After a severe drop-off in 2002, there’s a surge of movies with sexy stuff in 2003 but not necessarily a big jump in the amount of nudity. But there’s so many movies with something to cap for the year that this will be an update in three parts. Part one contains extensive nudity in Alexandra’s Project and decent scenes in A Cold Summer and Japanese Story.
Pictured below: Helen Buday in Alexandra’s Project
Johnny’s remarks (and a long film clip) about Alexandra’s Project:
Alexandra’s Project is a 2003 domestic thriller set over the course of Steve’s (Gary Sweet) 45th birthday. As he gets ready for work, he spends some time with his kids and there’s a little bit of tension between him and his wife Alexandra (Helen Buday), but nothing seems too out of the ordinary. As soon as he leaves for work, Alexandra tells the kids they aren’t going to school and they can help her prepare for their father’s birthday celebrations. Steve has a good day at work and leaves expecting a celebration but he arrives home and finds the house deserted with the electricity cut off except for the television and the VCR. He also sees a video camera set up on a tripod and a birthday gift. He opens it and finds a video with a message to play it. Steve watches and is greeted with a striptease from his wife before she sits down and starts talking about their relationship. Boring!!! So he fast-forwards the video and what he sees next will begin a night of viewing he’ll never forget for a long time. It’s a simple premise from director Rolf de Heer but an insanely intriguing one that delivers multiple gut punches as we watch Steve’s life implode on videotape. Both Sweet and Buday are excellent in what is basically a two-hander after the first twenty minutes where it’s just Sweet reacting to what he’s seeing on the tape. Buday spends most of the movie wearing not very much and it must’ve been a hell of an effort to get all the beats right. On rewatch, there’s one or two hints early in the tape as to what’s to come but you’d barely notice them on first watch. The twists are wild and leave Steve who started by thinking he had everything with nothing, his whole life stripped of what he thought he held dear. I hadn’t seen the movie since I capped it back in 2004 (so almost 20 years and my memory is I think I saw in theatres back in the day) but it’s still works after all this time.
She was the leader of the lost kidsin Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome ….