Take Me Naked (1996) is a film by Michael and Roberta Findlay, starring Roberta under the name Anna Riva. I have no idea what to call it other than a skin flick.

Complete Spoilers

The film opens with a derelict, just to set the mood. Cut to another derelict and drunk, who watches the woman across from him and recites bad poetry in voice over. He watches her undress, masturbate, then shower. Then she starts reciting bad poetry while we try to watch her through a lens covered with petroleum jelly having a lesbian encounter. Very few body parts were discernable during this half of the film. Then the man stabs a friend to death, and heads over to her apartment, fanaticizing that he is bringing her flowers. He is actually attacking her, and stabs her to death.

End Spoilers

Roberta stars in this film, which is not characteristic of their films. She usually does the photography. She shows breasts and buns. It is labeled horror at IMDb, and there are not enough votes for a score. This is one half of a Something Weird Video release, and is painful to watch and listen to. The video quality is poor to terrible, the camera work is mostly shaky cam and the petroleum jelly diffusion filter trick is way overdone. The audio is awful, and there really is no plot. This is a D- at best. I can't imagine any plausible excuse for watching this film.

Tony Scott is Ridley's younger brother. Although Ridley has won the lion's share of the post-season hardware, and has directed some of the most memorable films of the past few decades, Tony is actually the more stylish and practiced director.

Are you surprised that I said that? It is, like any opinion, debatable, but I feel quite confident that it is correct. Do I think Tony is a better director? Hell, no. Films speak for themselves.

Ridley's list is obviously more impressive. He has been nominated three times for the best director statuette (the three films with asterisks), and those aren't even his best films! Ridley's list can be broadly summarized as a roster of good to great movies.

Tony's list is a roster of stylish movies without much content, but stylish they are, marked by chiaroscuro lighting, meticulous storyboarding, beautiful cinematography, artistic genius ... all within often unwatchable movies. The Hunger fits neatly into that description.

It is a vampire story about an immortal Egyptian princess who lives off her slaves by feeding off their blood. The process grants them immortality, but makes them entirely dependent on her for youthfulness. When she tires of them, she places them in vaults where they continue to live and eventually to age into advanced decrepitude, but cannot die.

I guess the plot description makes it sound something like a horror film, but it really isn't. The Hunger is an art film placed within the shell of a horror plot. The set design and lighting effects are stylish and consistent. The entire film seems murky and dark, and is presented entirely in muted blue-green hues, so muted that the blue-green is nearly grey, and the entire effect is similar to a black and white film. There is very little dialogue, with some scenes seeming to drag on forever without any words. Scene after gloomy scene is punctuated with odd facial close-ups and somber classical music.

In fact, The Hunger was such a completely gloomy and artsy-fartsy film that it almost stopped Tony's career before it began. In the early 80s, Hollywood brought in more and more of the British directors (Ridley Scott, Adrien Lyne, Alan Parker) who had become the masters of their own universe - the UK's brilliant and highly stylized advertising films. Tony was the next in line, and had been tentatively selected to direct 1984's Starman. When the suits at Columbia saw that The Hunger was basically a Greenwich Village arthouse film with less-than-zero commercial appeal, they dropped Tony off the short list for Starman and handed the project to John Carpenter.

For lovers of celebrity nudity and film erotica, the film does have a sex scene between possibly the two most famous women ever to do a lesbian scene together: Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon. This scene is characteristically artistic and inexplicit, but it does feature some clear toplessness from Sarandon.

So the film has that goin' for it.

Apart from that scene, it can be a movie to admire, but a very difficult one to like. I predict you will have the following reaction when you watch The Hunger: "Wow, he's really a talented director, and he really put a lot of thought and work into that. But I hated the sumbitch."

• Susan Sarandon (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
• Ann Magnuson
• Catherine Deneuve's body double (1, 2)
• some chick

Other Crap:

• Miramax Films will co-finance and distribute computer-animated family films starting with 'Opus,' adapted from the popular 'Bloom County' comic strip"
• United States Patent: 4,022,227 - the comb-over. The patent holder - the Smith Brothers. {cough}
• Liza Minnelli's former chauffeur has accused her of repeatedly beating him up in booze-fuelled rampages. It's a sad case, isn't it? With her kooky personality, her tremendous talent, and the legacy of her mom, Liza could have been just about the most beloved cultural icon in the country. What went wrong? Everything went wrong.
• Kate Winslet won't have plastic surgery despite saying her boobs look like 'the ears of a dog'."
• It's difficult to choose, but I'd have to say that this is the President's silliest face during the debate.
• Ichiro breaks Sisler's 84 year old single season hit record with number 258.
• Fucking Russian assholes ban any foul-ass motherfuckin' language. "We want Russian to remain as pure as in the great classics"
• Trey Parker and Matt Stone are very, very proud of their new movie, Team America: World Police. The boys give good interview, as always.
• You'll never guess which country this story comes from. Moose breaks into grocery store. OK, maybe you will guess the country from the fact that local experts think it was a mentally disturbed moose. How many countries have moose psychiatrists? "That one's normal, Lars, and the other one isn't deranged. Just mildly neurotic."
• Norway mentioned as al-Qaida target. The terrorists planned to poison Norway's fish supply with lye - until they found out that was a Norwegian tradition!
• "'The use of troops to defend America must never be subject to a veto from countries like France.'" So I guess it would be OK from countries not at all like France. Examples? Countries like France: Belgium, Luxembourg, Canada. Countries not like France: Uruguay, Zimbabwe, Tuvalu.
• Top 10 coach-player feuds
• The University of Colorado has taken decisive action on their football/sex scandal - they banned the reporter who wrote the story from their VIP alumni list!!
• Gigantic slugger Adam Dunn sets the single-season strikeout record.
• The hit cartoon series The Simpsons is pushing for gay marriage rights in America with a shocking episode featuring Marge's chain-smoking sister Patty wedding another woman.
• Bert and Ernie discuss sex. (Quite clever - dialogue from "Happiness", visuals from Sesame Street)
• A Revolutionary new cell phone lets you talk to the dead -- for just five cents a minute! (Weekly World News)
• The U.S. is virtually alone in outlawing marriage among first cousins.
• Mel Gibson has obtained a restraining order against a man who stalked him to demand that they pray together
• 'Combover' Engineers Given Ig Nobel Awards
• Italian actor-director Roberto Benigni is now looking for laughs in wartime Iraq. That's some zany shit, right there! He promises that this film will be even funnier than his version of Pinocchio.
• Want your kids to enjoy both hip-hop and death? Then you need to buy them The Grim Rapper.
• More Fantastic Four casting notes.
• Mount St. Helens Volcano Cam
• Steven Colbert of the Daily Show talks about the debate highlights.
• Samantha Bee looks at undecided voters.
• Two of the Daily Show's correspondants debate about the debates.
• Jon Stewart of the Daily Show looks at the Presidential debates
• Current Electoral Vote Predictor 2004. Today's important changes: Michigan and Ohio fall into the undecided camp. Michigan had been "weak Kerry", Ohio had been "barely Kerry." Kerry's count falls to 221. (270 needed to elect)
• American portrait photographer Richard Avedon is dead at 81

• "Dear Uncle Scoopy,

  
  I hate to be argumentative, and would have passed on writing this e-mail if you hadn't emphasized the word "EXACTLY" in the paragraph emphasizing the importance of New Mexico, Iowa, and Maine to Sen. Kerry's Presidential hopes. ("Gore barely won New Mexico and Iowa, and won Maine by a fairly comfortable margin. Those three states possess EXACTLY the 16 votes Kerry needs, so he's not dead yet, by any means.")

  
  
  In point of fact, these four states are not likely to deliver the needed 16 votes to Kerry, even if he carries all of them, since Maine is a state without a 'winner-take-all' statute. Instead it allocates two of its electoral votes by Congressional district. With the race this tight, it is almost certain that Bush will carry at least the more conservative rural Congressional district, and thus obtain the needed one extra electoral vote to throw the race into the House of Representatives -- where he will certainly be elected by the new House of Representatives.

  
  
  Assuming Maine allocates its Vice Presidential electoral votes on the same basis (I haven't researched in that level of detail), then the new Senate will pick the new Vice President and that really will be a crap-shoot, particularly given the current Vice President's tendency to tell sitting Senators to 'go fuck themselves'. (Remember the Sen. Leahy gaffe?)."

