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timdraft #4: Movie Category Draft (2 Viewers)

When I drafted Son of Rambow, I couldn't find the specific scene online that I had in mind. Figured if I was judging I could fudge it. Just give me a low score for drafting something without a link.

 
Shoot as long as people are suggesting their scores, I'll take a 25 spot.

Speaking of scores, we need a DougB scoring update leading into these last few categories.

 
[SIZE=10.5pt]Judging Criteria[/SIZE]
[SIZE=12pt]Adultery/Sex movies[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt]This is pretty much 2 categories thrown together by the looks of it, so let me help.
If you feature on the Adultery angle, you had better make it real good as the sex movies are far deeper and more likely to score high.
A good adultery movie will need to primarily focus on the adultery angle and be a major revelation to the jilted/affected partner with sufficient affecting consequences. If both parties partake in adultery then it must have suitable revelatory purpose to the film.
If the adultery is undiscovered or a minor incident in the movie, then expect to score real low.

Now the far more interesting part of this topic, Sex.
The movie must be primarily about sex or feature dang good sex scenes. The sex must be consensual (no squealing like a pig).
I'm not concerned if it's man/man, man/woman, woman/woman, multiple partners or animal/plant/mineral/doll involvement. If its the latter, please expect a low score unless it is consensual, relevant or likely to not make me throw up.

Movies that are Hollywood blockbusters featuring eg Tom Cruise or John Travolta in an attempt to prove their 100% straight sexuality by having a clumsily filmed, erotic as a kick to the balls sex scene with an eventual lesbian, will score really low. Especially if the movie is essentially about Fighter jets or the like.

If the movie features real sex, great, make sure it's not a porno. There are some noted Italian/European directors who will do a real movie, with real sex, but it's not a porno if you follow. These will be treated the same as a normal sex movie not showing penatrative sex. A porno will score real low unless there is a real story that is about sex, but not about visiting tradesman getting paid in other ways hehe.

If you pick a movie about 2 80 year olds rediscovering their sexuality expect a low score. I have to be moved, and not to a sick bucket.

Sex must be the driving theme in the movie, but other minor themes can be explored.
Any questions, jism here.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt]As an addendum, if the movie features a foot fetish scene there will be bonus points. [/SIZE] :bag:

 
Some great European pictures were ignored, which is a shame. I’m not going to do a big list, but the Europeans have an expert way of making a real movie and showing sex that looks real, is sensuous and sometimes even is real. The real sex in non porn movies has really taken off in the last 10 years and while some of these movies suck balls, others are really effective as movies and show incredible sex scenes. I personally like movies like Q/Desire and Choses Secretes from France and films such as Guilty of Romance and In the Realm of the Senses from Japan that are real movies, yet explicit. Hollywood generally does a terrible job of sex movies and these scenes are forced, look utterly impossible to replicate or are just there to titillate.

I thought the representation of movies here was below what I would have expected and I probably have a list of 50 movies that all would have scored higher than the one that ranked 5th here. An example of this is Porkys. Not one of historys greatest cinematic moments, but it would have finished in the top 8 here. Yes a mean spirited, explicit and raunchy for its time movie would have done well. Some movies didn’t fit the category at all, others would have been better elsewhere. The Sex/Adultery angle was difficult as they really are different genres and the Adultery ones probably suffered in the rankings as they tend to be more dramatic pieces. I did warn anyone taking an adultery movie that it needed to be top notch to even compete and I was dismayed at the amount of movies that took on the adultery angle. I warned you.

 
1 Point

Body of Evidence (For Hooter 311) (Rotten Tomatoes score of 6%)

Is movie about Adultery/Sex?

It’s about Sex and Adultery, so it ticks that box.

If about Adultery, is there a big development?

Willem Defoe cheats on his wife with Madonna, so yes it definitely ticks that box

If about Sex, is it titillating or realistic?

This is where it falls down. The sex is just laughable, titillating and stupid. Sex Games, Candles, tying people up. This is how to give a movie no credibility. Madonna is so hot that she can tempt anyone into bed and ruins all the men in the movie. That is frankly ridiculous.

Foot fetish? – Ah who cares. This movie blows

Quality of Movie – Rotten Tomatoes gives this a 6% and I’m curious as to why the movie studio thought to employ the 2 critics who gave it positive reviews. A sexy courtroom drama with the cast assembled (except Madonna) looks like a winner, but incompetent direction, awful acting and a terrible screenplay makes this one of the worst movies you could ever be forced to endure

Ebert explains why this is terrible this better than me

[SIZE=10.5pt] I've seen comedies with fewer laughs than "Body of Evidence," and this is a movie that isn't even trying to be funny. It's an excruciatingly incompetent entry in the "[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Basic Instinct[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]" genre, filled with lines that only a screenwriter could love, and burdened with a plot that confuses mystery with confusion.[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]The movie stars Madonna, who after "Bloodhounds of Broadway," "Shanghai Surprise" and "Who's That Girl?" now nails down her title as the queen of movies that were bad ideas right from the beginning. She plays a kinky dominatrix involved in ingenious and hazardous sex with an aging millionaire who has a bad heart. He dies after an evening's entertainment, and Madonna is charged with his murder.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]But she's innocent, she protests - and indeed there is another obvious suspect, the millionaire's private secretary ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Anne Archer[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]), who is also his spurned former lover. [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Willem Dafoe[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt] plays the defense attorney who firmly believes Madonna is innocent, or in any event very sexy, and [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Joe Mantegna[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt] has the Hamilton Burger role.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]The movie takes place in Portland, Ore. - a city small enough, Madonna volunteers from the witness stand, that she once dated a guy who dated a girl who dated Mantegna. That's a typical exchange in the courtroom scenes, which involve Dafoe being reprimanded by the judge for just [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]about every breath he draws.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]I don't know whether to blame the director, the cinematographer or the editor for some of the inept choices in this movie. One example: Dafoe is addressing his opening remarks to the jury, and the camera pulls focus so that we see an attractive young female juror sitting in the front row. She gives Dafoe an unmistakable look. We in the audience are alerted that the movie is establishing her for a later payoff. We're wrong. She's just an extra trying to grab some extra business.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]But enough on the technical side. What about the story here? It has to be seen to be believed - something I do not advise. There's all kinds of murky plot debris involving nasal spray with cocaine in it, ghosts from the past, bizarre sex, and lots of nudity. We are asked to believe that Madonna lives on a luxury houseboat, where she parades in front of the windows naked at all hours, yet somehow doesn't attract a crowd, not even of appreciative lobstermen. What does she dedicate her life to? She answers that question in one of the movie's funniest lines, which unfortunately cannot be printed here.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]When it comes to eroticism, "Body of Evidence" is like Madonna's new book. It knows the words but not the music. All of the paraphernalia and lore of S & M sexuality are here, but none of the passion or even enjoyment. We are told by one witness that sex with the Madonna character is intense. It turns out later he's not a very reliable witness.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt][/SIZE]
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Other Comments – This is a very early film role from Julianne Moore and she is terrible here. The only comparison I can make is with another lovely redhead in Amy Adams who was simply atrocious in Cruel Intentions 2. Thankfully both have done much better work after their nadirs.

Anne Archer is miscast in a key role and Joe Mantegna plays a Lawyer rather than his usual Mafiosa.

Jurgen Prochnow appears and must have needed the money badly as it is a thankless and terribly written role he walks into. Then again he appears in Judge Dredd soon after this. He must have been drugged at the time.

Worst however is Willem Defoe who sleepwalks through this and deserves his Golden Raspberry nomination. Normally he is a gifted and engaging actor. Here you just want to slap him

Madonna. That is all I need to say.

Rating – If I could draw a limp **** I would

8=D

Yes seeing boobs, even Madonna’s give this a few points, but they are the only merit to this atrocious piece of shit.

Overall score of 9%

 
2 Points

Dr. Zhivago (For Kumerica) (Rotten Tomatoes score of 85%)

Is movie about Adultery/Sex?

This has a theme about Adultery, but you can hardly say the movie is about Adultery, it’s a love story set amongst the Russian revolution.

If about Adultery, is there a big development?

Most of the developments are not caused by the adultery itself, although some minor plot points are

If about Sex, is it titillating or realistic?

Not about sex in the slightest unless the site of Victor raping Lara turns you on.

Foot fetish?

Nope. Too friggin cold.

Quality of Movie

This is a fine movie that is easy to watch at it’s 3 ½ hour length, but totally wrong for this category. Sure Lara is attractive, but when it comes to sex/adultery movies this would be only slightly more appropriate than Mary Poppins. I’ll leave it to Ebert to review it further. Notice he doesn’t mention much about Adultery.

[SIZE=10.5pt] When David Lean's "Doctor Zhivago" was released in 1965, it was pounced upon by the critics, who found it a picture-postcard view of revolution, a love story balanced uneasily atop a painstaking reconstruction of Russia. Lean was known for his elaborate sets, his infinite patience with nature and climates, and his meticulous art direction, but for Pauline Kael, his "method is basically primitive, admired by the same sort of people who are delighted when a stage set has running water or a painted horse looks real enough to ride." Sometimes one must admit one is precisely that sort of person. I agree that the plot of "Doctor Zhivago" lumbers noisily from nowhere to nowhere. That the characters undergo inexplicable changes of heart and personality. That it is not easy to care much about Zhivago himself, in [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Omar Sharif[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]'s soulful but bewildered performance. That the life of the movie is in its corners (the wickedness of [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Rod Steiger[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]'s voluptuary, the solemn pomposity of Tom Courtenay's revolutionary). That "Lara's Theme," by [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Maurice Jarre[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt], goes on the same shelf as "Waltzing Matilda" as tunes that threaten to drive me mad.[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]And yet the stage has running water, and the horses look real enough to ride. "Doctor Zhivago," restored and revived for its 30th anniversary, is an example of superb old-style craftsmanship at the service of a soppy romantic vision, and although its portentous historical drama evaporates once you return to the fresh air, watching it can be seductive. Consider, for example, the early shot of the red star glowing above the dark tunnel opening where the workers march in and out. The shot of a child peering through a frosted pane with the claws of branches tapping against it. The cavalry charge on the Bolshevik marchers. Or the way snow crystals dissolve into flowers, and a flower dissolves into Lara's face.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Lean did nothing less than recreate Moscow and its countryside at the time of the Russian revolution, using locations in Spain and Canada (which supplied the vast landscape with the tiny train making its way across it). He accepted the challenge of setting most of the key scenes in winter, with all the attendant difficulties of photographing snow (both artificial and real). There is a moment when Zhivago and Lara enter the abandoned dacha, and the snow and frost have preceded them, turning everything into a winter fairyland. It is a scene where you simultaneously think about the skilled set decoration, and catch your breath at the beauty.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]The story is based on Boris Pasternak's novel, much praised on its publication in 1958 as a daring defiance of Russian censorship.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]So it was, but today the story, especially as it has been simplified by Lean and his screenwriter, [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Robert Bolt[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt], seems political in the same sense "[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Gone With the Wind[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]" is political, as spectacle and backdrop, without ideology.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]The specific political content of "Doctor Zhivago" is seen mostly as sideshow: Charges by the Czar's troops on demonstrating students; the caution of Alec Guinness' Soviet official; the unyielding way in which Tom Courtenay's general, once a poet, now says "history has no room for personal feelings." "Doctor Zhivago" believes that history should have a lot of room for personal feelings - that the problems of its little people do amount to more than a hill of beans - and that's perhaps why the Russian's didn't like Pasternak: He argued for the individual over the state, the heart over the mind.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]The first two hours of the 200-minute movie are the best, and the most personal. Rod Steiger gives one of the performances of his career as Victor Komarovsky, the investor and scoundrel who victimizes first a woman and then her daughter, Lara ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Julie Christie[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]). Zhivago (Omar Sharif) first meets Lara at this time; he attends at the mother's deathbed, and later looks on as she enters a wedding party and shoots at Komarovsky, gaining a vision that he will carry with him through his marriage to the loyal and steadfast Tonya ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Geraldine Chaplin[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]).[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Zhivago is cold to Komarovsky: "What happens to a girl like that when a man like you is finished with her?" The response is colder: "Interested? I give her to you - as a wedding present." This sets up Zhivago's romantic obsession, which finds its moral justification when the doctor meets Lara, now a nurse, behaving heroically on a battlefield. There is the temptation to get so swept up in their idealism that we forget (come on!) that the old doctor-and-nurse routine is a venerable building block of soap opera.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Watching the film again, I found it hard to believe that the Chaplin character could be so understanding. Later, when Komarovsky offers Lara an opportunity to save the life of herself and her child, call me a realist, but I thought she should have taken it. And the final pathetic scene, with Zhivago staggering after the woman on the Moscow street, is unforgivable. So, yes, it's soppy and manipulative and mushy. But that train looks real enough to ride.[/SIZE]
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Other Comments

