Sexy Cineplexy: Reviews

Bliss
(directed by Lance Young, 1997)



I love finding odd little gems you've never heard of and can't believe actually exist on In Demand Cable. Like when I found that movie with Sigourney Weaver as an autistic woman -- Snowcake -- it was the same kind of thing.

Here is an erotic drama starring Craig Sheffer (Nightbreed, Hellraiser: Inferno) and Sheryl Lee (Twin Peaks' very own Laura Palmer) as newlyweds with issues. Sheryl Lee plays Maria, a very neurotic woman. She's obsessed with catching flies with her fly swatter and she CONSTANTLY fixes up the house, taking everything apart to fix the tiniest little thing, to make sure ants and other bugs don't come in, etc. Craig Sheffer plays her husband Joseph. He does construction.

One day, during their therapy session together, Maria confesses a painful secret to reveal -- she's faking her orgasms when she makes love to Joseph! Meanwhile, Joseph's crew buddies at the construction site have been spying on a man across the street who makes love to many different women every day. They can see into his windows and they love watching the nude, busty women as they hump away on the strange man inside.



The strange man inside turns out to be Terence Stamp! As a gifted sex therapist named Baltazar. Yes, that Terence Stamp, the man who played Bernadette the transsexual in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Here he plays the Hannibal Lecter of sex therapists -- and surprise! Maria (Sheryl Lee) is going to see him! Craig Sheffer catches her going to the house as he watches from his construction site. He sneaks inside and hears her moaning in ecstasy as she rides away on Terence Stamp, sex therapist.

Ready to rip his throat out, Joseph (Craig Sheffer) goes to see Baltazar to confront him, but instead Baltazar calmly offers him tea and informs Joseph that he is merely trying to heal Maria from her deep psychosexual issues and repressed, subconscious traumas. Or something like that. Basically, according to Terence Stamp, sex therapist -- ecstasy filled, passionate, mind-blowing sex is the key to healing all deep, subconscious conflicts. Maria goes to Terence Stamp for sex because it's therapeutic subconsciously. It will heal her, it will change her, it will release her. Maybe she'll stop being so neurotic.



But then -- next thing you know, Joseph is getting trained in the art of lovemaking from Terence Stamp himself! This includes taking off all of his clothes (except his underwear) and standing in front of a full length mirror with a similarly dressed Terence Stamp to admire their bodies and talk about their feelings about them. This also includes discussing the topic of making love to yourself -- "Do you masturbate?" asks Terence Stamp to Joseph -- and getting Joseph to try it (not actually seen). Then they're talking about prolonging orgasms, holding off ejaculations, everything! If it's about sex, they're discussing it. Yak, yak, yak, yak, yak!

He makes Joseph go swimming in an Olympic sized pool, makes him hang upside down from the ceiling and breathe through each nostril one at a time, and on and on and on. It's a full course in sexual mastery from none other than Terence Stamp. Nevermind the fact that Terence Stamp's been screwing his wife -- there is much to learn sexually from Bernadette the transsexual. There's absolutely no time to get angry! Especially when Sheryl Lee needs her orgasms!



And -- after many thorough Terence Stamp sex lessons, Joseph is finally able to make love to Maria like a real pro -- and she finally has those mysterious orgasms she's heard so much about.

But, oh! The orgasms come with a painful price. Maria ends up orgasming out all kinds of nightmarish repressed memories -- mainly, the memories of her father sexually molesting her all throughout her childhood! Her orgasm from Hell puts her in the hospital -- and then she kicks Joseph out of the house and plans to separate from him! Nevermind the fact that he stayed with her cheating ass and learned how to be a better lover thanks to the help of her own secret Terence Stamp lover -- she's orgasming repressed memories of being molested by her father. When that happens, your husband's just gotta go.



So will Maria and Joseph get back together? Will she be able to heal from her painful past and orgasm like a normal woman?

You'll just have to watch Bliss to find out!

