Charlie's site (French Cinema) is updated

I just happened to stumble into an old copy of this. The quality of the tape precluded doing many captures, but I thought I'd mention it. (RDO did some good captures, which are in the encyclopedia)

Nude scenes from three different women: Lori Singer, Alexandra Paul, Sandra Wild. All three actresses got naked, but in the case of Paul and Singer, the scenes were cut tastefully to avoid pubic exposure. In fact, Singer got up from one energetic love scene where the lovers were obviously in the later stages of intercourse, the director cut away too slowly, and you could see that she was wearing a thong!

As for the movie, well, let me tell you. In the Olympics they won't let a 150 pound man wrestle against a 170 pound man because it just isn't a fair match. But in the movies, one drunken stumblebum private eye armed with a BB gun can overcome all of the following:

1. Several corrupt INS officials

2. The Mexican border federales.

3. The world's richest man and several doctors, who are running a scam to use illegal immigrants as unwilling heart and liver donors.

4. The world's richest man's connections, which "go so high up the ladder God can't see the top"

5. Thugs who look like a cross between Dolph Lundgren and Andre the Giant, and are better armed than the Iraqi army.

6. Treacherous girlfriends.

7. Incompetent associates.

8. Sarcastic bartenders.

Yes, a very realistic movie.

Stacy Keach plays, or maybe I should say overplays, the world's richest man, and he says that ripping hearts out of living victims is OK because:

* They are doing it for a good cause, to give the gift of life to senior members of the Republican Party and other equally important members of society.

* The Aztecs did it, and these victims are descended from the Aztecs, so they're kinda culturally prepared for it.

OK, fair enough. I was having some problem with it, but then when he explained the Aztec thing, I could relate to it. I think I've pointed out that in an earlier life I was an Aztec. In fact, I still hold the Aztec record for finishing second in the Aztec games for 32 consecutive years.

In a bizarre example of reverse genetic engineering, the Aztecs would rip out the hearts of the winners, since only the finest specimens were adequate propitiation for the Gods.

I remember giving many a heartfelt interview with Shirley Maclaine, when she was a reporter for the Aztec Times, in which I apologized to my fans and those who bet on me, explained that I couldn't fathom how I blew a 40 yard lead in the 100 yard dash, and promised to train much harder for the next year's games, because I was really looking forward to having my heart ripped out so I could join those gods.

IMDB summary: 3.9 out of 10. It's bad, but probably not that bad. That incredibly bad Minnie Driver in the desert movie, "Slow Burn", is rated 5.8. The Demi Moore with two lives movie, "Passion of Mind", is rated 5.3. And the very bad thing called "Very Bad Things" is 5.8. So the marker territory for bad movies is in the 5's, and this one is in the same league as those turkeys. The 3's are reserved for very special people, like Ed Wood (his three most famous movies are all about 3.3), and John Derek (between 2.7 and 3.1).

VHS info from Amazon. Not available on DVD. Not recommended, in either case, except for nudity.

As I promised, I read "The Forbidden", Clive's Barker's short story which formed the basis for Candyman. As usually happens when you check the written source material, the problems in the movie plot were NOT present in the original story.

To refresh your memory, there are two major flaws in the plot of Candyman:

1. THE MOVIE: Candyman starts killing people again to bring back the fear and belief that people used to have in the Candyman legend. But then he sets up Helen to take the fall for the crime, thus assuring that everyone in the world will think there is no Candyman, and that she is the killer - exactly the opposite of what he said he wanted.

THE STORY: This doesn't happen in the story. Candyman kills, Candyman wants the blame, because he wants people to believe in him and fear him.

2. THE MOVIE: Candyman has to babysit an infant for 30 days while Helen is in the prison psychiatric hospital.

THE STORY: Needless to say, this doesn't happen in the short story. Candyman simply kills the infant - simple, direct, evil - exactly what you'd expect from him.

The details in the story are more gruesome, of courzs, but they also follow the correct internal logic, and are fully consistent with the motivations of the characters.

By the way, all the background story- educated black son of a slave, killed by white guys because he dared to love a white woman - was fabricated for the movie. In the story he has no special grounding in reality. He's simply a legend with a hook-hand and a chest full of bees. In this case, however, I think the romance of the movie story was a bona fide cinematic twist, a good artistic liberty, and explained his presence at Cabrini Green.

I don't really recommend "The Essential Clive Barker", by the way, unless you are a rabid Clive Barker fan. It's more of a scholarly treatise, an exercise in self-analysis written by Barker about Barker. He defends his points with excerpts from his books. This is interesting, but it was very hard for me to get involved with the excerpts. And if I did? They ended, and Barker was moving on to another point, leaving me to wonder what happened. Only four short stories are printed in their entirety. I'll end up finishing the book someday, but not now. The lure just isn't as strong as if I were involved in a story.

Powerful themes and great acting are sometimes not enough when marred by heavy-handed execution.

Sigourney Weaver is a Wisconsin housewife who babysits her girlfriend's daughters one day, and one of the girls drowns in the pond.