This movie has detractors and a lot of that is for it’s length, but I enjoyed it. It’s just totally wrong for the category and if it weren’t for a shi[/]tty Madonna movie would have come in last place.

Rating

Can’t really draw a limp one so this will have to do. 8==D

Overall score of 52%

 
3 Points

9 1/2 Weeks (higgins) - Rotten Tomatoes score of 64%

Is movie about Adultery/Sex?

Yes. Domineering Rourke uses and abuses Basinger in all manner of ways.

If about Adultery, is there a big development?

Not really an adultery theme.

If about Sex, is it titillating or realistic?

This movie is more titillating than realistic and as you’ll see from the latter comments, realism barely comes into play at all in this movie. Anyone who has tried food will agree that the idea is always better than the execution and messy clean up.

This movie also for some reasons was seen as a credible exploration into sex. Later work from Zalman King (Two Moon Junction and Wild Orchid) and Adrian Lyne (Fatal Attraction, Indecent Proposal, Lolita etc) proved that they were just a pair of exploitation kings

Foot fetish?

Yes, there is a scene where Rourke plays with Basingers toes giving the movie a bump of a couple of spots.

Quality of Movie

If Wiki is correct:

In a preview screening of the film for 1,000 people, all but 40 walked out. Of the 40 who filled out cards, 35 said they hated it
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That is fascinating that 5 out of 1000 liked it (allegedly)

Here’s a section that perfectly sums up the movie. On the same night as the art exhibition Basinger has been preparing for months, even convincing the reluctant artist to appear, she’ll drop all that to pay a visit to see Rourke at a hotel. What kind of reality is that?

Here’s a review from Hal Erickson that gets close to my opinion

[SIZE=9pt][/SIZE]

The title refers to the duration of the relationship between self-absorbed Wall Street shark Mickey Rourke and divorced art gallery owner Kim Basinger. Kim is looking for true love, while Mickey is searching for...gosh knows what. His notions of lovemaking include blindfolds, ice cubes, chocolate syrup, and rolling around on spent peanut shells. When the alotted 9 1/2 weeks are up, Kim has finally come to realize that Rourke has been using her. We could have told her that twenty minutes into the film. One of the definitive works in the Mickey Rourke ouevre, 9 1/2 Weeks is deliciously awful, and as such will probably endure as a Camp Classic for the next hundred years. The film is available in both R-rated and unrated versions; either way, it's a hoot. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
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Other Comments - Some of this movie was utterly ridiculous. Using the Newbeats Bread and Butter while Rourke shoves food in Basingers mouth is stupid. The Rourke character is an absolute **** that no doubt women fall for every day. The fact that a body double was used for most of the explicit scenes is a major dampener, although Basinger clearly gets em out a couple of times. For all we know the body double was that of a man, like in Flashdance (also directed by Lyne)

The less said about the Basinger dressed as a man and eventual fight scene in the alley the better. It is poorly scripted, acted, executed and that awful synth soundtrack accompanying it sounds 5 years older.

The acting by some of the supporting cast is abysmal and worst of all I wouldn’t be surprised if this influenced the 50 Shades of Grey and their bags of sand books as well.

The movie was nominated for 3 Razzies, although the nomination for Basinger was harsh. The other 2 were merited (Original song and screenplay)

Rating 8===D

An overall score of 68% .

 
4 Points

The Ice Storm - Usual 21 (Rotten Tomatoes score of 83%)

Is movie about Adultery/Sex?

Not really much sex here, although there is a swinging party and lots of cheating going on.

If about Adultery, is there a big development?

More of an adultery movie and there are revelations, but not unexpected given the plotting.

If about Sex, is it titillating or realistic?

The sex, of what there is, is realistic. The teenagers are suitably clumsy, while the adults have given up and just use it to try and feel some love

Foot fetish? – Not a sausage. As it is in winter, most people have a lot of clothes on and apart from Kevin Klines bare chest we don’t see much skin at all.

Quality of Movie – I know this movie has its fans, but I’m not one of them. This is probably an excellent read, but even Ang Lee struggles to bring it life as a movie. Casting Joan Allen as the frigid and prudish wife is typecasting and Sigourney Weaver as the emotionless sexpot is bizarre. The child actors are much better. Christina Ricci is excellent as the curious young girl, while Katie Holmes is suitably lovely as Tobey Maguire’s ambitious attempt at a girlfriend. Frodo and Spiderman are excellent here as well. Maguire is charming and Elijah Wood is suitably excellent as a spaced out boy that probably has more depth and understanding into his character in the book.

Charles Taylor from Salon has an excellent review

[SIZE=13.5pt]I[/SIZE][SIZE=7.5pt]F YOU’RE A[/SIZE][SIZE=12pt] constant moviegoer, if you hang in there through all the bad movies, disappointments and blown opportunities, then sooner or later you’ve got to acknowledge the nobility of actors. I don’t think “nobility” is too strong a word to use for the combination of guts, instinct and fearlessness that today’s actors keep showing, given the quality of the writing or directing they’re often working with. There are plenty of recent performances that seem miracles of a sort. At least once every couple of months, I find myself wondering how in the world the actor ever pulled it off.[/SIZE][SIZE=12pt]You wouldn’t think it would require a miracle for actors to be good in “The Ice Storm,” since the source for [/SIZE][SIZE=12pt]Ang Lee[/SIZE][SIZE=12pt]‘s film (which opened the New York Film Festival last weekend), Rick Moody’s 1994 novel, is one of the most beautifully written and emotionally satisfying books any young American novelist has produced recently. Set in New Canaan, Conn., in the course of a freak ice storm during Thanksgiving weekend, 1973, the novel follows the coming apart of two affluent suburban families. Moody may be working territory claimed long ago by Cheever and Updike, but he writes from a younger perspective. His teenagers are caught between the safety and privilege of suburban life and its constraints, at which they’re just starting to chafe. They’re the sort of kids you can still see any weekend at any Connecticut commuter rail station making their first tentative forays into the city.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt]Their parents are experiencing the dregs of the sexual revolution as middle-class fads — desultory affairs and “key parties” where the men put their car keys in a bowl and are paired off at the end of the evening with the women who fish them out. Moody isn’t the first young writer to tackle the stifling conformity of the suburbs. When he writes, “More of same — or worse,” he’s only partly talking about the weather. But there’s no contempt in his approach. Writing each section from the point of view of one character, he extends compassion and pity to each of them. This is the closest the suburban WASP novel has ever gotten to a feeling that could be called soulful.[/SIZE]

​
​
[SIZE=12pt]But miracles are what the cast of “The Ice Storm” accomplish. It isn’t that Lee’s adaptation is a “bad” movie. Lee isn’t a bad director. He might be more interesting if he were. He’s careful, precise and bloodlessly competent. Everything about “The Ice Storm,” from the cool green titles that seem to smoke and shift (as if seen through ice) to Mychael Danna’s score of lonely, Asian-sounding wind instruments, is tasteful and distant. Moody’s controlling metaphor of the ice storm, which stands for a world that no longer offers these characters the insulating protections they’ve come to rely on, has become a reductive, clichid symbol for the distance between them. Lee can’t show two of the adolescent characters standing in a drained swimming pool and kissing without sending the camera discreetly skyward so they’re small and alone amid a carpet of dead leaves.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt]Moody was writing from the inside; Lee doesn’t get beyond displaying artifacts from a lost civilization. With its clips of Nixon press conferences, hardcover copies of “Watership Down,” toe socks and “Montego Bay” on the soundtrack, the movie does call up the early ’70s. But being an anthropologist isn’t the same thing as being a dramatist, and I’m not convinced Lee understands the period. How could he? Lee’s being Taiwanese didn’t matter in his last picture, “Sense and Sensibility,” because the early 1800s are distant to everyone, but the calamity of American life in 1973 is still fresh in the minds of anyone who lived through it. The exhausting, one-damn-thing-after-another tenor of American life, with the outrage of Watergate striking before the hangover from Vietnam wore off, was far removed from the cool, ascetic portentousness on display here. Lee destroys one of the book’s most touching episodes, a clumsy sexual encounter between two of its teenage characters (played by Christina Ricci and Elijah Wood), by having Ricci don a rubber Nixon mask. Is this the “period mastery” critics are raving about? Maybe it is to those who haven’t seen similar touches in dozens of lousy counterculture movies from the early ’70s.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt]And despite all this, despite the jokey tone of James Schamus’ screenplay, which occasionally nullifies the empathy Moody extended his characters, the cast is frequently amazing. Kevin Kline has the hardest time of it. His Benjamin, with his ascots and a rather desperate affair with his next-door neighbor, Janey (Sigourney Weaver), is the middle-aged suburbanite trying to pass as hipster. In many ways he’s a ridiculous man, and at times, Kline seems to want to give into his flair for comedy. He resists it, though, and comes up with moments of unadorned emotion (like carrying his teenage daughter Wendy, played by Ricci, home through the woods) and confused dignity (his final scene) that are like the sudden bubbling up of warm springs. Weaver’s role doesn’t provide enough for her to do, but her whiplike bearing conveys an intimidating, impatient hauteur, and her line readings have the sort of dry sharpness (to Kline, post-coital: “You’re boring me. I already have a husband.”) that make you long to see her in high comedy.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt]Joan Allen’s performances have sometimes suggested women like one of the maiden aunts Dylan Thomas described as “poised and brittle, afraid to break like faded cups and saucers.” She’s never gone further than she does as Elena, Benjamin’s wife, a woman whose dead marriage has elicited in her a mixture of sexual hunger and sexual terror. There’s both a neediness and a vindictiveness in the way Allen’s Elena chooses to take part in the key party. In their brief scenes together, Allen and Jamey Sheridan (excellent as Weaver’s discarded husband) achieve an awkward grace, the feel of two people searching for footing on terrain no longer recognizable to them.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt]Much of the weight of the movie rests on a quartet of young actors. Two of them, Tobey Maguire as Ben and Elena’s son Paul, already a few steps removed from his family at private school, and Wood — whose big eyes transmit a wounded bewilderment — as Weaver and Sheridan’s son Mikey, are merely faultless. Ricci (as Wendy) and Adam Hann-Byrd (as Mikey’s younger brother Sandy) are superb. Hann-Byrd (he was the pint-sized genius in “Little Man Tate”) is an unclassifiable young actor with a special talent for playing kids who’ve chosen to live largely inside their own heads. His Sandy has a fretful watchfulness, a hesitancy to move toward the adulthood the kids around him are grasping at. He never seems more of a little boy than when he’s cuddling in bed next to Wendy. He’s with the girl of his dreams, yet he’s off somewhere in an enchanted land of his own imagining.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt]As an actress, the 17-year-old Ricci has grown far beyond the gothic-tot she played in the “Addams Family” movies. Ricci nails the cynicism that defined adolescents during Watergate, cynicism that wasn’t jaded but raw, a reaction to unprecedented revelations about the corruption of power. And she does a good deal more. Ricci’s Wendy captures the volatile combination of aggressiveness and uncertainty in a young woman trying to come to terms with her sexuality like no performance since Emily Lloyd’s in “Wish You Were Here.” It’s a very different performance, quieter, harder and yet more vulnerable. When Ricci unflinchingly meets the eyes of an older woman who catches her shoplifting, she’s displaying the unreachability that adolescents affect, which only makes the need emanating from her that much more heartbreaking.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt]I don’t know when I’ve seen actors realize so many affecting moments in such a muddled conception. Lee’s aestheticized approach is its own kind of ice storm. Undaunted, his cast forges ahead with the conviction of people who believe they could start a bonfire at the North Pole.[/SIZE]
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Other Comments - This is probably another example of an excellent book failing to translate to the big screen. Everyone has their heart in the right place and the actors try their best, some better than others, but as an exploration of malaise in Marriage or budding childhood sexuality it doesn’t work.