I found myself laughing throughout a lot of this movie. It's an erotic drama like no other. It is a total riot. Fans of Twin Peaks (that means you, Daniel M) will wanna check out Sheryl Lee, who again is playing another character who's been sexually abused by her father. Terence Stamp and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert fans have GOTTA see this. Craig Sheffer is good to look at and the movie is .... well, interesting. Just interesting. Who needs 50 Shades of Grey when there's a nice Terence Stamp sex movie around? By the way, you never actually see Terence Stamp having sex, in case you were curious. Just thought I better put that out there.

A lot of psycho-spiritual-sexual-babble and more of a romance movie than a hot and steamy sexcapade, Bliss features a performance from Terence Stamp as a racy sex therapist that is down to earth and yet out of this world. Hook him up with Sigourney Weaver as an autistic woman and then you'll REALLY have a movie to end all movies.

Surprised you didn't like The Fly more Sexy, I watched it recently and I thought it was great. It is definitely very unsettling and disgusting in parts, but I can't imagine it not being.

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I skipped over the next review as I saw the movie name, hadn't seen it, so didn't read Looks like a strange film.

Terence Stamp as a sex therapist / love making god? Brings the term "Kneel before Zod" to a COMPLETELY different meaning!

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Fear and Loathing in MoFo... The Gunslinger 45's Top 50 Favorite Films

In the 10 Ring: Gunslinger45's reviews

A bit random but: Just jumped to a random page in this thread and what review do I see? You giving five stars to Blow Out. Love that film and glad you did too.

Guap is Brazilian. That's Portuguese, not Spanish.

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5-time MoFo Award winner.

Dallas Buyers Club was an excellent film. It probably would eek out Iron Man 3 if I were do do my best of 2013 list over again.

I'm sure you do. I do, too. But they're not.

Philomena
(directed by Stephen Frears, 2013)



I watched Philomena for the strangest reason -- I had a dream that was basically instructing me to watch it. I knew NOTHING about it; in fact, I wasn't even sure if it was a real movie. But in the middle of the night, I awoke from a dream with a deep feeling that I needed to watch this Philomena movie. I thought it was a real movie, but I wasn't sure. I considered the possibility that my subconscious had made it all up.

Lo and behold, Philomena was a real movie, starring Judi Dench and Steve Coogan. Instructed by my higher consciousness -- and the Great Spirit -- I did what my dream was trying to communicate to me, and I watched the film. It's nominated for Best Picture this year at the Academy Awards.

It's based on a true story and there is a book, written by journalist Martin Sixsmith, who is played by Coogan. He meets Philomena Lee (Judi Dench), an old woman who's been keeping a secret for fifty years -- she has a son, Anthony, that she hasn't seen since he was very young. Philomena, as a teenager, had sex with some guy and wound up pregnant. She was put in a convent, and her child was adopted and taken away from her.

Evil Catholic nuns shamed young Philomena for having sex and getting pregnant, and she wound up signing a contract saying she'd never be able to see her child again after he was adopted. But now, as an old woman, and all through her life, she desperately wants to see Anthony again, and journalist Martin Sixsmith is her key to that possibility.

Together they venture all the way to Washington D.C. in search of Anthony and what they discover are plenty of surprises.

I'd like to give all of the movie's secrets away (it is based on true events, anyway) but I won't, because I started watching this movie without any idea of what was going to happen. All I'll say is that the subject matter was certainly... well... a bit like my kind of subject matter. There's a homosexual angle to the movie. Alright, her son turns out to be homosexual -- I'll give that much away.

My biggest gripe? I hated how they turned Philomena into Super Accepting Mom. Not only is she A-Ok with her son being gay, but they put in a lot of stupid, cringing humor dedicated to bring laughs at her hardcore open mindedness to the issue. She spews forth a lot of lines that are "things that an old lady probably wouldn't say." Like, when she hears about her son being gay:

"Oh, I always figured he was gay. But did he have any children? He could have been bi-curious."

And then there's...

"Condoms make the sex feel not as good."

This irritated me -- this Super Accepting, Knows Everything, Dr. Ruth kind of mom gag. It went on and on after the homosexuality issue suddenly plopped down in front of us. Suddenly this lovely little Irish Catholic woman was Joan Rivers.

