Spanish Fly (1998) is a Spanish drama/romantic comedy written and directed by, and staring Daphna Kastner. It was not well received anywhere, and most reviewers point to her choice to cast herself in the lead and the thing that sunk the film. I kind of enjoyed the film, and liked and believed her character, which probably accounts for my enjoyment of the film.

Kastner is in Spain to write a book about Spanish machismo, after a short article on the subject was a success. She arrives to research without knowing the language, and far from a relationship expert. She doesn't get along with her mother, is hung up because her father abandoned them, and has had nothing but bad relationships with men, as she kept choosing the wrong men. Enter her new interpreter, Toni Canto. They fight like cats and dogs at first, a sure sign that they are destined to end up together. She eventually learns the truth about her father, and finds herself.

Kastner shows one breast in bed . IMDb readers have this at 4.8 of 10. Critics panned it horribly. I sort fo enjoyed it, because I enjoyed her. Everyone agrees that it is well shot, and gives the flavor and excitement of Spain. This is a C-.

Updates:

• Charlie's French Cinema Nudity site is updated.

Mailbox - a challenge:

• Scoop- Here's an extra credit type of question for you, your researchers and all of  the dedicated scoop-o-philes out there:  Who is the hot blond in the Sam Adams commercial House of Beer?  The one that speaks w/the tough German accent but looks sweet as strudel?
   

The Machinist (2004):

Critical opinion was sharply divided on The Machinist. The reviews generally focused on some combination of these four things:

1) A brilliant performance by the 190 pound Brit Christian Bale as a 130 pound American. Bale looked frighteningly skeletal. He's is a good actor to begin with, he's very good with accents, and he actually lost 63 pounds on a daily diet which consisted of one can of tuna and one apple.

2) Plot similarities to Memento and Fight Club

3) Explicit ugliness and gore. The Philadelphia Daily News said, "The movie is ingeniously designed. It is also repulsive and I wish I hadn't seen it."

4) The fact that the double secret probationary ending was too obviously foreshadowed and/or revealed earlier in the film

There's plenty of truth in all three of those statements. I did catch on to the secret (or at least a big chunk of it) early in the film, but that didn't keep me from enjoying the way in which it was revealed. In fact, when I looked back on the film, I felt that the film's author had done quite a clever job at showing how the machinist's insane delusions reflected the horrible secret he was running from.

The machinist, you see, is a man who has not slept in a year, and his mind is disappearing as fast as his body. His lack of sleep also makes him dangerous on the road and on a job filled with enormous machines. His life is unraveling. We know that there must be something that happened a year ago to start this snowball down the hill, but we don't know what it is. We are allowed looks into his subconscious in the form of his delusions, and within those imaginary episodes are clues to the events which precipitated his instability. We can't see everything clearly. The mystery is shrouded by the fact that we are trapped in his point of view, and don't really know when he's thinking clearly and when he's deluded.

The one part of the film that seemed clumsy to me was "Ivan", an imaginary person seen only by the Machinist. As many reviewers noted,  that portion of the secret was obvious, a bit clumsy, and quite derivative of Fight Club. On the other hand, the identity of "Ivan" was only part of the mystery, and I thought the rest of the details were handled quite cleverly.

The director, the cinematographer, and the composer also managed to do an excellent job on the look and tone of the film, allowing the audience to share the machinist's delusional world, allowing the audience to understand more about the delusion than the machinist himself, yet never fully pulling away the veil of madness so that the mystery could unravel.

It is an interesting story, and is performed well, especially by Bale, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Michael Ironside. Of course, it's a cult film for lovers of dark psychological mysteries, and it may stretch a thin premise out a bit too long, but it's a keeper. If you are curious about it, bear in mind that it's a grim and depressing movie, and is certainly not a wide-audience popcorn kind of experience. In fact, it is fundamentally a very arty episode of The Twilight Zone stretched to feature length, or rather it's the kind of thing Serling and Hitchcock would be doing today, given the current levels of screen explicitness which those two men never knew. 

