Basic Instinct 2

No, I have NOT seen this movie. However, I read an absolutely hilarious review of it by a guy by the name of Massawyrm over at www.aintitcoolnews.com that I simply had to repost here. As you can read below, this isn't the T&A-fest we were hoping for - in fact, it sounds a whole lot worse. The comparison of seeing Sharon Stone naked with "walking in on your Aunt Mildred getting out of the shower" had me pissing my pants!

Without further ado, here it is:

Hola all. Massawyrm here. Where the fuck is Joe Eszterhas when you need him? No seriously. Where the fuck is he? I mean, clearly we live in a world where someone was willing to dump buckets of money into a remake - ahem, sorry - sequel to the 1992 Verhoeven sleazefest classic Basic Instinct – one might imagine that they might go back to the source and squeeze one last epically debaucherous ride out of him. But no. Eszterhas may have become synonymous with the worst of the worst when it comes to screenwriting, but you gotta give it to the guy: he was the king of sleaze. His movies weren’t just bad. They were fucking epics of jaw-dropping magnitude. Flashdance, Basic Instinct, Sliver, Jade. Hedonistic, misogynistic, seedy pieces of trash one and all. And every single one of them was a step closer to his opus, his masterstroke, his monument to female degradation – mother fucking Showgirls. Yeah, now you’re with me.

When MGM released their super slutty, heavily unrated psudo-trailer on the net a few months back, word on this project began to change. All of a sudden the jokes about how bad it could be was readily replaced by talk of excitement about just how over the top and, once again, sleazy this was going to be. Curiosity began to stir and many of us waited with baited breath, wondering aloud: was this going to be another Showgirls, another trip into a hypnotically unbelievable sex romp with a budget?

In a word - no. As it turns out, that trailer MGM dropped on us was complete, utter horseshit – a farce of such unrelenting chutzpah that I can’t even begin to explain. But I’ll try, by god I’ll try.

Whether we like it or not, Basic Instinct is a classic and easily somewhere in the top 10 of most influential films of the 90’s. It single handedly legitimized softcore, and along with The Hand that Rocks the Cradle and Single White Female became the standard by which every single femme fatale ‘erotic thriller’ of the era was either compared or plagiarized. While I won’t even begin to argue that these films are good, they opened up a whole market of ‘adult’ filmmaking that allowed men to watch nudie movies while systematically claiming to be watching real films. Hell, late night Skinimax is nothing BUT Basic Instinct whackfest knockoffs – and Blockbuster Video made a very lucrative industry out of forbidding NC-17 films in their stores, while producing through subsidiaries their own ‘thriller’ softcore that had the benefit of being ‘unrated’ not ‘NC-17’. Would we even know who Shannon Tweed is if not for her endless strea of Basic Instinct clones?

So if you’re going to make a sequel to something that defined an entire genre, you’ve gotta do it right. It’s gotta be sexier, filthier, bloodier and quite simply, downright unwholesome. And that’s certainly what they’re selling in the internet ‘trailer’ and the countless Sharon Stone interviews meant to drum up controversy (the woman who a decade and a half ago publicly threw a fit about the infamous bush scene is now advocating oral sex for minors on talk shows and discussing how much she loves sex.) But that ain’t actually what they’re selling. You see, if you’ve seen the internet ‘trailer’, then you’ve actually seen 75% more sex than is actually in the film. Virtually every frame of sex and nudity that appears in Basic Instinct 2, you’ve already seen. Let that sink in for a moment. I’ll wait.

Yes, there are exactly three sex scenes in this movie. One with a single nipple and some bobbing man ass. Another with a single nipple and some bobbing man ass. And a third, with two expose nipples, and yes, dare I say it, more bobbing man ass. That semi hot looking threesome in the ‘trailer’? Never actually appears in the film - the third person in that three-way…never actually appears in the film. And outside of the sex, there is one, single, gratuitous nude scene. Of Sharon Stone. All told, there is perhaps 20-30 seconds of actual sexual content in this film. So it never actually achieves any level of ‘trashy’ that someone might be seeing this for. Oh, sure, it trrrrriiiiiiiieeeesss to be sexy, complete with a tracking down the legs shot that worked great 15 years ago, but now follows a trail of freckles and liver spots that feels more akin to walking in on your Aunt Mildred getting out of the shower than it does watching Basic Instinct, causing your balls to slowly creep back into your abdomen. Okay, yes, 40+ women can be sexy. But there are magazines for that kind of thing, and there’s a reason porn shops keep them on the back shelves of the racks – because they are reserved for ‘special’ kinds of men. If liver spots speak ‘experience’ to you, then the gratuitous shots of a braless Sharon Stone wearing a nigh see-through blouse with her under-the knife perkiness peeking out might bring you to half mast. Otherwise, the film isn’t sexy at all, but rather just seems kind of sad.

What’s left is a miserable train wreck of a thriller groaning under the weight of dialog so bad it becomes epic in it’s own right. You see, while this film isn’t epic in the same fashion as an Eszterhas thriller, it easily, without hyperbole, becomes a top entry into the ‘worst sequel to a blockbuster film of all time’ list. It makes Godfather 3 and Episode I look like gargantuan successes, and manages to make Speed 2 and Jaws: The Revenge seem watchable by comparison. Seriously, this movie is just…that…bad.