Her best moment, though, was when she arrived in Washington D.C. and instead of visiting the Lincoln Memorial, she wanted to watch Big Momma's House on the hotel television.

Subconscious of Sexy Celebrity, I'm not sure what the mysterious reason for making me watch Philomena was truly about, but whatever. Now I've seen another Best Picture nominee. Perhaps that's all it was about... but why Philomena? The gay angle? I don't know.

I enjoyed Philomena. It was a short movie and it felt short. Recommended.

Great review I saw it on Monday and it

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Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth, faithfulness the best relationship.
Buddha

The Angelika! Saw so many good movies there....miss it

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Under-the-radar Movie Awesomeness.
http://earlsmoviepicks.blogspot.com/

The Craft
(directed by Andrew Fleming, 1996)



I never saw this movie until just now.

NOW I KNOW WHY.

I always had a suspicion for some reason that this movie wouldn't be any good.

MY SUSPICION HAS JUST BEEN CONFIRMED.

Now... you know me. I can watch ALL KINDS of movies and not find much fault with them.

Even this movie -- THE CRAP -- has some pros. I watched the whole thing, for starters. I wanted to turn it off, but I couldn't. I stayed, until the end, because I got hooked. I wanted to find out what happened. I wanted to see more. I wanted to see what these witches would do.

But The Craft is godawful.

It just is.

Worst movie ever? No. But remarkable to me in its badness. One of those movies I can now confidently call and consider a bad film. If we did redid the '90s Countdown, even Sexy Hitler would understand if this film didn't make it.

This movie is about four witches at some kind of Catholic high school in California. One of them, Sarah (Robin Tunney), is new. She's always known she had magical powers, but thanks to a clan of three ugly witches (Fairuza Balk, Neve Campbell and Rachel True), she learns more about her powers and what she can do with them. Skeet Ulrich plays a guy at her school who makes up some dirty rumors about Sarah. She puts a love spell on him that makes him follow her around everywhere. Fairuza Balk, the meanest witch, lives with trailer trash parents. The girls use their powers to help her get out of that situation by having her stepdad drop dead, leaving her and her mother some insurance money which gets them an upscale apartment to live in. Rachel True, who is black, is constantly being harassed by a racist Christine Taylor (Marcia from the '90s Brady Bunch movies.) She makes Marcia Marcia Marcia's hair fall out. Neve Campbell is horribly scarred all over her back -- Sarah's powers help make all the disfiguring scars totally disappear!



When Fairuza Balk goes berserk and starts using her powers for evil, Sarah eventually must turn to a good witch at a witch's bookstore for help. All in the last act of the movie, that is. Most of the movie is fixated on the girls experimenting with their powers, little by little. Or we're treated to scenes of Neve Campbell in a doctor's office getting needles jabbed in her back as she undergoes some kind of genetic treatment to fix all the ugly, horrifying scars on her back.

The film is a great big mess. Horribly written, horribly plotted, and the witches themselves -- except for Robin Tunney -- are nails on a chalkboard bad. No wonder they used to burn witches.

What was the point of this thing? Except for Robin Tunney's character, everyone else was totally trashed by the end of the film, making The Craft seem worthless and meaningless. It's a lonely movie about a girl who starts at a new school and makes some sh!tty friends, has sh!tty experiences and then ends up leaving with nothing really great to say about it. There's even a ludicrous ending in which -- I'm going to give it away -- Fairuza Balk ends up locked in some kind of mental hospital, restrained to a bed! The movie was totally addicted to pain and insanity. It's a movie for depressed girls who cut themselves and go bulimic and go nuts until their mom and dad puts them in a mental ward for a week.

OH MY GOD -- IT WAS WRITTEN BY THE WRITER OF "FLATLINERS"!

*GASP*

And I love that movie.



