Erin O'Riordan writes smart, whimsical erotica. Her erotic romance novel trilogy, Pagan Spirits, is now available. With her husband, she also writes crime novels. Visit her home page at ko-fi.com.
CULVER CITY, Calif., - Rising starlet Kirsty Hill, also known by the stage name Sophie Dee, is set to make an eye-popping appearance in Sony Pictures’ upcoming The Hungover Games, a parody mashup of Hollywood’s mega-blockbusters The Hangover and The Hunger Games, out March 11th on DVD/Blu-ray and VOD.
Hill co-stars with a talented ensemble that includes Tara Reid (American Pie (Unrated)), Jamie Kennedy (Malibu's Most Wanted), Jonathan Silverman (Weekend at Bernie's), Ben Begley (NCIS: Los Angeles), Ross Nathan (Bollywood’s English Vinglish), and Herbert Russell (Law and Order, Robot Chicken) with appearances by Bruce Jenner, Hank Baskett, Robert Wagner, Kayden Kross and Real Housewives of Beverly Hills stars Kyle Richards, Brandi Glanville, and Camille Grammer.
“I’ve been working towards this opportunity for years, and can’t believe how lucky I am to be able to act alongside people I have admired for years,” said Hill. “2014 is shaping up to my best year ever!”
The Welsh-born blue-eyed beauty will also appear in Danny Glover’s new comedy Bad Asses and Marlon Wayans’ upcoming spoof A Haunted House 2, both out later this year. Hill is currently in Los Angeles shooting the dark thriller Criminal.
The Hungover Games DVD/Blu-Ray includes over 20 minutes of bonus content, including "Go Deep Inside The Hungover Games," behind-the-scenes footage, plus exclusive interviews with the cast and a hilarious gag reel.
Synopsis: After celebrating Doug's upcoming wedding in a cheap hotel in Laughlin, Nevada, our hungover party-ers, Bradley, Ed and Zach, wake up in a strange room in an even stranger world... and without their pal Doug. After meeting the haughty and flighty Effing and the gruff, alcoholic Justmitch, the trio soon realizes they are on a train car headed to The Hungover Games. On the way, the men must face a harrowing assortment of Pop Culture Districts, including The Superhero District, The Middle Earth District, the Puppet District, and the Johnny Depp District.
Kirstin in the Johnny Depp District
The Hungover Games, written by David Bernstein, Kyle Barnett Anderson and Jamie Kennedy, marks the directorial debut of Josh Stolberg. Producers are Ash R. Shah, Ben Feingold, Jim Busfield, Steve Small, and Jamie Kennedy. The film's run time is approximately 85 minutes. The DVD/Blu-ray is unrated. The unrated and R-rated versions will be available digitally and on VOD.
I stumbled upon a book-related blog hop yesterday... (2023 Update: the site was called http://www.blondeundercoverblonde.com/ and it's now defunct.)
...and naturally, I have opinions about books. Two of the bloggers read classics. Abbey at Finding My Forever read The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
I like this book, but it's not one of my all-time favorites. What's your opinion of Gatsby - love it or hate it?
Will you see the new movie, with Leo DiCaprio, when it comes out? I'm sure I will, eventually. I love Leo, but it's going to be awfully hard for him to out-Gatsby Robert Redford.
GWTW is an intimidatingly large book, which I'm sure turns some people off from reading it. It's also problematic because of the characters' racism, which is nauseating (but true to the time period in which the story takes place). Still, I contend this book is very definitely worth reading. It's a great story. Love it or hate it?
You should also, definitely, watch the movie, even though (like From Here to Eternity) it leaves out quite a bit of plot and characters. If you've only ever seen the movie, you don't know that Charles and Scarlett had a son.
Clark Gable aside: I happened to watch Public Enemies yesterday (because Christian Bale), and this time I noted a) that I don't like it when Christian Bale shoots Channing Tatum - I don't care if he is Pretty Boy Floyd; b) Emilie de Ravin of Lost and Remember Me has a small role; and c) the movie which John Dillinger is leaving when killed is Manhattan Melodrama, starring Clark Gable and Myrna Loy. You'll get to see a few moments of it - along with Johnny Depp reacting to the gangster story - as you watch Public Enemies.
