Ik ook van jou (2001), or I Love You Too, is a tragic love story from the Netherlands. It had the strangest introduction I can remember. Two friends, Antonie Kamerling and his buddy, are on holiday, camping in France. They are getting to know two girls who are also camping there. When the girls get in trouble in their canoe in some rapids, the guys rescue them, but they all have a long walk to the campsite. One couple hitches a ride, but Kamerling and the other girl end up walking. He twists an ankle, and she helps him back to camp. All of this has nothing to do with the story. She knows he is a writer, and asks him what his book is about.

The book is about his relationship with a deeply insecure, insanely jealous, and self-destructive woman, Angela Schijf. The rest of the story is his telling of the details of the affair. He was in law school, and engaged to the perfect girl, Anniek Pfeifer, when his girlfriend found Schijf passed out in the ladies room, and talks him into taking her home. He ends up staying, and the two have a joyous first several days of a relationship built on sex. When her parents return home unexpectedly, catch them in the act and throw them out, they move in together. The relationship is nearly storybook at first. She gets him to drop law school and is fiancee, and start writing. He chooses to write about the two of them. Then her jealousy and poor self image start her on a downward spiral of alienating him and escalating self-mutilation.

IMDB readers have this at 6.0 of 10. It won two awards in the Netherlands. Pfeifer shows breasts in two scenes, and Schijf shows breasts and buns several times. The lighting was dark, and usually lit with colored filters, making it a chore to cap. To make matters worse, the transfer is grainy, yellow shifted, and undersaturated. Most of the dialogue is in Dutch, with some French and English. The subtitles can't be turned off, but appear in the letterbox masked area. MY tolerance for tragic love stories is getting lower and lower, and the character development was not good enough to catch my interest. We never got an inkling as to why Schijf's character was the way she was, and I didn't understand why Kamerling choose her over his fiancee. For me, this is a C- at best.

Quick, identify this recent film:

• Stars Natascha McElhone
• Production budget more than $40 million
• Beautiful photography in ultra-widescreen 2.35:1 aspect ratio
• Stylish, but pretentious
• Plenty of body part close-ups, especially hands
• Plot is incomprehensible
• Opening weekend only $7 million gross, despite being in about 2500 theaters.

Amazingly, that description applies to two different movies in the past couple of months. Feardotcom closed October 27th, Solaris opened about a month later. Apparently that is the only kind of movie McElhone makes.

Feardotcom isn't otherwise similar to Solaris. It is edited with rapid cuts, and people speak at normal speed. It is incomprehensible because it simply makes no sense. Solaris makes some sense if you think about it, but by the time a character responds to another, you've forgotten what the previous character said, and you just don't care to put it together.

The basic premise of feardotcom is a snuff web site which mysteriously kills visitors. I think the idea is that the site is haunted by the ghost one of the snuffees, and she kills the subscribers for supporting snuffitude. The infinitely world-weary Stephen Rea is the snuffmeister, performing here in the high camp fashion of the late Vincent Price.

As usual with web sites in movies, the subscriber count goes up immediately, instantly,  when something exciting happens on camera. No indication of how the subscribers could possibly know what is happening on camera at that very moment.

In between these two movies, IMDB lists McElhone in something called City of Ghosts, which I don't know anything about, but it was directed by Matt Dillion and stars Gerard Depardieu, which tells me just about everything I need to know

Anyway, feardotcom has a fairly high boob count, but I don't know who these people are.

• Anonymous breastices (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)
• no nudity - but just to show you some of the beautiful photographic composition in this otherwise crappy movie

OTHER CRAP:

• I love The Sun. "These buxom bikers were a cycle for sore eyes yesterday as they peeled off to recreate the cover of the 1978 Queen hit Bicycle Race/Fat Bottomed Girls".

• ITV says: "Jennifer Lopez has presented her husband to be with a pre-nuptial bombshell, according to reports. Jen is said to be so determined to make her third marriage work that she wants to slap a £5 million fine on Ben Affleck if he strays. Other items on the list are said to include a demand for sex at least four times a week and a £1 million fine for lying." Yup, that's what all marriage counselors recommend for marital longevity - plenty of unreasonable demands and draconian restrictions on your partner. C'mon, he's the "world's sexiest man", isn't he? What does he need this woman for?

• Eonline picks the tackiest stars of 2002. The following did not win first place: Winona, Anna Nicole, Babs, and JLo. Read the article to see who beat them all out. I think I would have voted for JLo. There's the pre-nup and the nipple-tweaker and the public nose-picking, and mostly ... well, getting engaged to one guy while still being married to another is pretty damned tacky.

• Here's the nose-picking incident, to help promote the case for J-lo as the tacky queen

• Interesting story - a Kazaa skin is actually a virus that erases your mp3 files. Is it an RIAA thing? Nobody knows.

