Night Vision (1997) is a 70s style exploitation film starring Fred "the Hammer" Williamson and Cynthia Rothrock. He is a recovering alcoholic loner who has been busted all the way back to motorcycle patrol, and she has been demoted due to a shooting in the line of duty. They are assigned to work together to stop a serial killer who has a thing for media, and a personal vendetta against Williamson. The killer tapes personal details of young women's lives, then kills them, releasing the videos to the press, and selling them through Mafia connections worldwide. As if this wacko and the Mafia connections weren't trouble enough, there is spy on the police force. Rothrock and Williamson find that they are compatible, and she resolves to help him with his sobriety -- help he badly needs.

This is pretty much a standard low budget action film shot in Dallas, with lots of weak special effects, lots of gunfire, and not a lot of substance. On the other hand, it has the required breast exposure from two victims (Nina Richardson and Mary Kapper), good martial arts from Rothrock, and plenty of action. IMDb readers have it at 3.2. It is certainly an anachronism, but no worse than similar films from the 70s and 80s, and is hence a C. I, for one, would rather watch one of these than many huge budget special effects laden Hollywood mainstream films.

The Stand (1994):

• I guess we can give up all hope that Laura San Giacomo is ever going to take those monsters out and give us a good look at them, but she sure looked impressive bouncing around like mad in this 1994 scene! (.zipped .wmv, no sound)

A Home at the End of the World (2004):

One of the very few smart things I've ever written about movies can be found in my review of Tigerland, written about four years ago, before anyone was aware of Colin Farrell.

I was especially astounded by the performance of Colin Farrell as Bozz. He's an Irish stage actor, and he transforms himself into the perfect independent-minded Texas boy. This fella may have a hell of a future.

Farrell's subsequent performances have not been universally brilliant, but he has unquestionably become a star of international repute, based on his flamboyant private life as much as on his acting chops. He has the perfect combination of attributes for celebrity - talent, looks, recklessness, and an unquenchable sex drive.

In this film, he also proves that he is not just a star, but also one hell of an actor. In the past, many of his roles have called for extensions of his larger-than-life public persona - cheeky, dominant, and wild. The character he plays in this film could not be farther from that. It is a blissful, submissive, shy, passive, tame, sexually ambiguous hippie who just wants everyone around him to be mellow. I guess any good actor could play a part so far from type, but what distinguishes Colin as more than good, as a great actor, is that he shows no signs that he is acting. If you did not already know what Colin Farrell is like, you would assume that this character is just what Colin is like. He has no trouble at all with the American accent - you'd never suspect that he isn't an American. His overall performance is unaffected, natural, and completely free from artifice. It is also warm, generous, and tremendously likeable. Suddenly, I understand completely why Colin is so successful with women.

... speaking of which ...

This film is already semi-famous for all the wrong reasons. As a film, it is virtually unknown, despite some decent reviews and a respectable festival run. It never reached more than 65 theaters, and grossed only about a million dollars in the entire United States - and even that modest achievement took 14 weeks of arthouse distribution. As a cultural phenomenon, however, it is much discussed.

Oh, you can't remember hearing of this film by name. Neither could I. But you've heard of it all right. This is the film where the screening of Colin Farrell's and reputedly Brobdingnagian tallywacker caused such a stir that the director ended up cutting it out of the film. The San Francisco Gate described the controversy as follows:

According to a British newspaper the Sun, nude scenes spotlighting actor Colin Farrell's full-frontal manhood have been cut from his new film, "A Home at the End of the World." Sounds painful, eh? The paper quoted an undisclosed publicist -- sorry, an undisclosed source -- as claiming the dimensions of the offending member disrupted a test screening. "The women were overexcited," said the source, "and the men looked really uncomfortable."

Colin was said to be very upset that the scene was snipped, and was insisting that the scene be restored to the DVD. I have just watched the DVD, and I saw no sign of any gigantic penises,  so I guess the deleted scene remains deleted. There are no deleted scenes included in the DVD extras. The disc does have a featurette, but I fast-forwarded through that and didn't see any sign of an elephantine manroot. I don't think I could have missed it, since it is apparently the size of Costa Rica.