I'm pro-Gatsby and pro-GWTW, but I can't quite decide whether or not to like the music of Azealia Banks. "Liquorice" gets stuck in my head, but I'm not sure whether to applaud the bold sexuality in it or frown on the artist for (in this song) aspiring to be nothing more than a male fantasy - or both.
On the one hand, the word-picture she's painting is like that of the women Amy Winehouse mocks in "Fuck Me Pumps." On the other hand, who am I to judge? as argued by Salt N Pepa in "None of Your Business." Adults are free to make their own sexual choices among other consenting adults.
Plus, you can dance to "Liquorice." Azealia Banks - love her music or hate her music?
It's Thursday, and I am counting down the last hour and a half or so until the Person of Interest season finale (less time, by the time I finish writing). I haven't gotten to interact with my blog or social media as much as I would have liked over the past few days - my hubby and I rehabbed my parents' bathroom while they were out of town, and then I spent two days helping him with an exterior painting job. I've been painting porch pickets - hence the lackluster WIP Wednesday yesterday.
Pride and Prejudice and Person of Interest
Earlier today, I learned that Donna Summer passed away at the young age of 63 after a battle with cancer. I'm not a huge disco fan, but there was one summer when I drove an old Chevy Cavalier with a cassette player and wore out a cassette of disco favorites. One of them was "Bad Girls," but I think my all-time favorite Donna Summer song is "Love to Love You Baby."
In She's a Rebel, Gillian G. Gaar calls Summer "the undisputed Queen of Disco" and details how the Boston-born pop star was inspired by gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. After the decline of disco, Summer went through a born-again Christian/gospel music phase, but then returned to the pop charts with "She Works Hard for the Money."
My Facebook friend and fellow author/blogger Donald Peebles (he's on Blogger here) wrote, "My BFF DjMonalisa Indasoul and I used to talk about the infamous Kaminsky Park incident where many White males crushed and broke numerous disco albums at Kaminsky Park, Chicago as part of their "DISCO SUCKS" campaign. Disco was a musical form in which many White American males could not really capitalize on and dominate whereas African-American women, gay people, and newly independent White women navigated freely. This backlash more or less ended disco as well as the war on the gay liberation movement."
Disco - uniting African-Americans, the gay community and women in a way that white males couldn't appreciate or understand and felt threatened by. Whether you like the music or not, you've got to respect that it was a cultural force to be reckoned with from the mid-'70s into the early '80s.
Later this afternoon, Mom and I went to a matinee showing of Dark Shadows, starring Johnny Depp, written by Seth Grahame-Smith and directed by Tim Burton. I should state that I've never seen an episode of the 1970s TV show of the same name, the inspiration for the current film. Thus, I have no idea how the film compares to the original. (I can, however, read about the original on pages 146-151 of Vampire Lovers: Screen's Seductive Creatures of the Night by Gavin Baddeley.)
I liked Depp's performance as Barnabas Collins, a vampire chained in a coffin in the 1770s, only to emerge in the 1970s. He's absolutely charming. The problem with the film's plot and characterization is that the women are too easily charmed by him - to the degree that one love interest kills herself because she can't have him and the other goes completely psychotic when her love is unrequited.
The psycho with the unrequited crush on the pretty vampire is a witch, and I didn't appreciate the witch-bashing. The worst part, though, was the climactic battle scene in which Collins and the witch, Angie, battle it out in the Collins mansion. Although she's threatened his family, she isn't trying to kill him, so when Collins slaps Angie around, it just reeks of relationship violence. I like Johnny Depp; he's my beloved gypsy Roux from Chocolat. I don't want to see him as a character who slaps his ex around.
