Karma
Heart Attack
'Basic Instinct 2': Stoned Again
By Kurt Loder
Sharon Stone keeps the body count mounting in a long-delayed sequel.
Plus: The fantastic world of Daniel Johnston, and film noir goes to high school in 'Brick.' David Morrissey and Sharon Stone in "Basic Instinct 2" (Jaap Buitendijk) This movie rocks. It does so by boldly embracing the preposterousness at the core of its story right away, and then moving on to more important things like ultra-nasty sex, hyper-lurid dialogue and a species of over-the-top set design that hasn't been attempted with this much brio since the early Bond films, or maybe the gargantu-westerns of Sergio Leone. Everything in the movie is too much — and much more, too. Which is why, as I say, it rocks.
Sharon Stone is back as the murderously twisted erotic novelist Catherine Tramell — the role that made her a star in the original "Basic Instinct," back in 1992. This picture is ostensibly a "sequel" to that one, but there's no reason you need to have seen that one to be able to get down with this one. It stands — or sprawls lewdly — on its own.
The film takes off with a phenomenal rush. We see a sleek sports car tearing wildly through a London tunnel. Inside, at the wheel, is Catherine Tramell. In the seat beside her there lolls a big, good-looking black man, clearly a little out of it. Catherine is sucking on his fingers and, with her free hand, doing something else down below the steering wheel. The sequence builds to an orgasmic release as the car comes rocketing out of the tunnel and off a bridge and into the Thames, where it slowly begins to sink. Back with the two passengers again, we see water pouring in through every opening. As Catherine's companion, obviously immobilized, stares at her helplessly, we see her lower the window and maneuver her way out of the vehicle as more water comes gushing in. She watches as the car sinks like a stone toward the riverbed below, and then she slowly swims away.
At Scotland Yard the next day, Detective Superintendent Roy Washburn (David Thewlis) is very suspicious. The cops have found syringes in the recovered car containing a curare derivative that's known to paralyze the lungs. Catherine is unconcerned — she knows nothing about any syringes. In fact, she has a slick answer for every question. Washburn calls in his friend, Dr. Michael Glass (David Morrissey), a celebrated psychiatrist, to have a look at this cold-blooded specimen. Before Glass can even get started, though, Catherine begins running a speculative eye over him. "You look a little divorced," she purrs.
Glass is no match for Catherine, naturally. But he does deliver an analysis: "She vacillates between a feeling of Godlike omnipotence and a feeling that she doesn't exist," he says. She has "a risk addiction," and "I suspect the only thing that would stop her ... would be her own death."
He certainly has that right. Catherine likes to do first-hand research for all the sex bouts and brutal murders that fill her novels. As she tells Glass teasingly, she savors the freshness of a crime scene, when "the body's still warm, the watch is still ticking." If this were a run-of-the-mill ludicrous movie, the rest of it might consist only of bloody set pieces in which Catherine whacked every other main character, one by one. But the script, by the husband-and-wife writing team of Leora Barish and Henry Bean, is densely, head-hurtingly complex. So while it might seem that Catherine is being stalked by Glass and Washburne, and maybe a celebrity journalist named Adam Towers (Hugh Dancey), it is in fact she who is the stalker, carefully herding each of them into a web of suspicion and dark secrets from which they may never emerge. Along the way, she seduces both men and women (including Glass' girlfriend: "Denise was good in bed," she tells him), rips out somebody's throat, and — in perhaps the movie's most gloriously gaudy scene — pays a thug to attack her, drag her into an S&M bordello and have rough, sweaty sex with her. (Glass gets sweaty himself looking down on this through a skylight — until he realizes that Catherine is watching him back.)
The English director, Michael Caton-Jones, has set this story amid the up-market, go-go environs of the new London, a city the casual tourist might not often see. And so Glass's office — a vast expanse of expensive square-footage with two perfect leather armchairs amusingly situated at its center, like a pair of lost sheep, for doctor-patient consultations — is located in the pickle-shaped and delightfully phallic "Gherkin Tower," in the city's financial district. And Catherine's apartment — a huge, luxe cave of a place, with gleaming black stone floors and smooth gray walls hung here and there with paintings of a rather disturbing sort — seems a world away from the cramped, stuffy rooms with which most of us might associate the average English abode.
The Hungarian cinematographer Gyula Pados ("Control") captures this unfamiliar urban terrain in rich, beautifully muted colors, and with an inventive eye for unusual action perspectives; and John Murphy's somber score bathes the proceedings with thick, luscious strings. The movie is extraordinarily well-made, and the main players are all top-drawer British character actors. But it's Sharon Stone, an even lustier sex shark at age 47 than she was 14 years ago, who dominates the film with flamboyant abandon. Actually, she's completely shameless in what appears to be a headlong yen for a late-in-the-day career boost. Nevertheless, toward the end, when Glass realizes how evilly Catherine has manipulated him, and she says, "Don't take it so hard, even Oedipus didn't see his mother coming" — well, there's no denying how good she still is at being really, really bad.