Rating 8====D

An overall score of 72%.

 
5 Points

Fatal Attraction - Joffer (Rotten Tomatoes score of 80%)

Is movie about Adultery/Sex?

This is an adultery movie, with sex thrown in.

If about Adultery, is there a big development?

Most definitely a big development and several of them as Glenn Close goes from bonkers to insane and beyond. Bunny Rabbits, knife fights and a battle to the death

If about Sex, is it titillating or realistic?

The sex is realistic, although a touch too aerobatic, but Close isn’t exactly the hottest potato in the sack. She looks attractive in this movie, but it didn’t move.

Foot fetish?

None at all

Quality of Movie – Rotten Tomatoes gives this an 80% rating which is extraordinary considering it’s got a high quotient of doo-doo.

Once again Mr Ebert sums this movie up perfectly. Acting great, First 2 thirds great, last third is plain awful

[SIZE=10.5pt]"Fatal Attraction" is a spellbinding psychological thriller that could have been a great movie if the filmmakers had not thrown character and plausibility to the winds in the last minutes to give us their version of a grown-up "[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Friday the 13th[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]."[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Because the good things in the movie - including the performances - are so very good, it's a shame that the film's potential for greatness was so blatantly compromised. The movie is so right for so long that you can almost feel the moment when the script goes click and sells out.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]The story stars [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Michael Douglas[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt] as a lawyer who has been happily married for nine years, has a 6-year-old daughter, loves his wife and has no particular problems on the day he meets an intriguing blond ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Glenn Close[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]) at a business party. She makes it her business to get to know him, and one weekend when Douglas's wife and daughter are out of town visiting his in-laws, he invites the blond out to dinner.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]She finds him willing to be seduced, and they have wild, passionate sex. Their couplings take place in a freight elevator, on the kitchen sink and, I think, in bed. The film was directed by [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Adrian Lyne[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt] ("[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]9 1/2 Weeks[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]"), whose ideas of love and genital acrobatics seem more or less equivalent.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Douglas has made it clear that he's a happily married man and that he sees their meeting as a one-night stand ("Two adults who saw an opportunity and took advantage of it"), but Close doesn't see it that way. The moment sex is over for her, capture begins, and she starts a series of demands on Douglas's time and attention.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]He tells her to get lost. She grows pathological. She visits him at the office, calls him at home in the middle of the night, throws acid on his car, visits his wife under the pretext of buying their apartment. Desperate to keep his secret and preserve his happy marriage, Douglas tries to reason with her, threaten her and even hide from her, but she is implacable. (And you should read no further if you plan to see the movie, or perhaps, come to think of it, you should.)[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]The early and middle passages of the movie are handled with convincing psychological realism; James Dearden's dialogue sounds absolutely right, especially the way he allows the Close character to bait her hook with honeyed come-ons and then set it with jealousy, possessiveness and finally guilt (after she says, inevitably, that she is pregnant). With the exception of the silly sex scenes, "Fatal Attraction" never steps wrong until its third act - and then it steps very wrong.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]First, let me suggest how I hoped the movie would continue. Having created a believable and interesting marriage between Douglas and [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Anne Archer[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt] (who is wonderful as his wife), and having drawn Close as a terrifying and yet always plausible other woman, I hoped the film would continue to follow its psychological exploration through to the end.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]I wanted, for example, to hear a good talk between Douglas and Archer, in which truth was told and the strength of the marriage was tested. I wanted to see more of the inner workings of Close's mind. I wanted to know more about how Douglas really felt about the situation. Although he grows to hate Close, is he really completely indifferent to the knowledge that she carries his child?[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]The movie does not explore any of those avenues, although the filmmakers clearly have the intelligence to do so. Instead, the last third of the movie collapses into pathetic melodrama. The big scene of truth between Douglas and Archer is shortchanged and feels unfinished. There is a pathetic sequence in which Close captures their daughter and scares her with a roller-coaster ride, while a frantic Archer gets in a car crash and breaks her arm. Give me a break.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]And then there is the horror-movie conclusion, complete with the unforgivable "Friday the 13th" cliche that the villain is never really dead. The conclusion, by the way, operates on the premise that Douglas cares nothing for his unborn child.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]"Fatal Attraction" was produced by [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Stanley R. Jaffe[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt] and [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Sherry Lansing[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt], and it seems to repeat a pattern for them. In 1984 they made "[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Firstborn[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]," with [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Teri Garr[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt] as a divorced mother who falls in love with [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Peter Weller[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt] as a man who is very wrong for her family. The first two-thirds of that film also are psychologically sound and dramatically fascinating, and then it degenerates into a canned formula of violence and an idiotic chase scene. Now they throw away the ending of "Fatal Attraction."[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]What's the matter here? Do they lack the courage to follow their convictions through to the end? They seem to have a knack for finding thoughtful, sensitive screenplays about interesting adults and then adding gruesome Hollywood horror formulas to them. "Fatal Attraction" clearly had the potential to be an Oscar contender. I walked out feeling cheated and betrayed.[/SIZE]
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Other Comments

I hate to bag on a young kid, but that is seriously the best looking 6 year old they could find? I hate the precocious Hollywood 6 year olds usually, but I didn’t believe that was a girl until it was drummed in numerous times and even then I had to check if it was a boy acting as a girl.

Anyway enough of that, I read that in the original ending, Close committed suicide. Now THAT would have been a great movie. The ending in this version is so comical that all the realism the movie has gone with until then is dissipated.

Rating 8=====D

Has its moments, but then pisses them out the window in a ludicrous final act. Overall score of 74%

 
:lmao:

If the judging for this draft hadn't long passed absurd, I'd argue

Nice write ups

 
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6 Points

May be controversial

Last Tango In Paris - Doug B (Rotten Tomatoes score of 81 %)

Is movie about Adultery/Sex?

As neither character is married any more, this is purely about sex.

If about Adultery, is there a big development?

Not relevant

If about Sex, is it titillating or realistic?

The sex is reasonably realistic, even the awful butter scene. The relationship is purely about control, with sex as the primary aspect and falls apart once they know more about each other.

Foot fetish? – Several scenes of Maria Schneider, but the icing on the cake is a foot rub scene where Marlon rubs her feet for about a minute. Bonus points here.

Quality of Movie – I had a lot of trouble with this movie. An anal rape sequence where the actress is clearly not enjoying it and reading about the history of this scene seems like it was a spur of the moment decision by Brando, agreed to by Bertulucci. Schneider talked about the traumatic effect this sequence had on her life and I feel uncomfortable watching it. As the reviewer below says, it seems to be a male fantasy movie, rather than something that is likely to happen

From James Plath

Pauline Kael called it "The most powerfully erotic movie ever made."

Roger Ebert thought it was "one of the great emotional experiences of our time."

And DVD Town's John J. Puccio wrote that "the film can still beguile us with the passionate vagaries of its characters and the imagination of its storytelling."

Critics fell in love with "Last Tango in Paris" because it was one of the first films to combine pornography and serious filmmaking. It gave critics an opportunity to talk about sex in cinema and Brando's '70s comeback, and it also afforded them the chance to make cosmic pronouncements like this one from Ebert: "Paul . . . has no difficulty in achieving an erection, but the gravest difficulty in achieving a life-affirming reason for one."

But as John noted in his DVD review, when "Last Tango in Paris" played theaters in 1973 there were also plenty of reviewers who found it "merely contrived and obscene."

Somehow I missed seeing "Last Tango" until I popped in this Blu-ray, but I'd have to side with those disparaging critics. While there are plenty of moments in the film where a shot is handled artfully, those High Art moments are offset by the grossly misogynistic behavior of Brando's character and scenes and dialogue that can seem so insipid that they negate any real eroticism or serious shock value.

There's not much in the way of plot. The film opens with Brando having another "STELL-LA" shout (as in "Streetcar Named Desire"), this time under a railroad platform after the American in Paris has learned about the suicide of his wife. Brooding and disturbed, he turns up in the same apartment-for-rent as young Frenchwoman named Jeanne, who is in a relationship with a self-absorbed filmmaker and seems to want an apartment they both might settle into. Left alone with her, Paul aggressively "takes" her in that apartment and, like an abuser who knows that once women give in they'll keep giving in, he tells her that she's going to return to that apartment again and again to have sex with him and neither of them will give their names. Names aren't important. Later, in a scene where the whole thing about no-names comes up again, he substitutes an animal cry for a name and the two of them do their little Tarzan and Jane communication. As I watched, I couldn't believe how stupid it seemed, and with each Brando scene-munching performance I found it even harder to believe that he was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for this role. It's one of life's mysteries--more so than the film itself.

