Two modest straight-to-vids today, but both quite competent, and both with some pretty decent nudity.

Keep Your Distance (2005)

This is a character-based thriller filmed entirely in Louisville, Kentucky.

I know that "character-based thriller" sounds like kind of a contradiction in terms, but it's not such a bad idea at all. On the surface there is a mystery, there are some red herrings here and there, and there are a few situations where people seem to threaten violence, but there is no actual violence at all and the resolution of the mystery is not really even part of the film's primary appeal.

"So it's a thriller that isn't thrilling? That must suck."

Amazingly not. The main characters are written well, as human beings rather than archetypes, and they are acted by the kind of performers adroit at unaffected realism. There are no gun-waving bad-asses and there's very little wild posturing. There's no role for Samuel L. Jackson or Christopher Walken. Gil Bellows and Jennifer Westfeldt are the leads, and they both do an excellent job at being "just folks" from the suburban middle class.

The two characters just happen to run into one another one day at Louisville Downs, and something motivates them to stay in touch even though they are both deeply involved with others. Westfeldt plays a hard-working sales rep who turns down a marriage proposal on DiamondVision at the track. As she races from the arena in mortification, the object of curiosity from everyone at the track who had just been booing her image on the giant screen, she is almost hit by a car. Bellows comes to the rescue. He plays a gentle, good-hearted local radio personality.

The actual mystery takes place in Bellows's life. He gets a mysterious letter, which includes a cryptic message and a hotel room key. It smells of his wife's perfume, so he buys some flowers and heads to the motel. His wife is there all right, but ... um ... she wasn't expecting him. The mystery of the film centers around the identity and motivation of the author of the cryptic note. The humanity of the film centers around the two separate storylines about the main characters' love relationships. The film follows the progress of Westfeldt's relationship with the man whose proposal she refused, as well as Bellows's relationship with his unfaithful wife. Westfeldt and Bellows help one another out, and trust one another's advice, because neither has any self-interest in the other's life, so their advice can be trusted to be objective.

More cryptic notes follow, but I never really cared much about who was sending them to Bellows or why. The element of the film that held my attention was the development of the male/female friendship between the two main characters, and that was strengthened by the fact that they are both nice people who seem to deserve better hands than life is dealing them. The audience is encouraged to wonder if they might eventually come together as lovers.

The writer/director filmed many, many different endings to the film, and they're all on the DVD, so I guess I can't really spoil anything. No matter what scenario you envision, it's probably in one of those endings!

From our perspective, the best thing about the erotic side of the movie is that the cheating wife's lover is another woman - and a very foxy topless one at that, sexy Jenny McShane, playing a brunette for the one and only time that I can recall.

Here's the film's official site: http://www.distanceflick.com/. The writer director put his heart and soul into this project, and you have to love his passion for the project. He was making promotional appearances across the entire USA from last August until this April, and he documented all his travels on the website.

Here's Jenny McShane's official site: http://www.jennymcshane.com/

Here's the film's IMDb page: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0337656/. It's a 5.5.

Keep Your Distance is not Citizen Kane, and has some problems, but that 5.5 rating could be a bit higher. Even though there aren't really any thrills and the mystery is not especially engaging, I just kicked back and enjoyed watching it because it includes some interesting characters performed well, I was interested in their fate, and the story unfolds in from of some attractive views of Louisville. It's a very solid straight-to-vid, and the DVD is a good one: a full-length commentary, lots of deleted scenes (including more McShane nudity), some outtakes, several alternate endings, and a "behind the scenes" featurette.

Jenny McShane in the film (zipped .wmv). This film clip includes two scenes, a lesbian encounter and a subsequent threesome. The threesome is very long, and has very little nudity. Having thus warned you off a big download, let me add that it is kinda hot, even though it gets called off before it ever gets started.

more Jenny McShane in the deleted scenes (zipped .wmv)

an unknown in the deleted scenes (she can be seen in the McShane film clip of deleted footage.)

