Chic and Dumb and Down and Dirty

Basic Instinct is a 1992 movie directed by Paul Verhoeven, starring Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone, that is simultaneously abysmal and fascinatingly stylish.  You get a stomach ache watching it, but in a good way somehow.  Written by the great Joe Esterhas (who would later collaborate with Verhoeven again on the watchable and yet completely awful Showgirls), Basic Instinct is foulmouthed and mean-spirited and just plain vulgar.  But it has a sort of piss-elegance that makes you go along, and a ham-handed, bold, freaky intensity.  You just can't take your eyes off the thing as it spirals out of control.  I remember back in the day, gay people were picketing this, angry about the depiction of gays and bisexuals in it.  Totally a good thing to do of course because the movie does do a great job demeaning lesbians and bisexuals, but it is an equal-opportunity ass-hole of a movie:  no one in it is represented as moral or even maybe really human, especially the center of attention, Mr. Michael Douglas, who plays his cop role with tense jaw muscles and a squint and a tight fist, so much like a drag version of Clint Eastwood you think he could possibly be in on the joke. 

This movie is a cesspool, where everyone is telling everyone else to fuck off all the time.  And "sexual desire" has a sort of animal-porn grotesquery to it.  When people have sex in this movie they turn into over-animated porn-stars, as if their "sexual desire" has made them into idiot robots who have consumed so much pornography they are doomed to repeat it endlessly.  There's no true moment of respite from the sewage, but the sewage is so polished and glossy and intended you take in these moments like "disturbing" paintings in a museum.  Each scene you just walk past, curious about the extreme stupidity and violence and crassness, and then you forget until you're violated by the next sex scene or ice-pick murder or whatever.  But then that blurs into everything else, until the movie finally is over and you feel kind of overextended and glum.  A little perturbed, but somehow satisfied.

You got to love Sharon Stone in this thing though.  She's channeling Madonna circa 1991, but also there's a deep need inside her eyes, like she knows this is her ticket out of being second-rate, and yet somehow that's poignant because the movie is totally second-rate, elevated only by her desire for it not to be, and the Eurotrash greatness of Vorhoeven.  He shows finesse and innocence somehow in the way he sets up each debauchery, until you're mesmerized not by his nerve but by his creepy joy.  And the music by Jerry Goldsmith possibly is the most strident and gorgeous soundtrack ever.  Every goddamn move these characters make, from stepping out of a car to stabbing someone in the chest, is musicalized to the point of camp.  Horns and strings and drums and the kitchen-sink all being orchestrated to create a sort of hyperbolic drama that isn't drama.  It's just loud.  With a lot of people saying fuck all the time.

1992 may have been the apotheosis of this kind of movie.  Before people could easily access the internet and its sea of porn, before CGI really got a foothold and whole city-blocks could be demolished in that plastic-glare of sea-monsters and robots having their way, Basic Instinct was the highend of trashy adult escapism:  chic and dumb and down and dirty.  What's better than that?  I kind of miss it.  I really do.

What Else Can I Say? Everyone Is Gay

Behind the Candelabra is a kitschy/kinky title for a movie that doesn't really tolerate kitschiness (it exonerates it), and while the Steven-Soderbergh-directed opus does dance lovingly around kink it is more a homage to the mundane pleasures nestled within an opulent cluster of feelings and possessions than a salacious bio-pic.  It's a Faberge-egg tribute, with a plot driven by a tried and true Lifetime movie arc:  rich old man takes on a young lover and then gets tired of that lover and moves on and then on his deathbed confesses his love.  Michael Douglas portrays Lee with an offhand sweetness and assurance that does not mock the great showman's mannerisms but somehow ennobles them, giving us a Liberace that lives and breathes and can say shit like "I just love to shop," without assigning him to a one-note stereotype.  It is very clear in this movie that Liberace assigned himself to whatever type he felt comfortable being, and this type comes off as a piss-elegant meditation on luxury and perseverance:  he was the hardest working queen in show business.  That "hardest-working" part seems to have fueled his appetites for a lot of things, including sex and palaces and hot-tubs and diamond rings.  Matt Damon plays Scott Thorson, Lee's conquest at the beginning of the flick, with a sort of understated angst and joy that seems to have been borrowed from Mark Wahlberg's performance in Boogie Nights; in fact his Thorson is a tribute to that movie's deadpan kindness and innocent depravity.  Damon ages from 18 to late 20s in the movie, and that process is so believable it's kind of magical, transporting you past the transgression inherent in Liberace's seduction of Thorson and more into the realm of how relationships work.  All the way through Candelabra you're hypnotized by a sort of longing to go back to those days when Liberace could seduce both old ladies in Las Vegas auditoriums and young men with long blonde hair and sweey glassy eyes, without anybody wanting to notice or care.  Sonderbergh has built a visual villanelle of a movie, overly mannered and lyrical, and also completely free of cynicism.  By the end, when Thorson envisions Lee's funeral as his final and gorgeous curtain call, you realize how much judgment people apply to pop-culture and how hard it truly is to actually see things as they really are.  

 



Play The Game

(For Andrew)

Sometimes the best way to watch a movie is when you're drunk and tired at about 9 pm, with a couple of really close friends who are that way too, and the movie turns into a collage of laughter and whispers and imagery you remember but the meaning gets dislocated, and that movie becomes an installation art project in your head.  David Fincher's The Game, starring Michael Douglas and Sean Penn, is one of those movies.  I've only seen it that one time because I don't want to spoil that initial silly serendipidy that got into my brain.  All I remember is being dumb and ripped and enveloped:  Michael Douglas in an Armani suit, lit in gun-metal-blue light, with a bleeding forehead.  A frantic clown-doll haunting every other scene.  A huge mansion.  Shiny floors.  A taxi cab and a car chasing each other.  Wine glasses in a fancy restaurant.  Scenes with a lot of talk about nothing, plot details spilling out of chandeliers and a sexy ice-blonde waitress climbing out of her apartment in high heels.  A nothingness is at the center of it all:  meaninglessness that gives you a sense of how important meaninglessness is.  Beautiful, foreboding music like a music-box lullaby played with the intensity of Psycho violins.  And the three of us wrapped up in, and not understanding, all that pomp and style. Laughing and being stupid.

It's a beautiful way to be.