Yo, dudes, junior is working on his tan in the Caribbean this week, and I'm doing double duty, working on this page.

Life isn't necessarily fair.

He returns Saturday.

Movies:

New to DVD this week: Minority Report is a great entertainment picture - accused cop film noir, cum future fantasy, cum big actioner. It also explores a timely theme - the balance society must strike between individual rights and the greater good. No nudity.

Other crap:

Angel Heart (1987) is another early project with way to much good nudity not to redo, and it doesn't hurt that it is a better than average horror/mystery/thriller. Mickey Rourke is believable as an unwashed and mostly unemployed private eye in New York, who suddenly is contacted by a rich but very strange client (Robert De Niro), and asked to find a missing person. De Niro claims his only interest is to find out if the man is alive or dead. The missing man was a well known crooner before WW II, but was horribly disfigured during the war, and hospitalized with amnesia. The client had regular reports from a hospital that he was there, condition unchanged, but the last report didn't arrive. Rourke checks with the hospital, and finds that he has actually been gone for twelve years, but a doctor was paid a large sum of money to make people think he was still at the hospital.

With a little help from his reporter girlfriend, Elizabeth Whitcraft, he eventually figures out that New Orleans is the place to look, and has some names as starting points. As he gets closer to the truth, a hefty body count is building, including an ex girlfriend of the missing man, a psychic played by Charlotte Rampling. The more he learns, the more frightened and uneasy Rourke becomes. One of the more pleasant parts of his investigation is Lisa Bonet, who is the daughter of one of the women he wanted to track down. As I strongly recommend this to those who haven't seen it, I will leave the plot there.

Whitcraft shows breasts in a pre sex scene with Rourke, Rampling shows one breast after having had her heart cut out, and Bonet shows her breasts in several scenes, including a see through while washing her hair, a bathtub scene, a voodoo chicken execution dance, and a lengthy sex scene with Rourke that really sizzles. IMDB readers rate it 7.0 of 10, with men and women about equal. Bonet won a young artist best actress. Ebert is enthusiastic at 3 1/2 stars. Rotten Tomatoes says 86%, with 100% from the top critics. It is an unusual film that is this strong with the critics, and also with general viewing audiences. This film is a B-.
 

• Thumbnails (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
• Charlotte Rampling
• Elizabeth Whitcraft ( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)
• Lisa Bonet ( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31)

Today's little goody is part of a welcome trend:  weird little companies are buying up the rights to 60's and 70's and odd 80's movies and then doing a creditable job transferring them to DVD.  Case in point: Blood Mania.   Capped it oh so long ago because it has two Hefmates in it.  Well, that's almost not true.  It had one former Hefmate and a second babe who would in a couple years become a Hefmate.  The only occurrence of such an odd pairing that I've been able to find.

Blood Mania (1970) is a nasty little bugger.  Involves a doctor being blackmailed because he performed abortions as an intern and it includes a  money-crazed woman who kills off her father, who is or was, himself, the  doctor's patient.  This is all supposed to lead to an unconventional ending, but the plot, as a whole, and the ending, in particular, flies right on past  unconventional, misses illogical by a few hundred feet and lands right smack on top of fucking stupid.  Ed Wood woulda been proud of the writer and the  director.

But, and this is a very big but...JLo-sized, no bigger, almost  Shakira-sized...the director of photography was a certifiable genius and the
casting director did them all proud by snagging three nice looking babes to  get their kits off.

We got Hefmate of the month for Oct 70... which was the month of my birth,  so she's pretty darn special to me...Reagan Wilson.  (1, 2, 3) Cute redhead with a recreational body.  Got samples from three scenes.  One in the bathtub, one  boffing her boyfriend the doctor, and the third offering herself to the blackmailer, as a sacrifice to appease his appetites.  These are only  samples.  The rest I'm holding onto, for there's to be a second Hefmate flood in '02... and its to coincide with Xmas.

