"Everybody that I am close to dies!" Stone cries out about halfway through the film. Do they ever. Her fabulously wealthy parents have long since been blown to smithereens in a boat explosion; Stone's male lover, a former rock star, catches it in the neck with an ice pick during a moment of rapture; and her female lover is begging for catastrophe. Moreover, protesting her innocence all the while, Stone has been writing lurid novels based on these tragedies—usually before the ghastly facts. Enter Douglas where he began a couple of decades back, on The Streets of San Francisco, as the Bay Area's most handsome—and now most disaster-prone—detective, who sets off on the track of a killer even as the killer stalks him.
Nothing quite tracks in Basic Instinct, a film that is every bit as exhilarating, exhausting and seductively repellent as advance notices would lead you to believe. Aptly titled, this is a visceral movie, all supple flesh and slickly barbaric fantasy, leaving the audience with a sensation more akin to a communal hormone injection than a common visual experience. Director Paul (Total Recall) Verhoeven has such fun conjuring up old film noir tricks (dirty secrets, false endings) that he has no time left to attend to plot; the characters just pause now and again to commit brutally erotic or erotically brutal acts upon one another.
Stone makes a captivating California witch who ranges exquisitely from tragic temptress to (possibly) manipulative murderess. Stone's slithery blond allure is nicely balanced by her starchy, dark-haired counterpart, screen newcomer Jeanne Tripplehorn as a police psychologist who, given the self-destructive desperation of her own loves, surely needs some time on the couch herself. Douglas is clearly destined to look and sound more like his father, Kirk, with each passing year. He hasn't quite reached his dad's level of anguished intensity yet. Maybe the difference is that Kirk was a ragman's son and Michael is not. Still, he's a powerful presence and almost persuasive enough to make you believe that a shrewd cop pursuing a woman suspected of ice-picking her lover in bed would allow said suspect, however beguiling she might be, to lash him to a bedpost with her scarf.
Gay activists around the country have already launched a crusade against Basic Instinct, arguing that the film is homophobic because it portrays lesbians and bisexuals as psychopathic killers. Their protest gives the film credit for a seriousness it doesn't deserve and probably assures its megabox office success in the bargain. Whatever merit the activists' claims may have, though, it somehow seems redundant to hate a movie wherein the principals revel so wantonly in self-loathing. (R)
Woody Allen, Madonna, Mia Farrow, John Malkovich
Woody Allen's homage to German Expressionist cinema bears an unfortunate resemblance to Steven Soderbergh's Kafka. Beautifully shot in black and white like the Soderbergh movie, the film also centers on a haunted, alienated clerk (Allen). This clerk is trying both to find the man responsible for a series of gruesome killings in an unspecified European town in the early 1920s and to come to terms with the larger, inimical—let's say anti-Semitic, totalitarian—forces referred to as "they."
In the end Shadows and Fog has the dense feel of a grad student's film project. Allen, a bespectacled Milquetoast who "can't make the leap of faith necessary to believe in my own existence," is roused from his bed by vigilantes who want his help in nabbing a strangles though what Allen is supposed to do is never made clear.
During one surrealistic night of wandering, Allen attempts to make sense of himself and of people who jot his name in notebooks, murmur about incidents of well-poisonings, sniff him suspiciously, ask such questions as "Are you for us or against us?" and scorn his stuttered responses, such as, "I don't have enough facts." During his vigil, he meets and takes up with Farrow, a circus sword-swallower whose clown boyfriend, Malkovich, has forsaken her for aerial artist Madonna.
Shadows and Fog, which contains elements from other, better Allen movies—the prostitutes from The Purple Rose of Cairo, the magician from his segment of New York Stories—is not without its trenchant moments, notably a client's disclaimer to a hooker: "I never paid for sex in my life." "You just think you haven't," she retorts. But against the stark monochromatic canvas Allen has fashioned here, such lines seem out of place, like outtakes from another movie. As is often the case with Allen's "serious" work—e.g., Interiors and September—those who dislike the obvious, pretentious Shadows and Fog will figure they don't understand it. Yes, they do. Those who find Shadows and Fog torpid and stuffy may also think it's their fault. No, it isn't. (PG-13)
Joe Pesci, Ralph Macchio
As comedies go, My Cousin Vinny is nothing special, but it has a nice, cartoony vitality, thanks to efficient direction by Jonathan Lynn (he also directed the dippy Nuns on the Run), a swift, uncluttered script by Dale Launer (Ruthless People) and a cast headed by Pesci (Home Alone). Pesci plays the title character, a Brooklyn lawyer who has been practicing law for only six weeks (having failed the bar exam five times in 10 years) and is now called upon to defend his first clients. His college-bound cousin, Ralph "Teen for Life" Macchio, and his roommate, Mitchell (Reversal of Fortune) Whitfield, have been wrongly accused of shooting the clerk at the local Sac-O-Suds convenience store in Wahzoo City, Ala.
Sporting a jet-black pompadour that makes him look like a Cornish hen doing an Elvis impersonation, Pesci occasionally comes close to playing cute, but he has aggressive, sharply limed fun with the trial scenes. (A high point is when, speaking high Brooklynese, he spits out the phrase "grits al dente.") As his girlfriend, Marisa Tomei—long of leg, high of hair, nasal of delivery—has a Betty Boop charm, and reliable Fred Gwynne. looming and scowling as the presiding judge, evokes images of a dimpled little Justice Souter sent through The Fly's gene transporter.
The real acting turn, however, is by Austin Pendleton, a Broadway favorite. Though his public defender character is saddled with a stutter, Pendleton is charming, anxious, preening, shy, silly, sad—in sum, lovably muddled, closer in spirit to Chekhov's Uncle Vanya than Cousin Vinny. (R)
- Contributors:
- Mark Goodman,
- Joanne Kaufman,
- Tom Gliatto.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