   

• What the #$*! Do We Know?, a small film that mixes quantum physics, animation and documentary filmmaking, is spreading across the country like a New Age fad diet.
• Here's an unexpected newsflash - new legal and financial woes for Courtney Love
• It was a tough crowd for Kevin Spacey's debut as director of Old Vic: "'the most tedious drivel ever flushed up on a London stage.'"
• Earth Nears Asteroid Toutatis. Toutatis is in an eccentric 4 year orbit which moves it from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter to just INSIDE Earth's orbit. On one of its closest passes to earth, Toutatis ran against Bush's dad in the 1988 Presidential election.
• Dalai Lama visits El Salvador for long-driving contest. Big hitter, the lama. I suppose while he is in Latin America, he may try to visit some local llamas - just as a professional courtesy.
• You Are Either With Frank Sinatra Or You Are With The Terrorists!
• The books that Texas schools banned in 2003-2004 include Peter Pan, 1984, and The Color Purple. According to the story, 1984 was banned based on the objections of one parent of one 9th grade pupil. (Sorry, I don't know how accurate this is.)
• Bush, Kerry Debate as Quirky Puppets on Broadway
• Britney is a brunette!
• Queer eye for the Macedonian guy: The opening date of the Oliver Stone epic about Al the Great has been pushed back from Nov. 5 to Nov. 24. The rumor mill says one reason for the delay is that execs at the studio want to cut some of the male-on-male love scenes.
• OJ 'confessed' to best pal
• GALLUP: Kerry Wins Debate
• Zoroastrianism for Kids . "We are pleased that the American Library Association has chosen Zoroastrian Kids Korner as one of the best sites for kids."
• Identify the speaker: "I take the position that sexual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged." Hugh Hefner? Larry Flynt? Guess again. It's ultra-conservative Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia.
• Page3.com - the best of 1975-2005.

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.

• Leigh 1  (.avi zipped) (.wmv zipped)

• Leigh 2  (.avi zipped) (.wmv zipped)

• Leigh 3  (.avi zipped) (.wmv zipped)

• Leigh 4  (.avi zipped) (.wmv zipped)

• Leigh 5  (.avi zipped) (.wmv zipped)

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.

• Uma Thurman, brief but nice breast exposure in scenes from the Robert De Niro/Bill Murry movie, "Mad Dog and Glory" (1993).

Be sure to pay Graphic Response a visit at his website. www.graphic-barry.com.

Today from the Ghost...another batch of assorted Heffers shedding their clothes on screen. Zipped .wmvs as always.

• Carrie Westcott (September '93). The blonde centerfold takes off her top in a scene from "Lover's Leap" (1995).

• Daphne Duplaix (July '97). A brief topless scene from the Abel Ferrara movie, "The Blackout" (1997)

• Erika Eleniak (July 1989). The former "Baywatch" babe shows brief nipple views and some partial breast views in a love scene from "The Opponent" (2000).

• Kim Evenson (September '84). Opening up her graduation gown and showing off some excellent toplessness in a scene from "Porky's Revenge" (1985).

"The Last Great Wilderness"
A man agrees to give a hitchhiker a ride to the Scottish town of Skye in this 2002 British drama.

When the car breaks down they find themselves stranded at a rustic resort in the woods. The people there are all recovering from different additions, and are, to say the least, very strange. The more were learn of them, the weirder things get.

Things begin to climax when the hitchhiker's past catches up to him in the form of two contract killers who show up to fulfill their contract. A strange and interesting film.

• Victoria Smurfit

I have not seen this, but there is something unusual about this flick. On paper it looks like just another direct-to-vid Lambert flick. But here's the rub...it was directed by John Glen...the guy who has directed 5 James Bond movies! ("For Your Eyes Only" (1981), "Octopussy" (1983), "A View to a Kill" (1985), "The Living Daylights" (1987) and "Licence to Kill" (1989).)

Of course since his last Bond film, he has also directed the box office dud "Christopher Columbus: The Discovery" (1992) and the made-for-reasons-unknown-direct-to-vid flick "Aces: Iron Eagle III" (1992).

WILLIAM HUNG CHRISTMAS ALBUM
He Can't Drum, Either - Christmas will be a lot merrier this year: "American Idol" reject William "She Bangs" Hung is releasing a Christmas album. His first CD of tonedeaf tunes has sold over 200,000 copies, and now, "Hung For The Holidays" will hit stores on October 19. It includes classics such as "Deck The Halls" and "Little Drummer Boy," Hung's personal thoughts on the holidays, and a fold-out ornament.