8-second ride." Truer words ne'er written).

So Bonnie-Jill did a little topless work for a disk called H2OOOH. All the gals were shot in or near water, ya see. That's the H2 part, and they're all supposed to leave you saying "Oooooh." Reminds me of a Monty Python skit. But then most things do. Anyway, here she is, Bonnie-Jill, Renaissance Woman, showing off a spectacular mouth and other nice features.

• Bonnie-Jill Laflin (1, 2, 3)

Odds n' ends from the Ghost today....

First up, the second half of his coverage from the 1993 Richard Grieco movie "Tomcat: Dangerous Desires".

• Former Bond babe Maryam d'Abo (The Living Daylights) looking pretty darn good topless in this love scene. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
• Maryam d'Abo zipped .wmv

Other assorted video clips...

• Ione Skye (zipped .wmvs) topless in a love scene from the indie film, "Gas Food Lodging" (1992) (1, 2)

• Zipped .wmv video clips of Skinemax regular Regina Russell in "Passion's Obsession" (2000). Toplessness in #1, breasts, bush and pseudo-sex in #2, toplessness and more pseudo-sex in #3. (1, 2, 3)

"Ski School" (1991)
Sex comedy filmed in Canada finally released to DVD although the quality of the video transfer is abysmal and there are no extra features.

• Charlie Spradling: underwear, partial breast.
• Former Heffer Ava Fabian: topless in sex scene.
• Darlene Vogel: topless in sex scene.
• Alison Dobie: bikini as the one-liner "ooh dave girl".
• Stacy Brink: bikini as the half-naked woman.
• various: (1, 2, 3, 4) mostly topless Canadian bit actresses but Carrie Genzel kept her clothes on.

"Hide and Seek" (2000)
Very dark drama about a deranged couple (Jennifer Tilly and Brown Bunny director Vincent Gallo) who kidnap a pregnant woman (Daryl Hannah) and chain her to a bed so they can have her baby. This movie is highly recommended for scoopsters wanting to build up an immunity before watching Vincent Gallo get himself fellated in The Brown Bunny.

• Daryl Hannah: just tied up.
• Jennifer Tilly: pokies.

"Wedding Night" (2002) aka "Nuit de noces"
French-Canadian romance comedy.

• Genevieve Brouillette: cleavage, fully clothed sex.
• Catherine Florent: partial breasts.
• Diane Lavallee: tight sweater.
• Sonia Vachon: cleavage
• motorcycle mama: sexy.

PLAYBOY SEEKS WOMEN OF McDONALD'S
Hey, They Found Dorothy Stratton At Dairy Queen - Playboy.com is seeking women for a nude pictorial on the "Women of McDonald's." They say they want McDonald's sexiest employees "to serve a little shake with their fries." Editor John Thomas said they approach big companies because there's a bigger likelihood of finding a "girl next door" with the potential to be a model, and they pick unexpected ones like Home Depot or McDonald's because "you don't think of their employees appearing in Playboy."