She can't cope. Of course, the town gradually turns against her, as much for her strange behavior after the incident as for the incident itself.

But worse, she's a school nurse, and she ends up going to jail when accused of abusing another child, because her farmer husband can't raise the enormous bail. And the husband has to run his farm while he single-handedly raises two little girls, because nobody in the town will assist a child abuser. And of course, the townspeople spit on him and paint hateful graffiti on his farmhouse. And the real criminals in jail look down on her, because they think she's a child abuser.

So, they're really having a bad hair day.

Then her farm suffers from three biblical plagues, her husband runs off with a cheerleader, and she and her children are sodomized by runaway insane AIDS victims. And then she is led into the Pentagon war room, sees that button which starts a nuclear attack, and OOPS! - she causes the end of the world! OK, none of that last part happened, but do you take my point? She's hit bottom. The bottom of the bottom. The point at which drama becomes melodrama, and pathos becomes bathos.

The Sigourney Weaver character is both highly complex and quite unlikeable. If you watch the critical scenes a second time, you'll see that her own self-absorption really did cause the death of the little girl in her pond. While the toddlers were unattended, she stopped to daydream about a painting she had made when she was a child - the famous "Map of the World". If she had not done that while looking for a bathing suit, she might have saved the girl. When her self-sacrificing husband comes to visit her in prison, she wants to talk about her spiritual growth and the books she's been reading instead of asking about him, her friends, and her children.

This is complex character development, to be sure, but it makes it difficult to feel the emotions you're meant to feel when the sappy background music strikes the appropriate chords.

The movie is about how it all gets resolved. The film has plenty of strengths, to be sure, but these strong themes surely presented a big challenge for a rookie director and, in my opinion, it could have used a subtler touch. Especially the background score.

Box office: one half million dollars, on a very limited distribution scale. Not the kind of movie designed to appeal to the mainstream young, male entertainment-seeking moviegoer.

Awards: No Oscar nominations, but the writers were nominated for some smaller awards for best screen play adapted from another medium, and both Sigourney Weaver and Julianne Moore were nominated for various acting honors.

Consensus: about two and a half stars on the average, but the reviews were sharply polarized. For example, Ebert gave it a sparkling three and a half stars. Berardinelli gave it a dismal two. And you could justify either of those ratings just as easily. Perhaps one individual could see it both ways on two different days, depending on one's own mood.

The movie features a great deal of nudity from Sigourney Weaver (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) and David Straithairn.

IMDB summary: 6.8 out of 10.

Rotten Tomatoes summary. 57% positive, and 67% from the top critics.

DVD info from Amazon. There is no special feature of great merit on the DVD, but the print is a good one, and the aspect ratio is 16:9.

Determined to clean up the city, and especially its port, the city council decided to create an area for the prostitutes on the outskirts of town. Actually, it was just behind the French Quarter, and became known as Storyville, after Alderman Sidney Story, one of the main supporters of the plan. At it's peak, Storyville boasted 2,000 prostitutes in 16 square blocks. There were two main varieties of establishments, cribs and mansions. The cribs were small rooms with a bed and a washstand used be the affordable women. (See the tops of unknowns 1 and 2). The mansions (see top of unknown 3) were run by madams, and counted nearly every man of position and/or wealth in New Orleans among their customers. Many had specialties. Probably the best known was Lulu White, who put on a specialty show with one of her young female employees and a dog. (See images below).

In addition to the easy sin of every variety, Storyville became the home of a new and socially unacceptable new music called jazz. Two of the more famous musicians to come out of Storyville were Louis Armstrong, and Ferdenand Lemont, better known as Jelly Roll Morton, the Windin' Boy. Every "mansion" had a piano player (called professor), and the patrons enjoyed fancy meals, dancing, and then went upstairs.

Storyville thrived 'til WW1. They wanted to draft every able-bodied young man, but one of every two had VD. The solution? Close Storyville. So, in 1917, the War Department made it illegal for a prostitute to be within 5 miles of a military installation. Not everyone left without a fight. Lulu White converted her place to a chicken restaurant, where the Creole waitresses were also on the menu, and provided most of the profit. Even Lulu could not hold out forever, and Storyville was eventually demolished and housing put in its place.

This DVD is essentially a series of still images from the era, with narration by historians and people who actually worked in Storyville. As one of the narrators said, "You want to find out sumpin, you don't need no book. Find you an old person. They tell you." The narration is fascinating. VD was very prevalent and incurable (see graveyard in unknown 1). The women often got pregnant. The children were called "Trick Babies," and lived in the attics of the mansions. Remember this is the Victorian era, where Ladies were for marrying, and didn't have any sexuality. Women who liked sex were already whores, and other occupations for women were not very attractive. With the advent of the flapper, the "working girls" had serious competition. The rare photos are not only explicit, but give a real feeling for the era. The music is all early jazz, and was a total delight for me. The running time is 60 minutes. I suspect you have already made a rent/buy/ignore decision by now.

A: The New Orleans Saints

A: An anorexic.

A: A thief.

A: Soldier Field. They never get a touchdown there.

A: He saw "911" on the side and thought it was a Porsche