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Week of March 13, 2006 |
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You can take "The Peacemaker," "Deep Impact," and "The Tuxedo." We'll take "Gladiator," "American Beauty" and anything else that didn't suck.
Emilio's 17
Yeah, like he needed all that overpriced crap anyway...
This lawsuit's going to make 'House Party' look like 'House Party Two!'
I told you... don't call me SENIOR!!
Maybe this is all a bad dream too?
Thanks Sharon, but I think I'll wait until this one comes out on DVD (so I can freeze frame of course)
There is absolutely, positively no nepotism in Hollywood. None.
You're good, baby, I'll give you that... but me? I'm magic.
This band will go down like a lead balloon
Well, Goodbye there Children...
They can't sell the Capitol Records building! What will be left to destroy in the next crappy 'end of the world' movie?
Same old Courtney - still sponging off Kurt
Panic on the streets of Austin
You're a fat, Botox faced, wig-wearing ninny! Oh yeah? Well your band has a dirty H addict as a lead singer!
Black Sabbath, Blondie, Miles Davis, The Sex Pistols, Lynyrd Skynyrd Enter Rock Hall
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THE BREAK-UP |
$39.17
$12759/av |
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X-MEN: THE LAST STAND |
$34.02
$9159/av |
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OVER THE HEDGE |
$20.65
$5170/avg |
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THE DAVINCI CODE |
$18.61
$4953/avg |
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MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III |
$4.68
$1756/avg |
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POSEIDON |
$3.49
$1283/avg |
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RV |
$3.20
$1469/avg |
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SEE NO EVIL |
$2.04
$1607/avg |
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AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH |
$1.36
$17615/avg |
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JUST MY LUCK |
$855K
$892/avg |
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E-MAIL THE AUTHOR
THE BOTTOM OF THINGS
By Michael Sampson
August 27, 2003
For me it was Susan Dey in the 1981 film LOOKER.
I had just moved from a rural town outside of Chicago to a burgeoning suburban neighborhood in New Jersey replete with some newfangled invention called cable TV. The concept was foreign to me at first but I caught on quick. I think it was Day Two when I woke up around 6:30am for some Saturday morning cartoons and stumbled upon the USA Cartoon Express. My world was officially blown. Sometime after that, my interests also veered toward a channel called HBO. At first it was these little interstitials called “Braingames” that were animated clips based on popular brainteasers. Fun for a dorky little kid like me. But soon enough I stuck around and saw a movie. And by God, they were cursing! They cursed on TV! HBO was my new best friend.
It was around that time I stumbled upon LOOKER. Now I can look over at the IMDB and see it was a film written and directed by Michael Crichton, but that meant nothing to me at the time. I was just sitting around on a lazy summer afternoon looking for something to watch. At the time, HBO didn’t air R-rated movies during the day and since this was before INDIANA JONES AND THE PG-13 DEBACLE, PG movies could get away with a little bit more.
Susan Dey -- Laurie Partridge from “The Partridge Family” -- starred as a model investigating a series of murders of her colleagues. At one point she’s participating in some sort of futuristic (for the time) body scan that’s taking photographs of her body - naked. Those two boobs blew my mind into tiny little chunks I still haven’t pieced back together. If there was ever a perfect use for the phrase "it was all downhill from there," this is it.
Forget Transformers and He-Man; they were thrown in the back of my closet. My new favorite toy was HBO. I’d scour the movie listings in TV Guide for any mention of my new favorite letter: N. I was even a fan of N’s little sister, BN. (Now I’m more a fan of N’s much older brother, SSC.) I’d come across that fancy “Movie Presentation” intro that HBO used to have - the one where you’d fly through the town then the silver HBO logo comes at you and you spun around the O with bright colors, with that catchy music - and stick around just to hear that announcer come on and say, “The following movie is Rated R.” Then I’d plant myself a good inch from the screen and wait anxiously until bare breasts were exposed before me.