Oh, there is a brief last tango, but mostly the dance is the raunchy, manipulative, usury sex that's pretty much explained in a perverted scene where Paul bullies Jeanne into trimming her fingernails and then sticking her fingers up his ###. As she does it he rants about how he's next going to get a pig to f**k her and vomit and she's going to eat the vomit and will she do that for him, will she, will she? Yes, yes, Jeanne says, and Paul's "vulnerability" is exposed for nothing more than the lure at the end of an angler fish's mouth that dangles like a worm to attract a fish. The main dance in "Last Tango in Paris" is a sadomasochistic one, with Paul continuing to push the limits of what he asks Jeanne to do.

I'm no prude, and I enjoy female flesh the same as any healthy male, but I really didn't find this film as erotic as its reputation. Maybe it's because "Last Tango in Paris" plays like a male fantasy--the kind of film that any actor nearly 50 years old (as Brando was) would love to do with an actress who was only 21 at the time. Plus, I'm just not into domination that pretends to be something else, nor do I find Paul's character as sympathetic as the critics who love this film. He's a hot-tempered abuser, both physically and verbally, who hates women and even bullies his ex-mother-in-law. It's how he treats women, and what we see in his relationship with Jeanne, what he does to her, is no doubt what he did to his wife, what drove his wife to have an affair with another man--and sets up a scene in which Brando visits the older "other man" and the two of them sit there in matching bathrobes that each received from Rosa, talking about her and women in general. I didn't buy this chumminess one bit, for a guy who was as controlling as Paul. It was also uncomfortably obvious that throughout most of the film Brando is dressed, while actress Maria Schneider has conversations with him while completely nude or half-nude.

Schneider later said she felt treated like a sex object and that director Bernardo Bertolucci robbed her of her youth. She told a British newspaper in 2007 that one of the film's most famous scenes--a back-door rape with Paul (I mean, Ooooohuuuhohhhohhhhh) using butter as a lubricant)--was Brando's idea and shared with her only moments before the shot. Though it wasn't in the script or her contract, she went along with it because she felt she had no rights . . . kind of like living in Wisconsin these days. After "Last Tango" Schneider never did any more nude scenes, and the avowed bisexual, who died of cancer earlier this month, shifted toward a permanent relationship with a woman. After watching what she went through to make this film, who could blame her?

Ebert is right about one thing: there's very little information provided, even about the sideplot relationship between Jeanne and the young filmmaker who's making a TV series about her. It's so severely underdeveloped that, unless you pick up on the fact that the young filmmaker is, in his own benign way, just as controlling as Paul and that this is how men are, according to Bertolucci--aggressive, or passive-aggressive--it will all seem extraneous. Even so, "Last Tango in Paris" is the kind of film you probably have to see at least once, because it's gotten so much attention that there'd be a gap in your film education if you never saw it. But too much of Bertolucci's dialogue (and the stuff Brando reportedly improvised) seems too stupid to watch more than once.
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Other Comments – I didn’t think Schneider was that good in this film. Maybe it was her uncomfortableness with the English language, but while she is highly attractive and nude for a lot of the film, I wasn’t convinced by her or her character. Why would she go with a man who looked like he belonged in a homeless shelter and was crazy? I know women fall for bad boys, but insane tramps? Brando is good in his role, but the movie leaves far too many questions open for my liking and seems heavily ad libbed.

Rating - 8======D

Take out the rape sequence and I score this higher, but that is an uncomfortable image for me to get over . In the end I have more problems with this film than things I like and despite the theme of sexuality being on topic far more than most films here, I want to feel that this hits the right notes and is invigorating and not the wrong notes and makes me feel disgusted. Right idea by the drafter, wrong film.

Total score of 75%

 
7 Points

Basic Instinct - Dr Octopus - (Rotten Tomatoes score of 54%)

Is movie about Adultery/Sex?

It’s not really about either, just a stupid crime story, but it would lean towards the sex angle.

If about Adultery, is there a big development?

All the sex on screen is with single people or people who are happy to be promiscuous.

If about Sex, is it titillating or realistic?

As this is Paul Verhoeven it tends to be unrealistic. Some scenes work better than others. Some are really bad as well, like when Michael Douglas and Jeanne Tripplehorn get it on. The Oral sex sound effects are ridiculous. The first sex scene and the one after the oral sex bits, the Douglas/Stone one works a lot better. Lots of tease lesbianism, but no actual lesbian love scenes which is ridiculous as they make Catherine Trammel clearly bisexual.

Foot fetish? – When Michael Douglas drops off Sharon Stone in a rainstorm, she takes off her shoes and we see her feet as she runs in the rain. A better director would have zoomed in on the feet.

Quality of Movie – This ain’t no Body of Evidence, but it clearly is rubbish. Loved Sharon Stone for ages and we get to see her naked in this a fair bit. The uncrossing of the legs scene is iconic, but laughable. Michael Douglas phones it here, while Stone is very good. Most of the others here are hampered by poor direction and idiotic scripting (#### of the century--- come on).

The late, great Bill Hicks has an opinion on this movie - [SIZE=12pt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0q15cWSXP0[/SIZE]

And the first 3 minutes and 30 seconds of this [SIZE=12pt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYRIS9Ju7R8[/SIZE]

Here’s Ebert’s review

[SIZE=10.5pt]In their protests against Paul Verhoeven's “Basic Instinct,” gay activists have been giving away the ending of the movie. With some thrillers, that would be a damaging blow. But the ending of “Basic Instinct” is so arbitrary that it hardly matters. This is not a movie where the outcome depends upon the personality or behavior of the characters. It's just a wind-up machine to jerk us around.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Consider the last shot of the movie (no, I will not reveal it). This shot allows us to discover whodunit - whether one of the characters is a murderer, or not. The screen has faded to black. Then we get the last shot, and it answers our question. But if the last shot had provided the opposite answer, it still would have been consistent with everything that had happened in the film. Each and every shred of evidence throughout the entire movie supports two different conclusions.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]This is the kind of ending beloved by marketing experts. The audience likes the heroine? Make her innocent. They hate her? Make her the killer. Only one shot has to be changed. As a result, I left the movie feeling depressed and manipulated - because it didn't matter how hard I tried to follow the plot and figure things out, the whole movie was just toying with me. At least some of the other recent titles in this genre - like “[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Fatal Attraction[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]” and “[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Sea of Love[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]” - played fair.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]The movie stars [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Michael Douglas[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt] as a troubled police detective who has been up before Internal Affairs, after shooting some tourists in a murky misunderstanding. He gets involved in the investigation of the kinky murder of a rock star. The rock star's sometime girlfriend ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Sharon Stone[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]) has written a novel in which a rock star is murdered in precisely the same way. Does this mean she is guilty? Or did a copycat killer try to frame her? The police questioning of the woman is the best scene in the movie, as Stone flirts shamelessly and toys with their male libidos.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Douglas is entranced. The woman may be a killer and is obviously twisted and manipulative, and yet he's mesmerized - attracted by the danger as much as by her sensuous magnetism. As his investigation progresses, however, he finds the woman is more complicated than he suspected. She has a lesbian lover, for one thing.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]The screenplay, by [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Joe Eszterhas[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt], resembles his “[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Jagged Edge[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]” (1985) in keeping the secret until the last shot. It's not really the last shot technique that I object to. What bothers me is that the whole plot has been constructed so that every relevant clue can be read two ways. That means the solution, when it is finally revealed, is not necessarily true. It is simply the writer's toss of the dice.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Apart from the whodunit elements, the movie exists for its sexual content. The Stone character, described as “world class” by Douglas after one night in the sack, is a kinky seductress with the kind of cold, challenging verbal style that many men take as a challenge. Her friends include a woman who once killed her entire family; she needs these people, she says, as inspiration for her novels. Her next book, she tells Douglas, staring him straight in the eye, will be about a police detective who falls in love with the wrong woman.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]The sex scenes, threatened with the NC-17 rating until 45 seconds were removed to qualify for the R, belong in that strange neverland created by the MPAA's Hollywood morality. They aren't much by the standards of really daring movies, but they do go far enough to make the “R” rating into a fiction. Seeing movies that walk the ratings line like this, I realize that good soft-core is more erotic than trimmed-down would-be hard-core, and that the movie would have been more of a turn-on if it hadn't tried so hard. The sex resembles a violent contact sport, with a scoring system known only to the players.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]As for the allegedly offensive homosexual characters: The movie's protesters might take note of the fact that this film's heterosexuals, starting with Douglas, are equally offensive. Still, there is a point to be made about Hollywood's unremitting insistence on typecasting homosexuals - particularly lesbians - as twisted and evil. That's especially true in the same season when “[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Fried Green Tomatoes[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt],” a story about two women in love, is cravenly constructed to obscure the story's obvious lesbian elements. Hollywood is fearless in portraying lesbians as killer dykes, but gets cold feet with a story that might portray them (gasp!) as warm, good-natured and generous.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Since most people will be attending “Basic Instinct” in less than a Politically Correct frame of mind, however, does the movie deliver? In a way, it does. It kept me interested, and guessing, right up until that final shot, which revealed that all of my efforts were pointless since the guilt or innocence of the characters was a flip of the coin, based on evidence that could be read both ways. The film is like a crossword puzzle. It keeps your interest until you solve it. Then it's just a worthless scrap with the spaces filled in.[/SIZE]
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Other Comments – Has one of the worst car chases I’ve ever seen. 20 cars all perfectly equidistant from each other, no cars coming the other way, until of course they need to be. Michael Douglas overtakes stupidly for a police officer. There is no tension. Ludicrously plotted and staged. The other car chase is passable, but driving up a steep stepped path is just part of the illustration of how stupid the planning is for these scenes.

There was a lot of criticism for this movie at the time, as described in Ebert’s review about the Lesbian character Roxy, but as Ebert points out, no character in this movie is likeable. They all exude slime.

Rating – This movie is garbage, but it makes it this high on thing only, Sharon Stone. She plays the enigmatic Trammel beautifully and when she is on screen the sex appeal is ramped up to 10. The cop scenes, dialog and directing and awful though and I feel I’m being generous putting it this high.

8=======D

This gets an overall score of 76%

 
8 Points

Unfaithful - Tish (Rotten Tomatoes 49%)

Is movie about Adultery/Sex?

Mainly Adultery, but there is sex involved.

If about Adultery, is there a big development?

When the adultery leads to a murder, then yeah a pretty big development.

If about Sex, is it titillating or realistic?

The sex is reasonably realistic, both with Lane and Gere and Lane and Martinez, although the latter pair require a degree in gymnastics. We do get to see a fair bit of Diane Lane naked and for once Hollywood isn’t ashamed to show imperfection. Lane is an attractive woman, but flawed in a number of ways physically. It makes a change from the perfections of most naked women in film. Of course I don’t want to see Rosie O’Donnell naked, so let’s not get too carried away.