• This is, in my opinion, a great use of humor as a substitute for shrill tirades. Indians raise scholarship money by lampooning racist iconography - They name their team the Fightin' Whities, and make beaucoup bucks marketing their "Fightin' Whities" mascot  Find their items at http://www.cafeshops.com/fightinwhite. They missed a great opportunity. Their white stereotype mascot is funny, but I was a little disappointed that he wasn't smoking a pipe thoughtfully.

• OJ says that his search for the real killer has been hampered by the lack of mirrors in his house

• The ten stupidest coaching decisions of all time. Finally - a championship for the Red Sox! They also hold the record for the two stupidest personnel decisions of all time (1) their owner sold some guy named Babe Ruth to the Yankees for enough money to finance a musical called No, No Nanette (2) they were the last team in the majors to employ black players. While Veeck and Rickey were stealing pennants as early as the late 1940s by getting the top black stars ASAP, the Sox saw no need to compete. Then when they finally hired a black player, more than a decade later, was it Satchel, Aaron, Robinson,  Mays or Campy? Nah. They played an all-white lineup in 1958, then they brought up some clodhopper named Pumpsie Green to be their first black player in 1959, 12 years after integration! Pumpsie justified their skepticism by hitting a powerful .233 with ten RBI. And he was one strange dude. Three years later, Pumpsie was arrested at a New York airport for trying to board a flight to Israel with no luggage and no ticket.  Go, Sox.

• golfer Long John Daly, always a contender for that top 10 tacky award, releases a new album of his songs. I'm not kidding.

• Daly disqualified in Aussie open after throwing tantrum. He threw a fit when he lost the long driving contest to the Dalai Lama. Big hitter, the Lama.

• Parenting tips from Weekly World News - one word: straight-jackets. Or is that two words?

• In a rare demonstration of box-office recidivism, Harry Potter goes back to #1, after a week at #2. Extreme Ops and Solaris will probably not even cover marketing costs.

• The 20 worst things on the web. I would have included Orbitz. Never in my life, under any circumstances, will I ever buy anything from those people. If they have a ticket for a hundred bucks, and the next best deal is five hundred from a web site which uses its profits to support international terrorism  - well, I'll stay home.

• not another teen movie babe Chyler Leigh (1, 2) in the hot tub with Marilyn Manson in Tainted Love

Shameless Propaganda, part 8:

Pat Reeder is a guy whose name is not familiar to you, but who touches your life almost every day. He's actually the guy who writes the jokes that your DJ tells every morning during your drive to work.  He's also the guy who writes those Comedy Wire things that you see on the bottom of this page from time to time. If you wonder why your DJ and the Fun House tell the same jokes, Pat's the reason. At the moment, Pat has a new book out called "Nine Hallmarks of Highly Incompetent Losers."  It's a "reverse self-help" book that helps the reader attain success by avoiding nine stupid mistakes made by failures and idiots.  He illustrates his points with over 200 hilarious-but-true stories from his syndicated radio service, "The Comedy Wire."

If you like weird news and dumb criminal stories, or if you've ever been forced to suffer through a boring business/self-help book like "Who Moved My Cheese?", you'll love "Nine Hallmarks of Highly Incompetent Losers."  It earned four stars from Wireless Flash News, and will be in bookstores nationwide next spring, but you can get the jump on the rest of America and get it now through Pat's website.  Cheaper than Amazon and every copy is personally autographed! 

Click here (http://www.comedy-wire.com/bookorderpage.html) for a book excerpt, Real Audio updates on "Losers In The News," samples of the Comedy Wire and more. 

NINE HALLMARKS OF HIGHLY INCOMPETENT LOSERS

Samples from Chapter Eight:  Claim Talents You Don't Really Have

...Sadly, the fact that it is extremely rare to find someone who can do anything, much less everything, does not stop people from trying to display talents and abilities they simply do not have...  

*  Police in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, arrested a faith healer who told women he could cure any disease by sucking their breasts.  He actually persuaded three women to pay him for this "therapy."  He did manage to cure them of ever trusting men again.

...Even people who are talented enough to become top Hollywood stars can feel the need to prove they have talents beyond those that made them famous...

*  In a much-ballyhooed interview with ABC's Barbara Walters, Kelly Preston declared that the golden touch enjoyed by herself and husband John Travolta was no fluke, because their deep study of Scientology had taught them to make such good career and business decisions.  Just two days later, their most recent film, the Scientology-inspired megaflop "Battlefield Earth," won seven Golden Raspberry Awards for the worst in cinema, including Razzies for Travolta as "Worst Actor" and Preston as "Worst Supporting Actress."  Its seven Razzies tied an ignominious record set by "Showgirls," whose stars and creators were more likely to attribute their career decisions to Satan than to L. Ron Hubbard...

...Sometimes, what trips people up is not that they try to do new and difficult tasks that are beyond their capabilities, but that they try to do
too many seemingly easy, everyday tasks at the same time...

