Sexing up the 2004 Summer Olympics

Swimmer Michael Phelps was not the only one to grace the covers of Time and Sports Illustrated last month in their preview issues of the Summer Olympics. A number of female athletes got to share the spotlight in other periodicals as well.

Far off in another area of the magazine racks, away from such sports and news issues, were racy, titillating pictorials featuring a handful of Olympic female athletes on the front covers of the September 2004 editions of Playboy and FHM – For Him Magazine.

There was Playboy promoting on its cover “The Women of the Olympics – 12 pages of spectacular nudes” featuring U.S. high jumper Amy Acuff semi-clothed holding her athletic shoes – an obvious suggestion that if one were to open the magazine’s plastic bag upon buying it, he or she would find photos of her wearing a whole lot less.

On the cover of FHM were the words “Sexy Olympic Special! Team USA Bare Their Gold Medal Bodies” featuring 23-year-old Logan Tom, an outside hitter for the women’s volleyball team and 22-year-old swimmer Amanda Beard. Both were sporting white bikinis with their fingers playfully tugging down at their thongs.

FHM’s fold out cover would reveal other female athletes, including swimmer Haley Cope and long jumper Jenny Adams along with Playboy’s Acuff.

Needless to say, I wasn’t a bit surprised by some of their sexually suggestive comments. In FHM, for example, Logan Tom spoke of how she and her fellow female teammates enjoyed dancing with one another instead of with men.

“We’ll grind and do whatever, because I’d rather dance with them,” Tom said. “I am like, ‘Wait a second. I’m straight, right?’”

I wanted to say, “You’ve come a long way baby” after reading Amanda Beard’s comments in FHM about the skimpy outfits she wears while in training.

“I wear a two-piece a lot to train in, and I wedge it right up my butt,” Beard said. “We swim like we are Brazilian swimmers. We have it right up our asses.”

Hard to believe this is the same woman who, at age 14, had a teddy bear with her when she was on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” back in 1996, as well as at the Olympic games in Atlanta.

In Playboy, world championship Gold Medalist in the 100-meter backstroke Haley Clark (FHM used her maiden name, Haley Cope) commented about how her friends call her an “Olympic nudist.”

“I don’t walk through the door and strip, but I might paint my nails naked,” Clark said. “People are not comfortable with themselves. I am. I am a freak. I vote Republican. I worship Martha Stewart, and I do not mind being naked.”

It recalled the question – what was the focus of the 2004 Summer Olympics this year? Skin, or seeing female athletes compete?

Like most people last month, I had the television tuned into the Olympics for a few hours every night though I did not watch them. A lot of what I did watch when it came to the Summer Olympics was women’s beach volleyball – not because I wanted to see only that. It just happened that that was the only sporting event covered at the time I had the TV on. I took note of how skimpy their outfits looked and laughed at how their country was written on their rear-ends, thanks to the cameramen who, it seemed, focused right in on that quite often.

“If people think we’re sexy because we wear this, let them come out, think we’re sexy, enjoy that part of it, and then see that we’re also pretty dynamic athletes as well,” said USA volleyball team member Kerri Walsh, according to an article found on ABC News.

None of that bothered me. I saw it as part of their uniform. Although, I could see how someone with a halfway dirty mind could be turned on to thoughts of lesbianism after watching female volleyball players like Walsh and Misty May embrace each other frolicking in the sand the moment they won the gold for the United States against Brazil. I would have to see it again to be sure, but I had sworn I saw one of them playfully slap the other on the rear-end upon scoring the winning point.

I did not see it that way. I saw it as two women congratulating each other in the heat of the moment, much the same way Brandi Chastain removed her jersey in celebration of winning the Women’s World Cup final in 1999 against China.

Times have changed. This isn’t like four years ago when swimmer Jenny Thompson spawned off controversy appearing in Sports Illustrated with only her fists covering her breasts before the Sydney Games in Australia, according to an Aug. 12, 2004 article in The New York Times.

“Any exposure in a sports magazine that minimizes athlete achievement and skill and emphasizes the female object is insulting and degrading,” said Donna Lopiano, who was then executive director of the Women’s Sports Foundation, according to The New York Times article.

“I’m not quite sure what other people think about the recent magazines, but, for me, personally, I have fun doing it and I enjoy it,” Beard said about posing in FHM, according to the same New York Times article. “It’s a chance for me to branch out of swimming and kind of experience some other things like modeling and stuff.”

As I look back on the 2004 Summer Olympics, I did not see these pictorials done by some of the USA’s top female athletes as degrading to themselves or the sport. I saw it as them celebrating who they are and the fact they are proud of their bodies.

What is wrong with that?

