Sex, Lies, & Politics (1997) is another in the Alain Siritzky "click" series, based on the comic by Milo Manara. IMDB has yet to hear about it. It is not as good as the recently reviewed Rod Steele, but is also full of naked aroused women, and does still have a tongue in cheek sense of fun, which is one of Manara's trademarks. This time, the inventor, Dr. Fezz, gives the clicker to a Washington lobbyist, because he approves of his agenda. The lobbyist, Ron Slick, first uses it on a US senator, played by Kim Dawson, to change her vote on a logging bill.

That is really the end of the lobbying thread, as he comes under personal attack from a female reporter, and uses he clicker in self-defense. He also uses it on Miss Sweden and Miss Norway in the Lincoln room of the White House.

Again, way too much nudity for one night. Tonight, we have:

Kim Dawson showing breasts.

Petra Sexton (the blonde Miss Sweden) and Stacy Leigh Mobley (brunette, aka Holly Hollywood). Sexton shows breasts and buns, Mobley shows everything.

Tatiana playing a wife at the cinemaplex with her husband, who is used as the guinea pig by Fezz to prove that his invention works. She shows breasts in a darkly lit scene.

Tomorrow night, the rest of the review, and the other women.

Blink (1994):

One of the most difficult challenges for a screenwriter of thrill-based entertainment (horror films, thrillers, murder mysteries, etc.) is to hold the audience's attention in the set-up stage, especially if the premise is complicated. Doing just that is one of the many things that Dana Stevens did right in this, her first screenplay. Although the gimmicky premise required the transmission of a lot of information, the first 25 minutes went well, transmitted the many necessary facts in a painless manner, and got the audience involved in the characters.

The overall premise could have made this just another gimmicky film in which the killer, or an important witness, or an intended victim, has a unusual medical malady. (Multiple personality disorder or amnesia, anyone?) In this case, the set-up is kind of a really complicated version of "Wait Until Dark". The key murder witness is blind. Well, actually, she was blind until six weeks ago. Since her transplant, she is still kinda sorta still blind, but she can also kinda sorta see. Sometimes she sees things clearly, but more often not. Most important to the plot, she seems to have some kind of a delay in her nervous system. Stuff happens before her eyes on Tuesday, but she doesn't actually see it until Wednesday. To make matters even worse, some of her visions are flashbacks to events which happened decades earlier, so she is trapped in a world of dimly perceived sights which may or may not be clear, and may or may not be happening as she sees them.

For example, she went to a mirror and saw herself in the mirror as a child - the last thing she saw before she lost her sight twenty years earlier. Then she saw her friend in the hospital, although the friend had actually been there the day before. Given those facts, how could she know whether the criminal she saw was someone she really saw then and there, or someone from a day before, or even twenty years before?

To say the least, the police found her testimony to be lacking in credibility. In fact, they didn't even believe her at all when she first tried to report the crime - until a murder victim was found and the investigators stumbled into the formerly blind woman living in the apartment below the victim, thus supporting completely what she had reported earlier. The thrills of the thriller are generated by the woman's repeated sightings or visions of the murderer she may or may not have seen the night of the murder. Does she keep seeing him? Is he following her? Or did she ever see him at all? Since her vision is still developing, she can never really be sure what she is seeing, and she perceives most things as if in a fog or a distortion mirror.

The film was intended to function as a murder mystery as well as a thriller. The murder mystery portion of the development just doesn't work at all. When the police finally figured the case out, the relationship between the victims was something that we could not have solved from our theater seats, because the solution hinged on something hidden from us - the fact that one of the victims was killed by mistake. Furthermore, the criminal was never developed as a character, and his motivation, while eventually sufficing as a satisfactory explanation for his actions, got tossed in from deep in left field. On the other hand, if we forget about the cerebral part of the puzzle and react to the visceral portion, Blink is actually a pretty effective thriller, because director Michael Apted managed to keep the audience in the POV of the semi-blind woman, thus experiencing her paranoia and confusion.