*  Pravda reported that a couple in Ruzayevka, Russia, had a freak accident due to poorly conceived multi-tasking.  The woman was giving her boyfriend oral sex in the kitchen while he was frying pancakes.  At a particularly distracting moment, he dropped the cast iron frying pan on her head.  She gritted her teeth in pain, severely biting his male organ.  They both ended up in the hospital, the woman with a concussion and the man with stitches in his penis.  The lesson: if you want to show your gratitude to a man for helping out with the cooking, wait until he's finished... 

By the way, one of our members has been awarded the free year of access for being the first one to order Pat's book from the Scoopy web site, so if we haven't contacted you, you aren't the guy!

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.

• Irène Jacob, the French actress shows breasts and bum in scenes from "Victory" (1995).

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

Today's offering...vidcaps from "Wild Malibu Weekend".

So I figure if you are in the biz of making movies there ought to be a few things that raise red flags whenever someone pitches an idea.

One of those has to be a movie filmed around a tv show with a novel concept. TV sucks, right? And if an idea is so damn bad they won't even make a tv show out of it, perhaps you ought not to make a movie out of it, yes?

And a second should be anyone who says his nephew's garage band is real good, ya know, and I was thinking we could put them in the movie. Not just background music, nope, but IN the movie... like stars sort of. Whattaya think?

Well, you ought to think "get the fuck out of here" but that did not occur to the makers of Wild Malibu Weekend. No it did not. So you have 45 minutes or so of some real bad shit, man, and another 45 minutes of some real mediocre shit, man. But, and by that I mean butt, the producers went and totally redeemed themselves by casting some nice looking women and getting them unclothed to one degree or another. I smell Oscar.

In some order of screen nekkid time, the babes are

Kathy Pasmore. Ersatz red hair, ersatz big boobs, but otherwise okay. She is nekkid a lot. Boobs in 1-7 (4 and 5 are kinda funny as Kathy's character responds to a guy holding a condom), full frontal in 8 & 9, boobs and bum in 10.

• Kathy Pasmore (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)

Anastasia Rova is the central protagonist of the movie; a cute girl with a small, natural body. She shows boobs in 1 and 2, bum in 3.

• Anastasia Rova (1, 2, 3)

Karli Allen is a similar sort of cute-little-thing. She shows boobs and bum... and in collage 3 she almost gives up gyno-goodies as she plays some sort of game like Twister while wearing a thong bikini. If the camera had just panned in.

• Karli Allen (1, 2, 3, 4)

Former Pet and long-time B movie actress, Shauna O'Brien, shows boobs in an early scene and lots and lots of bum througout the rest of the movie, as she prances around in a thong bikini. So you guys get to see boobs in collage 1 and bum in all the rest. Shauna used the name, Stevie Jean, in this movie; the same as the one she used in her Pet lay-out. This was very early in Shauna's career and so her body is 100% unprocessed, unenhanced. Thank heavens.

• Shauna O'Brien (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

And the last couple of collages are a treat of sorts... all four of these babes take off their tops in the televised competition. Now, this would work on television. Just look at the Manshow.

So you see Karli and Shauna real well (Shauna looks terrific, IMHO), Kathy and Anastasia less well... and in the upper right hand corner of the first collage you see former Hefmate Barbara Moore before the girls start to disrobe. Then she kinda disappears. Turns out she movies behind the band members so that the camera barely catches her at all (extreme right of collage 2). This pissed me off, mainly because I got the mofo-ing movie because Barbara was supposed to be nekkid in it. Girl was a Hefmate, for goodness sake, so it wasn't like she had never, ever given up the goodies on camera. Guess she be trying to establish a career as a serious actress.

That's why she agreed to a movie with Wild, Malibu and Weekend in its title.

• Group shots (1, 2)

The other night "The Mask", a Jim Carey vehicle was on TV, a movie I had never seen. This movie was Cameron Diaz's very first screen appearance and boy did she look hot. So I went out and got the DVD and made these caps. What a first time debut it was, now granted she didn't get naked, but in this case it didn't matter as I think some of these scenes with her cleavage and leg exposure are certainly hot enough to light my fire. Her dance sequence with Jim Carey has to be seen to be believed. If you have never seen it by all means do it.

• Cameron Diaz (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12)

• Angelina Jolie, cleavage, breasts and bum. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)

• Elizabeth Mitchell, breast exposure. (1, 2)

• Angelina Jolie and Elizabeth Mitchell. Both show breasts in a lesbian love scene. (1, 2)

"LINGERIE BARBIE": EDIBLE THONG SOLD SEPARATELY
But Her Feet Are Made For High Heels! - Some parents in Nashville, Tennessee, are trying to launch a nationwide protest against Mattel's new "Lingerie Barbie." The doll comes dressed in a peek-a-boo peignoir, garter belts and high heels. One dad called it irresponsible, saying that little girls see it and think it's glamorous and that's how they're supposed to be. But Mattel says Lingerie Barbie is for ages 14 and up and is not sold in toy stores but is intended for collectors only.