Second babe is Vicki Peters. (1, 2, 3) Cute little blonde who would become Hefmate of the month in April '72.  She plays the demented daughter's sister.  Samples from two scenes.  One in which she boffs the doctor.  Shot through burning  logs, which means periodically one can grab a frame with perfect lighting.

And about her boffing the doc.  That's an example of the wretchedness of the  plot.  Here the guy is shacking up with Reagan's character, she screws the guy blackmailing him to help ease the situation and poof, she's gone from  the movie and the good doc turns his attentions to a second babe, as if babe #1 had never existed.  No mention of her, nothing.  I'm tolerant of the ethics, mind you, if that's what it takes to get the poor slob through the day, but to have a character just up and disappear?  It's as though they ran out of money to pay Reagan and had to let her go in mid-movie.

Anyway, nice upper frame on Vicki, an' she looks kinda cute in her undies.

Third babe is Maria de Aragon.  (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11) Has a sister named Catherine, brother-in-law  named Henry.  Live in London, I think.

Maria has a beautiful body.  Not bovine, mind you...beautiful.  And the DP lights it perfectly in several scenes and then brings the camera this close to her.  Eleven collages.  Perfecto-hooters in the first ten, bum in the  last.

Collages (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)

Wallpaper

Anne Parillaud in Le Battant (1, 2)

Anicee Alvina in Ames Perdues

Carole Laure in Assassin Passe

Christine Boisson in Emmanuelle

Corinne Touzet in Amour Propre

Emmanuelle Seignier in Cours Prive

Fanny Cottencon in Coups Crosse

Katia Tchenko in Cure Nudiste

words and pics from The Snapper

Kylie Minogue removing some clothing in the back of a car (1, 2)

Estella Warren doing what she does best (I don't mean acting).
 

Pat's comments in yellow:

The new Playboy has an article ripping George W. Bush for getting ahead thanks to family contacts

..We assume this means that of the millions of people who'd love to be running Playboy, the most qualified of all was Christie Hefner.

Pat also points out that yesterday would have been Keith Richards's 59th birthday, if he were still alive.

Depending On The Movie, This Could Be A Plus - Los Angeles movie buff Warren Eallonardo is suing MGM, claiming that several "widescreen" movies he's bought on DVD, including "Rain Man" and "Hoosiers," were just the standard version with the top and bottom of the screen cut off.  He says buyers are getting even less of the picture than in the standard version.

*  They're renaming this "the audio version."

*  Tell the truth: do you REALLY want to see all of Dustin Hoffman's face?

*  He's just disappointed because he was hoping to see more skin in the nude scenes.

Scoop's notes:   The guy who is suing is one of those "half-empty" guys.

When you get a widescreen DVD with less info than the full-screen version, it means that the DVD includes only the portion of the image within the photographer's viewfinder, which is what you are supposed to see on the big screen as well. Most of the time (except in rare cases of hard-matting), there is actually far more info on the original 35mm negative. In this case, the standard or full-screen version is simply the entire 35mm frame. A 35mm frame is in almost exactly the same ratio as a TV screen, so the easiest way to make a full screen version is simply to use the whole image.

When the standard version has less info than the widescreen, it is a different kind of standard version, one created artificially by the "pan & scan process". In some cases, the pan & scan and widescreen have both been created separately from the original 35mm frame, and in such a case the pan & scan may show actually more info on the top and bottom, but far less on the sides.

What this guy actually wants in his suit, although he doesn't know it,  is for the DVD to include the full 35mm negative. In general, I kind of agree with him in that I'd love to see both the widescreen and the original 35mm negative, when available. The film studios are under no obligation to give us information that was not originally meant to be seen, but I would like to see it anyway, specifically for the nudity.

When the studios do give the full 35mm frame to us, we should view it as a gift, and appreciate it, but we have no right to demand it. In some cases, filmmakers would be horrified to know that we are seeing it, because it may include boom mikes. It may even include footage of body parts that the director promised would not ever be seen.