The best part of the film, the element that lifts it above the dozens of similar films that go straight to video every year, is the character development. It is done so well that the gimmicky premise is soon fully internalized and accepted as a given. The four good characters - two cops, the blind woman, and the blind woman's doctor - are all developed, and are all real people. Like all of us, they said things they regretted, they said things that were politically incorrect, they hurt each other, they goofed off when they should have been working, and they made mistakes. The lead detective and the blind woman did fall in love, as required by movie convention, but not until after a lot of hesitation and false starts. Even after they fell in love, the screenwriter was daring enough to suggest that their mutual obsession got in the way of the bone-crunching detail work necessary to real police investigations. In time, the detective dumped the woman on a uniformed cop so he could get back to the station and get some work done. He then ducked her calls, not because he was mad at her, but simply because he had a job to do, and jobs don't stop so people can fall in love. That was pretty damned effective, because (1) it was true-to-life (2) it made things more emotionally satisfying for us when they overcame the problems and worked things out sensibly.

The director brought something very interesting into the film - the sights, and sounds and geometry of Chicago. I used the word "geometry" with a great deal of consideration, because Michael Apted plays his own visual games with the changing geometric shapes of the city of Chicago, just as Jean-Pierre Jeunet did with Paris in Amelie. The camera angles are set up to catch the triangular symmetry of the entry stars to the El, or the unique curve of the train's approach, the diamond of the Wrigley infield, or the repeating rectangles of the skyscrapers whose details are lost in the morning fog. This is a very impressive subtlety that really invokes the feel of the city on a very deep level for those who have been there. It makes the film smell like Chicago.

C+ by our standards. It's a good little movie that should not have been forgotten so soon. I recommend it for people who enjoy crime thrillers. It has great characterization and the "hook" (her lack of clear vision) works quite well to enhance the tension of the story and put the audience in her POV. That is more than enough to compensate for the gimmicky nature of the premise and the failure of the murder mystery to provide any audience engagement.

• Joy Gregory
• Madeleine Stowe (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Promised Land (1987):

Promised Land is a "Last Picture Show" wannabe about young lives in a small town.

The four main characters are

• a high school basketball star who washed out in college ball, lost his scholarship, and came back to work as a cop in his podunk town, where he could still bask in some of his youthful glory.
• his cheerleader girlfriend, who was studying at a distant university, but was still pulled back to her small town by the warmth of family, her love for the ex-basketball star, and the memory of having been a very important person in the hierarchy of her small town society.
• a geek who had been a long-time friend of the jock and the cheerleader, who left town without graduating from high school, drifted through menial jobs, and finally married a crazy speed freak he had known for three days.
• the crazy speed freak.

All four characters seemed to be seeking a family unit that they couldn't quite find. The geek and the speed freak returned to the small town from Reno, both of them looking for a family, only to face the realization that the geek's bleak family life could not provide either of them with what they needed. For him, the reunion with his father was a severe disappointment, but for the speed freak, even a dysfunctional family seemed better than no family, and she wanted to build some kind of nest. They argued, and the result of their argument was a melodramatic tragedy with brought them back into the lives of the cop and the cheerleader.

Promised Land is a mediocre movie which seems to have a good movie hiding somewhere inside of it.

I guess it's a story about the failure of the American Dream, whatever that means. The plain truth of the matter is that in America, as in every other country, young people dream glorious dreams, then settle into less than glorious lives. With only a very few exceptions, people don't get a chance to live out their youthful dreams, and even those few who do achieve everything they dreamed about often find out that happiness does not accompany their achievements.

Immature filmmakers, however, love to tackle the grand subject of "America as Promised Land", the gap between the media conception of American life and the reality of everyday existence for average people. In the case of this filmmaker, he not only attempted to take on that weighty subject, but tried to do it with grand religious symbolism, in the rarefied atmosphere of fallen angels and religious hymns. This movie must show more angels than a Botticelli exhibition. There are even the obvious symbolic angels with broken wings! Oh, well, I guess that's part of being a young filmmaker, and not realizing that a good story carries its own weight in terms of wider applicability, when and if people can see their own lives or familiar lives reflected.

This film would have worked much better without all the angel statues, and it certainly could have lost the cut-ins of Ronald Reagan speeches. The characters in the film didn't suffer tragedy because of the false promises and misrepresentations about America. There's no reason to believe that their lives would somehow have been better in another country, or with another, more compassionate President. In fact, the characters in this film were only about 20 years old, celebrating the Christmas vacation only a year and a half after high school graduation. That's a bit young to be a tragic failure, isn't it? At 20, one may have to re-adjust the vision of the future one had in high school, but that adjustment just involves setting a more sensible height for the bar, not wallowing in despondency and sorrowful longing for things past.