I thought Neve Campbell would make this thing at least reasonably good to watch since I love her in the Scream movies -- and this movie has Skeet Ulrich who played Billy in the first Scream! But she was just... mousy and strange and forgettable, except for her bizarre medical procedures, which looked like a rape scene. The movie seems to have a subtext going on that I thought dealt with teenage girls coming to terms with teenage boys and what they want from them... but I don't know if it got resolved or handled exactly right. It seems to be rather anti-male and this feels like it may even be a lesbian movie, under the surface. There's even a scene where the girls kiss each other during a nature ritual. It even has roots with Disney cartoons -- Robin Tunney's (Sarah) mother is DEAD! She died giving birth to Sarah.



I remember, in the '90s, going to school with kids who were into witchcraft, Wicca, whatever. I even thought the stuff was fascinating -- casting spells and having power over stuff would be a bonus to life, not a minus.

Thank God I didn't expose myself to The Craft back then. It's possible I could have liked it back then... and God knows where I could have gone from there. Maybe I'd be in that mental institution like Fairuza Balk.

Okay, can I just say that I HATE writing movie reviews in the new Movie Forums layout? Yoda needs to do something to fix some of the issues I'm having... any witches out there wanna cast a spell on him?

I HATE the new popcorn boxes, too, so I have a new system for rating movies.

I give The Crap....

3 out of 10.

Nice review Sexy so glad I haven't seen it now I never will

The Craft is no masterpiece of filmmaking, but I always thought it was a lot of fun.

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Not seen The Craft though I have fancied giving it a shot someday as it looked like it could be good silly fun. And you absolutely tearing it apart has in a strange way made me even more intrigued. I always love the passion you write your reviews with; you're certainly never left in any doubt as to your opinion.

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Nope. I don't care enough about The Craft and Pink Flamingos is a piece of *****. No deal.

3 out of 10 is a little harsh, Sexy. The Craft is a solid 3.5/10 film for me.

The Wolf of Wall Street
(directed by Martin Scorsese, 2013)



They've made a movie like this movie already. You've probably heard me talk about it. It's called Caligula.



Maybe you even read my Caligula movie commentary.

Now, the Wolf of Wall Street was no murderer, I guess, but both he and Caligula were obsessed with power, obsessed with being wicked, and obsessed with sex. Both of these movies (Caligula came out in 1979 and starred Malcolm McDowell) feature a gratuitous, obscene amount of wild sex and nudity. Caligula showed worse, but that was only in the X rated version. An X rated version of The Wolf of Wall Street would probably surpass all that was shown in Caligula! I can't believe The Wolf of Wall Street -- this movie I just watched -- was only R rated. They got away with it, I think, because it's a Martin Scorsese/Leonardo DiCaprio picture. Anything else and I believe the movie would have been NC-17.

While there may have been no murders in The Wolf of Wall Street (although a gay butler almost gets murdered), Wolf makes up for a lack of Caligula's violence by featuring LOTS and LOTS of drugs being ingested. There is even a major character, portrayed by Jonah Hill, who has MARRIED HIS FIRST COUSIN, and feels no shame about it.



Caligula took place in Ancient Rome, centuries and centuries ago, and The Wolf of Wall Street took place in the late '80s through the 1990's, but not much has changed. The beast known as the human being -- in particular the male beast -- is still obsessed with himself, still longing for fame and fortune and still needing and craving sex at every moment. He still likes to hold power over everyone else and now we know that he also likes to mess with his brain by taking drugs and altering his reality and his perceptions. Man is corrupt, deviant, depraved, sinful, lustful, and addicted to tyranny. Even the people who try to stop someone like The Wolf of Wall Street is probably in it for themselves. To hunt is to kill; to kill is to take pleasure for some reason.



Leonardo DiCaprio returns to the screen as Jordan Belfort, AKA The Wolf of Wall Street, a stockbroker who wound up making millions and millions and millions by being corrupt and ripping off people. Jordan Belfort is a real, living person and the movie is based on his 2007 memoir. Leonardo DiCaprio is obviously addicted to playing rich and powerful people -- lately I've seen him in this, The Great Gatsby, Django Unchained and J. Edgar. In every one of these movies (am I forgetting anything else?) he played a rich and powerful figure. He loves this, I'm sure. If there's ever a movie about Leonardo DiCaprio -- a biographical work -- I'm sure he'd play himself.