Foot fetish? – A few lingering shots of Lane’s feet are nice, but it doesn’t explore this deeply enough.

Quality of Movie

The problems I have with it:

That the seemingly happily married woman has an affair for seemingly no reason, we never find out. I guess the same happens in Fatal Attraction, except the other way around, so I suppose its good to see a woman stray, rather than the usual plot device of a male.

Richard Gere’s performance is also a strange one. Usually playing the smug, cocky guy, it’s just odd to see him wracked with insecurity at home, yet so self-assured at work. In a happy marriage, this shouldn’t play true and Gere is not convincing in this role at all.

Review from Jeffrey Chen

Adrian Lyne's movie about a housewife's adultery and its consequences would play better as a study of the human predisposition toward infidelity were its characters not so illogically single-minded and its atmosphere not so cheap-romance-novel trashy. One can believe Diane Lane's character, subconsciously bored by routine suburban life, would flirt with the idea of an affair -- even act out such a whim in a singular rush of the moment -- but her premeditated visits to her lover (Olivier Martinez) continue with neither strong evidence of her dissatisfaction with her family life nor any sign of a debilitating struggle to stop doing what she knows would hurt her loved ones if they found out. Credibility is further stretched when Martinez is presented more as a plot device than as a character, laughably whirling his prize away to the land of cheesy sensuality (watch him guide her hand across a page of Braille) before moving on to low-impact S&M ("Hit me!") and bathroom quickies. In a sudden tonal shift, the film's latter half focuses on the husband's (Richard Gere) reaction, which makes his wife's motivations seem all the more insignificant to the movie -- less as central theme, more as plot-driver. The film is watchable due to high potential for audience participation -- yelling at the characters on the screen is fun and seems to be common during viewings.
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Other Comments

Again what is with Adrian Lyne movies and ugly kids. Isn’t there a million more kids who don’t look weird when they do casting?

####### Adrian Lyne. The fact that 3 of his movies are in the list is a shame. Much better international fare is available. Much more explicit and much better movies. Thankfully this was his last movie to date. This is his highest rating one here, but oh for shame drafters. 3 James Spader (Fair enough) and 3 Adrian Lyne movies.

Rating - 8=======D

This movie has a lot of merits, but the poor characterizations and the average direction hold this back from being the movie it could be. I guess it’s nice to see a movie where the murderer gets away with the murder, but the miscasting of Gere is a big problem with this movie. Some of the plot points are laughable, such as why the eventual murder weapon would be gifted to the lover and the frequent running into friends while she is far away from home and trying to get with her lover.

Total score of 77%

 
9 Points

The Graduate - Time Kibitzer (Rotten Tomatoes score of 88%)

Is movie about Adultery/Sex?

It is about sex and adultery, but mainly about a whiny boy who somehow is 21 and doesn’t know how to act around people.

If about Adultery, is there a big development?

Pretty big development in that the affair Mrs Robinson leads to a romantic relationship with the daughter, rape charges and a runaway wedding. Pretty realistic stuff there.

If about Sex, is it titillating or realistic?

I imagine for 1967 this was quite the shocking movie. A moment in time perhaps. Now it’s ridiculous. The sex is not seen, but cutaway to just as it is getting under way. We see Anne Bancroft just about to undress and then a cutaway or a distraction

Foot fetish? – We see Anne Bancroft slowly putting on her stockings in more of a leg fetish moment. Iconic images, but a) it’s the leg shown and not the feet and b) I am just not getting turned on by Anne Bancroft. She is supposed to be in her mid forties here and I just don’t get the horny young guy attracted by older women thing. Not my cup of tea.

Quality of Movie – It’s an ok movie now and has definitely dated. It is obviously a landmark cinema moment, but as you’ll see from Ebert below, a movie of its time. Some of the plot points are almost farcical and while the direction is clever and stylish this movie would not be taken seriously today.

[SIZE=10.5pt]Well, here *is* to you, Mrs. Robinson: You've survived your defeat at the hands of that insufferable creep, Benjamin, and emerged as the most sympathetic and intelligent character in "The Graduate.'' How could I ever have thought otherwise? What murky generational politics were distorting my view the first time I saw this film? Watching the 30th anniversary revival of "The Graduate'' is like looking at photos of yourself at an old fraternity dance. You're gawky and your hair is plastered down with Brylcreem, and your date looks as if you found her behind the counter at the Dairy Queen. But--who's the babe in the corner? The great-looking brunette with the wide-set eyes and the full lips and the knockout figure? Hey, it's the chaperone! Great movies remain themselves over the generations; they retain a serene sense of their own identity. Lesser movies are captives of their time. They get dated and lose their original focus and power. "The Graduate'' (I can see clearly now) is a lesser movie. It comes out of a specific time in the late 1960s when parents stood for stodgy middle-class values, and "the kids'' were joyous rebels at the cutting edge of the sexual and political revolutions. Benjamin Braddock ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Dustin Hoffman[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]), the clueless hero of "The Graduate,'' was swept in on that wave of feeling, even though it is clear today that he was utterly unaware of his generation and existed outside time and space (he seems most at home at the bottom of a swimming pool).[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]"The Graduate,'' released in 1967, contains no flower children, no hippies, no dope, no rock music, no political manifestos and no danger. It is a movie about a tiresome bore and his well-meaning parents. The only character in the movie who is alive--who can see through situations, understand motives, and dare to seek her own happiness--is Mrs. Robinson ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Anne Bancroft[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]). Seen today, "The Graduate'' is a movie about a young man of limited interest, who gets a chance to sleep with the ranking babe in his neighborhood, and throws it away in order to marry her dorky daughter.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Consider, for a moment, the character of Elaine ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Katharine Ross[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]), Mrs. Robinson's daughter. She has no dialogue of any depth. She has an alarming fetish for false eyelashes. She agrees to marry a tall, blond jock ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Brian Avery[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]) mostly because her parents will be furious with her if she doesn't. She is so witless that she misunderstands everything Benjamin says to her. When she discovers Benjamin has slept with her mother, she is horrified, but before they have ever had a substantial conversation about the subject, she has forgiven him--apparently because Mrs. Robinson is so hateful that it couldn't have been Benjamin's fault. She then escapes from the altar at her own wedding to flee with Benjamin on a bus, where they look at each other nervously, perhaps because they are still to have a meaningful conversation.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]As Benjamin and Elaine escaped in that bus at the end of "The Graduate,'' I cheered, the first time I saw the movie. What was I thinking of? What did the scene celebrate? "Doing your own thing,'' I suppose.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Occasionally I will meet an almost-adult son of friends, and notice that he behaves like a mute savage in company, responding to conversation with grunts and inarticulate syllables. This behavior is usually accompanied by uncoordinated lurches, as if he is behind the wheel of a body too big for him to drive. A few years pass, and this creature regains the use of his brain and speech, and I see that he was passing through a phase. Does he look back on his earlier years in embarrassment? Today, looking at "The Graduate,'' I see Benjamin not as an admirable rebel, but as a self-centered creep whose put-downs of adults are tiresome. (Anyone with average intelligence should have known, in 1967, that the word "plastics'' contained valuable advice--especially valuable for Benjamin, who lacks creative instincts and is destined to become a corporate drudge.) Mrs. Robinson is the only person in the movie who is not playing old tapes. She is bored by a drone of a husband, she drinks too much, she seduces Benjamin not out of lust but out of kindness or desperation. Makeup and lighting are used to make Anne Bancroft look older (she was 36 when the movie was made, and Hoffman was 30). But there is a scene where she is drenched in a rainstorm; we can see her face clearly and without artifice, and she is a great beauty. She is also sardonic, satirical and articulate--the only person in the movie you would want to have a conversation with.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]When the movie was first released, I wrote of the "instantly forgettable'' songs by Simon and Garfunkel. History has proven me wrong. They are not forgettable. But what are they telling us? The liberating power of rock and roll is shut out of the soundtrack ("The Sound of Music'' plays on Muzak at one crucial point). The S&G songs are melodic, sophisticated, safe. They even accommodate the action, halting their lyrics and providing guitar chords to underline key moments. This is Benjamin's music; Mrs. Robinson, alone with her vodka, would twist the radio dial looking for the Beatles or Chuck Berry.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Is "The Graduate'' a bad movie? Not at all. It is a good topical movie whose time has passed, leaving it stranded in an earlier age. I give it three stars out of delight for the material it contains; to watch it today is like opening a time capsule. To know that the movie once spoke strongly to a generation is to understand how deep the generation gap ran during that extraordinary time in the late 1960s. There were true rebels in movies of the period (see "Easy Rider"), but Benjamin Braddock was not one of them. I wonder how long it took him to get into plastics.[/SIZE]
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Other Comments

I have to mention the Simon & Garfunkel soundtrack. Great to hear agin, but it’s amazing how understated the “Mrs Robinson” song is here and how often we here Scarborough Fair and Sounds of Silence. Bonus point for nice music.

Rating – 8=========D

This one is a hard one to rank. Of it’s time it stands up ok, but not great. As a drama it works better, although it has definite adultery and sex themes throughout. I rank this higher than Dr Zhivago for instance because the sex and adultery is more open and integral to the movie, but as a whole it isn’t in the top echelon.

Overall score of 78%

 
10 Points

Double Indemnity - Mister CIA (Rotten Tomatoes score of 96%)

Is movie about Adultery/Sex?

The adultery is implied at best in this movie. No sex.

If about Adultery, is there a big development?

Yes Fred MacMurray commits murder for a woman, but do we know for a fact that Barbara Stanwyk was committing adultery with him? I suspect that it is more than likely and it probably is written into the source material. It was more than likely that Phyllis was banging her daughters boyfriend, but again it is all implied.

If about Sex, is it titillating or realistic?

No sex here. It is 1944.

Foot fetish?

When we first meet Barbara Stanwyk she comes down the stairs with a focus on her lower leg and feet in high heels. Then we see her crossing her leg, flashing he ankle bracelet and feet. Definitely deliberate and sexual and for that it gets significant bonus points.

Quality of Movie

This is rated among the all time classics and it is a well written story, done with panache. Other categories may have suited this better although it is not wildly out of place like some others. I enjoyed the movie and wish it could have fit better into the criteria.

