Jun 29, 2006 07:29 PM
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Spatting one-liners and sucking on cigarettes, the vampy, campy Sharon Stone does Bette Davis proud in this reasonably fun but ultimately empty suspense/thriller. Proceed at your own risk.
Thestars:
Sharon Stone, David Morrissey, Stan Collymore, Charlotte Rampling, David Thewlis
Storyline:
Novelist Catherine Tramell is once again in trouble with the law, and Scotland Yard appoints psychiatrist Dr. Andrew Glass to evaluate her. Although, like Detective Nick Curran before him, Glass is entranced by Tramell and lured into a seductive game.
I can hear all u guys there say-
It was fun, admit it, to watch Sharon Stone in 1992's Basic Instinct, getting Michael Douglas and his cop buddies cross-eyed just by uncrossing her legs on a day she forgot to wear underwear. The laughs to be had in this deliciously awful sequel are all unintentional. A bummer for film buffs, but a ball for fans of the misbegotten. Take the opener, when Stone, back as bisexual crime novelist and accused serial killer Catherine Tramell, drives her car off a London bridge while a soccer star finger-fucks her to a screaming orgasm. And they say Hollywood forgot how to make movies for the whole family.
Credit Stone, 48, for getting in knockout shape for this vanity project. And she can act (see Casino), she just doesn't choose to do it here. Instead she loads up every line with sexual innuendo and plays Catherine as a predator who sits around her flat in heels, tight skirt and full makeup waiting for drop-ins. First up is Dr. Michael Glass (David Morrissey), a shrink who treats her for risk addiction and becomes addicted to her himself. You'll have to take the script's word for that, since the doughy, dead-eyed Morrissey projects all the ardor of a zombie in a bespoke suit.
let's talk About Basic Instinct 1 :
In their protests against Paul Verhoven's "Basic Instinct," gay activists have been giving away the ending of the movie. With some thrillers, that would be a damaging blow. But the ending of "Basic Instinct" is so arbitrary that it hardly matters. This is not a movie where the outcome depends upon the personality or behavior of the characters. It's just a wind-up machine to jerk us around.
Consider the last shot of the movie (no, I will not reveal it). This shot allows us to discover whodunit - whether one of the characters is a murderer, or not. The screen has faded to black. Then we get the last shot, and it answers our question. But if the last shot had provided the opposite answer, it still would have been consistent with everything that had happened in the film. Each and every shred of evidence throughout the entire movie supports two different conclusions.
This is the kind of ending beloved by marketing experts. The audience likes the heroine? Make her innocent. They hate her? Make her the killer. Only one shot has to be changed. As a result, I left the movie feeling depressed and manipulated - because it didn't matter how hard I tried to follow the plot and figure things out, the whole movie was just toying with me. At least some of the other recent titles in this genre - like "Fatal Attraction" and "Sea of Love" - played fair.
The movie stars Michael Douglas as a troubled police detective who has been up before Internal Affairs, after shooting some tourists in a murky misunderstanding. He gets involved in the investigation of the kinky murder of a rock star. The rock star's sometime girlfriend Sharon Stone has written a novel in which a rock star is murdered in precisely the same way. Does this mean she is guilty? Or did a copycat killer try to frame her? The police questioning of the woman is the best scene in the movie, as Stone flirts shamelessly and toys with their male libidos.
Douglas is entranced. The woman may be a killer and is obviously twisted and manipulative, and yet he's mesmerized - attracted by the danger as much as by her sensuous magnetism. As his investigation progresses, however, he finds the woman is more complicated than he suspected. She has a lesbian lover, for one thing.
The screenplay, by Joe Eszterhas, resembles his "Jagged Edge" (1985) in keeping the secret until the last shot. It's not really the last shot technique that I object to. What bothers me is that the whole plot has been constructed so that every relevant clue can be read two ways. That means the solution, when it is finally revealed, is not necessarily true. It is simply the writer's toss of the dice.
What made it reach to the sky???
Apart from the other elements, the movie exists for its sexual content. The Stone character, described as "world class" by Douglas after one night in the sack, is a kinky seductress with the kind of cold, challenging verbal style that many men take as a challenge. Her friends include a woman who once killed her entire family; she needs these people, she says, as inspiration for her novels. Her next book, she tells Douglas, staring him straight in the eye, will be about a police detective who falls in love with the wrong woman.
The sex scenes, threatened with the NC-17 rating until 45 seconds were removed to qualify for the R, belong in that strange neverland created by the MPAA's Hollywood morality. They aren't much by the standards of really daring movies, but they do go far enough to make the "R" rating into a fiction. .The sex resembles a violent contact sport, with a scoring system known only to the players.
What's not to b there???
As for the allegedly offensive homosexual characters: The movie's protesters might take note of the fact that this film's heterosexuals, starting with Douglas, are equally offensive. Still, there is a point to be made about Hollywood's unremitting insistence on typecasting homosexuals - particularly lesbians - as twisted and evil. Hollywood is fearless in portraying lesbians as killer dykes, but gets cold feet with a story that might portray them (gasp!) as warm, good-natured and generous.
Since most people will be attending in less than a Politically Correct frame of mind, however, does the movie deliver? In a way, it does. It kept me interested, and guessing, right up until that final shot, which revealed that all of my efforts were pointless since the guilt or innocence of the characters was a flip of the coin, based on evidence that could be read both ways. The film is like a crossword puzzle. It keeps your interest until you solve it. Then it's just a worthless scrap with the spaces filled in.
About Basic Instinct 2:
Catherine Trammel, the novel-writing, icepick-wielding, best-selling author from 1992's Basic Instinct is back – this time, she's set up her sexy shop in London and she's set her homicidal sights on analyst Dr. Michael Glass (David Morrissey).
Basic Instinct is certainly a gloriously guilty pleasure...
Pros Sharon Stone still sizzles (despite obvious surgical augmentation) Decent dialogue,with some good one-liners Everything and everyone looks polished and pretty Cons Too talky Needed some more twists No spark from David Morrissey Not nearly as gory as the first Basic Instinct
Do tell me what do u think!!
Luv,
Tani
