Friday

  • French Cinema Nudity is updated

Huevos de Oro

Bigas Luna has made a career out of odd films, and this is no exception to the rule. In terms of visuals it has kind of an Almodovar meets Salvador Dali meets Russ Meyer kind of thing going on, combining colorful and flamboyant locales with surrealistic dreams and breasts. In terms of source material, it's a blend of Scarface, Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, and the Sydney Sheldon novel of your choice. Layered on top of all of that are the type of obsessive and quirky characterizations one might find in a Pewter Greenaway movie, with a leading man who has to have a woman of precisely the correct weight, and gets off on drawing geometric patterns on his women.

I know those things don't really go together, but Luna does not know that, which is what makes him a unique filmmaker.

As in Scarface, a working class guy seems to have an impossibly big dream. He wants to be the biggest developer in Spain and to build its tallest skyscraper. Never mind that he's an uncultured boor doing military service in Africa and knows nothing about either business or architecture. He has one very important talent - women like him. A lot. The name of the film is "Golden Balls," and that reflects the fact that he turns his testicles into success. An aspiring model/actress (Maribel Verdu) is so in love with him that she's willing to sleep with important clients and bankers to advance his career. He has such a complete hold on her that he calculates correctly that she will continue to serve him if he marries another woman, so he marries yet another woman who can help his career, the daughter (Maria de Medieros) of a big-time banker. You'd think his world would start to collapse when his wife and mistress find out about the arrangements, but it turns out that they are soulmates, and fall in love with one another, while also continuing to have sex with him, sometimes in a threesome.  At this point, he has everything a man could want. Starting with no education nor money nor family connections, he has achieved power and wealth and has two great women who love him and agree to share him.

Now he is finally cruising for a fall, and that's what the rest of the film is about. He loses his mistress in an automobile crash, and also loses his manhood in the accident. Without his golden balls, he is nothing. Trying to recapture his studly mojo, he tries to replace the mistress with a hot floozy (Raquel Bianca), thinking his wife will also accept her as a replacement in their threesome. The wife finds this idea ludicrous, and divorces him. He then loses the financing for his buildings, and loses his best friend in an industrial accident. He ends up living in Miami with the floozy in a run-down little house, but he can't even hold on to her because of his impotence, so she ends up having an affair with their gardener (Benicio del Toro!!). To add insult to injury, the floozy is actually paying the gardener to give her a good hearty rogering from time to time. The second half of the movie ends up just as the first half did - with a sexual threesome, but this time it is Bardem sitting and watching, impotent and helpless, while the gardener pleasures his woman - and gets paid for it.

The end.

That plot summary only reflects the Sydney Sheldon and Ayn Rand portions of the film's influences. You probably realize that the plot above is the essence of every book by Sydney Sheldon (not to mention Arthur Hailey and Harold Robbins), but if you also noticed a close kinship to Rand's The Fountainhead, give yourself an "A" for remembering your freshman "Survey of Literature" class. But all that is merely plotting, and that alone doesn't really convey the flavor of the film. The path to the end of the story is nowhere near as straightforward as I've led you to believe. Along the way are 15 minutes of sex scenes, karaoke to Julio Iglesias songs, surrealistic dream sequences, fey men prancing about in small bathing suits, all sorts of obsessive talks about Rolex watches, smells, and women's precise weights. Plus plenty of over-the-top symbolism playing on the whole correlation between his erections and his ... other erections.

One of the sex scenes would have involved some graphic cunnilingus -  except that Bardem couldn't stop talking about business deals long enough to concentrate on Maribel Verdu's honeypot. Of course that seems normal compared to another scene where Bardem watched his wife and his mistress copulate, interrupting their passion to ask his wife if his beige shirt was ironed for his trip the next day.

As I indicated at the beginning of this essay, it's odd stuff. One thing you can grant to writer/director Bigas Luna is that he is unique. Golden Balls is so exaggerated and so far from real life that it's not even possible to determine whether it is supposed to be a morality play structured like a Sheldon-style melodrama or whether it is a dark parody of that kind of movie.

Actually, I'm not sure it really matters. Any movie with Maribel Verdu naked for five minutes at a time is OK by me.

Hall of Fame nudity in general.

Collages tomorrow. Film clips today.

Bug

I already covered this

Here are some better caps from this film clip from a Russian DVD. At least this time the DVD producers dubbed OVER the English, instead of having the Russian and English spoken simultaneously.

 

 

* Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe).

* White asterisk: expanded format.

* Blue asterisk: not mine.

No asterisk: it probably sucks.