The most effective element of the film was the wintertime cinematography of the desolate wide-open spaces between Reno and Utah, stark imagery which effectively underscored the film's message. That emptiness, and the individual lost lives encountered on the way, set the proper mood far more effectively than the heavy-handed religious and political symbolism.

• Meg Ryan

Heaven's Prisoners (1996)

This is an overlong N'Awlins noir starring Alec Baldwin.

Actually, that's not completely accurate. It is too long, and it did start out as some kind of Southern Gothic Noir, but it ended up being a revenge film, ala Death Wish. Alec Baldwin spent the last 67 minutes of this film tracking down and killing the three guys who killed his wife. The problem is that it took 63 minutes to get his wife killed in the first place. The two halves of the movie are related to one another, but not very directly. The first half has a complicated story about a reformed alcoholic, a  retired policeman who was running a small fishing resort in the bayou when he and his wife saw a small plane crash near their boat. They dragged a little girl from the plane. The DEA showed up. Hit men showed up. More hit men showed up. Baldwin got beat up a few times. He beat a few guys up in revenge. The baddies showed up to get counter-revenge, and killed the wife when Baldwin was not there. Then Alec started drinking again. Old girlfriends showed up. He informally adopted the little girl from the airplane. Meanwhile Eric Roberts was involved, as Baldwin's childhood friend turned bad guy. Then there were some Northeastern Mafia guys who thought their partnership with Eric was becoming too public. Then there was Eric's wife (Teri Hatcher) who may or may not have betrayed her husband - and everyone else for that matter. Then there was a stripper with a heart of gold, a voodoo priest, and I don't know what else.

The plot rambles, to say the least.

Frankly, I was lost for a while in the first half of the film. Baldwin's problems all started because the DEA agent came out to talk to him, but I can't for the life of me figure out why the DEA made that visit in the first place. The agent told Baldwin to stay out of DEA business, but there was no reason to think Baldwin wanted to do that, or to get into any trouble of any kind. He was just living a pastoral existence with his pet ducks and his fishing boats.

As the story progressed, I couldn't figure out who was working for whom, or how people knew to be where they were when they got there. There was a surprise ending about 70 minutes later which explained why I (and Baldwin's character) had been confused, but by that point I had forgotten about the mystery and was watching what was essentially another movie - the Charles Bronson portion of the entertainment in which Baldwin hunted down the three killers and tried to find out who ordered them to make the hit.

This movie is a cliché in the celebrity nudity racket. Every time I tell people what I do (which is not often, to be honest), they ask me, "why did Teri Hatcher do that balcony scene?" I have gotten tired of talking about it over the years, but it is a good question. Hatcher was considered one of the sexiest women on the planet in the mid 90s. She looks fantastic with her clothes on - slim-hipped and darkly exotic, ideal for leather or sultry mystery, but easily convertible to the girl next door. What guys always say to me is, "I thought she was so hot until I saw her topless, then my desire deflated completely". For some women, nude scenes can be a great career move - they sometimes provide a much-needed image transformation or a giant leap in recognition. For Hatcher, to the contrary, the nude scene was the wrong decision, the destruction of a magnificent illusion. I don't know why she agreed to do such a straightforward scene in bright daylight, but it was not the right career move, and it showed off her body too clearly. Her breasts aren't ugly, by any means, but she looks totally, completely ordinary between her waist and neck, no better than our wives. Before she did the balcony scene she was a goddess. Goddesses cannot afford to be ordinary.

"Cheers" argument fodder. Add this to the "sweatiest movie" debate, along with the greats like Cool Hand Luke. Alec Baldwin is drenched in sweat or rain or both from start to finish.

• Teri Hatcher (1, 2, 3, 4) -in the pics of Hatcher from behind, what the hell does she have between her legs? (I mean besides the usual fun stuff.) Either she's wearing some kind of thong, or she has the worst hemorrhoids in history.
• Connie Whittemore

OTHER CRAP:

• Josh Beckett - complete game shutout in Yankee Stadium. The Marlins are the champs of baseball.

