RANKED: The Top Ten Women!

Theme: I Respect Your Feelings as a Woman and a Friend - Anal Cunt

As you know, this March marks Women's History Month, and we at Pat Bastard and the Spurious 5 Dot Blogspot Dot Com intend to honour this prestigious month by ranking the women who have shaped our lives and brightened up our world. You may not like our ranking, but we don't like you.

Diora Baird

Freckles bros, your patience has paid off.

South of Heaven star Diora Baird may have been famous for her chest, but let's not sleep on her ridiculously kino hips and face. In the Berenstein timeline in which Hollywood was wiped out by a natural disaster and taken over by me and my goblins in the 90s, she would have reigned as queen of the silver screen throughout the 2000s. In a way, though, her legend is more potent for the fact that, like a latterday Barbara Crampton, she remains a secret to be found in such B horror fare as Night of the Demons and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake prequel.

Anita Ekberg

No wonder Sweden's furniture is so popular.

Like Baird, Anita Ekberg would have been Earth's biggest star had she lived under my dictatorship, but kinosseurs have little to complain about, what with her livening up La Dolce Vita and dancing hypnotically in GOAT noir Screaming Mimi. Although styled by publicists as Paramount's answer to Marilyn Monroe, Ekberg was much better because Monroe was a cartoon character, a camp and derisive pastiche of the hetero ideal, while Ekberg was the real thing. Mass media hacks only revealed their classless seething in dubbing her "Iceberg" for her completely warranted dearth of patience with their bullshit.

Stacy Keibler

As prophecied by ZZ Top.

INSPIRING: WCW and WWE star Keibler proved you can rock A-cups and still be a 10. All you need to compensate is an impossibly perfect visage and 41½" legs. INSPIRINGER: thanks to her, straight men watched wrestling for the first time in droves. Is there any barrier she couldn't break?

Linda Darnell

You must be this perfect to be known professionally as The Perfect Face.

Sabotage a safe-horny "classic beauties" list by posting monochrome 10 Linda Darnell, whose largely forgotten oeuvre nonetheless includes odd gems like Hangover Square and Blackbeard the Pirate. Literally and accurately called The Perfect Face, I'm surprised the Hayes code allowed Darnell to be shown from the neck up. Check out the Hills Have Eyes rejects at your local bus exchange and tell me with a straight face that we're all one species.

Aishwarya Rai

Finally, a 10 who doesn't have to say "my eyes are up here".

One hundred billion Indians were guaranteed to produce at least one instance of genetic perfection. Rai's credits include Dhoom 2 and The Last Legion, but who are you kidding? You'd watch her watch paint dry. Plus, getting to feature a woman whose hottest feature actually are her eyes classes this article up by ~500%.

Kelly Brook

Kelly Brook looked like this:

Thank you, Kelly. Very cool!

Elena Satine

Pictured with suspicious beverage.

Doomed forever to be known as Pissfu for the scene in Twin Peaks The Return in which she listens sexily to Dougie draining the lizard (????), Elena Satine deserves immortalisation of a more auspicious and dignified kind: on my bl■g about Mad Max ripoffs and sea slugs.

Jennifer Connelly

Our Jen models her very least bedroom eyes.

Dark City may have been her most cerebral and stylish kino and The Hot Spot the pinnacle of top shelf sleaze, but it was in Career Opportunities that she redefined the possibilities of that most tastefully erotic female garment, the white tank top.

Claudia Cardinale

If you draw a woman this shape, at least 200 people will tell you it's unrealistic and impossible.

From The Leopard to The Pink Panther, Cardinale made two films named for big cats. Federico Fellini cast her as herself as his perfect dream waifu in 8½, placing her on the same tier as Anita Ekberg. Nordic? Med? Why can't we all just get along?

Tia Carrere

Filipina/Chinese/Spanish, born in Hawaii, as if that gives you anything to work with.

Best known for her role in Wayne's World, Carrere also starred in Relic Hunter, which was a show about her chest. Carrere singlehandedly started the yellow fever epidemic that killed every single male who came of age in the 90s, making her the Typhoid Mary of her day.

Did I miss any good women??? Post ur favourites in the comments!!!

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Higher Learning!

Aight, listen up you filthy crackkkers. This week's greatest movie of all time of the week is by a Black director (it's about time). John Singleton's magnum opus, Higher Learning, stars Foreman from House as Will Smith, a young college freshman who butts heads with his bowtie conservative surrogate father figure Uncle Phil (Laurence Fishburne, Cherry 2000, Dream Warriors).

"WRONG, Will, the answer was in fact lupus" - Laurence Fishburne

Meanwhile, a wise and prescient campus raype subplot results in Kristy Swanson (The Chase, The Phantom) making out with Jennifer Connelly (Dark City, The Hot Spot), as though such a pretext were remotely needed.

"Um, John, what's my motivation for this scene?"
"Yours?"

In a fit of 90s rap typecasting, the movie also stars Ice Cube (the "Bye Felicia" gif) as himself, and Busta Rhymes as Soyjak:

"wHITE peephole on MY campus? I'm going insaaaane aaaaagh" - Busta Rhymes

Worse still, Will must contend with that perennial college campus menace: the local neo-nazi frat.

Your campus had one of these, right?

Naturally, these inconspicuous ne'er-do-wells fly safely under the radar of the racially profiling campus security, because I see bald wHITE guys in Doc Martens hanging around colleges all the time, looking to recruit shy autistic guys (those freaks need to be watched closely at all times). Naturally, these evil ethnats start an unprovoked race war against the noble, oppressed Black ethnats, culminating in a mass shooting. No spoiler warning necessary; we all know wHITE peephole just do that.

