There are no page numbers in Madonna’s book Sex, but it doesn’t take long to flip through on the Internet Archive if you want to see her eating pizza in the nude!
Jen and Tim nineties nineties nineties nineties Denzel Washington nineties nineties virtual reality, nineties Russell Crowe nineties, nineties nineties nineties Virtuosity nineties!
Tim and Jen enlist animal expert Emma Bowers (Hyenas and Gin on YouTube) to explain why the fascinating story of two man-eating lions resulted in a boring movie called The Ghost and the Darkness.
Watch a 1996 documentary about the man-eaters of Tsavo, which includes brief interviews with stars Kilmer and Douglas and director Stephen Hopkins. One interviewee theorizes that the local lions’ taste for human flesh stems from generations of slave traders who left injured or dying captives to their fate in the bush.
As Richard Stanley, who directed Kilmer for three days in The Island of Dr. Moreau before being fired, recalls, “Val would arrive, and an argument would happen.” Says John Frankenheimer, who replaced Stanley: “I don’t like Val Kilmer, I don’t like his work ethic, and I don’t want to be associated with him ever again.” And Batman Forever director Joel Schumacher calls his onetime star “childish and impossible.”
Jen and Tim welcome returning guest Darren Herczeg to go to bat for an almost universally loathed Netflix feature, Blonde. Naturally, the trio revel in the film’s grotesque and overt misogyny while twirling their mustaches.
Tim and Jen try and fail to recall the name of Olympian swimmer Michael Phelps as they discuss Olympian gymnast Kurt Thomas’s sole feature film, Gymkata.
Jen’s half-assed inaccurate anecdote about Phelps being considered to play Tarzan is actually true, albeit not the way she told it. Producer Jerry Weintraub (no relation to Gymkata producer Fred Weintraub) believed that he’d found the new Johnny Weissmuller in Phelps. However, the swimmer’s appearance on SNL in 2008 immediately disabused him of that notion, as Phelps appeared to Weintraub as little more than a “goon.”
Seven-time Olympic gold medalist Mark Spitz has only five minor credits on IMDb, incidentally, none of which involve starring in a feature film. In case you were wondering.
You can hear our interview with martial arts superstar Cynthia Rothrock here!
The Daily Beast has details of Emile Hirsch’s attack on a Paramount executive at a Sundance party, although the headline’s assertion that he “starred” in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a slight exaggeration (he had a small part as man-about-town hairdresser and murder victim Jay Sebring).
They just can’t stop witchin’! Tim and Jen continue the unending spooky season with a franchise entry that pleased no one, Halloween III: Season of the Witch!
Marxist art critic John Berger’s analysis of western media, Ways of Seeing, is available on YouTube. He casts a critical eye on the depiction of the female nude in European oil painting in the second episode.
Men dream of women, women dream of themselves being dreamt of. Men look at women, women watch themselves being looked at. Women constantly meet glances which act like mirrors, reminding them of how they look, or how they should look. Behind every glance is a judgement. Sometimes the glance they meet is their own, reflected back from a real mirror.
Your hosts range widely and freely on the topic of horror: specifically, found footage horror. The films discussed are The McPherson Tape, The Blair Witch Project, Backrooms, and Horror in the High Desert.
In 1989 Dean Alioto shot his first film, UFO Abduction, for a meager budget of $6,500—the master copy of the film was subsequently destroyed and thus the movie was never widely released. Ten years later Dean Alioto pitched UFO Abduction to Dick Clark Productions, who picked up the idea and gave Dean Alioto a $1.2 million budget to shoot a remake for television. In 1998, the remake was released entitled Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County (a.k.a. The McPherson Tape).
Over the years the names of these films has resulted in a great deal of confusion. Even to this day, both UFO Abduction and Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County are referred to as “The McPherson Tape.”
Rotten Tomatoes shows The Love Witch to be a darling of critics with a rating of 95% (audiences were more lukewarm, with their rating sitting at 61%). One of the few negative reviews calls it “dawdling, hollow and kind of awful, really:”
Some of the movie comes close to camp or just falls in, as when Elaine is assaulted by former friend Trish (Laura Waddell in the film’s only genuine performance), whose husband Elaine has stolen. “Skank! Whore!” Trish yells, slapping Elaine while wearing a wig cap — the movie helpfully provides its own drag-show re-enactment. A sequence in which Elaine is confronted in a bar by a mob of superstitious goofballs (“Burn the witch!”) is frankly terrible and staged with incredible clumsiness. The Love Witch will be worshipped as a fetish object by a certain breed of film nerd who luxuriates in its DIY retro aesthetic, but it isn’t really a movie — it would have to move first, and the pacing is leadfooted. The plot’s pairing Elaine with a stolid detective (Gian Keys) just leads to a handfasting scene at a local ren faire that seems to go on for six, maybe seven years.
