A wonderfully stylish but ultimately unfulfilling mystery that hints at themes of sexual manipulation, Hitchcockian obsession, human nature and self-reflexive storytelling without ever committing itself to follow any of those lines very thoroughly. Paul Verhoeven has never left me completely satisfied with anything that he’s made, likely due to his embrace of genre artifice at the expense of genre deconstruction. His subversion is more on the surface –- an embracing of highly sexualized or violent subject matter and depiction, while avoiding the conceptual apparatus of commenting on those things through his cinematic depiction. His films are made up of some wonderful moments and pieces, but are generally unfulfilling as a whole.
Basic Instinct features a frightening Sharon Stone performance and one amazing scene that demonstrates Verohoeven’s power as a manipulator, provocateur, stylist and storyteller: the infamous leg-crossing scene. In that one scene Verohoeven has built a complex environment of sexism, objectification, sexual tension/frustration, rage, resentment, institutional manipulation, and narrative suspense that is unrivaled in everything else he has done. The power shifts, the playful sensuality of Stone, the disarming move that gains her control of the whole room. But, the narrative Joe Eszterhas and Verhoeven have woven around that essential scene is one of convolution, shallow thrills and easily spotted misdirection. Also features one of the best film scores of the 1990’s.
Bakshi wants so much to present an adult alternative to Disney that he forgets that simply subverting Disney without putting anything of substance in its place is a recipe in futility. An utter mess of tone and content made only slightly watchable by Gabriel Byrne.
Daniel Day-Lewis is fine, the score is superb and there is a nice incorporation of Hudson River school-esque locations but overall there's not much to say about this solid but unspectacular film.
Spielberg still has the ability to create a few notable sequences (the raptors in the field and the glass window cracking over the cliff), but overall I have no idea what this movie is thinking. Idiotic characters making bad decisions, a mishmash of tones and elements with a little corporate domination thrown in for good measure and the total loss of narrative stakes once they leave the island for the mainland. Very disappointing considering there are dinosaurs, millions of dollars with Goldblum, Moore and Speilberg.
A quiet, nearly poetic misdirection that feels so much like a Miami summer night the fact that it eventually remembers to be an explosive actioner by the end nearly comes as a surprise. James Woods is in manic form, with merciless verbal abuse showered on every extra or day player in his path. Stallone takes himself seriously enough to give the film a strange contemplative air but Sharon Stone never quite finds her footing as a woman in distress/independent woman/femme fatale/red herring/serious love interest. The narrative twists left her character pretty flat by the end, despite some really wonderful moments early on. Overall, The Specialist is too interesting to dismiss completely but not satisfying enough to praise as a unified film.
An awkward yet highly entertaining farce about the paradoxes of globalization and corporate fascism, wrapped in the superficial trappings of an adventure movie based on a martial arts video-game. Raul Julia leaves this world with a bang, having the time of his life as General M. Bison, while Van Damme struggles with language (nevermind an American accent).
Hey Oliver Stone: put down that metaphor before you hurt somebody. Captivating at first before collapsing under its own weight.