"Now hold your horses there, Patravious", you might object, wHITEly. You might go on to note that real-life instances of racial violence are far more likely to be Black-on-wHITE than wHITE-on-Black, recalling RACISTLY such cases as the Southport mass stabbing and the Waukesha Christmas parade car massacre. You might further note that all the real-life rape cultures turned out to be in overwhelmingly l*ft-wing environments like Hollywood, the BBC and the public school system, among homosexual priests, in minority-wHITE prisons, in South Asian immigrant communities in Bri'ain, and in m*ssad pedo blackmail rings, while all the hyped-up college campus cases turned out to be bullshit.

But here's the thing, wHITE DEVIL: you only know all that because you've been paying attention and learning, when what you should have been doing is unlearning. For today's kino has a righteous message so subtle I missed it the first time:

"'Ignorance is strength' - George Orville" - John Singleton

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Hot Spot!

Spoilers throughout:

Mid population of a small town in the 90s (colourised).

Different plots have different stakes. In Dennis Hopper's greatest film as a director, The Hot Spot, our hero (Don Johnson, Miami Vice) faces a troubling predicament: if he achieves his win condition, he gets to go to the Bahamas and live out his days banging prime Jennifer Connelly. If he loses, he has to live on a small fortune in a big house banging prime Virginia Madsen. This rarely happens to me.

Nooo not sex with Virginia Madsen nooo pleeease anything but that

Johnson's Harry Madox drives into town like a man-with-no-name archetype out of the endless desert of the cinéma only to find himself consistently outwitted and outmatched by Madsen's superlative femme fatale, for he is in the wrong genre, and his efforts at antihero antics - robbing the bank, sweeping Connelly's naïve young hottie off her feet, and disappearing into the sunset - are thwarted by a run of "bad" luck reminiscent of the Kafkaesque determinism of 1945's fateful Detour, all capped off by the malign machinations of Madsen's scenery-chewing nympho villainess. Johnson is willing to go as far as rob a bank, but feels compelled to save a man trapped in a burning building, while Madsen tells him point-blank she's not above child murder to get her way. Like every man first entering into a relationship with a woman, he finds, to his dismay, he's brought a knife to a gunfight; a self-help pamphlet to a Machiavelli book club.

Born to lose: Madox's shirt is striped like an old-timey prison outfit. But will he end up trapped behind bars or in another type of prison?

The early-90s cycle of "erotic thriller/neo-noir" films is a curious case of reviving a genre in an era permissive of more lurid and explicit exploration of a subject matter formerly rendered mysterious by the strictures of the Hayes code. While many like to simperingly praise the old noirs for their enforced restraint, most of them now just play as shy and awkward about sex, not really coy and knowing as their hipster fanbase would prefer you to believe.

These expressions alone would have incurred the banhammer in the 40s.

Noir is largely the flipside of horror in that horror enables women to vicariously experience their fantasies of being pursued obsessively by aggressive men without shame or taboo, while noir allows men to indulge the side of them that wants to be tied down by a sexually uninhibited woman who never "has a headache". Sure, a man's first choice might be globetrotting adventure with wide-eyed Connelly on his arm, but if domestic purgatory comes attached to insatiable Madsen, we can think of worse ways to repay our sins.

(Extremely French existentialist voice) we must imagine ze guy banging Virginia Madsen...happy.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Dark City!

Alex Proyas is best known for directing an entire capeshit movie like a Sisters of Mercy music video.

>i once mouthed the en-word while rapping along to the radio
ONE, NOTHING WRONG WITH ME

This is a shame because, presumably after he turned 15, he went on to direct this week's greatest movie of all time. Some have called it the patrician's Matrix. None have called it anything else, because that's what it is. Dark City dropped a clean year before the Wachowski Brothers' Ghost in the Shell-meets-Total Recall ripoff and is smarter, better and kinoer.

DESPITE ALL MY RAGE I AM STILL JUST A RAT IN A CAGE

WARNING: watch the director's cut. The studio mandated an expository voiceover in the original release that gives away too much of the plot. I mention this not because plot is important but because it plays better when you share the protagonist's fog of confusion about his predicament for much of the runtime.

We've all been there amirite?

John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) wakes up in a bathtub in a scene that might incline you to suspect this will turn out like Saw or perhaps another Urban Legend. Fortunately he appears to have all of his kidneys, but suffers from memory trouble. Thus begins a journey of awakening that sees him flee from Nosferatuesque mystery men, cross paths with William Hurt's noir detective, Kiefer Sutherland's eccentric Igor and Jennifer Connelly's hypnotic nightclub singer, and discover secrets that will blow his mind.

Jennifer Connelly is in this movie :)

The titular metropolis through which this journey winds its idiosyncratic way blends the aesthetic influences of German Expressionism with the art deco retro of the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s to create a wonderfully anachronistic space that seems familiar yet strange, remixed the way a dream is said to remix memories and events. It's really quite a lot like Gotham City in Tim Burton's Batman duology, if the atmospherics tended less toward operatic pulp camp and more toward sepia sadboicore - less Bat Out of Hell, more Deathconsciousness.

An overlooked component of movie magic is the architectural escapism by which we can spend time in achingly sad cityscapes devoid of litter and winos.

Sadly yet hilariously, the movie goes full retard toward the end and resolves in a comical anime battle, perhaps because Proyas still had a bit of Crow to flush out of his system. This left-field black mark on the project would be a killer for any less a kino but Dark City more or less recovers in its final denouement, which even salvages a little ambiguity and mystery that almost brings us full circle. It's an underrated balancing act to pull off, since too many mystery movies wrap everything up too neatly, and in so doing kill off any lingering resonance in the mind. As the credits roll, you feel the Dark City is still out there somewhere, awaiting your return.

Hundreds of Billy Corgans live beneath YOUR feet.