Here’s a review from Ebert

[SIZE=10.5pt]No, I never loved you Walter -- not you or anybody else. I'm rotten to the heart. I used you, just as you said. That's all you ever meant to me. Until a minute ago, when I couldn't fire that second shot.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Is she kidding? Walter thinks so: "Sorry, baby. I'm not buying.” The puzzle of [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Billy Wilder[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]'s "Double Indemnity,” the enigma that keeps it new, is what these two people really think of one another. They strut through the routine of a noir murder plot, with the tough talk and the cold sex play. But they never seem to really like each other all that much, and they don't seem that crazy about the money, either. What are they after?[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Walter ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Fred MacMurray[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]) is Walter Neff ("two f's--like in Philadelphia”). He's an insurance salesman, successful but bored. The woman is Phyllis Dietrichson ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Barbara Stanwyck[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]), a lazy blond who met her current husband by nursing his wife--to death, according to her stepdaughter. Neff pays a call one day to renew her husband's automobile insurance. He's not at home, but she is, wrapped in a towel and standing at the top of a staircase. "I wanted to see her again,” Neff tells us. "Close, and without that silly staircase between us.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]The story was written in the 1930s by James M. Cain, the hard-boiled author ofThe Postman Always Rings Twice.A screenplay kicked around Hollywood, but the Hays Office nixed it for "hardening audience attitudes toward crime.” By 1944, Wilder thought he could film it. Cain wasn't available, so he hired [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Raymond Chandler[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt] to do the screenplay. Chandler, whose novelThe Big SleepWilder loved, turned up drunk, smoked a smelly pipe, didn't know anything about screenplay construction, but could put a nasty spin on dialogue.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Together they eliminated Cain's complicated end-game and deepened the relationship between Neff and Keyes ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Edward G. Robinson[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]), the claims manager at the insurance company. They told the movie in flashback, narrated by Neff, who arrives at his office late at night, dripping blood, and recites into a Dictaphone. The voice-over worked so well that Wilder used it again in "[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Sunset Boulevard[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]” (1950), which was narrated by a character who is already dead the first time he speaks. No problem; "Double Indemnity” originally ended with Neff in the gas chamber, but that scene was cut because an earlier one turned out to be the perfect way to close the film.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]To describe the story is to miss the nuances that make it tantalizing. Phyllis wants Walter to sell her husband a $50,000 double indemnity policy, and then arrange the husband's "accidental” death. Walter is willing, ostensibly because he's fallen under her sexual spell. They perform a clever substitution. The husband, on crutches with a broken leg, is choked to death before a train ride. Taking his place, Neff gets on the train and jumps off. They leave the husband's body on the tracks. Perfect. But later that night, going to the drugstore to establish an alibi, Neff remembers, "I couldn't hear my own footsteps. It was the walk of a dead man.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]A clever crime. But why did they do it? Phyllis was bored and her husband had lost a lot of money in the oil business, so she had a motive. But it's as if the idea of murder materialized only because Neff did -- right there in her living room, talking about insurance. On their third meeting, after a lot of aggressive wordplay, they agree to kill the husband and collect the money. I guess they also make love; in 1944 movies you can't be sure, but if they do, it's only the once.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Why? Is Neff blinded by lust and greed? That's the traditional reading of the film: weak man, strong woman. But he's aloof, cold, hard, terse. He always calls her "baby,” as if she's a brand, not a woman. His eyes are guarded and his posture reserved. He's not moonstruck. And Phyllis? Cold, too. But later in the film she says she cares more about "them” than about the money. We can believe the husband died for money if they both seem driven by greed, but they're not. We can believe he died because of their passion, but it seems more like a pretense, and fades away after the murder.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Standing back from the film and what it expects us to think, I see them engaged not in romance or theft, but in behavior. They're intoxicated by their personal styles. Styles learned in the movies, and from radio and the detective magazines. It's as if they were invented by [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Ben Hecht[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt] through his crime dialogue. Walter and Phyllis are pulp characters with little psychological depth, and that's the way Billy Wilder wants it. His best films are sardonic comedies, and in this one, Phyllis and Walter play a bad joke on themselves.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]More genuine emotion is centered elsewhere. It involves Neff's fear of discovery, and his feelings for Keyes. Edward G. Robinson plays the inspector as a nonconformist who loosens his tie, reclines on the office couch, smokes cheap cigars, and wants to make Neff his assistant. He's a father figure, or more. He's also smart, and eventually he figures out that a crime was committed -- and exactly how it was committed. His investigation leads to two scenes of queasy tension. One is when Keyes invites Neff to his office, and then calls in a witness who saw Neff on the train. Another is when Keyes calls unexpectedly at Neff's apartment, when Neff expects Phyllis to arrive momentarily -- and incriminatingly.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Does Keyes suspect Neff? You can't really say. He arranges situations in which Neff's guilt might be discovered, but they're part of his routine techniques; perhaps only his subconscious, "the little man who lives in my stomach,” suspects Neff.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]The end of the film is curious (it's the beginning, too, so I'm not giving it away). Why does the wounded Neff go to the office and dictate a confession if he still presumably hopes to escape? Because he wants to be discovered by Keyes? Neff tells him, "You know why you couldn't figure this one, Keyes? I'll tell you. Because the guy you were looking for was too close -- right across the desk from you.” Keyes says, "Closer than that, Walter,” and then Neff says, "I love you, too.” Neff has been lighting Keyes' smokes all during the movie, and now Keyes lights Neff's. You see why a gas chamber would have been superfluous.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Wilder's "Double Indemnity” was one of the earlier films noir. The photography by [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]John Seitz[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt] helped develop the noir style of sharp-edged shadows and shots, strange angles and lonely Edward Hopper settings. It's the right fit for the hard urban atmosphere and dialogue created by Cain, Chandler, and the other writers Edmund Wilson called "the boys in the back room.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]"Double Indemnity” has one of the most familiar noir themes: The hero is not a criminal, but a weak man who is tempted and succumbs. In this "double” story, the woman and man tempt one another; neither would have acted alone. Both are attracted not so much by the crime as by the thrill of committing it with the other person. Love and money are pretenses. The husband's death turns out to be their one-night stand.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Wilder, born in Austria in 1906, who arrived in America in 1933 and is still a Hollywood landmark, has an angle on stories like this. He doesn't go for the obvious arc. He isn't interested in the same things the characters are interested in. He wants to know what happens to them after they do what they think is so important. He doesn't want truth, but consequences.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Few other directors have made so many films that were so taut, savvy, cynical and, in many different ways and tones, funny. After a start as a screenwriter, his directorial credits include "The Lost Weekend,” "Sunset Boulevard,” "Stalag 17,” "[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Sabrina[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt],” "The Seven Year Itch,” "Witness for the Prosecution,” "Some Like It Hot,” "The Apartment” and "The Fortune Cookie.” I don't like lists but I can't stop typing. "Double Indemnity” was his third film as a director. That early in his career, he was already cocky enough to begin a thriller with the lines, "I killed him for money -- and for a woman. I didn't get the money. And I didn't get the woman.” And end it with the hero saying "I love you, too” to Edward G. Robinson.[/SIZE]
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Other Comments – I like many others tend to ignore films that aren’t of our time. When a movie dates, it quite often dates very badly. That is not the case here most of the time, although some of the sequences, behaviors and mannerisms are clearly of days gone by. It holds up well due to the solid performances and excellent direction. Sometimes less is more and the enigmatic approach of its time works well here.

Rating - 8==========D

How it fits into this category is problematic. As a drama it would score high, as a film noir even better. As a movie from the 40s very good, here I have to be harsher. It is a damn fine film that deserves better, but my gut feel is that some drafters went to the IMDB keyword section, typed adultery and this spewed out as one of the top results. That doesn’t guarantee it anything. It rates highly among all the adultery films here, but not a patch on the others. The themes and an almost note for note reproduction of this movie is done in another movie that is more relevant to the category and we'll see soon enough

Overall score of 79%

 
John Maddens Lunchbox said:
How it fits into this category is problematic. As a drama it would score high, as a film noir even better. As a movie from the 40s very good, here I have to be harsher. It is a damn fine film that deserves better, but my gut feel is that some drafters went to the IMDB keyword section, typed adultery and this spewed out as one of the top results. That doesn’t guarantee it anything. It rates highly among all the adultery films here, but not a patch on the others. The themes and an almost note for note reproduction of this movie is done in another movie that is more relevant to the category and we'll see soon enough

Overall score of 79%
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I could care less (but just a little less) about the score, but here you are absolutely incorrect. Maybe you have gas.

ETA: Still, love the judging effort.

 
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Mister CIA said:
John Maddens Lunchbox said:
How it fits into this category is problematic. As a drama it would score high, as a film noir even better. As a movie from the 40s very good, here I have to be harsher. It is a damn fine film that deserves better, but my gut feel is that some drafters went to the IMDB keyword section, typed adultery and this spewed out as one of the top results. That doesn’t guarantee it anything. It rates highly among all the adultery films here, but not a patch on the others. The themes and an almost note for note reproduction of this movie is done in another movie that is more relevant to the category and we'll see soon enough

Overall score of 79%
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I could care less (but just a little less) about the score, but here you are absolutely incorrect. Maybe you have gas.

ETA: Still, love the judging effort.
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I didn't mean to imply that you did, but it is in the comments for the film you drafted, so apologies for the implication.

I'm pretty sure some drafters did though. Not that it really matters I suppose, we all have our sources for some of these categories.

 
Movie Draft Score through 26 of 30 Categories

Drafter - Total
---------------------------------------------

BobbyLayne - 417
Nick Vermeil - 416
krista4 - 409
Tiannamen Tank - 401
Tremendous Upside - 396
AcerFC - 380
Andy Dufresne - 372
Val Rannous - 372
hooter311 - 369
Aerial Assault - 368
timschochet - 364
Mrs. Rannous - 356
Karma Police - 349
John Madden's Lunchbox - 347
jwb - 324
Time Kibitzer - 320
Doug B - 308
higgins - 308
Joffer - 305
Kumerica - 298
Mister CIA - 284
Dr. Octopus - 273
rikishiboy - 260
Usual21 - 246
Tish155 - 208

...

Categories remaining:

Adultery/sex (in progress)
Courtroom Scene
Monologue
Shooting a Movie Scene

 
11 Points

Knife In the Water - jwb - (Rotten Tomatoes score of 100%)

Is movie about Adultery/Sex?

It has adultery in it and the sex is an undercurrent, but they are not the prime movers in this film

If about Adultery, is there a big development?

The adultery occurs late in the film and is basically unrevealed to the male lead or at the very best, he has been told about it, but seems disbelieving at the very end.

If about Sex, is it titillating or realistic?

The sex is fairly understated, but at least we see something that makes it clear that sex was involved. Until then we don’t see much except a tense drama with only 3 characters. The sex is deeper here and a lot more subtle.

Foot fetish?

The female lead shows her feet when sun baking. The film is in black and white, but it wasn’t a prominent tease in this movie.

Quality of Movie

There is no doubt this is a quality film debut from Roman Polanski, and it is a reasonable choice for this category. It’s in the right area to be considered, but cannot compete with the better titles here.

There aren’t many quality reviews online for this, so this from Ken Hanke will have to do

Roman Polanski’s debut feature Knife in the Water (1962) is the film that made him an international figure in the cinematic world—and ironically, still stands as his only Polish-language feature, since it led to his depature for France and then to British cinema. The appeal of the film—a simple three-character story designed for getting the most out of a very small budget—is obvious even today. The movie is an economical exercise in the growing sexual and socio-economic tension that takes place in one afternoon when a middle-aged sportswriter and his much younger wife pick up a hitchhiking student and then invite him along for a day on their sailboat. The impetus of it all comes from the aging writer’s desire to show off how much more worldly and knowledgeable he is than the young man—and what results from that.The film is similar in some ways to Polanski’s second British film, Cul-de-sac (1966), in that it places its characters in a confined setting and then forces them to interact. The difference is that Cul-de-sac adds characters and a vein of dark humor that is largely absent here. Still, the similarity between this first work and it—and to even later films—attests to the idea that Polanski was from the very onset, a filmmaker with a singular and disturbing vision. His is clearly a cinema of obsession.
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Other Comments – The undercurrent of tension present in this movie is often referred to as sexual, but I found more of a class thing, tinged with sexual presence. It definitely is a good choice, but to me the low budget couldn’t make up for a great script.

