Miss Right (1982)

An American living in Rome as a UPI stringer has decided to change his life. He has recurring dreams and fantasies about a woman he can see quite clearly, but does not know. He senses that the dream-girl  is Miss Right, and that his subconscious is warning him to start looking for his one true love instead of dallying with his many hot girlfriends.  In order to accomplish this, he makes a dinner date with each of the hot girlfriends, in each case so he can break off the relationship, ultimately leaving him free to pursue the true love with a pure heart.

That's about it. He invites a bunch of women to his apartment, feeds them and dumps them. They react with varying degrees of despair. One half-heartedly tries to commit suicide. Another refuses to leave, and when he physically throws her our the door, she comes crashing back in through the window.

Astoundingly, his plan works. After he dumps the ballast from his life, he sees the living incarnation of his dream-girl in the streets. He strikes up a conversation and starts to romance her. There is the usual Italian-style twist. In the last scene we see him bringing her flowers at her art class, supposedly smitten with love, when he catches the eye of a beautiful art student. He is flirting with the student with his eyes as he gives his "true love" the flowers. The end.

A difficult movie to summarize. Reviews usually begin with a brief summary statement, like "The Forgotten Nightmare is a rare German Expressionist comedy ... " This movie is so poor that I'm not even sure how to summarize it, because I can't figure out why the filmmakers created it. I think they felt they were making sort of an Italian-style sex comedy, but the attempts at humor are so lame and the performances so unappealing that it's almost impossible to call it a comedy. The only real "tell" is that the performers act like they are in a situation comedy, delivering lines with the same tone of voice as Catskills comedians waiting for the drummer to deliver a rim shot. But the lines are all wrong. It's like they want to say, "Your mama is so fat that she didn't have children, she had suburbs," but it comes out "Your mama is so fat that she really should see a doctor."

I suppose I had the right idea in the first place. Maybe it is a German Expressionist comedy.

Author/star William Tepper wrote this in 1982. As of the beginning of this year, this was his only leading role and his only screenplay. He played only two roles of any kind after this movie, and his last performing credit is in 1984. You might remember him. He's the guy who played Tom Hanks's doctor friend in Bachelor Party. That was his last role. There is a happy ending to the story, sort of. After being without a credit of any kind for two decades, he now has another screenplay credit in 2006, a Ray Romano movie called Grilled. While that doesn't seem to be the next Duck Soup, it is rated 5.3 at IMDb, compared to 2.0 for Miss Right. And that 2.0 might be a bit inflated because it includes a few bogus 10s. The top IMDb voters score it 1.6, and that will now go down if I'm in that group.

The DVD is every bit as bad as the film itself. There are no features, and the film itself is obviously just a transfer of an old full screen, pan-n-scan, VHS print.

It is an F in this particular DVD. It would be an E if it were cleaned up and remastered.

To tell you the truth, I'd obtain a copy if it is ever issued in a cleaned-up DVD because it does include a little bit of flesh from three famous women. Karen Black and Marie-France Pisier show their breasts. Lois Lane shows a plumber's crack, and then exposes the side of her nipple in exactly one frame.

Karen Black

Marie-France Pisier

Margot Kidder

Third party videos:

• The New Rose Hotel (Movie House Comments)

  • Asia Argento  (Several zipped .avis)

   

• The Lover (Movie House Comments). The greatest soft-core movie ever made - period, filmed by a legitimate film genius, Jean-Jaques Annaud. The cinematography is not just the best-ever for a softcore, but compares to any movie you can name. ANY. (Examples in the Movie House review)

  • Lisa Faulkner  (Two zipped .wmvs) These are from the extra features on a DVD: deleted scenes and a "behind the scenes" clip.

  • One more of Lisa Faulkner (Zipped .avi)

OTHER CRAP:

Movie Reviews:

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

Metrosexuality (1999)

This is a feature-length DVD assembled from a TV show about the gay scene in London's Notting Hill. The tag line, "Boy meets girl, girl meets girl, boy meets boy, whatever" pretty much describes it. 

Kwame is seventeen, and has had his first shag, but it didn't go well. He does have a lot on his mind however. His father and his father's husband have split, and he wants them back together. His girlfriend is hanging with two lipstick lesbians. His mother is lesbian. His best friend is in love with his dad. In fact, he is the only straight person he knows. His father is going through a second childhood and has purchased a skating park.

The gay community seems to love it. At 225 minutes and with thick accents, I had some trouble keeping track of everyone, but it is colorful with some very funny moments. You will either enjoy these day-glow characters or not. They are flamboyantly gay, but basically have the same sorts of problems as anyone else.

I will give it a C as a Gay/Lesbian comedy.

IMDb readers say 6.7.

T

Anna Chipovskaya

Viktoriya Tolstoganova

Hard Candy

Ellen Page

"Dexter" ...  Valerie Dillman

Uma

Lohan

Emma Samms

Catherine "Daisy Duke" Bach

The London Sun reports that a friendly, middle-aged man in a pink fairy outfit with tiara, tutu, wings and a wand has been popping up all across Cornwall, England, handing out free lottery tickets and paying for people's shopping and meals.  He leaves a card with a picture of a fairy and a handwritten note that says, "You'll be hearing a lot about me - The Hairy Christmas Fairy."  It's not clear whether it's a publicity stunt, a good Samaritan or a loony, but a worker at a bakery where the Fairy paid for everyone's lunch said, "He got a few odd looks, but if someone is offering to buy you a sausage roll, you don't say no."

*  If a middle-aged man dressed like a fairy offered me a "sausage roll," I
would definitely say no.

*  A hairy, middle-aged fairy who pops up all over England?  This must be how George Michael spends the holidays.



Iran's Etemad-Melli newspaper reports that a 24-year-old Tehran man is facing up to three years in jail for setting his neighbor's $40,000 luxury car on fire.  He said he was teaching the neighbor a lesson for refusing to heed his demands that he stop throwing parties and entertaining "badly-veiled women" every night.  But more bad news for the neighbor: it's illegal in Iran to host parties in which unrelated men and women socialize and women don't completely cover themselves, so he could face
hefty fines and lashes.

*  He would flee in his car, but...

*  Judging from his parties, he'd enjoy the lashes.



A new study by Mastercard debunked the ideas of "Black Friday" and "Cyber Monday."  It found that the Friday after Thanksgiving wasn't even one of the top five busiest shopping days last year, and the Monday afterward saw no big surge in Internet shopping.  Instead, the study predicts that most people will put off their shopping until right before Christmas.

*  "Most people" meaning "all men."