This film is not as good as Fight Club, nor as original as Memento, but overall I admired it, and was quite solidly hooked into the mystery.

• Jennifer Jason Leigh (1, 2)

• Jennifer Jason Leigh film clip (zipped .wmv)

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993):

I have been wondering for two days if there was anything nice I can say about Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, and I just keep running into dead ends. I could say that it has a pretty good cast in a film made by a good director (Gus van Sant) from a novel by a respected author (Tom Robbins), but that would not really be a compliment at all, would it? It would just raise the question of "how did all that result in such a complete waste of time and eight million dollars?"

I just don't know the answer to that question.

• I could point to an egregiously bad performance from Rain Phoenix, who managed to get none of the looks nor any of the talent in her family gene pool. It doesn't seem possible to imagine a movie in which Angie Dickinson, Buck Henry and Udo Kier all appear, yet none is the worst actor in the film. (Although God knows they tried.) You need to imagine no longer That seeming impossibility takes shape right here. According to her biographers, Rain Phoenix can sing any kind of music and has even studied opera. Apparently all that musical education left her without the time for acting classes.

• I could cite the fact that the film is weird and eccentric just for the sake of weirdness and eccentricity. Somebody needs to tell the people who made this film that weirdness and eccentricity are not, in and of themselves, valuable or entertaining. Several actors embarrass themselves in this film. John Hurt wears lipstick and whiteface throughout the film, as a queen whose advertising agency specializes in products deodorizing women. To imagine what he looks like, picture The Joker, then replace all the green with red. Lorraine Bracco plays a whip-cracking lesbian cowgirl with a foul-smelling crotch. Mr. Myagi plays some kind of a mountain-dwelling guru named The Chink. Uma Thurman plays a woman with giant thumbs which look so fake that she simply seems to be wearing gloves. Keanu Reeves plays an asthmatic Native American who seems to be wearing Doc Severinsen's hand-me-downs. Roseanne Barr is on hand as a fortune teller. Several familiar faces appear in crowd shots, yet have no lines (Edward James Olmos, Heather Graham, River Phoenix). I think I can summarize this point by saying that Carol Kane and Crispin Glover are in this film and, compared to the rest of the cast, they provide a fresh breath of down-home normality.

• As for the dialogue, James Berardinelli summed it up eloquently: "The dialogue, especially the Tom Robbins-supplied voiceovers, is grating. There's too much pretension and posturing here, and a typical conversation consists of characters trying to one-up each other in the number of meaningless profundities they can spew."

• The book was written in the hippie era, and the ideas were never updated to reflect the advancement of ideas past that point. As a result, the script was referencing some ideas and mocking other ideas that, for the most part, no longer existed.

Those factors all contributed to the problem, but I don't think those bullet points are ultimately capable of explaining the abysmal depth of the sucking done by this film.

I think that there are just some kinds of writers whose work doesn't translate well to the screen.

The guys whose books do work on screen, like Mario Puzo, fill their pages with juicy sex, gossipy details, lurid violence, and hard-driving plot. One reads their books for their plots and characters. The authors' own voices are virtually absent from their books.

On the other side of the fence, men like Tom Robbins, Kurt Vonnegut, Fred Exley, Vladimir Nabokov, and William Thackeray write books where the author's voice is ubiquitous. Reading their books is an encounter with their minds and their techniques, not with their plots or characters. On paper, the fact that they embrace the eccentric and cherish the outré seems gentle, charmingly dotty and life-embracing. Their cynicism toward the bourgeoisie seems arch and insightful. None of that works in movies. Those authors just seem to come off as weird, naive, catty, unsophisticated, and possibly even mad. (Excepting Kubrick's films, of course. He did a great job at catching Thackeray's exact tone in Barry Lyndon, and he did well with the comical elements of Nabokov's Lolita, although not so well with the greater complexities of the story.) 

