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3 Blind Mice (2003):
London. A guy witnesses a live murder on a web cam. He tries to
call the police, but during the call he realizes that he has no
idea who the victim really is, or where she lives, so his call has
been futile. He hangs up without identifying himself. The police
trace those Emergency calls, of course, and show up at his house,
since he is either their only witness or a suspect.
This idea might have germinated a great movie. This is not that
movie. In fact, this is so far from being that movie that it is
difficult to find anything positive to say about it.
- The cinematography seems to have been done by the same guy
who did the Rob Lowe sex tape. Half of it is dark and
indecipherable. The other half consists of screen grabs of
grainy web cams.
- The story line is about as coherent as in the film the
stowaways made on Gilligan's Island. The stowaways, however,
did a better job of editing.
- The action scenes are bungled. Characters fall out of
frame; dialogue is garbled; bullets hit body parts in close-up
so that the identity of the victim can't be determined; a
large, violent, armed man has difficulty escaping from an
unarmed Edward Furlong.
- The technology pictured in the film does not exist. The
magic cam, which can follow characters no matter where they
go, is the same imaginary technology George Burns used to
watch Connie Stevens on "Wendy and Me." People watch other
people from a 45 degree overhead angle no matter where they
go. If a character walks along a Paris boulevard, somebody
will be watching him on a web cam just ahead of him and just
above his head, as if he had stayed in his apartment. One must
wonder where, exactly, that camera is positioned. Maybe on a
satellite with a really good zoom lens. That's only one
example of the technological misconceptions. The characters
have dial-up connections, for example, that work about a
thousand times faster than broadband. They connect to
fully-loaded web sites as quickly as you and I can get a new
channel with the TV remote. Wireless web cams are placed just
about everywhere in London, and they all run on
super-batteries with an infinite life.
- The characters have to behave stupidly in service of the
illogical plot. Edward Furlong in London at the time the woman
was being murdered in Amsterdam. The police can determine he
was on his desktop PC at the time, because they confiscated
his hard drive and can monitor many of his activities during
the previous night, just as they could from your hard drive or
mine. The computer keeps track of when e-mails are sent, when
files are saved or deleted, and so forth. Even streaming video
would leave records in temporary files. Because the police
always accuse the protagonist in plots like this, thus
requiring him to prove his innocence, the police accuse him of
the logistically impossible murder, and want to hold him until
a sympathetic female cyber-detective has "a gut feeling" that
he's innocent. The saddest part is that the coppers really
believe that he did it! This might have made for a compelling
(if clichéd) plot line - IF he hadn't left a trail of evidence
so obvious that any fairly technical eighth grader could
easily have determined that he really was at his desk in
London, just from his hard drive alone.
- The continuity is non-existent. One e-mail message says:
"She knows that man I met in the Jaguar." When the character
reads it in close-up, it says, "She knows that man I met in
the Rolls."
- The acting is below the level of a decent summer stock
company. Apparently they could not find an American actor to
play Furlong's brother, so they cast a Londoner who does the
worst American accent since Monty Python's Graham Chapman.
(And Chapman was doing it poorly on purpose, for comic
effect.) The brother sounds like a Bulgarian who learned how
to speak English in a lower-class Dublin neighborhood. I was
wondering how such a thing could have happened in a
professional film until I noticed that the director was
French. Obviously he couldn't hear the problem, any more than
I would know whether a German speaker was really Bavarian or a
man from Saxony mocking a Bavarian accent.
- Because of the editing, technical, scripting, acting, and
continuity errors, the audience is left dumbfounded by the
plot in general, but that level of confusion wasn't quite high
enough for the film's creators. After every situation seems to
have been resolved, or at least to the best of our ability to
comprehend the labyrinthine goings-on, the script tacks on two
more of those "endings after the ending" with additional plot
twists which are even more anfractuous than the main plot, and
which are left unresolved and unexplained as the credits roll.
- The Region 1 DVD has a full screen transfer of the film.
Period.
In other words, you don't want to watch this DVD. You don't
even want to watch it for Emilia Fox's nudity, which is spoiled by
the cinematography because it's either too dark or pictured on a
web-cam enlargement.
F. Utter rubbish, as they say in the U.K.
Not a single redeeming element. (Although Emilia's nudity would be
excellent if it were shown properly.)
It is rated a dismal, but still incomprehensibly high, 4.3 at
IMDb. I would have expected it to be around 3.0, based on films of
similar quality. It's not quite bad enough to join the exclusive
neighborhood of the all-time Bottom 100, but resides in an
apartment close enough to use their school system.
Third party videos:
That Virginia Madsen is one sexy
woman! Here is a great non-nude (but very close) sequence from a
forgotten TV movie
called A Murderous Affair: The Carolyn Warmus Story.
Zipped .avi
here, capture follows:
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| Virginia Madsen |
TV star Charisma Carpenter got
nekkid earlier this year for a TV movie called Flirting with
Danger. She kept her massive cans covered, but she showed off a
very impressive and firm tushy. Here's
two
.avis zipped together. Two sample captures are below:
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| Charisma Carpenter |
We saw Hilary Swank in The Black Dahlia the
other day. Here's the rest of the nudity from the new De Palma
film. (Movie House
Review). The blonde is Jemma Rooper.
