Jean-Claude. Van Damme. Does not compute. I don't care if he can crack nuts with his buttcheeks; he canna act!!

after one of the nakedest sex scenes ever

Spoken like someone who has never seen a Bernardo Bertolucci picture. Let's just say I had The Dreamers out from Netflix, and saw way, way more of Eva Green than the Bond movie showed.

To see more of Eva Green (or any of the principals) than The Dreamers showed, the filmmaker would need to use a sigmoidoscope.

Hee on the Van Damme comments! I've never seen him except inadvertently while channel surfing, but I will say that his closest counterpart when it comes to lack of acting skills is Steven Seagal. The man almost ruins what is in actuality a damn good action film, Under Seige, simply from his very inability to portray anything other than Seagal-ness.

(most of all as the crazy Russian in Snatch).

YESS!

his characters were interestingly defined and rewarded (or not).

I really, really want to like Timecop in the same way I want to like The Saint. Actually, there's a couple of Jean Claude's I actually even like (such as Bloodsport, despite it being sillier than just about any movie we've mentioned here this morning, and featuring the worst examples of Jean Claude's Acting Face evar).

Well, Sudden Death and Legionnaire !!!

(exclamation marks mine, but they should have been in the title).

It wasn't about the amount of flesh shown. I mean, I've seen porn. This wasn't porn. Okay, it kinda was. The camera was pretty much fondling JC's ass. I even remember seeing his body fuzz backlit by a very sentimental sun.

It wasn't how much. It was how, and how lovingly. There was a chick in the scene too, I guess.

JC does celebrate his physicality in a way Seagal couldn't, but I do give him more credit, because his movies were often fun (Double Team anyone?). He also played effeminate a couple times, and not just for laughs.

Speaking of which, that reminds me of a Dacascos bargain basement flick, Boogie Boy, which has random homosexuality in it. Kinda weird, just there in passing.

I don't like Steven Seagal, he always seems so smug, which is bad enough but combined with his inablity to act it's horrible to watch. I haven't seen a lot of Jean Claude's movies (although the ones I can remember are Cyborg, Universal Solider) but I had a huge thing for Dolph Lundgren back in the day and watched a bunch of his movies. He can't act either but he was better eye candy (for me) than JC.

Mmm. Dolph. I much preferred his Punisher to the Thomas Jayne one. He could totally kick Tommy Boy's ass.

Plus he was married to Grace Jones! How eugenic is that?

CREEPY:

Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson intend to use performance-capture technology -- used to create the character of Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies -- to turn Georges Remi's comic-book drawings in his Adventures of Tintin series into three features that will be shot back-to-back beginning next year, Daily Variety reported today (Tuesday). The trade publication said that the three films -- one will be directed by Spielberg, another by Jackson; there is no decision on who will direct the third -- will likely be released through DreamWorks Animation. It quoted Spielberg as saying that the drawings by Remi, who used the name Hergé, will have the look of a live-action film, "and yet Peter and I felt that shooting them in a traditional live-action format would simply not honor the distinctive look of the characters and world that Hergé created." Jackson said that the characters will "look photorealistic ... They look exactly like real people -- but real Hergé people."

I liked Dolph. I loved Red Scorpion back in the day (doubt it will hold up on rewatch).