Wednesday

Keeping Up With The Steins (2006):

In the manner of TV's "Wonder Years," Keeping Up With the Steins is a coming of age story with first person narration by a young boy. He is approaching his Bar Mitzvah, and he's filled with trepidation. First, he is terrified that he will make a fool of himself in the temple, since he has no idea what the Hebrew is all about and also has a bad case of stage fright. As if that weren't enough intimidation, he has a big-time Hollywood hotshot agent of a dad (Jeremy Piven, playing what is now his official obnoxious agent role) who wants to use this Bar Mitzvah to outdo a rival who threw his own son's party on a cruise ship. How does one top that? Dad's thinking of renting out Dodger Stadium for the party!

The lad contrives a plan to get the uptight dad off his case. He sneaks an invitation to the grandfather he has never met, and changes the date by two weeks so that grandpa will arrive early. He figures that the friction between his overachieving father and his ne'er-do-well hippie grandfather will occupy all of the two men's time, thus getting dad's spotlight off of the Bar Mitzvah. The situation starts out far more negative than expected when grandpa shows up with his much-younger hippie girlfriend (Daryl Hannah, playing a character named Sacred "call me Sandy" Feather), parks his beat-up trailer in the driveway of their expensive Brentwood home, and starts skinny-dipping in the family pool. Dad and grandpa immediately get at each others throats over every one of grandpa's real and imaginary slights in the past. As it turns out, and as you can probably anticipate, the flawed crackpot of a grandpa turns out to be quite a decent human being, really helps the youngster cope with growing up, and even melts dad's heart eventually.

I think you've probably already deduced that the film is fundamentally a sitcom in convenient film format. I liked the first half better, when it was basically a satirical comedy with some fairly broad characters. It gets all mushy at the end, but even though the second half got a bit too sappy for my taste, it's still a pleasant way to pass the time, if you enjoy a warm-hearted coming-of-age sitcom. I was able to relate to it in a lot of ways since the wound-too-tight dad is way too much like me, and the laid-back grandpa is a lot like my own dad, who also had a calming influence on our family.

The film stars Garry Marshall as grandpa, and it was directed by his own son Scott. As far as I know, no relative of Jeremy Piven contributed to the film or, for that matter, will even acknowledge being related to him.

Call it a C. It's solid for the genre, but not spectacular.

It came out this May and grossed less than a million dollars in very limited distro.

Not much nudity (It's rated PG-13). (See "third party" section below for a video.)

 

Daryl Hannah

 

Third party videos:

LC's zipped .avi of Marisa Coughlin in Masters of Horror, the premiere episode of season 2. The collages are in yesterday's edition.

LC's zipped .avi of Daryl Hannah in Keeping Up With The Steins.

 

 

 

 

OTHER CRAP:

This week's movie openings ... Three critical smashes this week.
  • Borat: 91% positive reviews. Outrageous comedy, in 800 theaters.
  • Volver: 88% positive reviews. Almodovar's new film, in arthouse distro.
  • Flushed Away - 83% positive reviews. 3-d animated film, in 3400 theaters.
  • The fourth noteworthy opening is Tim Allen's latest Santa Clause movie. No review yet, but it will be in more than 3000 theaters.

The Weekend Warrior's box office predictions for the upcoming weekend

  • He thinks that the kiddie movies, Santa Clause 3 and Flushed Away, will duke it out for first. The other new release, Borat, is expected to finish a strong fourth and also to win the race for the highest revenues per theater.

Girls Gone Wild :: FREE Girls Gone Wild Videos & Pics

TV Links - TV shows available for free online

'Queen of the Internet' finally bares all for Playboy

  • Her hilarious claim to be the most downloaded woman on the internet is based on one incident in 1996. When Uncle Scoopy's Fun House was a completely free site back in 1996, the downloads of Jennifer Connelly from my site alone were far more than the total number of downloads claimed by Cindy!! (And my site was just one little source for Connelly pictures --- one of many.)

Bob Barker is retiring, 50 years after his TV debut , and a full ten years after his own death.

The Daily Show, Monday, October 30. Part 1 ... Part 2 ... Part 3 ... Part 4.

