Elvira Parker (1929-1986)

Played by Anne Ramsey in Deadly Friend.

Head of the Family (1996)

The National Ledger (9/30/05)

"[For] Domino ... Keira Knightley sat down with the director and bargained with him over what parts of her body she'd expose ... 

She explains, 'It was one of the most extraordinary conversations of my career ... It was, 'I'll give you both [bleep] but you're not having my [bleep].' He said 'Fine, done it's a deal.'

'I don't mind about the boobs, not the butt ... I'm a woman. There's no reason to it.' 

Knightley had to pick a butt double for revealing lap-dancing and sex scenes in the biopic. 

Keira, 20, said: 'Tony brought three girls in to choose from. It was hard not to laugh but I didn't want to offend anyone.' 

'I decided to be very businesslike. They all had very nice bottoms and I chose one.'"

Nathan White (1936-1987)

Played by John Ryan in Death Wish 4: The Crackdown. 

The Last Boy Scout (1991)

"Great, the game's on. Go Stallions! 

A Star's a Star

If we've learned anything from American Idol (other than that music isn't a form of personal expression, it's something to have on in the background of a Ford commercial) it's that pop singing is easy. We were a couple of decades late to this realization but that's not our fault. We're not stars of film and television. They decided that way back in the 1980s. Let's look at some of their most famous efforts.

The Thunder Warrior Trilogy (1983, 1987, 1988)

I've always admired social activists. I see people sacrificing their free time to protest draconian immigration laws. I read articles about environmentalists who have been arrested for acts of civil disobedience aimed at preventing the logging of old-growth forests. I watch news reports about individuals who have risked their very lives to stop Japanese whalers from annihilating our planet's largest animal species. After years of hearing about these noble souls and their tireless efforts to right social wrongs, I've decided it's time to do my part. For the last five centuries, Native populations whose ancestors arrived on this continent thousands of years before have had to endure unimaginable atrocities at the hands of the white man. Thousands of activists over the years, many of Native American descent and some who had no Native ancestry whatsoever (technically, that would only include first- and second-generation immigrants, but I'm not here to argue about whether various politically correct terms make any logical sense) but were able to see that a terrible injustice had been perpetrated, have put their lives on the line and imperiled their families to fight for equality, rights, and compensation for the descendants of the victims of this centuries-long holocaust. I've thought long and hard about it, and I've decided to join that proud tradition.... by arguing for a DVD or Blu-ray release of the Thunder Warrior trilogy.

Ski School (1990)

One of the great film genres of the 80s and early 90s was the skiing-themed comedic sex romp. Beginning in 1971 with Apres-ski, and continuing into the 80s with such classics as Hot Dog...The Movie and Snowballing, this genre was explored primarily by a small handful of iconoclasts who had become sick and tired of the idea that teenagers had to be in a tropical locale in order to participate in wet t-shirt contests. Why, thought these cinematic revolutionaries, couldn't the wet t-shirt contest be held...at a ski resort? No one could come up with a reason. 

I'm not sure to whom to credit this epiphany, but it initiated a flurry......no.....an avalanche......uh........a whole lot of ideas and insights. Wouldn't a ski gondola be the ideal place for two curious youngsters to experiment with oral sex? And I'll bet out-of-control skiers are always crashing through the walls of buildings. Why not have the overweight buffoon character crash through the walls of the women's bathhouse while the Swedish women's ski team is having a steam in the nude? And we'll never need an elaborate set-up for the line, "Let's get you out of those wet things." We could use it every time a female character comes in off the slopes! And think of how many different occasions there'll be to use "pole" as a double entendre! When the guy behind the counter at the equipment rental shop asks the sex-starved older woman whose businessman husband is too preoccupied with work to satisfy her carnal needs which size pole she prefers, it'll seem completely natural! The ideas just kept coming until in 1990 a film was made that so perfectly embodied the skiing-themed comedic sex romp aesthetic that it would ultimately bring about the death of the genre. That film was Ski School.

The Patriot (2000)

When An American Carol came out as with every time a movie is labeled or promoted as a "conservative film" and turns out to be particularly bad (as AAC was said to be; I only use "said" because I haven't seen it myself) there was some discussion about whether conservatives "can" make good movies (or "good art"). It'd be a poorly-framed debate no matter what. It wrong-foots the "Yes" side from the start and it assumes that the political beliefs of filmmakers have to inform their movies and that most films can be said to have a specific ideology. There are plenty of "issue films," earnest dramas with heavy political undertones and satires that "really want to make you think," but most of the time the people behind the movie you're watching only wanted to tell a good story that would appeal to the broadest possible audience.

Private School (1983)

Peter Biskind's book about the "New Hollywood" era, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, closes with the idea that, to quote Peter Bogdanovich, "The cinema of the director went into eclipse at the end of the '70s. There was a general movement away from .. auteurism toward producer-oriented movies." If there ever was an "American New Wave," it's supposed to have ended in the early '80s. I disagree. I think that's when it began. 

The American New Wave was the cinema of the producer, not the director. If Truffaut and Godard saw American crime films from the '40s and wondered "What could we do with this, artistically?" men like Ben Efraim saw drive-in exploitation films from the '70s and thought "What could we do with this, commercially?" The latter is the American approach, and though he was an Israeli expatriate born on a kibbutz, Ben Efraim understood it better than anyone. 

Private School was the second film in his Private series (after Private Lessons and before Private Resort). I'm reviewing it first for two reasons. First, because Private School has as much to do with Private Lessons as it does with Private Benjamin, so the order doesn't matter. I know what you're asking yourself. "How can they be part of the same series if they don't have anything to do with one another?" Stop that. You're thinking like a director. Or worse, an auteur. Start thinking like Ben Efraim. I want so much for you to do so that that's the other reason why I'm doing it first. For you to understand what the true American New Wave was I first have to explain to you to why Private School is its masterpiece.