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Une Vielle Maitresse
In my rush to publish Thursday's
edition, I forgot to link to my own collages! Here they are, iff'n you
missed 'em.
Mailbox
From SPAZ, master of all things Canadian:
"ID's from American Pie 6.
Naked Fear
I think this film gave me my biggest surprise of the year. Except for the
opening credit sequence, the first 44 minutes of this movie are god-awful,
consisting of melodramatic situations populated by cardboard characters being
acted by performers who couldn't get decent roles in dinner theater. I was
wondering how this film could have been directed by Thom Eberhardt, an
experienced 60-year-old man who has directed such competent films as:
- Without A Clue, which stars Michael Caine and Ben Kingsley as Sherlock
Holmes and Doctor Watson
- Captain Ron, a pretty funny lowbrow comedy starring Martin Short and
Kurt Russell.
The opening credits show a yokel wearing his hunting gear, tracking down
and shooting a naked girl. She is only wounded, so he approaches her and
shoots her in the head with a handgun, as one might do with a wounded buck.
That scene was actually very effective, offering some hope that the film would
be good. The scene then switches to a small desert town which has recently
seen an epidemic of missing strippers. There's no mystery about what will
happen. The fate of the missing girls is obvious, and it is only a matter of
time before the naive new stripper becomes the latest girl recruited for the
hunt. It takes 44 minutes of tedious exposition and irrelevant sub-plots to
bring the hunter and his naked prey together for the start of that hunt, and
they are 44 of the most amateurish minutes ever put onto film by en
experienced filmmaker. I was cursing my fate that I had to watch this for the reported nudity. I was in
an especially sour mood because even the nudity in the first 44 minutes is a
tease.
And then I got my surprise.
Once the movie began in earnest, with the actual pursuit, it became
spellbinding. The stiff line readings became irrelevant because it was just a
man chasing a naked woman through the woods. No need for them to deliver any
Wildean dialogue, or any other dialogue for that matter. And Eberhardt
suddenly remembered what he was supposed to do to make a film suspenseful and
exciting. Not only that, his direction became very smooth. He used camera
angles, including overheads, to show the strategic maneuvers of the two actors
on their outdoor chessboard, occasionally to demonstrate how close they could
be without one being aware of the other's presence.. He used POV techniques
effectively to show when one of them found another. He used foreshadowing to
focus in on important items that could be used as weapons or on terrain that
could be used by the girl to hide or escape or plan an ambush. As long as
those two characters were the focus of the film, I never gave a single thought
to the passage of time until the hunt had reached a conclusion. There were
still a couple of clunky scenes which took place back in town as people
noticed first that the girl was missing, and then that the yokel hadn't
returned on schedule. Those cutaways may have been necessary to the plot, and
they were mercifully short, but since they were expository, they required more
badly-delivered dialogue. The good news is that once the action returned to
the wilderness, the film again became suspenseful and interesting, and moved
along beautifully except when dialogue was needed. What's more, there were
some interesting, unexpected and credible plot twists out there in the outback
as one of them, then the other, gained the upper hand in a seesaw battle.
Not only did the film become entertaining when the hunt began, but it
finally delivered on the nudity as well. Danielle De Luca did a 19 minute nude
scene. Literally. She went nineteen consecutive minutes without a stitch of
clothing on her body at the beginning of the hunt.
In fact, if this film had started in minute 44, I would be raving about
what a beautifully paced indie film it is. Unfortunately that is not the case,
so all I can say is what I started with: what an incredible surprise. If you
were to divide this picture into two films, you would start with a very bad
44-minute film. Who could expect that to be followed by a taut, riveting
60-minute film with the same characters, filmed and performed by the same
team.
Not I.
(One other stripper - in the background - was topless for a couple of
frames. I just ignored it.)
Sorry, no collages. Doing caps and collages could have taken me hours that
I didn't have. But one or more of you guys feel free to play around with it if
you like. We'd all be pleased.
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OTHER CRAP:
Catch the deluxe
version of Other Crap in real time, with all the bells and whistles,
here.
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What?
(1972)
What? is a Roman Polanski comedy starring Sydne Rome. She is hitching through
Italy, and some guys pick her up and try to rape her. They get excited and start
attacking each other, and she escapes. She next finds herself in a plush villa,
and is shown to a room for the night. Her shirt is torn. In the morning she
finds it missing altogether, leaving her topless. She soon meets Marcello Mastroianni, a
former pimp who starts a romance with her. She also comes to know the other
oddball residents of the villa, including Roman Polanski and Hugh Griffith. She
soon loses her pants, but finds the top of some PJs. It is about then that
someone paints the back of her leg blue. Eventually, she is chased from the
villa because she was running away. Roger Ebert, in awarding 1/2 star,
complained that newspaper policy wouldn't allow him to score it lower. He wrote:
"It was completed in 1973 and has not been released until now (1976) because
almost every distributor who saw it fled the screening room in horror, clutching
at his wallet. The movie's original title was "What?" That is reportedly what
Carlo Ponti said (in Italian, no doubt, and appropriately embellished) after
Polanski showed it to him. In its original version, it looked like the work of a
madman, of a crazed cinematic genius off the deep end. Ponti, in desperation,
had all of Polanski's outtakes printed up (outtakes are versions of a shot that
the director decides not to use.) With the aid of skilled editors, Ponti
attempted to substitute various outtakes in an attempt to construct a film that
resembled, well, a film. No luck. When Polanski makes a bad movie, he does it
with a certain thoroughness. Even the shots he didn't use were bad. "
I was not able to figure out what got Roger so worked up. I got a couple of
laughs out of the beginning of the film, and then found it rather tedious, but
no more so than many other Italian comedy farces of the era.
Only for Polanski completists and genre aficionados.
IMDb: 5.7, Polanski's lowest ever in 50 years of filmmaking - and therefore
lower than such films as The Ninth Gate, Pirates, and Bitter Moon!
Sydne Rome shows full frontal and rear, as does Renee Langer, as one of the
other residents.
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Notes and collages
The Man Who Knew Too Little
and
Willow
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Bluebeard
I don't think it was supposed to be, but the 1972 drama Bluebeard is
hilarious. It isn't played for laughs, but it's funny anyway. It's also
full of beautiful and often-nude women, so you can't miss. In addition, if
you're a fan, the male lead was Richard Burton, although this movie is
definitely not his shining hour.
As you might guess from my comments so far, the story is kind of lame,
maybe even trite, but it's also campy and funny without meaning to be, and
a lot of fun to watch. It definitely is NOT meant to be a story of the
real man who is thought to be the basis for the legend of Bluebeard;
rather, it's just one variation of the Bluebeard fairy tale.
Baron von Sepper is an aristocrat and World War I flying ace, who is
much beloved in Germany after the war. He has a knack for marrying
beautiful women, many of them. They have a knack for dying or disappearing
shortly after the marriage.
His latest wife is a beautiful American showgirl named Anne (Joey
Heatherton). While prowling the Baron's castle, she discovers a frozen
vault filled with ex-wives, all quite dead and nicely preserved. When she
discusses this oddity with her new husband, the Baron admits that killing
wives is a handy alternative to having to divorce them, and much less
messy. Unfortunately, now that she knows, Anne has to be the next pork
chop on the shelf.
Silly as it sounds, and silly as it is, this is a very entertaining
flick, not to be taken seriously even for a second, and filled with
beautiful women.
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| Joey
Heatherton |
Agostina
Belli |
Karin
Schubert |
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| Nathalie
Delon and Sybil Danning |
Marilu
Tolo |
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