I didn't like his hasty disposal of the Helena Bonham Carter character, Dr. Hoffman, either. Her "crimes" of getting drunk and wanting to be immortal were hardly worth the death sentence. She's not Bellatrix LeStrange here, and she doesn't deserve the contempt the other characters treat her with.
Et tu, Seth Grahame-Smith? You, the same guy who made Elizabeth Bennett into a deadly ninja warrior in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? If Mr. Darcy would have raised his hand to Lizzy in anger, she would have snapped him in half like a twig. She did kick him into a marble mantelpiece, and all he did was propose to her (albeit in a rather backhanded way).
The best part, actually, was a farcical sex scene in which Collins and Angie destroy an office in a fashion that puts Bella and Edward's bed-wrecking to shame. That, my friends, is what should have happened between Diana Bishop and Matthew Clairmont in A Discovery of Witches.
The same theater was also showing The Lucky One (based on the Nicholas Sparks novel I recently read- and loved. That ending - oy! I literally threw the book down and said, "Now THAT is how you end a novel! Well done, Mr. Sparks!") and The Hunger Games. I have a feeling I would have been better off seeing either one.
Oh, and earlier today, while I did a bit of online research, I watched The Thin Red Line. I admit I've never read a James Jones novel. Once, when I was 16 or so, I checked From Here to Eternity out of the library. Because the profanity and sexuality of the book were considered somewhat controversial when it was published, I thought I might enjoy it. I don't think I made it past page 10. Line (the title comes from a Kipling poem) is a sort of sequel to Eternity.
It's a brilliant film, although I don't particularly care for Sean Penn. Jim Caviezel is playing Private Witt, a Southerner who's not particularly intellectually gifted, but who is nonetheless amazingly perceptive, kind and noble. His observations in voice-over are lovely. Now I'm forced to wonder how much of Witt comes from James Jones and how much comes from the screenwriters. Might have to go to the library and peek inside the book.
Witt, your soul is pure. You're as pretty on the inside as you are on the outside. Which is a lot.
Juliet Capulet: for centuries, the heroine of Shakespeare’s tragedy has been defined in terms of her relationship to Romeo Montague. She is the pursued, the beloved, the object. He is active, the pursuer, the lover. The most decisive thing Juliet does in the play is commit suicide. She doesn’t even get first billing in the title.
Along came Stacey Jay, whose paranormal young adult novel Juliet Immortal cast Juliet Capulet in an entirely new light. Suddenly, Juliet had a personality, a consciousness, thoughts and opinions and the ability to tell her story in her own words. According to this Juliet, Shakespeare got it wrong - way wrong. Although she loved Romeo when she secretly married him, but by the end of their honeymoon night, Juliet had good reason to hate Romeo Montague forever. They were not dead by their own hands, but rather given an immortality in which Juliet was a sort of cosmic bodyguard, sent through time to save pairs of lovers whom Romeo would try to rip apart.
Jay allowed Juliet a full range of emotions above and beyond fawning over a hot guy. Her Juliet has pent-up rage, even murderous impulses, tempered with a basic goodness and sense of duty. She has little reason to believe in true love, yet it’s the very thing she’s sworn to protect. She’s complicated. She has better days and worse days. Her emotions are realistic.
This is not to say that female authors can write a kick-ass teenage heroine better than male authors can. Consider the examples of two fictional teenage girls forced to become warriors when war broke out in their once-peaceful homes. One is Scarlett O’Hara, heroine of Margaret Mitchell’s 1930s masterpiece Gone With the Wind.
Before the Civil War broke out, Scarlett’s biggest concerns were boys and parties. She’s a smart young woman, but thinks it’s “cute” to play down her intelligence. For a while, she saw the war as the dreadful thing that forced her to be a nurse and wear widow’s clothes when she only wanted to wear bright colors and dance. Once the Yankees burned Atlanta, something inside her snapped. Scarlett’s fierce determination to “never go hungry again” hardened her. Some might say she went from a thoughtless young woman to a heartless one. Love her or hate her, by the middle of the book, Scarlett will do anything to survive.