Cutting Farrell's mighty member seems kind of hypocritical to me, in light of the fact that an actress is shown naked in a completely unnecessary scene (a flashback to Colin's childhood, and memories of his beloved older brother), and that the nudity is quite explicit. Oh, well, I guess the size of Colin's prodigious flesh-rocket will have to remain a whispered and undocumented secret.

Getting back to the subject of the movie for a minute, it is a pretty good one. "Why?", you ask. I suppose there are many reasons why a film can be called "good", and in this case I felt that way because it made me totally uncomfortable. "Huh?", you respond. You see, I felt like I was watching people's home movies. I got the illusion that many of the moments in their lives were really happening, and were so personal and intimate that I had no business watching. Colin Farrell was the best of the cast at conveying that intimacy, but Sissy Spacek almost matched him beat for beat. To my way of thinking, that kind of honesty is very effective and convincing filmmaking.

What's it about? Not much of anything. The plot is meandering. It's character-driven personal history, I guess. Other people might call it a soap opera which encompasses decades of life. It's not for the homophobic. Its author, Michael Cunningham, is widely celebrated in the world of gay and lesbian authors, and he won a Pulitzer Prize for his other major novel, The Hours. Queer Studies describes the source novel for A Home at the End of the World as follows:

Michael Cunningham's celebrated novel is the story of two boyhood friends: Jonathan, lonely, introspective, and unsure of himself; and Bobby, hip, dark, and inarticulate. In New York after college, Bobby moves in with Jonathan and his roommate, Clare, a veteran of the city's erotic wars. Bobby and Clare fall in love, scuttling the plans of Jonathan, who is gay, to father Clare's child. Then, when Clare and Bobby have a baby, the three move to a small house in upstate New York to raise "their" child together and, with an old friend, Alice, create a new kind of family. A Home at the End of the World masterfully depicts the charged, fragile relationships of urban life today.

It traces the friendship of the two friends from boyhood to adulthood. They become close. The one boy is definitely gay, and the other (Farrell) just wants to please people and connect with them, so he becomes his friend's lover. He also becomes kind of a fantasy lover for the friend's mom (Spacek), and by the time the kids grow up, he takes on a female lover when the two young men get embroiled in a strange triangular love with an eccentric aging hippie chick (Robin Wright). The Colin Farrell character is simply having sex or making connections with everyone of both sexes, although he never actually initiates sex, and is perfectly content going without sex during those periods when he's separated from his closest acquaintances. Farrell's first encounter with Wright and the first encounter between the two boys are both painfully intimate scenes. Colin's scenes with Spacek, on the other hand, are not painful to watch, and in fact they portray a unique and very sweet May-December relationship of some kind, but those scenes still create an illusion that we are eavesdropping when we should not be.

The main characters go through various travails. Since it is based on a Michael Cunningham novel, you can bet that everyone will be of indeterminate or confused sexuality, and that AIDS will rear its ugly head. Based on its reputation, The Hours must be considered the better of the two books, but I liked this intimate film much better than the film version of The Hours, which seemed very artificial, rhetorical and stagy to me.

• Asia Vieira (1, 2, 3, 4)

Other Crap:

• President's Acceptance Speech Inviting the 55 Million America-Haters Who Voted Against God to Bend Over and Take It Like a Prison Bitch.
• The Drudge Report says: "Attorney General John Ashcroft 'plans to submit his resignation to Bush in the next several days'... "
• Arafat said to be ready to die happy after Red Sox victory.
• The UK's Channel 4, no stranger to challenging broadcasting taboos, is about to cross another televisual rubicon by filming the decomposition of a human body. This is especially appealing to those who could not see Cher's farewell tour in person.
• News from the Bizarro World: David Spade dumps Krista Allen
• MSIE's share of the browser market drops from 95.5 in June to 92.9 today.
• The President's daughters during Dick Cheney's speech. The blogger thinks Barbara really liked it a lot.
• The Smartest State Awards 2004-2005. I'm sure Kerry supporters will be quick to note that the seven smartest states voted for him while the seven dumbest states voted for the Prez.
• The first teaser clip from Bloodrayne has hit the internet. (To be honest, I wasn't impressed)
• "Take Lindsay Lohan, The O.C. and sheep brain pie, put them all together and what do you have?" I'm not sure of the answer, but throw in some KY-Jelly, and I'm there, dudes!
• I LOVE this headline (which is real news; not from a satire site). "Blood-Sucking Monkeys Attack Hundreds Of Kids". Man, those Republicans will stop at nothing to keep new voters from the polls.
• Borowitz Report: IT'S GORE!! CBS Declares Former Veep Surprise Winner.
• The Daily Show's Samantha Bee conducts some intimate exit polls of her own.
• MSNBC has assembled a raw summary of nationwide exit polls.
  • Where did Bush win? He polled 57% among married voters. He polled 58% among white voters. He polled 56% among voters making $50,000 per year or more.
  • Kerry was strong among unmarried people in general, but remarkably so among unmarried women, who preferred Kerry in 61% of the cases. Unfortunately for Kerry, the ol' wedding ring causes women to change their support dramatically - only 44% of married women supported Kerry. Even more unfortunately for Kerry, married women are the largest single bloc of voters among the four combinations of gender and marital status, comprising about a third of all voters. (The number of married female voters is more than twice the number of unmarried males.)
  • This leads into another interesting question. Why doesn't the mood of the internet come anywhere near to reflecting the pro-Bush results of the actual voting? Several reasons: (1) those unmarried men who are relatively insignificant in elections are very significant on the web, while the massive bloc of married women make very little web noise (2) needless to say, the internet is international. There are plenty of non-Americans on the internet, and President Bush is not popular outside of America's borders (3) So look at it this way - married American women may supply something like 1% or so of the internet's voice, but they supply 31% of the votes in U.S. elections.
• Electoral Vote Summary Retrospective - how did the experts do?
  • Rasmussen called every state correctly, although they ruled eleven states too close to call.
  • However, of the states too close to call, Rasmussen's polls showed a leader in eight of them - and their leader won the state in all eight cases. Rasmussen ruled! In fact, one of the three states they called a dead heat was Iowa - which was (and pretty much still is) a dead heat.
  • RCP called all states correctly.
  • The New York Times called all states correctly
  • On the other side of the coin, Electoral-vote.com couldn't have done too much worse. Their November 2nd electoral map called Florida, New Mexico, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Hawaii wrong. They showed no particular bias - they called three Bush states for Kerry, two Kerry states for Bush, and a Kerry landslide state undecided. New Jersey and Florida were their big flubs, since (1) they had the only electoral map calling Florida for Kerry or New Jersey undecided. (2) Rasmussen was showing Bush in the lead in Florida in their final poll (although they did not call the state), and (3) Neither state was especially close.
• Ted DiBiase, the Million Dollar ... Preacher ???
• The cast assembles for "Dallas Reunion: The Return to Southfork"
• A California man is facing rape and kidnapping charges after his alleged victim recently spotted him appearing as a contestant on the NBC reality show 'Blind Date.'
• The Moscow Metro is or was considered the world's most beautiful underground railway, and pictures of it, once forbidden, are exceedingly rare.
• Does this outfit make my labia look fat?
• Silly sex laws - with pictures of a couple breaking them.  
• New Hannibal Lecter movie gets director Peter Webber. Behind the Mask will be directed by the same guy who did Girl With a Pearl Earring.
• An eight minute excerpt from The Daily Show's live election night coverage.
• Here's a new clip from Unleashed: "This is the story of Danny (Jet Li), a slave who has lived his whole life without any sort of normal human education, with the mind and personality of a young child, with only one lesson learned: how to fight. Treated like a dog by his owner/boss, Bart (Bob Hoskins) which includes having to wear a collar, Danny has been raised to be a lethal fighting machine who fights in illegal gladiator-style fight clubs, where he earns lots of money for Bart as the undisputed champion. After a car accident that lands Bart in a coma, however, Danny meets a kind elderly blind piano tuner (Morgan Freeman) on the run because he knows secrets some bad guys don't want known, who uses music to teach Danny some things about the world and about being human."
• Clooney places a "Small Penis On Board" sign on Brad Pitt's car.
• Serena wears a see-through dress to meet Pierce Brosnan. WOW! She is as bold off the court as on.
• The release date of Mr and Mrs Smith (Pitt, Jolie) has been "put back indefinitely". Not mentioned in this story: the studio has been asking internet sites to remove the trailer!
• Weekly World News: "ACTOR SUES AFTER FAULTY HAIR DRYER SHRINKS HIS HEAD!"
• Four free short vids from Playboy's Beach Babes!
• Playmate Gallery - Brooke Richards, December 1999 - Courtesy of PlayboyPlus.com!
• 5'5" Renee Zellweger goes from a plump 145 pounds to a stick-thin 100.
• By accidentally failing to erase a test screen, CNN shows Good Time Ralphie leading in Louisiana. You go, girl!
• A funny spoof of campaign ads.
• A new clip from After the Sunset, the crime caper flick witrh Pierce Brosnan and Salma Hayek.
• Seven clips from Finding Neverland, the film with Johnny Depp as the author of Peter Pan.
• Three new clips from the next blockbuster - The Incredibles
• Here's the trailer for Imaginary Heroes. "Imaginary Heroes" centers on a family that on the surface seem to have the ideal life. This perfect façade is smashed when an incomprehensible event shatters the Travises, spinning their lives out of control. Only by facing the truths about themselves, each family member must confront the past in order to regain control of their future. (Sigourney Weaver, Jeff Daniels, Emile Hirsch, Michelle Williams)
• Britney buys Kevin a $100,000 watch!
• This is the funny twist for the election night. NBC and Fox will not call Nevada although the President has obviously already won it (ABC and CBS have called it for Bush). Why not make the call? NBC and Fox have trapped themselves with a tenuous call of Ohio, placing Bush on the brink of victory with 269 votes. If they call Nevada for the Prez, it puts him over the top, and they are therefore calling the election for him. Therefore, they have only two choices (1) admit they called Ohio too soon, or (2) call Nevada without changing Ohio, thus calling the election and risking the chance of being forever remembered as the "Dewey Beats Truman" network. Neither one wants to go first, but Fox is especially vulnerable to a charge of bias in this regard, and would look really foolish if they were the only network making the incorrect call in Bush's favor, so I have a feeling Fox won't call Nevada even after all the votes have been counted (unless they decide to retract their call of Ohio).
  • Tom Brokaw is really weaselling his way around the Nevada issue!
  • Even more embarrassing for those two networks is the fact that they have both given Bush the election and don't realize it. They think that Bush needs 270 to win. While it is true that Kerry needs 270, Bush needs only 269, because a tie is broken in the House of Representatives. The two networks have called 269 for Bush, but don't realize that is enough to assure him a second term!!