Years later, I sat through HARDBODIES, BLAME IT ON RIO, ACTION JACKSON, JUST ONE OF THE GUYS... And these movies are bad - Rutgers Football bad - but I sat through them with a big grin on my face. The odd thing was, after a few viewings, I actually began to like them for more than the nudity. Yes, I'm admitting I laughed during JUST ONE OF THE GUYS.
As HBO grew as a channel, they experimented with more programming including the awful "Dream On" that was always good for some nudity and sex, and eventually the "Real Sex" series of documentaries.
HBO, coupled with a Playboy here or there, was about all the naked women I saw in my childhood. But in between the mid-1980s when I first saw movie nudity and now, 2003, when I’ve seen more movie nudity than I’d like to admit, a lot has changed. There is a whole industry that thrives on seeing our famous celebrities naked.
There’s the Celebrity Skin, Celebrity Slueth and Celebrity Nude magazines, paparazzo trying every possible angle to get a shot of an actress sunbathing topless, MrSkin.com and now even a series of videos advertised on cable channels like Comedy Central, offering the best nude scenes from the movies in one compilation.
So what exactly is our obsession with seeing celebrities in the nude?
One can argue there's something to seeing our most rich, famous and beautiful in their birthday suits. But it's not even Jennifer Lopez or Julia Roberts that people are dying to see in the buff, it's anyone with even a tenuous grasp on fame. Celebrities that aren't all that famous, i.e., reality show contestants, are being paid quarters of millions of dollars to pose nude in the pages of Playboy magazine. And not even the winners, for Chrissake! Did we need to see "Joe Millionaire" runner-up Sarah Kozer in Playboy? Well, we didn't need to...but I looked anyway.
Therein lies somewhat of an answer. The reason Playboy pays so much to "celebrities" to grace its pages is because those issues sell so well. Everybody has to sneak a look. Why they do is unclear, but one can't argue the numbers. In 1999, female wrestler Sable posed for Playboy and it became the best-selling issue in the magazine's history. Possibly it's because the reader (which is a nice way of saying "masturbator") recognizes the celebrity as a familiar face and not just a random centerfold, Miss June. Think if that hot girl you had a crush on in high school was now stripping in your hometown. You'd be there the very next day with a pocket full of singles.
This theory applies to movies as well. There is no argument that nude women are attractive and having a nude (or topless) woman in a movie, is a selling point. But is much made out of nude scenes that feature a lesser-known actress? But when Meg Ryan decides to bare all -- as she will for this fall’s IN THE CUT -- the world almost grinds to a halt. It’s big news.
People are literally counting down until Britney Spears, the Olsen Twins or Christina Aguilera show off their goods. Hell, I’m one of them. And I can’t say I find any of them overly attractive. Certainly not on my top-five list (I'll save my top-five for another column...too much to get into now). So I don’t know why I’m so obsessed that Britney just did a topless photo shoot for British Elle (calm down guys, her elbows are precariously placed over her breasts).
If we're going to study celebrity nudity (now that sounds like a major I could've handled at college) we should first break it down. There are five major types of celebrity nudity: movie or DVD screenshots, paparazzi photos, actual posed shots, leaked private material and fake nudes.
The first is the most obvious and most prevalant. Here an ambitious person with screen capture software can use their DVD-ROM drive (or even a VHS tape hooked up to their computer using a TV tuner) to snap freeze frame shots of actresses in their movie nude scenes. This is particularly troublesome for celebrities whose nudity is so brief you might not normally catch it the first time around until it's captured and enlarged for all the world to see. It should be noted that this type is not limited to images as frequently entire video files of the nude scene in question are posted online.