Scarlett’s more modern counterpart is 17-year-old Irena Zaric in Scott Simon’s novel Pretty Birds. She loves to play basketball, hang out with her friend Amela, sneak around with boys, listen to Madonna and watch Johnny Depp movies when the Bosnian Civil War hits her home of Sarajevo. Like Scarlett, she’s forced to starve. Her family lives in the ruined remains of her grandmother’s apartment building, where they crawl on the ground like crabs to avoid becoming targets for snipers.
Like Scarlett, Irena makes a hard decision to survive: she becomes a sniper herself, learning how to use a rifle. She shoots at the teenage boys, classmates only days before, who have become soldiers. She kills young women not unlike herself, only they happen to be Serbs and she is a Muslim. Still, she never becomes heartless. The one thing Irena will never do is betray a friend.
Written seven decades apart, one by a Southern belle who wrote to avoid boredom while recovering from a broken leg and the other by a Chicago journalist who witnessed the war firsthand, these very different novels tell the same story. To write a kick-ass heroine, you must capture all sides of her, the good and the bad. If everybody loves her all the time, why is she interesting? The reader needs to know what makes her angry, what can push her over the edge, what she hates as well as what she loves...and who loves her. To write a kick-ass heroine, you first have to discover the human being.
Images: Juliet by John William Waterhouse is in the public domain.
Retouched photo from Gone With the Wind is in the public domain within the U.S.
What is it about you Jews from Minnesota and changing your names? Bob Zimmerman wants everybody to call him Bob Dylan, and Winona Horowitz is much more famously known as Winona Ryder.
Winona Ryder has:
-Played Mina Murray-Harker in the Francis Ford Coppola Dracula
-Been featured on my all-time favorite episode of my all-time favorite show, the "Lisa's Rival" episode of The Simpsons
-Caused Johnny Depp to get a tattoo that said "Winona Forever." When they broke up, he had it altered to say "Wino Forever."
-Not only starred as Jo in Little Women, but did so opposite Christian Bale as Laurie. She introduced Bale to his wife, makeup artist Sandra "Sibi" Blazic, and so could even be considered an honorary member of the Steinem-Bale family.
-Been featured several times now on Gender Fuck Thursdays at Dorothy Surrenders. In other words, she's shown a distinct preference for dressing in the clothing of the male sex
In other words, she is not only one hot Yiddish mama, she's also an integral part of girl culture. Winona, I'm sorry I bumped from my list of the 10 people with whom I'd most like to drink wine. Forget Colin Firth. He's gone. You can have your spot back.
Join me HERE on December 28th for a special Hanukkah post and giveaway.
Photo by Eric Weiss, Creative Commons License. Not the Houdini one, though - his name was spelled Erik Weisz
Former Michael Jordan teammate Toni Kukoc was born September 18, 1968, in Split, Yugoslavia, (now Croatia) in the Dalmatian region.
After playing for the Bulls, he also played for Philly and then Milwaukee. He currently resides in Highland Park, Illinois, with his wife Renata, their teenage son Marin and daughter Stela. Today's blog post is dedicated to Toni Kukoc in literature.
From one of my favorite books EVER, Pretty Birds by Scott Simon: "It wasn't until Irena had opened up the shirt that she saw JORDAN across the back, CHICAGO on the front. The gift, along with the gunshots and emptiness outside, alarmed her. Irena was cunning. She knew that Coach Dino enjoyed having sex with her, but she assumed that one day he would approach her with his sad hound's face and announce that he was returning to his wife (or, at least, to their bedroom from the couch on which he professed to sleep) or moving in with Julija Mitric, the hazel-eyed women's soccer coach. Irena enjoyed her moments with Coach Dino, but she spent more time dreaming about Toni Kukoc, the great Croatian player, or Johnny Depp than about the coach."