OTHER CRAP:

Catch the deluxe version of Other Crap in real time, with all the bells and whistles, here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Naked and Betrayed

 (2004)

Naked and Betrayed is an erotic whodunit. Mandy Fisher and Tucker Caine are to be married at a plush resort, and arrive early with a few best friends, including the best man (Barrett Blade), the matron of honor (Julian Wells), and a married couple (Frank Harper and Gina Ryder) who are taking a short break from their political campaign. The guys hold a stag party with stripper August. The groom wakes up in the morning next to her corpse. Everyone initially assumes that he screwed and killed her, but there will be many sexual pairings and twists and turns before sorting everything out.

The plot is a little better than genre norms, the nudity is fine, and the camera work is very good, but the sex is tepid at best.

Call it a C on average - a good genre film, not a classic.

 Naked and Betrayed

It is only available in the US from RLDVDs.com on a dual region (1 and 4) DVD in English with Spanish subtitles. You know the drill. Click on the pic for more info.

Mandy Fisher, Gina Ryder and Julian Wells show everything. August shows breasts and buns.

 

Mandy Fisher

 

 

Gina Ryder

 

 

Julian Wells

 

 

August

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Dance With Death

Today we have Barbara Alyn Woods, who plays a reporter who goes undercover (or should I say uncovered) to catch a killer who is knocking off the dancers at a strip club. You can get the idea from there as Barbara stripteases her way through the movie.

 

 

 

 

 

Notes and collages

"Charmed"

Shannen Doherty, Season 2, Episode 1

 

For those of you who have been missing my "series" collages, I have bought the entire TV series "Charmed" on DVD. (Ms. Milano is taboo for legal reasons) but the TV series is full of beautiful women in tight clothing and I will be sharing collages of them with you. (For you collectors...the file names will list the shows by season and episode.)

 

 

 

 

 

It's a Boy/Girl Thing


Remember that movie were 2 people can't stand each other and they wish the other one was in their shoes and the next day they exchange bodies?

Well they made another one.

This time it's two neighbors, the Geek Girl (Samaire Armstrong) and the Popular Boy (Kevin Zegers). The movie plays out lots of possiblesituations something like this could cause, like the boy waking with a boner and the girl in the showers. There is some nice nudity and some not so nice, but that was made for laughs. Of course the two of them end up together in the end, so they went with the popular ending.
 

Brooke D'Orsay

 

Samaire Armstrong

 

Uncredited

 

 

 

 

 

 

Segundo Asalto

 

Eva Marcial

 

 

Laura Aparacio

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A film clip of Heather Graham in Broken. The nudity is mostly wishful thinking, except for Jeremy Sisto's ass.
A film clip of Olga Sekulic in Virilite. No idea who she is, but it's some nice full frontal nudity.

Charlotte Rampling in Purple Taxi

 

Sienna Miller was photographed by paparazzi while she was filming an outdoor nude scene for a movie called Hippie Hippie Shake

 

 

 

 

 

 


The Comedy Wire

Comments in yellow...

 
A couple in York, Pennsylvania, broke up after seven months and went to court to see if their wedding performed by a friend who was ordained over the Internet was even legal. The judge sparked a major brouhaha by ruling that such marriages aren't valid.  The Universal Life Church Monastery, which ordains ministers over the Net, plans to challenge the ruling, but state officials are warning couples not to file such marriages.  Dorie Heyer, the Windsor Township bride who brought the case, said that ordaining ministers over the Internet "makes a mockery out of the whole marriage system."

*  You can always spot an Internet-ordained minister: after he tells the groom to kiss the bride, he tries to sell him Viagra. 



Vassilly Kovalchuk of Kiev, Ukraine, was arrested after he used the wrong toilet at the toilet museum.  The museum, which traces the entire history of the toilet, from a hole in the ground to the toilets of the future, just opened last week, and Kovalchuk said he didn't realize that the toilets were "only to look at."  After he relieved himself, he was told visitors are supposed to use the public toilets on the street outside.  The museum has now added "Not for Use" signs to their displays. Kovalchuk said he apologized, then "I told them I want my money back." 

*  He chose a "toilet of the future," so technically, he hasn't used it yet. 



At the Frankfurt Motor Show, Toyota launched a new appeal to environmentalist consumers by unveiling the prototype of the "IQ," the world's smallest four-seater micro-car.  It's shaped a bit like a rolling jelly bean and is three inches shorter than a Mini Cooper.  But it might be cheating a bit to call it a "four-seater": officially, it holds
three adults and a small child, but the seats can be reconfigured to hold two people.

*  Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman. 
 


*  In her upcoming memoir, "Celebrity Detox," Rosie O'Donnell reveals that as a young girl, she used to break her own hands and fingers with a baseball bat.

* Then, she'd blame the government.