The annual nude scene poll is closed. The winner and the second place finisher won their respective positions by a mile. Pictorial and numerical results will be posted on New Year's Day, as usual.

Broken Flowers (2005)

Bill Murray plays a profoundly depressed ex-lothario named Don Jonston. That name would be the English-language version of Don Juan, get it? If you don't, the script will help you out with a scene in which the character actually watches an old Don Juan movie on TV. Ol' Don Juan receives a anonymous pink letter informing him that he has a 19-year-old son who may be looking for him. Prodded by a neighbor who loves detective stories, Don decides to embark on a cross-country search for his girlfriends from that era, hoping to ... well, really hoping to learn something about himself, I guess. If he just wanted to know more about whether one of them could have written the letter, he could have accomplished the same thing telephonically, so I guess we can assume he wants to meet them face-to-face for other reasons unrelated to the son's identity.

It is an arthouse film which was nominated for arthousey awards, and won a special jury prize at Cannes. It's one of those films where the author derives some alleged humor by standing condescendingly above all the characters, giving them ridiculous ideas and outlandish professions. (His four ex-girlfriends are a pet psychiatrist, a professional closet organizer, a refined and demure seller of "high quality pre-fab homes," and a biker chick.) I believe the point is that your life is shallow and empty unless you are a judgmental middle-aged filmmaker. Bill Murray turns in yet another of those sad sack performances in which he plays a man with no enthusiasm for anything, no spring in his step, and no facial expressions beyond a single mask of despondent boredom. Within the spectrum of recent film performances, this is most comparable to Wilson the Volleyball.

It's the kind of movie that people either love or hate. If you'd like to read more about the film, there are many links at The Movie House.  To me the most incisive comment was the following:

We are reminded in every possible way that this man is a "Don Juan" and yet nothing in the story or character development suggests how someone so broken, so numb, so completely uninterested in life or people, could be that sort of man. We have no idea how or why he has become so broken, and so ultimately don't much care that he is. No light is shed on this at any point - the movie is just one long dip into a stagnant pool of listless nothingness.

I can only imagine that the transitions between scenes of simply fading to black again and again and again, and the endless travel footage (Don in plane, Don in car, Don reading map, Don sleeping in hotel) were one of three things: lack of imagination, self-indulgence or laziness. I can think of no other reasons as this just adds to the stultifying feel of the movie. The parallel between the film's pace and Don's life seems like an amateurish parlor trick to fool the audience into thinking that the mundane is meaningful - not in this movie! Here, the mundane is just plain old boring. All the symbolism is lurid in its obviousness (ex: Don watching the old/original "Don Juan" movie on TV as his life unravels) while the character/story development is so subtle as to be non-existent.

 If you have already seen the movie, I have written extensively about the "solution" to the mystery.

 

 

Alexis Dziena

Wedding Crashers (2005)

I have written extensively about Wedding Crashers before. See the details at The Movie House

Jane Seymour

Isla Fisher's body double

Wedding Montage chicks

 

Other Crap:

Movie Reviews:

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

Sex and a Girl (2001)

The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful (2005) is a Fred Olin Ray, Retro Media Entertainment soft core that IMDb is not yet aware of. Nicole Sheridan is a cocktail waitress who takes a customer home for the evening. She was evidently too much for him, as he not only falls asleep after sex, but does so permanently. His will gives all of his estate to "whomever is closest to him at the time of death." So Sheridan inherits a lost silver mine, and a casino. Excited about the casino, she and her best friend, Beverly Lynne go to what ends up being a ghost town. The villain wants Sheridan's map to the lost silver mine, rumored to be where outlaw and now ghost Calamity Kate (Belinda Gavin) stashed all of her loot. With the help of two idiot ranch hands, he tries to harass and badger the girls to give him the map and leave, but Calamity Kate comes to their rescue.

This is a typical Fred Olin Ray low budget sex farce, and is no better nor worse than most of his work. C.

Belinda Gavin shows breasts in a scene with the two girls, and Brooke Taylor and Jassie also show breasts in a girl.girl at the villain's house. Beverly Lynne and Nicole Sheridan both do full frontal and rear nudity in several scenes.

Belinda Gavin

Beverly Lynne

Nicole Sheridan

Brooke Taylor and Jassie

Melanie Laurent