• The worst albums of 2003

• Nora Ephron to write and direct Bewitched the movie, Will Farrell to star as Darrin

• Meg Ryan discusses In The Cut, based on Susannah Moore's controversial novel, a love story that involves grisly murders, various decapitations, a serial killer. And, oh yes, some of the steamiest sex to get past the North American censor board in a long while.

• MovieJuice looks at the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

• A novelty toy dog which breaks wind sparked a major security alert at an American airport.

• Germans love Michael Moore more than they love David Hasselhoff

• The Official Guide to Being a Good Republican - The Talking Points

• Are you a Kicking King?

• Leslie Nielsen Interview - Scary Movie 3

• You have to love The Sun. Greatest animated .gif ever.

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 inclusion in Other Crap

MOVIE REVIEWS:

Here are the latest movie reviews available at scoopy.com.

• The yellow asterisks indicate that I wrote the review, and am deluded into thinking it includes humor.
• If there is a white asterisk, it means that there isn't any significant humor, but I inexplicably determined there might be something else of interest.
• A blue asterisk indicates the review is written by Tuna (or Lawdog or Junior or C2000 or Realist or ICMS or Mick Locke, or somebody else besides me)
• If there is no asterisk, I wrote it, but am too ashamed to admit it.

• Jane Fonda, brief breast exposure in scenes from "La Curée" (1966).

• Laila Robins and Sheryl Lee are both topless in scenes from "The Blood Oranges" (1997).

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

Various TV-caps from all around.

Scoops...some hardcore 'caps featuring three women in scenes from "Wild Pair". Two of these babes are familiar faces on Skinemax.

Diana Espen is the most famous of the bunch. In addition to several late night cable thingies, she has been in a couple hundred porn films (using the names April, April Flowers, April Rain and April Summers). Monique Alexander has made Skinemax appearances in episodes of "The Best Sex Ever" and "Hotel Erotica". Britney Foster is a newbie.

• Diana Espen (1, 2, 3, 4)

• Monique Alexander

• Britney Foster (1, 2, 3)

"The Last Tycoon"
In The Last Tycoon we have boobs and bum from a young looking Ingrid Boulting.

• Ingrid Boulting (1, 2, 3)

"Greetings"
Lots of naked flesh in Greetings especially by Sara-Jo Edlin and Ashley Oliver. There's less visible, but still worth a look, from Megan McCormick, Roz Kelly and Ruth Alda.

• Sara-Jo Edlin (1, 2, 3)
• Ashley Oliver (1, 2)
• Megan McCormick
• Roz Kelly
• Ruth Alda (1, 2)

"Large"
No nudity in Large but some interesting pictures by Mirren Delaney, Melanie Gutteridge and Lucy Voller.

• Mirren Delaney (1, 2, 3)
• Melanie Gutteridge
• Lucy Voller

"Pootie Tang"
It's a similar story with Jennifer Coolidge in the pointless movie Pootie Tang.

• Jennifer Coolidge

"Russian Doll"
Likewise, Laurie Foel and Natalia Novikova in the Aussie film Russian Doll.

• Laurie Foel
• Natalia Novikova

"Goddess of 1967"
Another Aussie movie is Goddess of 1967, but in this case we see a topless Rose Byrne.

• Rose Byrne (1, 2)

"Complex of Fear"
Farrah Forke is down to her underwear in Complex of Fear.

• Farrah Forke (1, 2)

"Bed and Breakfast"
Michelle Axbey is topless in Bed and Breakfast.

• Michelle Axbey

"A Gunfight"
Jane Alexander is naked in A Gunfight but not much is visible.

• Jane Alexander

"Insignificance"
No nudity in Insignificance. Theresa Russell and Desiree Erasmus are down to their underwear. Theresa does a Marilyn Monroe impersonation and looks particularly sexy.

• Theresa Russell (1, 2, 3, 4)
• Desiree Erasmus (1, 2)

"What Happened Was..."
A bit of cleavage by Karen Sillas in What Happened Was...

• Karen Sillas

"Lenny"
Valerie Perrine is topless in the black and white movie Lenny, and there are some other topless dancers.

• Valerie Perrine (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)
• Topless Dancers (1, 2, 3)