From Big Game, Small World: A Basketball Adventure by Alexander Wolff: "During his first season in the NBA, while the war raged back home, you could see the labor in everything Toni Kukoc did...after joining the Chicago Bulls in 1993, he seemed to repudiate the style that had turned him into the finest young player in Europe...Crack through the shell into which Kukoc retracted and you could find an essential homebody, a player who back in the mid-1980s was always the most reluctant to take part in those late-night high jinks [as part of the Yugoslavian national youth team]. His first coach in Chicago, Phil Jackson, would tease Kukoc about how he played better when a Bulls game was being broadcast back to Croatia and his mother might be watching."
From Sacred Hoops by Phil Jackson: "Toni wasn't a selfish player. Nothing gave him more pleasure than to dish the ball to someone else. But he didn't want to conform to the triangle offense. I knew right from the start that I would have to ride him hard in practice to protect him from being torn apart by his teammates. I'm sure my method didn't seem like an act of kindness to Toni. He couldn't understand why I allowed Scottie [Pippen] the freedom to make creative moves outside the system, but would start yelling at him when he tried similar gambits."
From Scottie Pippen by Fred McMane: "...at times, Pippen made life difficult for Kukoc. He sometimes yelled at him on court for failing to execute a play properly. As Kukoc became more comfortable with the NBA style of play, however, he became a valuable member of the team and Pippen softened in his criticism of the Croatian star.
'I think Toni is a very talented player,' Pippen said. 'He has a lot to learn about this game...When I push Toni, I try to make him better, like Michael did me. People look at it wrong and assume I dislike him. The problems I supposedly had weren't personal. I objected to the way they were pursuing him and offering him so much money...I honestly enjoy talking to Toni and trying to teach him how to be a better player...I see a lot of my game in Toni.'"
From Bad As I Wanna Be by Dennis Rodman and Tim Keown: "I think Toni Kukoc is the guy who was most affected by the trade [when Rodman came to Chicago]. He went from being the best player on the whole continent of Europe to being the fourth best player on this own team. I'm not saying he was overwhelmed when I showed up, but he has to understand that with this kind of team they've put together here, it doesn't matter who gets the glory. This team will free him up to do whatever he has to do; he just needs to understand that and get his mind right about the game. We'll cover up for Kukoc's mistakes. He's a great shooter, and he can shoot 15 times a game and score 16 or 17 points a game, easy. Kukoc can take over the Vinnie Johnson, instant-offense role on this team."
My contribution! From "Pairs of Really Big Ones" by Erin O'Riordan: "But I soon found that, with Reggie and Rik, I'd established a pattern. My chocolate fantasies needed a scoop of vanilla. For that, there was Toni Kukoc, the Bulls' six-foot-eleven power forward. Not quite as pretty as Dennis, a bit skinny and slope-shouldered, he had other nice features. In contrast to Dennis's many colorful markings, Toni had a single tattoo, a shark. He pulled off a goatee that would have looked ridiculous on any American white boy. And he was even more exotic than Rik [Smits, who is Dutch], coming from Croatia. He spoke to the press rarely, but when he did, his deeply accented English (think Gary Oldman in Dracula) never failed to melt my butter. Most of my Dennis and Toni fantasies began with Dennis and me putting eyeliner on Toni, and ended with sexy words I didn't understand hollered out in Serbo-Croat."
When you remember Toni, you must remember this song, ubiquitous in the summer of 1998 when the Bulls were winning their 6th championship of the 1990s. I'd like to think that if I ever danced with Toni, this would happen. You've seen the size of the dude's feet.
Image: the "cover" of a RPF (real person fiction) I wrote in 2005, featuring Toni, Madonna and Dennis Rodman
and The Hunger Games, out March 11th on DVD/Blu-ray and VOD.
), Jamie Kennedy (Malibu's Most Wanted
), Jonathan Silverman (Weekend at Bernie's
), Ben Begley (NCIS: Los Angeles), Ross Nathan (Bollywood’s English Vinglish), and Herbert Russell (Law and Order, Robot Chicken) with appearances by Bruce Jenner, Hank Baskett, Robert Wagner, Kayden Kross and Real Housewives of Beverly Hills stars Kyle Richards, Brandi Glanville, and Camille Grammer.