I have all but abandoned hope that we will ever see a great interpretation of a Vonnegut film. The Slaughterhouse Five and Mother Night films, although flawed, seem to be the best we will ever get. After the raw sewage that was Breakfast of Champions, we may not see any filmmaker try Vonnegut again for a long time. After Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, a movie that makes Breakfast of Champions seem in comparison to be The Godfather, Part 2, Tom Robbins may never get another chance at a cinema legacy. That's something of a shame, because his books, including this book, are fun to read, if anyone could figure out how to translate that fun to film.

The studio knew how bad this film was. Horrified by the screenings, and then by the audience reaction at the Toronto Festival, they asked Van Sant to re-cut it. The release, originally scheduled for 1991, was postponed and delayed until 1993, at which time it was snuck it into a minimal distribution schedule, where it grossed between one and two million dollars and quickly disappeared.

• Lorraine Bracco

• Rain Phoenix (1, 2)

Other Crap:

• Two new clips from The Woodsman. This is the controversial film in which Kevin Bacon plays a pedophile who attempts to start a new life in his home town after 12 years in prison.
• Ten new clips from After the Sunset, the caper film with Pierce Brosnan and Salma Hayek.
• Larry LaPrise, the man who wrote 'The Hokey Pokey', died peacefully at age 83. The most difficult job was the undertaker's role in placing LaPrise in the coffin. He put his left leg in, he took his left leg out ...
  • Actually, Mr LaPrise died in April of 1996, but it was a good story.
• A headline-writer's dream assignment: "Sarasota man arrested in death of Elvis". Elvis is ... well ...
• Here are about a bazillion high quality pictures of Tara Reid's store-bought breast falling out completely at P-Diddy's party.
• Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris has fenced off a famous tomb to prevent women from performing lewd acts on a statue. For those of you female readers who are disappointed by the closing, there is an alternative. Rubbing MY crotch will also cause you to find a husband within a year, so if the cemetery turns you away ...
• "Pigs and Small Horses are to be allowed on board Northwest planes". This is a funny item (apparently true) in Dave Barry's blog, but the real fun is beneath the item. Look below and read the comments, which are hilarious.
• Two golf course managers and a tournament organizer were sentenced to house arrest for hosting two competitions featuring prostitutes and strippers stationed along the putting greens. I've always thought that America was a great country, but how great can it be when this is illegal?
• British bookies make odds on the next James Bond. The latest rumor is that McGregor is in negotiations, but the bookies list Colin Farrell at 3-1, Hugh Jackman at 4-1, Carrot Top at 5-1, and Ewan at 14-1. OK, I made up the part about Carrot Top, but I'm still pulling for Pete Postlethwaite. We've had just about enough of these pretty boy Bonds. It's time to give us ugly suckers a chance.
• You know Tom Hanks has made it - Bafta gives him the same award as Hugh Grant. It isn't exactly clear what that award is for. I have narrowed it down to two possibilities (1) best acting by guys who could afford good haircuts, but just don't care, or (2) best acting by heterosexual guys who seem not to be.
• The ultimate Christmas Gift from the Scoopy Gift Catalogue? Bigger breasts under the ol' X-mas tree. For those of you who really want to put the X back in X-mas.
• World population 'to level off at 9b in 2300
  • The submitter wrote: "Later in the article it goes on to say that any prediction after 2050 is a shot in the dark, and that estimates of 12 billion could be possible. I think that the world population will reach 12 billion, but will start go down about the time Soylent Green becomes popular. We then may be forced to kill all people over the age of 30 in the fiery ritual of Carousel, but it doesn't matter after we blow ourselves up in a nuclear war. The cause of the war is uncertain ... either Skynet takes over or some mad terrorist launches one missile which triggers a world wide war. All we will know is that a war occurred, evidenced by the dilapidated Statue of Liberty washed up on a beach. Well, all of this will be moot if Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck fail to blow up the Texas sized asteroid coming our way (which we will not know about until it is only seven days away from impact).
• Playboy TV to Launch 'Night Calls Hotline' Friday
• Various celebrity paparazzi photos
• CANADA REPORTS HUGE JUMP IN IMMIGRATION. Over 55,000,000 Requests for Citizenship Since Tuesday Night
  • Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew said that he was “flabbergasted” by the fifty-five-million-plus requests for Canadian citizenship, adding that it was difficult to pinpoint the precise reasons for the staggering increase. “My only theory is that after many years of exposure in the U.S., hockey is finally starting to catch on,” Mr. Pettigrew said.
• The Daily Show looks at the international response to the Bush victory.
• GALLUP: How Americans Voted - demographic breakdown.
  • One of the crazy things floating around the net is that President Bush was elected by a coalition of the stupid. Whether you like the President or not, the plain facts are that the identifiably stupid voted for Kerry, not Bush. America's least educated citizens, people who quit school after or during high school, went overwhelmingly for Kerry, 54-46. On the other hand, America's most educated citizens also preferred Kerry by a solid margin. Those with post-graduate education favored Kerry 53-47. Where President Bush won was in the middle ground - those who attended college, maybe graduated, but did not continue their education after college. Bush took the college grads overwhelmingly 58-42, and took the "attended college but did not graduate" group 56-44.
  • The craziest split, as I have noted elsewhere, was between married and unmarried women. Kerry WON the unmarried women vote by a massive 28 points, but LOST the married woman vote by 16 points. The election was lost on a wedding ring.
  • Compared to 2000, the President LOST substantial support (7 points) among voters aged 18-29. I guess those "rock the vote" things have some impact. It didn't matter, at least not this time, because the President improved so much among the other age groups, but it shows the influence which external efforts may be able to exert over the youth market in future elections. Or not.
• LA Direct -Models Available. Click on their names for nude portfoliios and a complete list of what they will do on camera including SM, BD, LOL, and sometimes even LS/MFT.
• Latest Internet rumor going around is that Vegas star Josh Duhamel used to star in gay porn. Real or "shopped"? You make the call.
• Some guy supposedly takes Jessica Simpson's ... um ... cherry. I think this photo must be a fake of some kind, but I don't know the trick. They discuss it below. Consensus is that it is not a live Jessica, but another woman or a wax dummy or something.
• Two new way cool posters from Sin City.
• Submitter wrote: "This just in...Jessica Alba is freakin' hot! Huge pic here, but you may wish it could be bigger"
• The trailer for Monster-in-Law: "The story of a young woman who must reconsider her engagement when confronted with her nightmarish future mother-in-law." (Jennifer Lopez and Jane Fonda)
• Four free short videos from Playboy's Twins & Sisters!
• Playmate Gallery - Heather Carolin - April 2002 - Courtesy of PlayboyPlus.com!
• To the dismay of 'Star Wars' nerds everywhere, Natalie Portman will not be nude in the upcoming Mike Nichols movie, 'Closer.' "Portman, who plays Queen Amidala in the space epics, was supposed to bare all for her role as a stripper in 'Closer,' until she got cold feet and asked Nichols to cut the footage of her romping fully nude in a topless club."
• The Tonight Show with Jay Leno presents The Fruitcake Lady

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.

Words, pictures, and vids from ICMS
 

WET (1995)   --- Day 1

Tara Fitzgerald
(1, 2, 3, 4)

Scoop pretty much summed it up in his review with this comment...

I have to say that on a scale of 1 to 100, rating beautiful nudity from famous women in non-sex movies, this is 100. "Sirens" is the Holy Grail of naked famous women.

Mischa Barton
(1, 2, 3)

Barton and Bilson

Emmanuelle Vaugier
(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

BAD WEEK FOR MICHAEL JACKSON
Dangling Chad...Off A Balcony - It's a bad week for Michael Jackson. His judge rejected his lawyer's request to remove the district attorney that Jackson thinks is gunning for him.