By Kurt Loder
Sharon Stone keeps the body count mounting in a long-delayed sequel.
Plus: The fantastic world of Daniel Johnston, and film noir goes to high school in 'Brick.' David Morrissey and Sharon Stone in "Basic Instinct 2" (Jaap Buitendijk) This movie rocks. It does so by boldly embracing the preposterousness at the core of its story right away, and then moving on to more important things like ultra-nasty sex, hyper-lurid dialogue and a species of over-the-top set design that hasn't been attempted with this much brio since the early Bond films, or maybe the gargantu-westerns of Sergio Leone. Everything in the movie is too much — and much more, too. Which is why, as I say, it rocks.
Sharon Stone is back as the murderously twisted erotic novelist Catherine Tramell — the role that made her a star in the original "Basic Instinct," back in 1992. This picture is ostensibly a "sequel" to that one, but there's no reason you need to have seen that one to be able to get down with this one. It stands — or sprawls lewdly — on its own.
The film takes off with a phenomenal rush. We see a sleek sports car tearing wildly through a London tunnel. Inside, at the wheel, is Catherine Tramell. In the seat beside her there lolls a big, good-looking black man, clearly a little out of it. Catherine is sucking on his fingers and, with her free hand, doing something else down below the steering wheel. The sequence builds to an orgasmic release as the car comes rocketing out of the tunnel and off a bridge and into the Thames, where it slowly begins to sink. Back with the two passengers again, we see water pouring in through every opening. As Catherine's companion, obviously immobilized, stares at her helplessly, we see her lower the window and maneuver her way out of the vehicle as more water comes gushing in. She watches as the car sinks like a stone toward the riverbed below, and then she slowly swims away.
At Scotland Yard the next day, Detective Superintendent Roy Washburn (David Thewlis) is very suspicious. The cops have found syringes in the recovered car containing a curare derivative that's known to paralyze the lungs. Catherine is unconcerned — she knows nothing about any syringes. In fact, she has a slick answer for every question. Washburn calls in his friend, Dr. Michael Glass (David Morrissey), a celebrated psychiatrist, to have a look at this cold-blooded specimen. Before Glass can even get started, though, Catherine begins running a speculative eye over him. "You look a little divorced," she purrs.
Glass is no match for Catherine, naturally. But he does deliver an analysis: "She vacillates between a feeling of Godlike omnipotence and a feeling that she doesn't exist," he says. She has "a risk addiction," and "I suspect the only thing that would stop her ... would be her own death."
He certainly has that right. Catherine likes to do first-hand research for all the sex bouts and brutal murders that fill her novels. As she tells Glass teasingly, she savors the freshness of a crime scene, when "the body's still warm, the watch is still ticking." If this were a run-of-the-mill ludicrous movie, the rest of it might consist only of bloody set pieces in which Catherine whacked every other main character, one by one. But the script, by the husband-and-wife writing team of Leora Barish and Henry Bean, is densely, head-hurtingly complex. So while it might seem that Catherine is being stalked by Glass and Washburne, and maybe a celebrity journalist named Adam Towers (Hugh Dancey), it is in fact she who is the stalker, carefully herding each of them into a web of suspicion and dark secrets from which they may never emerge. Along the way, she seduces both men and women (including Glass' girlfriend: "Denise was good in bed," she tells him), rips out somebody's throat, and — in perhaps the movie's most gloriously gaudy scene — pays a thug to attack her, drag her into an S&M bordello and have rough, sweaty sex with her. (Glass gets sweaty himself looking down on this through a skylight — until he realizes that Catherine is watching him back.)
The English director, Michael Caton-Jones, has set this story amid the up-market, go-go environs of the new London, a city the casual tourist might not often see. And so Glass's office — a vast expanse of expensive square-footage with two perfect leather armchairs amusingly situated at its center, like a pair of lost sheep, for doctor-patient consultations — is located in the pickle-shaped and delightfully phallic "Gherkin Tower," in the city's financial district. And Catherine's apartment — a huge, luxe cave of a place, with gleaming black stone floors and smooth gray walls hung here and there with paintings of a rather disturbing sort — seems a world away from the cramped, stuffy rooms with which most of us might associate the average English abode.
The Hungarian cinematographer Gyula Pados ("Control") captures this unfamiliar urban terrain in rich, beautifully muted colors, and with an inventive eye for unusual action perspectives; and John Murphy's somber score bathes the proceedings with thick, luscious strings. The movie is extraordinarily well-made, and the main players are all top-drawer British character actors. But it's Sharon Stone, an even lustier sex shark at age 47 than she was 14 years ago, who dominates the film with flamboyant abandon. Actually, she's completely shameless in what appears to be a headlong yen for a late-in-the-day career boost. Nevertheless, toward the end, when Glass realizes how evilly Catherine has manipulated him, and she says, "Don't take it so hard, even Oedipus didn't see his mother coming" — well, there's no denying how good she still is at being really, really bad.