"World's wittiest lonely hearts ads"

Douchebag gets first question wrong on Millionaire

David Letterman interviews Borat

"Top Ten Things I Have Learned From 'Dancing With The Stars' ... as presented by Jerry Springer

"Lena Headey is Leonidas's hot, happy to take her top off wife, who is smarter than she appears. Oh yes, there is AMPLE nudity and sex in 300, a quality missing in too many movies these days."

'Dancing With The Stars' final four include A.C. Slater and Emmitt Smith

World's tallest tower rising in Dubai

  • The contractor is keeping the final size a secret, but he's revealed that it will have at least 160 stories

"Of all the cases I've worked with phony money, this is the sorriest bill I've ever seen"

  • How could you expect poor the guy to know that the face on a $100 bill isn't Les Nessman of WKRP? That's the kind of shit that only Ken Jennings knows.

Chertoff Raises Threat Level on Reports of Imminent Election Calls Threat of November 7 Vote 'Credible'"

  • "My advice to all voters who were thinking of voting for Democrats is to stay at home until this current threat passes," Mr. Chertoff said. "In this business, it's better to be safe than sorry."

Reese Witherspoon, Ryan Phillippe split

  • I don't usually care about these things, but I thought this one was a keeper. They are both attractive and talented. They've got two kids, have avoided any messy tabloid stories, and have been together for something like eight years. Shame, really.

From the "cats and dogs living together" department: In a surprise U-turn, the right wing New York Post endorses Hillary Clinton

 

 

 

 

Movie Reviews:

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

Slim Susie (2003)

Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004) is a sequel to a zombie movie based on a video game.

Umbrella Corporation has decided to reopen "The Hive' in Raccoon City, and guess what? Yes, the dread T-virus escapes again and starts creating zombies. One of the employees of Umbrella will help some women escape The Hive if they agree to find and rescue his daughter. Everyone else will be nuked. The nuke is a fascinating development, in that the radiation doesn't bother "good guys."

I am not the least bit frightened by slow motion monsters. It could have helped that the chief zombie fighters were Milla Jovovich, Sienna Guillory and Sandrine Holt, but the director kept them mostly in the dark and wearing way too many clothes. The fight scenes were especially dark, probably in an attempt to make it seem like it is a great feat to kick a slow motion monster. Two of the women and all of the men were too stupid to learn that you need to shoot zombies in the head. Stepping on their toes doesn't work.

Roger Ebert, in awarding 1/2 of a star, summed up my feelings perfectly:

"The movie is an utterly meaningless waste of time. There was no reason to produce it, except to make money, and there is no reason to see it, except to spend money. It is a dead zone, a film without interest, wit, imagination or even entertaining violence and special effects."

Well said, Roger. I admit to a prejudice against zombie movies, but I could see nothing about this film to recommend. 

D

Fans of this tripe will be glad to know that the film ends with a blueprint for the next sequel, Resident Evil: Extinction. I can only hope it will include no nudity so that I will not be obligated to watch it.

IMDb readers have this incomprehensibly high at 5.7. It did somehow manage to earn $120M worldwide against a budget of $43M.

 

 

Milla Jovovich shows breasts near the end.

 

 

Two women, Venice Grant and Ana Danilla, show breasts as zombie strippers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Church (La Chiesa - 1989) opens in the manner of the "Blind Dead" films. We see a medieval witch-hunt turn into a massacre, followed by a cathedral being built over the graves of the demon-worshippers. Cut to the present day, with the church librarian investigating various supernatural occurrences and falling under the spell of the ancient evil. In the third part, the old demons finally awaken and,  taking a cue from Demoni and The Exterminating Angel, shut the Church's doors with an old mechanism, thus trapping inside a bunch of stereotyped characters (female school teacher, pupils, priests, old couple, young couple, bride-to-be) who eventually kill each other or meet blood-splattered deaths.

There are visual "loans" throughout the film:

  • The girl embraced by a winged snake man is a recreation of the well-known Boris Vallejo fantasy art illustration.
  • The scene with Barbara Cupisti and a horned demon seems modeled on Polanski's similar one in "Rosemary's Baby." There’s also a mirror who reflects strange things, a monster outside the window, the list goes on and on.
  • Pretty effective music by Goblin and Keith Emerson, a large part of it “based on” the works of Philip Glass.