Other Crap archives. May also include newer material than the links 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.

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.

First up from the Ghost today...'caps and vids from the very off beat movie 1993 movie "The Pickle".

• Linda Carlson, topless. One major downside to these...we also see Danny Aiello's bare chest. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)
• Linda Carlson zipped .wmv

Next up, Mimi Craven. A former flight attendant as well as ex-Mrs. Wes Craven. Here she is topless and showing thong views while playing a brass pole enthusiast in scenes from "Dog Watch" (1996).

• Mimi Craven (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)
• Mimi Craven zipped .wmv

"Death Factory"
What I found interesting about this 2002 less-than-zero-budget horror movie (I think the actors paid to appear) was the appearance of Tiffany Shepis as the deranged killer. What I didn't find interesting was the movie itself.

Gore and sexploitation are the main offerings of this stinker, but oddly, Tiffany, who is not shy about getting naked, kept her clothes on in this one. Hell, even porn star Ron Jeremy, who has a small part as a drunk bum, stayed clothed. Fortunately, a couple of other actresses didn't, which may be the movie's only saving grace.

A worker at a chemical plant contracts a virus which mutates her into a half-human creature with a craving for blood. After killing and eating a bunch of co-workers, she disappears and the factory is closed. Years later, young people partying at the condemned plant discover she's really not gone, and she's hungry as ever.

Gross and really badly done, but with a little interesting nudity. For hard-core gore fans only.

• Allison Beal
• Rhoda Jordan
• Tiffany Shepis

ZELLWEGER FED EXES HER UNDERWEAR
All Sizes - Renee Zellweger told Femalefirst.com that she's so terrified of airport guards handling her underwear at baggage check-in that she sends it home by Fed Ex. She said the guards recognize her and always go through her phone book and underwear, and she can't stand it. She says it might be cheaper to buy new underwear, but "I'm not going to throw away perfectly good underwear." She admitted that other private items and "anything scandalous" also goes into the Fed Ex box.