This movie -- The Wolf of Wall Street -- is three hours long. I want to say it definitely feels like it is, but maybe that's not entirely true. I will say, though, that I couldn't finish the movie in just one sitting, but after about the first hour and a half, it's much more tolerable. Some people have said the beginning is better but then it starts to drag. I felt the opposite. And I really, really liked the "lemmons" scene, which I saw Miss Vicky and The Gunslinger45 talk about, but I didn't find it hysterically funny. I wasn't laughing, but I was enjoying the slow motion scene with Leonardo DiCaprio all tangled up in the phone cord. That whole thing, starting from when they got the pills to Leo's arrest at the end of the night, is probably the best part of the movie.

The rest, though, seems to rely too much on sex and shock value. It seemed like every time you turned around, they threw in naked bodies humping away or something. All of this, to me, felt rather gimmicky. If Lady Gaga could wear a movie as a costume, it would be The Wolf of Wall Street. Both of them are flashy, loud, "controversial", obscene and attention seeking. You could make a drinking game out of how many times The Wolf of Wall Street showed someone having sex and wind up at the Betty Ford Center before the end credits.



I do take somewhat of an issue with the movie glorifying the evils of this kind of corruption. I just read an article that said the job search for stockbrokers has skyrocketed since this movie came out and I am not surprised -- this movie says to everybody that you can be rich if you just take advantage of people. It's true, and this movie makes it all the more appetizing. I felt angry by this movie at first, which is why I kind of had a hard time with the first hour of it. I mean, this movie is about a bunch of bastards who f**ked over people and got a glorious lifestyle out of it. People can love this movie all they want, but if you had been screwed over by Jordan Belfort and his crew, you'd probably want to take a gun to his forehead, along with the rest of his cronies.

As a movie, I found The Wolf of Wall Street entertaining and exciting and a breath of fresh air in some ways. I was ready to totally write off Martin Scorsese, but I ended up liking this movie and I recently gave The Departed another chance and I liked it, too. Movies like this one call to our primitive, bestial side. This is not a "feel good" movie, but maybe you'll relax and bask in the insanity of human nature, which is truth. Anybody could have wound up being Jordan Belfort. Hell -- being him would probably be a lot better than however you're living right now. Just imagine being him and having experienced all that he did. Imagine you never had your life and you had his life. It's a lot more to experience. It's a lot more thrills and wild rides. You may never live a life like the lives of these people, but you can watch the movie and dream that you do. And who knows? Maybe one day the dream will come true.

On a side note, I thoroughly enjoyed the short performance from Matthew McConaughey. I still prefer Dallas Buyers Club over this movie, though. However, despite how cool American Hustle might be, The Wolf of Wall Street absolutely trumps it for me.

Oh, and I liked the fact that Family Matters, the TV show from the '90s, found its way into this movie.

Matthew McConaughey, though -- his performance as Ron Woodroof in Dallas Buyers Club was not as large and in charge as Leonardo DiCaprio's performance here in Wolf, but had Matthew been in this movie longer than just the 10-15 minutes he did, he would have OWNED this movie, okay? Leonardo DiCaprio is not the kind of man Matthew McConaughey is. I can't even totally buy DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort. It was a big performance, but McConaughey upstaged him in that one scene he did in the film. DiCaprio knows how to scream, but McConaughey knows how to act. I love them both, though.

7 out of 10.

Nice review, but I don't agree with a lot of what you said. McConaughey was excellent in Wolf, sure, and I would've loved to have seen more of him, but I don't think he would've "owned" the movie. Both actors are incredible and MM greatly deserved his Oscar, but no way do I agree that McConaughey is the overall superior talent.

Finally someone says what I've been thinking. It amazes me that The Wolf of Wall Street gets an R rating while Blue is the Warmest Color gets an NC-17, when The Wolf of Wall Street is MUCH dirtier.