Best Nude Scenes of 2006:

Balloting has begun: vote and/or check the results, as well as last year's results, here.

 

LOVING ANNABELLE (2006):

It's the old story, often told, about the maverick student who has been dismissed from several private schools. Her mother is a U.S. Senator, and hopes to bring her young rebel in line, so finally sends her to a strict Catholic boarding school for girls, hoping at least to remove most of the occasions for temptation. Mother doesn't count on the one teacher who will finally break through to the youngster and eventually form a bond that will extend into the carnal, with unhappy consequences for one and all.

Why tell this story again? Primarily for a new audience. Varying from the usual male fantasy subtext inherent in this story, this is a chick-flick. It easily meets the minimum requirement of a 1 point differential between the male and female ratings at IMDb with a 1.4. More specifically, it is for a very special kind of chick. For, you see, the teacher and student are both female.

Loving Annabelle is not such a bad movie. It's slick, technically savvy, sincere, and well acted. It just can't really quite find a comfortable place to settle. It vacillates between rosy-tinted fantasy romance, soft-core titillation, and serious drama, and it never really finds a home in any of those places.

Variety gave it a negative review:

Taken as softcore lesbian fantasia -- though there are signs writer-helmer Katherine Brooks' intentions are serious -- this unofficial, very loose "Maedchen in Uniform" remake will provide decent guilty-pleasure sofa-date fare for specialized auds. Gauzy lensing, nubiles lounging in lingerie, and some high-drama moments verging on unintentional camp keep slick but silly item well removed from any semblance of real life.

I don't have much to add to that, and I believe that the show-biz publication honed in precisely on the correct genre for the movie - it's a guilty pleasure film for lesbians. The comments at IMDb, which are mostly from women in the target audience and are mostly quite favorable, confirm that the film does have an enthusiastic, if specialized audience. In fact, the audience is exceptionally enthusiastic. The IMDb scores are astounding. There are nearly 500 votes, and the arithmetic mean is 9.1/10. That's Casablanca territory! 3/4 of the voters awarded it the full 10/10, and there are virtually no scores under seven. Well, good on ya, ladies. I guess you have as much right to those guilty pleasures as the rest of us.

The film's pre-DVD exposure was limited to gay and lesbian film festivals, but that fact creates two incorrect impressions of the film. It is a better film than implied by that fact, and it is a more widely appealing one as well. Male audiences will undoubtedly find the story too familiar, with only the teacher's gender varying from a dozen other films stored in vague memory. Men who want to see the film's sex scene, which comes near the end of the story, will probably reach for the remote several times to plow through the humorless, melodramatic dialogue. On the other hand, there isn't really time for the film to drag. It's only 76 minutes long including all the credits and titles, so some men may well find that short wait worthwhile. The guilty pleasure aspect of the film can work for men as well as women, because there is no preaching or strident gay activism involved in the film, and the sex scene does, after all, involve two attractive women. The teacher looks like a 40ish Helen Mirren, and the young girl is a more glamorous, less innocent version of Jennifer Jason Leigh circa Ridgemont High. While the nudity is quite subtle - only a half-glimpsed nipple here and there, the sex scene features two attractive women in a lingering, erotic embrace in which they press their bare breasts together and move sensuously. Although I'm not in the target market, I found this erotic, and might have found it extremely erotic if the director had used a few more light bulbs and had opened it up a bit.

I made a film clip of the sex scene, and then I discarded it because I just couldn't see a damned thing. As you can see from the collages below, it's not possible to see much even after considerable brightening. That's a shame.

 

Diane Gaidry

Erin Kelly

THIRD PARTY VIDEOS:

* Pledge This is the latest film with a title preceded by "National Lampoon's".

Angela Dodson (Two .avis zipped together.)

* Used Cars (Movie House Page) is one of the best of the screwball comedies of the late seventies and early eighties. It should be. It was directed by Robert Zemeckis, and the executive co-producers were Steven Spielberg and John Milius. One of the more interesting elements of the film is that Betty Thomas, now a hotshot producer and pal of the Clintons, had a small, comical role as a stripper.

Here's Betty Thomas, almost topless (pasties), and her fellow stripper. (Zipped .avi)

Cheryl Rixon, a former Penthouse Pet of the Year. (Two .avis zipped together.)

Deborah Harmon, the film's female lead, in a sex scene with Kurt Russell. (Zipped .avi)

 

 

 

OTHER CRAP:

The Other Crap site has simply become too big and detailed to fit into my Fun House column. It contains far too much info, too many graphics, too many news feeds, and too many embedded videos to include here. Plus the scoopy.net version was always a day out of synch. You fans please catch the deluxe version of Other Crap in real time, with all the bells and whistles, here.

MOVIE REVIEWS:

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

Colpo in Canna (1975)

Colpo In Canna (1975) is an Italian gangster comedy.

 A stewardess is paid to deliver a letter to a gang leader, and ends up in the middle of a battle among several rival gangs and the police over control of the Naples drug trade. It is nearly impossible to figure out who is who, and it doesn't much matter. Nearly all the fights, and there are many, are complete slapstick, and there are car chases very reminiscent of Keystone Cops. Towards the end, you realize that the stewardess is also part of a gang, possible US federal agents, possibly something else.

You may wonder why I am bothering with a film like this. Well, first, it is a gorgeous digital remaster, with bright, saturated colors and no grain. Second, the Naples scenery is very attractive. Third, some of the fight choreography is so far over the top that I couldn't help but laugh.

You are not convinced yet, you say? Well, how about Ursula Andress as the stewardess, doing full frontal and rear nudity in clear light in several scenes? In fact, I think she was naked more than she was dressed. She was 39 when she made this film, looks great. Not just for her age. She looks phenomenal for any age. Some unknowns were also nude briefly in an orgy.

IMDb shows it little respect at 4.3, but the comments at IMDb don't even seem to realize this is a comedy. Of course 70s Italian farce is an acquired taste, but this film holds its own with films like Sirens and Showgirls in the Parthenon of celebrity nudity. For the record, I kind of enjoyed the slapstick as well. Some days I love this job.

 In this context, it is a strong C+.

 

Ursula Andress

Unknowns

Marisa Paredes in Queens

Comedy Clubs are getting dangerous: Last night, video hit the Internet of Pauly Shore performing at a club in Odessa, Texas.  The crowd was talking loudly during his act, he began sparring with a heckler, and the heckler, a big galoot in a cowboy hat, climbed onstage.  Shore backed away and tried to make peace, but the guy punched him in the face before police pulled him away.  Shore yelled, "F--- all you f---in', white trash (unintelligible)" and stormed off. 

* This has never happened before: someone laughed while Pauly Shore was onstage!

*  At Pauly Shore shows, the only punchline is the line of people waiting
to punch Pauly Shore.




In an amazing example of evolution, University of Miami scientists found that a nectar bat from Ecuador evolved a retractable tongue half again as long as its entire body to reach the nectar in a certain deep flower.  Proportionally, it's the longest tongue of any mammal.

*  Aside from Gene Simmons.

* There is a trade-off: proportionally, it also has the smallest penis...yet the female bats don't seem to mind.

The NSA denies that it was the US government agency that tapped Princess Diana's phone

* Actually, it was all a misunderstanding: Bill Clinton saw Diana on TV one day, turned to a Secret Service agent, and said, "I'd sure like to tap that!"