The brunette, of course, is Mia Kirshner,
who is no stranger to this page. Here is the (zipped
.avi), the captures follow:
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| Jemma Rooper |
Mia Kirshner |
Elizabeth McGovern in an episode
of Women and Men (zipped
.avi). It's a VHS clip of limited quality, but it is
definitely, as Borat would say, "N-i-i-i-ce!"
This is the first time I've seen the actual film clip of
Fairuza Balk in Tollbooth. She came up with some serious craziness
in this film. (Zipped
.avi) This is a VHS clip. So far as I know, the film has never
been issued on DVD.
I really liked Kiss the Sky (Movie
House Review), a drama about ex-radical baby boomers longing
for their youthful idealism. Tuna, and pretty much everyone else,
disliked it. Nobody disliked Sheryl Lee's
nudity. (Five .avis
zipped together)
OTHER CRAP:
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Paperback Cover Artwork
Collection:
"Covers of paperbacks published from the early
1960s into the mid-1970s "
Weekend Box Office
Results for September 22–24: The jackasses
save the day.
- Jackass Two took in
a very solid $28 million. You can assume
that there will be many more sequels to
Jackass if these guys can manage to stay
alive, because this one will gross $70-90
million and the production budget was only
about $11-12 million. Compare that to
Flyboys, which will gross about $20 million
from a $60 million budget, or All The King's
Men, which won't gross enough to buy a
toaster.
- The weekend was
still down 7% versus last year, but that's
only because last year was an exceptionally
lively week. This week was actually up 30%
from last weekend, which is undoubtedly
quite gratifying for worried studio execs.
Rice surprises FSU by
showing up for a second straight game
- After their
disappointing 52-7 loss to Texas, the Owls
turned it up a notch and lost 55-7 to the
Seminoles.
- How did they avoid
putting Ohio State on their schedule?
Zambrano does it again -
another win, another homer
- He's the first
National Leaguer to hit homers in five of
his own wins since Don Drysdale in 1965
- With a 16-6 record
for a bad team, and weighing in at 255
pounds, he's a bona fide candidate for two
major pitching awards: the Cy Young award,
which is given to the best pitcher, and the
Jumbo Brown award, which is given to the
largest.
- Jumbo, a journeyman
reliever who played most of his career in
the 30s, was 6'4", 295, and was the heaviest
man ever to play in the majors until the
Orioles fielded a 322 pounder named Walter
Young last year. However, it must be noted
that Cecil Fielder is listed at 240. Cecil's
son Prince is three inches shorter and
admits to 265. I'm guessing that the old man
was up to three bills before he finally
retired.
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Movie Reviews:
Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe). White asterisk: expanded format.
Blue asterisk: not mine. No asterisk: it probably sucks.
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Mari-Cookie and the Killer Tarantula in Eight Legs to Love You (1998)
Mari-Cookie takes place in Malaga, Spain, although we must go back 200
years for the start of the story. A pregnant woman is brutally raped by a
soldier, and, while she is lying there, exhausted and still spread-legged, a
tarantula finds a great warm, moist place to lay eggs. Cut to present day, and
someone is abducting young men and women. A female cop (Michelle Bauer), who
interrogates witnesses with advanced lesbotronic techniques, suspects "The
Tarantula," although she doesn't know who that is. Society woman Linnea
Quigley is no help, nor is Mari-Cookie, played by Lena Romay. We know that
Lena is also a club owner and also performs as "Tarantula." (This is a farce,
and was clearly intended to be so.) Eventually, with an assist from Quigley's
horny daughter (Amber Newman), they all discover the truth.
Lena, the director's girlfriend and then at least 44 years old, plays a dual role and gets the lion's
share of the screen time as well as the nudity. Mavi Tiendo serves as a victim. Analia Ivars dances
in another club and her character shares the cop's sexual tendencies. Many of
you have already already guessed that we are in Jess Franco territory. Many
people claim to love making movies. With Jess, it is literally his life. The
thing is, it is only important to Jess that he is making a movie. He is not
concerned about public acceptance, and only moderately concerned about whether
or not it is any good, although he is capable of excellent achievements and
has pioneered some effects.
IMDb readers say 3.4. I would imagine they found it stupid and pointless
with a throw-away plot and bad dubbing. If they are going to let little things
like that bother them, they have no business watching a Jess Franco film.
Although this film is not one of those his excellent achievements I mentioned,
Franco still manages to create some entertainment. He gets a lot of
women undressed and he and his band even provide the sound track. If you are
looking for plot, pace, symbolism and the like, look elsewhere. If you want to
laugh a lot at mature naked women in ridiculous situations, give this one a try.
The genre is nudie comedies, and this is a C.
Linnea Quigley stays dressed in the film, but makes up for it in her all-nude commentary
featurette!
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