©9/22/04

Fahrenheit 9/11: Stop accepting what Hollywood says is the undisputed truth

The thunderous applause from the audience was not what bothered me when director Michael Moore’s Bush bashing fest “Fahrenheit 9/11” ended when I saw it opening weekend in June. The idiotic comment made by two obviously misguided and I hesitate to say this – gentlemen who were either seniors in high school or were entering their first year in college the churned my stomach.

As I walked out, I heard both say how they are now going to vote democrat because of the truths they learned from watching “Fahrenheit 9/11”.

I wanted to strike both. It is not their comment that ticked me off so much as it is their blind stupidity into accepting that everything liberal Hollywood just told them on the big screen is the truth.

I will not deny controversy sells. That does not mean, however, everything said in a movie or so-called documentary, or in the case of “Fahrenheit 9/11”, “mockumentary” is true. The fact is if Hollywood were deeply concerned about telling real life stories as they really happened without adding their own unique twists, not only would no one see the movie, but the liberal press would have nothing to talk about.

If Michael Moore had offered both positive and negative viewpoints of how President Bush oversaw the 9/11 attacks and his decisions to go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, I would have been more than willing to listen to the many falsehoods uttered throughout the film. Hell, I would agree with the big guy’s comment that he made shortly after his “documentary” won the Palm d’or award in France that he hopes his movie will get more people to go out and vote.

I do agree that more people should go out and vote but not because they saw a movie that influenced them without doing any research themselves.

Since the film opened, several websites have published articles listing several untruths Moore’s so-called documentary addresses. Some sites list as many as fifty-nine lies or more. Human Events – The National Conservative Weekly listed nine such lies the film offers which was posted July 22, 2004, on their website, humaneventsonline.

Everyone knows how President Bush reacted after being told of the planes hitting the World Trade Center while visiting some grade school kids at a Florida school the morning of September 11, 2001. Several 9/11 documentaries have shown him making calls to Washington in another classroom while the attacks were going on and telling people, “We’re at war.” And the tales of how he was insistent to get back to Washington immediately following the attacks but at the behest of his advisers did not return until that evening. And what about his visit to Ground Zero a couple of days after the attacks visiting firefighters and the victims? In response to their cries of “God Bless America”, the president yelled out through his megaphone, “We hear you and the ones who knocked these buildings down are going to be hearing from all of us soon.”

That is not what Michael Moore wants you to believe. He wants you to think what America that day had was a leader in such a state of shock the only thing he could do was pick up the book, “My Pet Goat,” and read along with the school kids in a daze.

Moore wants you to not only look down on the job the United States armed forces are doing abroad for this country risking their lives. He also wants you to believe if you are a minority with a low IQ and low-test scores on college entrance exams and are a senior in high school who just happens to live in a poor area of town, you will be approached by a military recruiter at your local Walmart asking if you would be interested in working for Uncle Sam.

Anyone can do a bashing session of someone they do not like. I know this. I criticize movies. My negative reviews are much longer than the positive ones. It is easy to bash someone. It is much harder to write up something positive.

What Moore has done aside from adding his own personal take on President Bush is gather up lots of comedic moments showing the commander-in-chief making off-the-wall comments. Added to it is commentary from pissed off minorities who still think Bush stole the election, pissed-off wounded military servicemen with either one arm or no legs who don’t see a point to why America is fighting in Iraq, a distraught mother upset they lost their son in combat, and residents living in the poorer areas of Flint, Michigan claiming their neighborhoods are just as bad as the bomb-ridden cities of Iraq.

If President Bush loses the election this November, it is my hope that it will be because the American people think he has not done enough to help the economy when it comes to creating jobs. Not because some radical filmmaker personally thinks the guy is a lousy commander-in-chief who cannot be trusted to lead in times of crisis.

“Fahrenheit 9/11” is not a history lesson. It is not a documentary. It is a comedy mixed in with tragedy used as sick entertainment. Movies based on historical events and documentaries should prompt one to find out more about the subject, not “ass-u-me” that what they see on the big screen is the Gospel according to Michael Moore.

My advice to those two individuals, and to anyone else so easily swayed by such so-called documentaries Hollywood unleashes on the public, read more about the subject before making a sound decision.

©9/22/04

My Personal Worst Films: Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004)

Resident Evil: Apocalypse «
R, 94m. 2004

Cast & Credits: Milla Jovovich (Alice), Sienna Guillory (Jill Valentine), Oded Fehr (Carlos Olivera), Thomas Kretschman (Major Tom Cain), Sophie Vavasseur (Angie Ashford), Razaaq Adoti (Sgt. Peyton Wells), Jared Harris (Dr. Ashford), Mike Epps (L.J.), Sandrine Holt (Terri Morales), Matthew G. Taylor (Nemesis). Screenplay by Paul. W.S. Anderson. Directed by Alexander Witt.