 

Bad City (2004)

Bad City is another one that went straight to DVD. Well, more or less. I think it played in a few regional theaters under the name Dirty Work, or its even earlier title, Political Animal. It must have played somewhere in Chicago because Roger Ebert reviewed it, as did the reviewer from the Trib. Like Keep Your Distance, it is quite good for a straight-to-vid, but it could not be much different from Keep Your Distance. Where KYD is suburban and unthreatening, Bad City is dripping with urban menace. While KYD includes no violence, even from the armed people, Bad City implies that anyone could kill at any time. While the characters in KYD are all basically decent humans, even the antagonists, the characters in Bad City are all thoroughly corrupt, even the protagonists.

It's a very cynical Chicago crime drama. Two dirty cops are the closest the film comes to good guys. An assistant DA is running for the big job against his boss. He wants the two officers to solve a high-profile crime just before the election, and to give him the heads-up for the photo ops. He doesn't care if they really figure out who killed the murdered hooker, just that they solve it. The dutiful cops, always looking for an angle, figure that this could give them a DA in their pocket, so they round up one of the usual suspects, frame him, and lock him up. The same night they are caging their pigeon, the same assistant DA gets into a big fight with his alcoholic wife and kills her. Who does he call? The police? An ambulance? Ghostbusters? Not on your life. He calls his political consultant to plan the spin. The consultant does what I think any good consultant would do in this case, says "fuck spin, somebody else killed her, you are a grieving widower - your polls will go through the roof." The consultant advises his client to wrap his wife's body up, dump it in a slum somewhere, and make it look like it was done by someone else.

Done, and done.

Only one problem.

The DA makes it look like it was done by the same guy who killed the hooker. Unfortunately for him, the two cops were so efficient that they had already booked and locked up their patsy for that first crime at the time the assistant DA's wife became the second victim.

Oops.

You see the problem here? How does the DA get out of this one? His wife couldn't have been killed by that guy because he was locked up at the time of the murder. The DA can't admit that he framed the guy, and yet he can't very well blame him for the second, identical killing, and he can't blame a copycat because he duplicated details of the first killing which were never released to the public. Oh, he's in some deep doo-doo. So what's the plan? Well, you'll have to watch the movie to find that out. Meanwhile, you may remember that the guy in jail is just a patsy, and the real killer of the hooker is still out there. When the real baddie starts to fit into the plot, things get extremely complicated.

This isn't a film of earth-shattering significance, but I don't think you'll regret watching it if you get the chance. The director is quite competent, there is some offbeat casting, and there are some good performances. I especially liked Lance Reddick (of The Wire and CSI: Miami) as an intense, corrupt cop who really wants to be a good person, but is trapped in a bad situation of his own making. There are also plenty more sub-plots and twists that I haven't even touched on. My comments above don't spoil much of anything at all. In fact, I only described the set-up. It just keeps twisting, and people just keep trying to outmaneuver one another, so you shouldn't get bored!

 

Here's Meghan Maureen McDonough as the hooker who gets killed. Meghan Maureen McDonough? I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that her family is probably Irish. (Zipped .wmv)

 

 

Third party videos:

The Hunger is really not the greatest film I've ever seen. It fact, it's downright unpleasant, but ... well, it's difficult to complain about a lesbian love scene between Catherine Deneuve and a young Susan Sarandon. (Movie House Review) So the film has that goin' for it, plus it's a Tony Scott film which always means "lots of style." I wrote in my review: "He's really a talented director, and he really put a lot of thought and work into that. But I hated the sumbitch. Chiaroscuro lighting, meticulous storyboarding, beautiful cinematography, artistic genius ... unwatchable movie."

Anyway, here's Ann Magnuson (zipped .avi) and the Susan Sarandon / Catherine Deneuve duo (two .avis in one zip file).

OTHER CRAP:

Movie Reviews:

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

Marg Helgenberger shows breasts briefly in a sex scene with Michael Madsen

Natasha Henstridge is completely nude much of the time

 

 

Fanny Valette, La Petite Jerusalem

Elsa Zylberstein in La cloche a sonné

Elsa Zylberstein in La Petite Jeusalem

Lare Bottrell in Huff

Shoshannah Stern in an episode of Weeds