Category: Beauty

Paz Vega: full-frontal nudity

UncleScoopy

This is a scene from her epic, nearly legendary, performance in Sex and Lucia.

This earned her the #9 spot among our Top Nude Scenes of 2002, a year in which she faced some stiff competition!

Emily Mortimer, Patricia Arquette, Heather Graham, Rebecca Romijn, Kate Winslet, Salma Hayek, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Monica Bellucci all did full-frontal nudity that year. Every single one of those scenes was in a theatrically-released film.

That 2002 list represents a perfect illustration of how dramatically the world of entertainment has changed. Not one of the twenty best nude scenes was from a TV show or streaming series. In recent years, shows like Game of Thrones, Spartacus, Altered Carbon, True Detective, True Blood, Strange Angel, Euphoria, Westworld, GLOW, Weeds, Girls, Shameless and Jett have churned out many great nude scenes.

Before 2008, no scene from a series had ever been chosen as the year’s best. Since then, annual winners have included Anna Paquin, Eva Amurri, Emmy Rossum, Alexandra Daddario and Alison Brie, each from a series. Many other series performers have been top ten finishers.

Jim Bouton dead at 80

UncleScoopy

He had an interesting life.

He was a successful baseball pitcher for a brief time, then became an author who pretty much single-handedly transformed sports literature from a form of hagiography to the realistic modern mode. In so doing, he made himself an outcast among the players and management. He also annoyed many fans who preferred their heroes untarnished.

MLB sums it up as follows: “The irreverent diary of his 1969 season with the Seattle Pilots and Houston Astros featured tales of players’ antics and adolescent behavior, sexual activities, sexually tasteless jokes, drunken horseplay, contract squabbles with management in the era before free agency, and the use of performance-enhancing drugs — yes, even way back then — that enraged the baseball establishment.”

Bouton became famous and notorious for his life off the field. In addition to being an influential and controversial author, he even had a brief career as a film actor. Bouton played the bad guy in The Long Goodbye, a major film directed by the legendary Robert Altman.

Bouton was also a damned good pitcher before he threw his arm out. That took only two years, but what years they were! In 1963 he went 21-7 with a 2.53 ERA, and he followed that up with 18 wins and a 3.02 ERA in 1964. His Yankees lost the World Series in each of those seasons, but Bouton himself was brilliant in both Octobers. His post-season ERA was below 2.00 in both seasons, and in 1964 he won both of his World Series starts.

Because of his arm troubles, that was basically his entire career. He would never again win more than four games in a baseball season, but he was still at it 14 years later because he kept unretiring in the hope of a comeback.

Bonnie Bedelia topless

UncleScoopy

Bonnie Bedelia in The Stranger (1986)

When I wrote my review of this film, it was based on a VHS viewing. The captures here represent the first time I’ve ever seen anything from the film in good quality. (It’s now available from Amazon Prime in HD.)

In addition to the B&W flashback scene pictured above, Bedelia also did a very brief topless scene in color, seen here.

My review can be summed up in two sentences: (1) This movie is pretty damned good for a low-budget flick you never heard of; (2) Bonnie Bedelia should have become a bigger star.