Recent nude paparazzi photographs include Catherine Zeta-Jones, Jennifer Aniston and Natalie Portman - three actresses who rarely work in the buff. Paparazzi often catch celebrities sunbathing topless with these telescopic lenses that must be created by NASA. Since these are often very rare pics caught by only one cameraman, they can often be sold exclusively to one magazine who can then watch as its issues fly off the shelves. Just imagine if a paparazzi catches Britney Spears topless sunbathing and sells the pictures to the Enquirer. Not only will the cameraman make a ton of dough, but the issue would sell more than any other magazine...ever. In fact, I'm surprised there isn't a guy just stalking the Olsen Twins with a camera hoping to catch a glimpse and reap the windfall of money.
The posed shots are the ones like you see in Playboy where they get fading stars like Kristy Swanson and Tia Carrere to pose nude with the hopes of saving a career on the skids. There are also examples, like Charlize Theron and Cameron Diaz, of actresses posing nude before they got famous and working hard to keep those pics sealed. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't - Playboy ran the layout of Charlize but recently Diaz filed a lawsuit against a man who had nude photographs of her from a shoot taken before she starred in THE MASK. She won and the pictures were ruled sealed.
Next you have the rarest form of nudity and, in turn, the most popular. The very real, leaked videotape. The best example of this is the Pam and Tommy Lee video that made national headlines when it hit the internet in the late-90s. This wasn't just big, it was HUGE. I remember my uncles telling me they rented the tape and they're generally conservative guys in their 40s. It was one of those landmark things everyone just had to see, and everyone pretty much did. It launched Pam Anderson into a whole new realm of celebrity and Tommy Lee was suddenly more than just a washed-up old rock star.
Finally there’s that whole subsection of the nude celebrity world, the fake nudes. When not enough legitimate celebrities were doing nude scenes to satiate the horn-dog interests of men worldwide, a few creative and artistic guys thought to make their own. With the proliferation of the home computer and the price of professional-level graphic software dropping to affordable levels, it suddenly became very easy for someone to load up Adobe Photoshop and paste Sandra Bullock’s head on a nude model’s body. Some are done so obviously that it looks like the actress has the proportions of the Great Gazoo - giant head on a little body. But some are done with such precision and care that you really need to look twice…and a third time…and a fourth time.
What we have here in all these cases is simple fantasy fulfillment. What a regular issue of Playboy fulfills is the fantasy of seeing a really beautiful woman naked. What seeing Halle Berry naked in SWORDFISH fulfills is the fantasy many men have already had in their heads of what Halle Berry looks like naked. "Man, I'll bet she's got a great rack," they think, anxious to see if it's everything they've built it up to be. After being teased by sexy poses in less racy magazines, guys are simply curious, in that voyeuristic way, to see what they've fantasized about. So right there, SWORDFISH did more for a guy than Playboy did because he saw a chick naked and it was Halle Berry. You don't get that every day.
Celebrity nudity has become so popular lately because a) of it's ease of access on the web, b) the use of computers to facilitate in the capturing of said nudity and c) because actresses know points a and b all too well and are more reluctant to do a nude scene than ever. It used to be that every action movie that came out of Hollywood featured at least one gratuitous nude scene. Now you're lucky if you even get your action movie rated-R, let alone with any nudity. Studios have seen that a PG-13 rating means more potential audiences and more money, so they're writing into director's contracts that they must produce a rating less-than-R. It seems as if the best place to find nude scenes (other than the web) are independent films that are free of such restrictions and where scenes are often considered more "artistic" (see Jennifer Aniston in THE GOOD GIRL).
But if actual nudity in movies is drying up, does that mean the phenomenon will die down?
No, MrSkin.com and its million competitors (go ahead and search Google if you're brave) will continue to find an audience for naked actresses. Playboy will continue to pay big money for any actress to pose in their pages. In fact, Daryl Hannah is coming up this November. Will we ever get sick of this trend? Probably not. But maybe if all the famous actresses decided to just do more and more nude scenes the mystique will be lost and people will gradually lose interest. In fact why don't we try that just to see if it works. Mary-Kate and Ashley? You're up first.
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