"Resident Evil: Apocalypse" is an endlessly loud shoot-em-up equivalent to a violent video game which isn’t very far from the truth since this follow-up to 2002’s Resident Evil is really based on a popular computer game. The plot is not so much an actual story as it is “the object of the game” where the handful of one-dimensional characters must go through several precarious situations before calling themselves the winner. Such situations include roaming the night streets of Raccoon City, inhabited by flesh eating zombies and infected rabid salivating dogs. The “object of the game” has the characters searching for a young girl who is the daughter of a wheelchair bound scientist whose company called the Umbrella Corporation is responsible for unleashing a deadly virus throughout the city.

I equate the film’s storytelling format to the "Star Wars: Rebel Assault" game I played on an Apple computer years ago where the first five minutes of each segment was dedicated to watching the characters converse with each other as they flew through space. Then the rebel pilots run into enemy forces and the viewer becomes the game player where I had to shoot down as many Imperial ships as possible in order to get to the next step.

The difference between that game and the film, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, however, is under my control I could switch off the Rebel Assault CD-ROM whenever I wanted to. That’s a luxury I wished I had watching "Resident Evil: Apocalypse." Then again, no one was holding a gun to my head forcing me to keep my eyes glued to the big screen. I was technically still in charge of my own destiny and could have so chosen to walk out long before the credits rolled. If I had done so, however, I wouldn’t have been able to write this review.

When it comes to sequels, it isn’t unusual for one to want to familiarize themselves with the predecessor before seeing the latest one. I never saw "Resident Evil" and now after seeing this sequel, I am not only thankful I didn’t but was also relieved to know the first few minutes of “Apocalypse” reveal much of what happened previously.

The survivors include among them, a demoted gun-toting female officer (Sienna Guillory), a weather reporter (Sandrine Holt) who sees this tragedy as her ticket to winning an Emmy, and an Umbrella tactical officer (Oded Fehr) who when one of his team asks why the company left them out to die with the zombies, says they’re “expendable assets and we’ve just been expended.” They are led to safety by Alice (Milla Jovovich), a former security guard for the company who reveals early on how there was “an accident.”

There is not a single moment of originality or creativity here. The script was written by Paul W.S. Anderson whose directorial credits include a number of B rated sci-fi/horror/action-adventure movies like "Mortal Kombat" (1995), "Event Horizon" (1997) with Sam Neill and Laurence Fishburne, the little seen Soldier (1998) with Kurt Russell, and the recent "AVP: Alien Vs. Predator" (2004). Seeing "Mortal Kombat" and "Event Horizon" I can tell Anderson isn’t in the filmmaking business to make the critics happy. He wants to make movies and write screenplays that appeal to a wide range of young audiences. That’s all fine and dandy. Trouble is his ideas aren’t so much inspired-by as they are rip-offs of better films.

Watching "Resident Evil: Apocalypse", I found it hard not to be reminded of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead trilogy (1968-1985) or any movie for that matter dealing with flesh-eating zombies that would include "28 Days Later" (2002) and even the recent remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004). As an added bonus, the filmmakers even throw in an ugly mutated creature with large teeth that bears an obvious resemblance to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator from the cyborg killing machine movies (1984-2003). He, or I guess I should say “it,” carries a shoulder armored rocket launcher in one hand and a machine gun styled assault weapon in the other and is just as difficult a foe the characters have a hard time killing.

The film appeals to only three kinds of viewers. Those who love when their favorite video games are turned into ninety-minute movies, those with very little imagination, and those who get off seeing a couple of take charge female characters in short skirts, high heeled sandals and leather boots or wearing barely nothing at all who bust through the doors of empty high school hallways or church windows on motorcycles with guns blazing. Or, they just want to see Milla Jovovich.

I won’t deny the fact that she is quite an attractive woman judging by the Revlon television commercials I have seen her in. I liked her in "The Fifth Element" (1997) with Bruce Willis, which unlike "Resident Evil: Apocalypse" I found to be a tribute to several science fiction movies made before it. Her character, Alice, in “Apocalypse” is a born “Rambolina” who doesn’t even yell out in pain after popping a couple of fingers back into place when she injures her hand.

She’s Supergirl who not only catches speeding bullets with her bare hands but throws them back at the person who shot them with the same amount of speed. She runs down the side of skyscrapers with a cable attached to her waist kicking the you know what out of corporate soldiers and stares alluringly and telepathically into a set of video surveillance cameras that cause a security guard’s eyes to ooze out blood.

Her character alone is what saves this movie from being a complete waste of celluloid trash. I suspect were it not for Jovovich, "Resident Evil: Apocalypse" would be exactly what one character says in the film that evolution is dead. She is the only one who brings any life or personality to this picture. This film would be what doctors call “DOA” as in “dead on arrival” were it not for her.

©9/17/04