Rating – 8===========D

This movie is good, but not great.

An overall score of 81%

 
12 Points

Secretary - Krista4 - Rotten Tomatoes rating of 75%

Is movie about Adultery/Sex?

More about sado/masochism, which comes under the broad umbrella of sex

If about Adultery, is there a big development?

No themes on that here

If about Sex, is it titillating or realistic?

Very little actual sex takes place, but the sado/masochistic scenes work very well.

Foot fetish?

We do get shots of Gyllenhalls feet, but not in an erotic setting.

Quality of Movie – This gets 75% on the rotten tomatoes meter. One of the negative reviews by Peter Rainer I can understand, even though it’s not worth the negativity he gives it. When Gyllenhall is used in movies as a sexpot, she falls woefully short of the mark. As a vulnerable young woman exploring her desires she is much better. The director here does a good job of making her dowdy, but attractive. He should have won an academy award for that alone.

[SIZE=13.5pt] A[/SIZE][SIZE=10pt]nother movie that should have been a lot riskier, given its subject matter, is Secretary, a naughty trifle about a priggish lawyer, E. Edward Grey (James Spader), and his sadomasochistic helpmate, Lee (Maggie Gyllenhaal). Most of this chamber drama -- which was directed by Steven Shainberg and written by Erin Cressida Wilson, based on a Mary Gaitskill short story -- involves Edward's getting increasingly hot over Lee's clerical mistakes and taking it out on her appreciative bottom (for starters). The pace throughout is pretty glacial, which is meant to make every thwack meaningful. Spader, enunciating each of his syllables as if speech itself were a form of S&M, is in a constant state of slow burn; it's the most James Spader–ish performance he's ever given. Gyllenhaal, with her bright saucer eyes and her aging-cherub face, is always worth watching, and she has some fine, flukey moments when the bliss of self-abasement sends her sky-high. She seems primed to be in a much more disturbingly comic movie than the one she ended up in. For all its Buñuellian pretensions, Secretary is deeply conventional: Edward and Lee accept their bondage as the way to a more fulfilling life. It's the filmmakers who need to be spanked.[/SIZE]
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Other Comments

This was an interesting movie that features James Spader in a very James Spader role. I just felt there was way too much weird here for the S&M focus to work effectively. Gyllenhalls family are all warped, Jeremy Davies is and so is Spader and practically all the cast. There needed to be degrees of normalcy to make the S & M work.

Rating 8============D

An overall score of 81%.

 
13 Points

Dangerous Liasons - Mrs Rannous - Rotten Tomatoes score of 93%

Is movie about Adultery/Sex?

The movie is more about manipulation, using sex as its chief weapon.

If about Adultery, is there a big development?

Definite Adultery theme with Malkovic chasing the married Pfeiffer character. The development is of course that he falls in love with her, but not in the traditional way.

If about Sex, is it titillating or realistic?

The sex is realistic, although the garments of the time make it hard to take too seriously.

Foot fetish? We do get a few lingering shots of feet in this movie, so thank you.

Quality of Movie – Rotten Tomatoes gives this 93% which is slightly higher than I’d have it. I actually preferred the Cruel Intentions interpretation set in modern times, than this one set in ye olde France. The acting is top notch though and even Keanu Reeves doesn’t disgrace himself , although he sounds exactly like his character in Bill & Ted, so it’s hard to take him too seriously. Malkovich could be seen as a problem with this movie and although he doesn’t detract from the final result, a different actor may have been a better choice. Although Close acting wise is superb, I am not seeing her sex appeal.

Once again I hand over to Mr Ebert

[SIZE=10.5pt] "Dangerous Liaisons" is a story of two people who lack the courage to admit they love each other, and so they spend their energies destroying the loves of others. They describe as cynicism what is really depravity and are so hardened to the ordinary feelings of life that only one emotion can destroy them. That emotion is love, of course.[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]The two people live in 18th century France, at a time just before the revolution, when the decadence of the aristocracy has become an end in itself. The Marquise de Merteuil lives in a world of drawing rooms and boudoirs, where she swoops down like a hawk upon the innocent and the naive, wrecking their idealism with a triumphant laugh to herself.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Her partner and confidant is the Vicomte de Valmont, who was once her lover and is now her weapon against young women presumptuous enough to love. In their private score-keeping, nothing counts more than a heart destroyed and hopes laid to waste.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]One day the Marquise ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Glenn Close[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]) comes to the Vicomte ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]John Malkovich[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]) with an assignment. She has lost a lover who left her to marry an innocent young woman named Cecile ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Uma Thurman[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]). She wishes the Vicomte to seduce the young woman before she can bear her virginity to the marital bed. The Vicomte accepts the dare and dispatches himself to the country, where, however, he eventually sets his sights on another young woman instead.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]She is the virtuous Madame de Tourvel ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Michelle Pfeiffer[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]), who wishes to be faithful to her husband. Certainly there is nothing overpoweringly attractive in the lecherous Vicomte, who is a little cadaverous and has a reputation as a cad. But the Vicomte persists, and he uses a weapon that sometimes works against the pure and the good: He presents himself as frankly evil and thus inspires a spark of lust to stir within the woman herself. He plays on her curiosity about what it would be like to be a bad girl.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]All this intrigue goes more or less according to plan, especially when the Marquise sics another young man on the unsuspecting Cecile, then uses that as an excuse to arrange for Cecile to visit the country home where, wouldn't you know, the Vicomte and Madame de Tourvel are staying. The seduction of Cecile comes easily. But the seduction of Madame Tourvel, when it is finally arrived at, is a surprise for everyone because the Vicomte and Tourvel really do fall in love.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]This is too much for the Marquise; as her instrument, the Vicomte may make love to whomsoever he pleases, but he is not to fall in love with anyone. All of the pretend emotions of the game of seduction turn into the real emotions of the game of betrayal.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]"Dangerous Liaisons," based on Christopher Hampton's London and New York stage hit "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" (and on the scandalous 18th century novel by [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Choderlos de Laclos[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]), is a mannered, elegant film in which the languorous intrigues of the opening scenes set up the violent passions of the later ones. It is a film in which the surfaces are usually calm and only the flash of an eye or a slightly raised voice betrays the most terrible struggles going on beneath.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]It is played to perfection by Close and Malkovich in the central roles; their arch dialogues together turn into exhausting conversational games, tennis matches of the soul. The other key roles, played by Pfeiffer and Thurman, are trickier, because they involve characters who should not be entirely aware of what is really happening. Both actresses are well cast for their roles, and for Pfeiffer, in a year that has seen her in varied assignments such as "[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Married to the Mob[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]" and "[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Tequila Sunrise[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]," the movie is more evidence of her versatility. She is good when she is innocent and superb when she is guilty.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]If there is anything lacking in the movie, it may be a certain gusto. The director, [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Stephen Frears[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt], is so happy to make this a tragicomedy of manners that he sometimes turns away from obvious payoffs. I am not suggesting he should have turned the material toward the ribald, or gone for easy laughs, but there are times when he holds back and should have gone for the punch line. "Dangerous Liaisons" is an absorbing and seductive movie, but not a compelling one.[/SIZE]
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Other Comments 2 Glenn Close movies in a topic about sex. I feel it shrivelling as I write this. Never been a big fan of Uma Thurman either, although she gets em out here and they are awesome to look at. Michelle Pfeiffer is divinely lovely. Not sure I want to see a rape scene in a movie about sex, although it is definitely less repulsive than the one in Last Tango in Paris.

Rating 8=============D

Overall I am giving this 82%

 
14 Points

Brokeback Mountain - Bobby Layne/Scott Norwood (Rotten Tomatoes score of 87%)

Is movie about Adultery/Sex?

Well adultery and sex are parts of this movie, but it’s really a good old fashioned love story

If about Adultery, is there a big development?

When Michelle Williams sees Ennis and Jack making out, it is a massive shock for her character, but given the time the movie is set in, it is just a backdrop to the love story between the leads

If about Sex, is it titillating or realistic?

Both Williams and Anne Hathaway show some breast during sex scenes with their husbands and it is realistic, but basic. The sex between Ennis and Jack is kept to minimum, apart from numerous kissing and hugging scenes. This hilarious, but deleted scene from Knocked up talking about Brokeback Mountain would have sent this skyrocketing to near the top if they were brave enough to film it and show it [SIZE=12pt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0MrczERAe4[/SIZE]

Foot fetish? – We do get to see a foot rub given by Heath Ledger on the waitress. That earns the movie an extra point or 2.

Quality of Movie – This is an excellent movie, but like Dr Zhivago, again I don’t see it as a fit for a sex or adultery movie. It’s a clear love story. Unlike Zhivago though this has enough elements in to score a lot higher and it is the better movie.