Allow me to read from the book of BI2 for a moment, to illustrate more effectively the type of trite, overblown dialog that pervades this film. When asked what she writes about (Sharon Stone’s character Catherine Tramell, as you might recall, is quite possibly the worst successful novelist ever set to film – really, the passages she reads aloud in BI2 make us AICNers read like Nobel fucking laureates) Stone's answer is this (quoted verbatim from the film)

CATHERINE TRAMELL
The lurid, the violent, the sexual.
The basic instincts.

Oh yeah, baby. They go that far. The entire film is filled with the kind of lame, self-referential bullshit that will either make your asshole pucker tighter than a drum or cause you to laugh out loud uncontrollably. Laid atop one of the weakest, unnecessarily convoluted plots known to man it achieves brand new levels of ‘WTF were they thinking?’ making this the surefire leader of the pack for the Razzies, easily sweeping in the categories of Worst film, Worst director, Worst Actress, and most notably and ironically, the Joe Eszterhas Dis-honorary award for Worst Screenplay. Normally, I scoff at the Razzies for picking only on mediocre to kind of bad big budget or big star failures – but this is exactly the type of film the Razzies love to roast, and is a failure of such a spectacular level – one that misses absolutely everything that it aims for - that this year they can’t help but be right on the money. Distributing a film that even manages to come close to how bad this is seems pretty much like a mathematical improbability.

But there’s something to be said for a movie this bad. And that is that it’s really, truly, amazingly funny. When it’s not being boring as all fucking hell, that is. It’s filled to the brim with beautiful nuggets of pure gold that any drunken film watcher will split their pants laughing at. But this is only recommended for the most astute and well trained of ‘bad movie watchers.’ This isn’t amateur level bad. This requires someone ready to deal with soul crushing banality for minutes at a time to enjoy the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I mean, it’s just plain gawd awful. I would say that the studio behind it should simply be ashamed of themselves for even thinking of letting it show on a single screen – but it’s an MGM film and those people practically wear masks to work out of embarrassment already. For them it’s nothing but another can of film atop a pile of buttfucked properties.

This is the single worst, most unbelievable film I’ve seen on the big screen since Torque. And if given the Sophie’s Choice of sitting in a chair with a gun to my head having to choose between watching one of the two, I’d suffer Torque again. Something about Bike-Fu makes me chuckle. That, and I hope to god to never have to see Aunt Sharon naked again.

Until next time friends, smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em. I know I will.

Massawyrm

Walk The Line

I enjoyed this movie quite a bit - not because I thought the movie was amazing, but because the performances were.

A lot has been made of Reese Witherspoon's performance as June Carter Cash. And rightly so. She was excellent. But so was Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash. Joaquin sounds so much like Johnny, that if I didn't know any better, I would've thought they dubbed Johnny's voice in. There's a lot of singing in this movie, and the vocals are great, across the board.

The movie was good, but, like so many other true stories of musicians, the tale remains the same. During the Academy Awards, Jon Stewart joked that he enjoyed "Walk The Line" the first time he saw it when it was called "Ray". And, you know what? He was right. Same story, different races.

This movie was good, but was not Oscar good. If I had seen it in the theater, I wouldn't have been disappointed. But seeing it at home, on DVD, it was absolutely worth the time. Rent it. Good movie.

Inside Man

My friend Rob has been busting my balls because of my Brokeback Mountain / The Unit reviews. (See the comments to both of the reviews, below.) Well, now I'm adding to my double entendre reviews by watching the latest Spike Lee movie "Inside Man".

Inside Man stars Denzel Washington as an NYPD hostage negotiator biding his time to make Detective First Grade, when a bank heist creates a hostage situation with over 50 hostages and the number one negotiator is on vacation. Bank robber Clive Owen and a group of cohorts have taken hostages while robbing a bank in Manhattan. But it is clear from the beginning that this is no ordinary bank robbery, and you, the viewer, are left to wade through the myriad of clues and flashbacks (and flash-forwards) to figure out what exactly is going on.

I really enjoyed the style of this movie. Jodie Foster makes up for "Flightplan" with a great performance as the person the people with power go to when in a jam. The acting is great, and Spike Lee makes a great turn as a director of an action/thriller. Plus, it's always great to see Clive Owen on screen. I can't wait to see him in the Sin City sequel.

When I left the theater, my first thought was that the movie went on a little too long, and could have been edited down. But the more I thought about the film over the weekend, the more I liked it. There are some truly wonderful small roles acted by some really gifted unknown actors and actresses - I expect to see many of them go on to bigger and better things. The supporting cast is excellent.

This movie isn't for everyone, and I suspect that many of you will agree that it drags a little. But you should at least put it on your list of movies to rent.

Doom

Doom, the movie, is based upon the wildly popular Doom video game - one of the first games of its kind to feature 1st person bloody death and mayhem. By the way, both the computer games Doom and Doom II kick ass, and although I haven't yet played Doom 3, I'm sure that kicks ass too.