The film was co-written and produced by Dario Argento, and it's surprising to see the obsessive way he films and frames his daughter Asia in various suggestive situations. Of course, the film was actually directed by Michele Soavi, who is considered to be one of Argento's acolytes, and also gave as Dellamorte Dellamore (Cemetery Man) and Deliria (Bloody Bird).

Considering his uneven output, it seems to me that the end result of Soavi's films always depends more on luck and the particular circumstances of the time, rather than anything else.  The Church is a satisfying effort for genre fans, a gothic horror film with impressive imagery, bloody set pieces and effective music, art direction and camerawork (as usual in Argento films). The plot is not one of it's strongest points however, being essentially a "haunted church" film. All in all, the film's underdeveloped characters and scattered storyline transform it from its beginning as an investigative thriller like Name of the Rose, to a "kill the possessed" gore-fest in the end. This will put off the more demanding viewers. More ’s the pity for them then, because all the rest, like me, will be easily seduced by the film's visual style, camera pyrotechnics and meticulous attention to detail.

Asia Argento
Antonella Vitale
Barbara Cupisti
Claire Hardwick
Unknown

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Today is a doubleheader "Babes in Bondage" day.

First from "Sexual Predator" we have caps of a totally nekkid McKayla Mathews.


 

Then the time machine goes back to 1975 for more full frontal nudity from Gayna Shireen in "Wham Bam Thank You Spaceman" as a rape victim. Here's a movie clip (zipped .wmv). Below is a sample cap (more in the archives on October 25, 2005).

 

 

 

 

Dann reports on Hard Luck:

You get three for the price of one in this crime thriller from 2006 that follows three convergent story lines, following a group of bootleggers, a pair of serial killers, a former drug dealer, and a stripper, thrown together by coincidence.

Out of jail and vowing to go straight, a former drug dealer finds himself dragged into a bootlegging deal by a friend. Turns out the deal is a setup by the cops, but during the ensuing shoot-out, our guy has a chance to escape with two suitcases full of money.

Making his escape, and being chased by both bad guys and cops, he carjacks a car driven by a stripper who had danced for him only minutes before. They wind up in a motel, but with the bad guys hot on their tail.

Continuing to try to make a clean getaway, our guy is kidnapped by a sweet middle-aged housewife and her much younger lover, who just happen to be serial killers.

Lots of action and a pretty cool story idea, but the script is less than perfect leading to a lot of confusion along the way. Once you finally figure out what's going on, it's not bad.

 

Jackie Quinones

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes and collages

Angela Aames in "Bachelor Party"

This opening scene from "Bachelor Party" is obscenely juvenile...which is okay considering the rest of the film.  Angela Aames looks great as usual. (She died young: R.I.P. dear lady.)

...and this was Tom Hanks being that complete humorous idiot before he started to win well-deserved Oscar awards.


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scoop's note:

As you can well understand, we let Flauti have the night off. The only reason this section is here is because some of the captures from last night were not visible because the code I wrote for the Spanish letter "ñ" was not acceptable to all browsers, so many of you did not see the following captures. Here they are with a regular old "n" in the filenames. If you are persnickety about such matters, you can change "nino" to "niño" after you download the pics.

 

La habitación del niño

 

Leonor Watling

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jamie Lee Curtis. OK, she now looks like your aunt, but a really cool aunt!

The usual daily picture of Lindsay Lohan's coochie, this time in hi-def.

Suzanne Snyder in Femme Fatale

Some familiar faces match up with bare breasts in The Heart of Me. First, Helena Bonham Carter ...

... and then Olivia Williams

 

 


Pat's comments in yellow...

 
Early Monday in Lancaster, Texas, a Lincoln Town Car drove off the road, nearly hit a house, went across several yards and knocked down some trees before stopping.  Inside, police found two dead men in the front seat and one uninjured passenger.  The two dead men had apparently gotten into an argument while one was driving and both pulled handguns and shot each other. The passenger was questioned by police.

*  They asked if he'd mind autographing his latest rap CD. 




Scientists at Britain's Newcastle University have used stem cells taken from a baby's umbilical cord to grow the world's first artificial liver in the lab. It's currently a "mini-liver," only about the size of a penny, but they plan to develop it into a full-size, functioning liver.  They say within 15 years, people will be routinely getting transplanted livers grown in a lab.

*  Well, now we know why Ted Kennedy backs stem cell research.