Mädchen Amick

Mädchen Amick was born December 12, 1970 in Reno, Nevada to a musician and a medical office manager. She's 1/2 German, 1/4 Norwegian and 1/4 Swedish, if you want to start your own breeding program and were interested in the ingredients. Mädchen is German for "girl." It's pronounced "maid-shen" and "was chosen by her parents because they wanted an unusual name." She was raised in Sparks, Reno's twin city, and "encouraged by her parents to follow her own creative instincts where she learned .. the piano, bass, violin and guitar as well as .. tap, ballet, jazz and modern dancing." 

I've mentioned that the song I'd watch anyone do a serious karaoke version of is "Total Eclipse of the Heart." I haven't decided what my choice for interpretive dance would be. The frontrunner is "Somebody to Love" by Queen but after seeing this I'm willing to consider "Strong As I Am" by The Prime Movers. There are no videos of Robert McQueen High School's Modern Dance Team (the Lancers) circa 1988 on YouTube, but if there were Mädchen Amick wouldn't be on them because she dropped out of school a year earlier "to move to Los Angeles to model and act." 

Sugar Boxx (2009)

The Internet asks "Tweed no Whirry or Whirry no Tweed?"

We wanted to start a feature where we answer your questions but since we have fewer than five readers (counting us) for now they will have to be questions we either ask each other or find on the Internet. Our first question comes from darktone, who asked me (and anyone else reading) the following on an IMDb message board on July 27, 2005:  

"Would it be [Shannon] tweed or would it be [Shannon] whirry? Which of them had better counterparts or 'assistants' in their soft-core flicks? If you could choose only one of them which would it be? Why didn't they do a soft core movie together? Would you like to see them in a threesome with another guy in a movie?" 

So You Want to Become a Vampire

Whether or not to let yourself be turned into a vampire is one of the biggest decisions in a person's life and like every important decision it can be based on what we've seen in movies. Say some tall stranger with pale skin, awesome hair and a vaguely Slavic-sounding name sits down next to you at Sbarro tonight and asks "Do you want to become a Creature of the Night, my child?" Don't be put off. That's how they talk. (It's how you'll talk, too. That's your first warning from me.) Calmly ask him to produce some fangs. If he can't, find the nearest mall cop. If he can, it's decision time. Will you be ready? I don't believe you will, so I've come up with a list of things to consider before baring your neck.

Hector's Five Sickest Projectile Vomit Scenes

If there's one thing that makes me want to fuckin' puke, other than warm beer, it's a half-assed vomit scene. I realize that in real life people don't repaint the walls with partially digested food when they throw up, but one of the purposes of film, and of art in general, is to show us something we don't witness every day. If I wanted to see someone produce two cubic centimeters of saliva-colored liquid after retching over a toilet for fifteen minutes, I'd go to a frat kegger. There's a reason that I sit around and watch movies all day and all night instead of going out and interacting with the outside world, and that's that I'm a lazy and misanthropic bastard. Oh, and also that real life is boring, and if I couldn't escape the depressing mundanities of everyday existence (an existence in which vomiting humans can't be used as backup fire hoses) by watching people launch their lunches into low Earth orbit in films like those described below, I'd... well, I suppose I'd get more exercise. But the point is this: If you're going to take the trouble to put a vomit scene in your film, do it right. If you're not sure how, read on.

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.