Bec Rawlings is a famous Australian professional bare-knuckle boxer and former mixed martial artist

It seems to me that Nicola Peltz is too well established to take a cameo with no lines, but that other woman sure looks like her.

The previous nudity in this series

New link: a full gallery and higher quality (and a very sexy .gif)

Original post

What sort of mental picture have you formed from the title? Are you picturing a cute girly cartoon? Wrong. It’s a dark, twisted, sexually charged pseudo-supernatural “thriller” from Nic Roeg, who had previously created some notable films like Walkabout, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Don’t Look Now, Castaway and Bad Timing, all in the period 1971-1986. This was not the work of THAT Roeg, but of an 80-year-old man who had lost a lot of the zip from his fastball. And he wasn’t exactly Nolan Ryan to begin with.

So what’s the deal with the title? The Puffball is a type of wild mushroom which resembles a woman’s swollen belly, and this is a film about pregnancy.

Or something.

I’m not really sure what it’s about, to tell you the truth. I’m not even positive that the writer and director knew, because it is supposed to be adapted from a book by Fay Weldon, and from what I have been able to determine (I haven’t read it), that book is brimming with wit and clever dialogue. Although the script for this film was written by the son of the late Weldon, I see no sign of wit, and gathered not the vaguest inkling that the writer or Roeg tried to put any ironic distance between themselves and this preposterous story about Norse mythology, Celtic voodoo, aphrodisiacs, rabid stable couplings, stolen spirit-children, sperm, and rocks with holes in them. I suppose the self-important humorlessness should come as no surprise. Roeg was in the film business for fifty years and continually demonstrated that he lacked even the slightest sense of humor.

Of all Roeg’s earlier films, Don’t Look Now is the one most similar to Puffball. Puffball takes the earlier film’s premise of a normal young couple trapped in a menacing, ominous Venice and transports the couple to the menacing, ominous Irish countryside, where they unexpectedly create a pregnancy and stir up deep feelings of envy in the local harridans, especially a woman who is trying futilely to become pregnant and feels that the outsider has stolen her child.

There were exceptions among the critics, but most of the scribes who profess to like Roeg’s earlier films found this one to be like an unintentional parody of them, with all of the director’s familiar devices exaggerated to ridiculous extremes. There is, for example, obvious sexual symbolism, some of it not so symbolic. Come to think of it, it’s not really symbolism when you can see sperm squirting into a womb from the inside, is it? Let’s just call it sexual imagery. There are several seconds of what appears to me to be an actual penis violating an actual vulva, as shot in extreme close-up, porn style, but disguised by fancy colored lenses and an absence of hair. Or maybe it is symbolism and it’s actually something extremely similar to a penis penetrating something extremely similar to a vagina, in which case it takes the award for the most heavy-handed symbolism of all time, since it looks exactly like real coitus. This is far beyond the ol’ “train entering a tunnel” device.

And the symbolism is actually subtle compared to the stereotypical Irish rurals and the oppressive Celtic musical cues!

If Roeg fans found this movie difficult to watch, you can imagine how I felt, because I don’t even like his “classics.” I always find his narratives jumbled, his themes too-too serious and self-important, his execution very close to high camp, and the overall effect inevitably soporific. I mean, c’mon. I sat through two hours of Don’t Look Now to find out that Sutherland’s vision of his dead child was actually an evil dwarf. Worst “reveal” ever!

As I pointed out in my review of Don’t Look Now:

You know what the explanation really was? There was a serial killer wondering around Venice, skulking in and out of the shadows, and that is whom Sutherland mistook for the ghost of his daughter. So what’s so odd about that? I’ll tell you. The serial killer was an evil dwarf who looked exactly like a ten year old girl. So what’s so unlikely about that? Well, I might have bought into it partially, except that the serial killer skulked around Venice in a shiny red overcoat. I know that I’m neither short enough nor evil enough to think like an evil dwarf, but if I were an evil serial-killing dwarf, I’d try to dress a little bit less conspicuously.

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Kelly Reilly’s Nudography

Mexican horror film.

A female security guard is assigned to cover a morgue at the last minute. On the way, she hits a pedestrian who walks in front of her car. When she arrives at the morgue, strange things start to occur.

Or do they? Most of the film’s action takes place in her own mind. It’s a pretty taut thriller, even though the “mystery” seems obvious from the beginning, because similar ideas are so commonplace in horror films. Because genre fans will get the point immediately, it could be tedious with a long running time, but at 70 tense minutes, it never overstays its welcome.

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We have seen Natalia Solián naked in two other recent films.

Brazilian series now streaming on HBO MAX

Forty years after becoming a popular phenomenon, Dona Beja once again circulates powerfully in the Brazilian imagination, now with a new cast and a different historical sensibility. The character who set television ablaze in the 1980s is revisited in a completely different industrial and cultural context, with a promise of greater inclusion and on a platform that reaches beyond Brazil. This distance does more than update the narrative; it opens space for a question the original 1986 version was not obliged to sustain in depth, because the country as a whole was occupied with other debates. Who, after all, was Dona Beja before she became legend, scandal, collective fantasy, and, later, an audiovisual product?

Here is an in-depth overview of both versions (1986 and 2026) as well as the woman who inspired the story.

Grazi Massafera gave perhaps the best nude performance of the young year so far, although I tend to favor Llúcia Garcia in Romería. I try not to be too judgmental about female bodies, but I just don’t like Grazi’s bad boob job.

There was some nudity from others as well:

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… assuming you also have night vision goggles, and don’t mind wasting the brief and precious time granted to you on this planet.

(From Tell Me Lies, s3e6)

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Previous nudity from Tell Me Lies

La Cid doesn’t walk around L.A. like that, but you might spot her looking like this.

In the Italian TV series, a young couple grapples with the difficulties of a relationship marked by hard, risky, and unpredictable work. Ram is a radio interception technician from Rome, often absorbed in the operational demands of the investigation, a condition that puts a strain on his emotional relationship with Benetta.

Full title: “L’invisibile. La cattura di Matteo Messina Denaro” (“The Invisible: The Capture of Matteo Messina Denaro”)

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Arianna Di Claudio is known as a singer. Here is her cover of Leonard Cohen’s The Partisan

French historical fantasy/drama.

A pioneer of modern architecture, Le Corbusier (Jeanne Balibar) paces around his studio. Memories come back to him. He recalls a brief but decisive encounter with Josephine Baker (Emara Neymour-Jackson) during a transatlantic voyage in 1929… They meet again on the roof of his most famous building, where they celebrate Baker’s vision of the rainbow tribe by dancing to a conga rhythm.

Note: Le Corbusier was a brilliant architect, but was an ugly, bald dude. Jeanne Balibar is none of the above. The decision to cast her was discussed here.

I think it was a way for us to avoid the pitfalls of re-inscribing a heteronormative binary.

I personally have no problem re-inscribing a heteronormative binary. I try to do one a day, just before breakfast. But then again, I’m just a reckness, full-speed-ahead, devil-may-care rebel. I’m willing to break all of the unwritten laws and at least three of the Vanderpump rules. I even messed with the Zohan.

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