The plot: Some really bad shit happens at a research facility on Mars. The marines are sent in a la "Aliens". Sarge (played by The Rock) leads a group of so-called "elite" soldiers. If these bozos are the future of our "elite soldiers," we're in deep trouble. They suck.

Doom is a sub-average scifi horror movie. The scares are minimal, the horror negligible, and the action typical. There is, however, one moment in the film where, for about 4 minutes, all the action is in the 1st person, just like the game. It's a very effective twist, although after about 3 minutes and 30 seconds I started to feel a little motion sick. And I don't get motion sick.

Doom is what it is: A forgettable escape. You watch it, are mildly entertained, and then forget all about it when it's over.

I still liked it better than Wedding Crashers. (See below.)

Wedding Crashers

Well, everyone I know who saw this movie has raved about it. I've heard that it was hilarious - just as good as The 40-Year-Old Virgin - great, raunchy fun.

They were wrong. It wasn't hilarious. It's not even CLOSE to the fantastic The 40-Year-Old Virgin. And it was neither great nor raunchy. Nor fun.

What I found when I rented Wedding Crashers was an average romantic comedy trying to be labeled a bawdy, American Pie-type movie. As far as I'm concerned, the trailers for Wedding Crashers are false advertisement.

I was very disappointed in this movie. Frankly, I found it lame. Right down to the stereotypical scene where a man runs into a church to stop the wedding because he loves the bride. Stupid. Trite. The few great funny moments were drowned out in a sea of stupid romance.

Rent it if you want. I don't recommend it.

The Hills Have Eyes (2006)

The Hills Have Eyes (hereinafter "THHE") is a remake of Wes Craven's 1977 film of the same name. Wes directed and wrote the original, and has now been promoted to Producer of THHE.

The premise: An extended family (Mom; Dad; their teenage son and daughter; their married daughter; her husband, their baby; and 2 German shepherds (named in both versions Beauty & Beast)) is driving to California and decides to take the long way to see America. Their SUV and Streamline Trailer crash in the middle of the desert. There's no cell phone service. They are then beset upon by radioactive, mutated cannibals. Let the bloodbath begin.

If you saw the original, THHE follows it to a "T". The opening sequence is fantastic. After the credits, the movie takes its time, introducing the audience to is characters while they travel along. There are all the stereotypical jumps - a loud orchestral swoop, a startled scream, and a bird flies through the window. "Whew. Just a bird." But they are all used to decent effect.

Once the violence starts, however, it doesn't let up. This is a very gory, disturbing movie. Very gory. Lots of body parts. Cannibalism. Rape. Burnings. Explosions. Dismemberments. An axe is used frequently. And lots, and lots, and lots, of blood. If gore ain't your thing, don't see this. I, however, like my horror gory, so I thought it was pretty cool.

One of my friends with whom I saw this was disappointed, because, among other reasons, he was hoping for a little more social commentary, along the lines of Land of the Dead. The social commentary IS there in THHE, but there isn't much, and what is there is literally stabbed into the skull with a brutal, strong vengeance. See the movie, and you will understand that my use of the word "literally" is correct.

So, where does this review leave me? I don't know. I can say that I really enjoyed this movie. I can also say that this movie isn't great - hell, it may not even be good. But I liked it. So, I guess I'll say that if you enjoy graphic, gory horror movies, then this movie may be for you. Personally, I can't wait for the unrated DVD!

The Unit - TV series on CBS

Well, it's not a movie, but I believe it worthy of a recommendation.

See, I love my TV. And SO often series that I really enjoy get cancelled immediately. Firefly, Wonderfalls, Love Monkey, Jake In Progress. All gone. So I'm taking it upon myself to try to get people to give a new show a try...

Last night, I saw the series premiere of a new show on CBS called "The Unit." TV Guide describes it as follows:

A covert team of U.S. Special Forces operatives undertake missions around the world while their wives attempt to carry on a normal life back at home, living on a military base and keeping their husbands' secrets.

While that description is accurate, it makes a thoroughly compelling series sound like a bad Chuck Norris movie. Judging solely on the premiere episode, The Unit is an awesome show, with fantastic potential. It could very well become my favorite series currently on the air. I suppose I should've expected nothing less of a series created by David Mamet!

It stars Dennis Haysbert (President Palmer from "24") Scott Foley (some guy from "Felicity") and Robert Patrick ("Terminator 2" and Jumped-The-Shark X-Files). The actresses playing the wives are all relatively unknown - at least to me. I was surprised at how much I liked the wives' backstories.

The Unit is a group outside of every other military branch. It is completely autonomous. The action was great. The missions were difficult, but not "Mission: Impossible" difficult. And the drama between the wives, including the wife of the newest Unit member, is excellent. Foley is the newest member, and his wife and their young daughter had no idea what they were getting into. The wife insists that, under the Army regs, they are allowed to live off base. Haysbert's wife gently pats the young woman on the shoulder and says, "You're not in the Army. You're in the Unit."

Give the show a chance. It's very, very good.