Again I’ll turn to Ebert for a full review

[SIZE=10.5pt]Ennis tells Jack about something he saw as a boy. "There were two old guys shacked up together. They were the joke of the town, even though they were pretty tough old birds." One day they were found beaten to death. Ennis says: "My dad, he made sure me and my brother saw it. For all I know, he did it."[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]This childhood memory is always there, the ghost in the room, in [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Ang Lee[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]'s "Brokeback Mountain." When he was taught by his father to hate homosexuals, Ennis was taught to hate his own feelings. Years after he first makes love with Jack on a Wyoming mountainside, after his marriage has failed, after his world has compressed to a mobile home, the laundromat, the TV, he still feels the same pain: "Why don't you let me be? It's because of you, Jack, that I'm like this -- nothing, and nobody."[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]But it's not because of Jack. It's because Ennis and Jack love each other and can find no way to deal with that. "Brokeback Mountain" has been described as "a gay cowboy movie," which is a cruel simplification. It is the story of a time and place where two men are forced to deny the only great passion either one will ever feel. Their tragedy is universal. It could be about two women, or lovers from different religious or ethnic groups -- any "forbidden" love.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]The movie wisely never steps back to look at the larger picture, or deliver the "message." It is specifically the story of these men, this love. It stays in closeup. That's how Jack and Ennis see it. "You know I ain't queer," Ennis tells Jack after their first night together. "Me, neither," says Jack.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Their story begins in Wyoming in 1963, when Ennis ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Heath Ledger[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]) and Jack ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Jake Gyllenhaal[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]) are about 19 years old and get a job tending sheep on a mountainside. Ennis is a boy of so few words he can barely open his mouth to release them; he learned to be guarded and fearful long before he knew what he feared. Jack, who has done some rodeo riding, is a little more outgoing. After some days have passed on the mountain and some whiskey has been drunk, they suddenly and almost violently have sex.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]"This is a one-shot thing we got going on here," Ennis says the next day. Jack agrees. But it's not. When the summer is over, they part laconically: “I guess I’ll see ya around, huh?” Their boss ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Randy Quaid[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]) tells Jack he doesn't want him back next summer: "You guys sure found a way to make the time pass up there. You weren't getting paid to let the dogs guard the sheep while you stemmed the rose."[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Some years pass. Both men get married. Then Jack goes to visit Ennis in Wyoming, and the undiminished urgency of their passion stuns them. Their lives settle down into a routine, punctuated less often than Jack would like by "fishing trips." Ennis' wife, who has seen them kissing, says nothing about it for a long time. But she notices there are never any fish.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]The movie is based on a short story by E. Annie Proulx. The screenplay is by [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Larry McMurtry[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt] and [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Diana Ossana[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]. This summer I read McMurtry's Lonesome Dove trilogy, and as I saw the movie I was reminded of Gus and Woodrow, the two cowboys who spend a lifetime together. They aren't gay; one of them is a womanizer and the other spends his whole life regretting the loss of the one woman he loved. They're straight, but just as crippled by a society that tells them how a man must behave and what he must feel.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]"Brokeback Mountain" could tell its story and not necessarily be a great movie. It could be a melodrama. It could be a "gay cowboy movie." But the filmmakers have focused so intently and with such feeling on Jack and Ennis that the movie is as observant as work by Bergman. Strange but true: The more specific a film is, the more universal, because the more it understands individual characters, the more it applies to everyone. I can imagine someone weeping at this film, identifying with it, because he always wanted to stay in the Marines, or be an artist or a cabinetmaker.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Jack is able to accept a little more willingly that he is inescapably gay. In frustration and need, he goes to Mexico one night and finds a male prostitute. Prostitution is a calling with many hazards, sadness and tragedy, but it accepts human nature. It knows what some people need, and perhaps that is why every society has found a way to accommodate it. Jack thinks he and Ennis might someday buy themselves a ranch and settle down. Ennis who remembers what he saw as a boy: "This thing gets hold of us at the wrong time and wrong place and we're dead." Well, wasn't Matthew Shepard murdered in Wyoming in 1998? And Teena Brandon in Nebraska in 1993? Haven't brothers killed their sisters in the Muslim world to defend "family honor"?[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]There are gentle and nuanced portraits of Ennis' wife Alma ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Michelle Williams[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]) and Jack's wife Lureen ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Anne Hathaway[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]), who are important characters, seen as victims, too. Williams has a powerful scene where she finally calls Ennis on his "fishing trips," but she takes a long time to do that, because nothing in her background prepares her for what she has found out about her husband. In their own way, programs like "[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Jerry Springer[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]" provide a service by focusing on people, however pathetic, who are prepared to defend what they feel. In 1963 there was nothing like that on TV. And in 2005, the situation has not entirely changed. One of the Oscar campaign ads for "Brokeback Mountain" shows Ledger and Williams together, although the movie's posters are certainly honest.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Ang Lee is a director whose films are set in many nations and many times. What they have in common is an instinctive sympathy for the characters. Born in Taiwan, he makes movies about Americans, British, Chinese, straights, gays; his sci-fi movie "[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Hulk[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]" was about a misunderstood outsider. Here Lee respects the entire arc of his story, right down to the lonely conclusion.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]A closing scene involving a visit by Ennis to Jack's parents is heartbreaking in what is said, and not said, about their world. A look around Jack's childhood bedroom suggests what he overcame to make room for his feelings. What we cannot be sure is this: In the flashback, are we witnessing what really happened, or how Ennis sees it in his imagination? Ennis, whose father "made sure me and my brother saw it."[/SIZE]
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Other Comments - Were this movie more graphic, I am no doubt it wouldn’t have received the acclaim it did , nor the audience, but to score better in this category it needed to be so. Forbidden love does not a sex movie usually make.

Rating 8==============D

An overall score of 83%.

 
15 Points

Eyes Wide Shut - Tiannamen Tank (Rotten Tomatoes score of 77%)

Is movie about Adultery/Sex?

Kubrick’s swan song is a weird movie. The adultery of Cruise and Kidman is all imagined or something happens to prevent it. The adultery is definitely in the mind. The sex displayed in the “secret meeting place” is bizarre and interesting though and for some reason only Kubrick knows, everyone in the movie seems to hit on Cruise, male and female.

If about Adultery, is there a big development?

No adultery between the main couple, although the imagined adultery is a great plot device

If about Sex, is it titillating or realistic?

A lot of people made complaints about the sex not being realistic between Cruise and Kidman, but I didn’t find that. This is probably the first time I found Kidman really attractive and the nude shot in front of the mirror is a great image. Kubrick doesn’t seem that comfortable doing this, but it is reasonably believable. The scenes in the secret meeting place are much more interesting though, especially the “music’ being played.

Foot fetish? – There are a couple of minor moments here, but nothing to write home about.

Quality of Movie – There is so much going here that it is hard to understand it all unless you read more about the symbolism. Kubrick put his heart, soul and eventually life into getting this movie to us and it is worth the time to investigate the depth here. I’ve only watched this for the first time and will do so again, so whatever rating this has may be increased or decreased as I understand this movie more.

Once again from Ebert

[SIZE=10.5pt] Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut'' is like an erotic daydream about chances missed and opportunities avoided. For its hero, who spends two nights wandering in the sexual underworld, it's all foreplay. He never actually has sex, but he dances close, and holds his hand in the flame. Why does he do this? The easy answer is that his wife has made him jealous. Another possibility is that the story she tells inflames his rather torpid imagination.[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]The film has the structure of a thriller, with the possibility that conspiracies and murders have taken place. It also resembles a nightmare; a series of strange characters drift in and out of focus, puzzling the hero with unexplained details of their lives. The reconciliation at the end of the film is the one scene that doesn't work; a film that intrigues us because of its loose ends shouldn't try to tidy up.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Tom Cruise[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt] and [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Nicole Kidman[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt] star as Dr. Bill and Alice Harford, a married couple who move in rich Manhattan society. In a long, languorous opening sequence, they attend a society ball where a tall Hungarian, a parody of a suave seducer, tries to honey-talk Alice ("Did you ever read the Latin poet Ovid on the art of love?''). Meanwhile, Bill gets a come-on from two aggressive women, before being called to the upstairs bathroom, where Victor ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Sydney Pollack[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]), the millionaire who is giving the party, has an overdosed hooker who needs a doctor's help.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]At the party, Bill meets an old friend from medical school, now a pianist. The next night, at home, Alice and Bill get stoned on pot (apparently very good pot, considering how zonked they seem), and she describes a fantasy she had about a young naval officer she saw last summer while she and Bill were vacationing on Cape Cod: "At no time was he ever out of my mind. And I thought if he wanted me, only for one night, I was ready to give up everything ... .'' There is a fight. Bill leaves the house and wanders the streets, his mind inflamed by images of Alice making love with the officer. And now begins his long adventure, which has parallels with Joyce's Ulysses in Nighttown and Scorsese's "After Hours,'' as one sexual situation after another swims into view. The film has two running jokes, both quiet ones: Almost everyone who sees Bill, both male and female, reacts to him sexually. And he is forever identifying himself as a doctor, as if to reassure himself that he exists at all.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Kubrick's great achievement in the film is to find and hold an odd, unsettling, sometimes erotic tone for the doctor's strange encounters. Shooting in a grainy high-contrast style, using lots of back-lighting, underlighting and strong primary colors, setting the film at Christmas to take advantage of the holiday lights, he makes it all a little garish, like an urban sideshow. Dr. Bill is not really the protagonist but the acted-upon, careening from one situation to another, out of his depth.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Kubrick pays special attention to each individual scene. He makes a deliberate choice, I think, not to roll them together into an ongoing story, but to make each one a destination--to give each encounter the intensity of a dream in which this moment is clear but it's hard to remember where we've come from or guess what comes next.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]The film pays extraordinary attention to the supporting actors, even cheating camera angles to give them the emphasis on two-shots; in several scenes, Cruise is like the straight man. Sydney Pollack is the key supporting player, as a confident, sinister man of the world, living in old-style luxury, deep-voiced, experienced, decadent. [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Todd Field[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt] plays Nick, the society piano player who sets up Bill's visit to a secret orgy. And there is also a wonderful role for [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Vinessa Shaw[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt] as a hooker who picks up Dr. Bill and shares some surprisingly sweet time with him.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]The movie's funniest scene takes place in a hotel where Bill questions a desk clerk, played by [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Alan Cumming[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt] as a cheerful queen who makes it pretty clear he's interested. [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Rade Sherbedgia[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt], a gravel-voiced, bearded patriarch, plays a costume dealer who may also be retailing the favors of his young daughter. Carmela Marner is a waitress who seems to have learned her trade by watching sitcoms. And [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Marie Richardson[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt] is the daughter of a dead man, who wants to seduce Dr. Bill almost literally on her father's deathbed.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]All of these scenes have their own focus and intensity; each sequence has its own dramatic arc. They all lead up to and away from the extraordinary orgy sequence in a country estate, where Dr. Bill gate-crashes and wanders among scenes of Sadeian sexual ritual and writhings worthy of Bosch. The masked figure who rules over the proceedings has ominous presence, as does the masked woman who warns Dr. Bill he is in danger. This sequence has hypnotic intensity.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]The orgy, alas, has famously undergone digital alterations to obscure some of the more energetic rumpy-pumpy. A shame. The events in question are seen at a certain distance, without visible genitalia, and are more atmosphere than action, but to get the R rating, the studio has had to block them with digitally generated figures (two nude women arm in arm, and some cloaked men).[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]In rough-draft form, this masking evoked Austin Powers' famous genital hide-and-seek sequence. I have now seen the polished version of the technique, and will say it is done well, even though it should not have been done at all. The joke is that "Eyes Wide Shut'' is an adult film in every atom of its being. With or without those digital effects, it is inappropriate for younger viewers. It's symbolic of the moral hypocrisy of the rating system that it would force a great director to compromise his vision, while by the same process making his adult film more accessible to young viewers.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Kubrick died in March. It is hard to believe he would have accepted the digital hocus-pocus. "Eyes Wide Shut'' should have been released as he made it, either "unrated'' or NC-17. For adult audiences, it creates a mesmerizing daydream of sexual fantasy. The final scene, in the toy store, strikes me as conventional moralizing--an obligatory happy resolution of all problems--but the deep mystery of the film remains. To begin with, can Dr. Bill believe Victor's version of the events of the past few days? I would have enjoyed a final shot in a hospital corridor, with Dr. Bill doing a double-take as a gurney wheels past carrying the corpse of the piano player.[/SIZE]
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Other Comments – This is where it gets interesting. The Illuminati story line is utterly fascinating and made more so by Kubricks death 4 days after the final print was sent to the movie studio, heightening conspiracy talk. At 15 consecutive months this is the longest movie shoot in history and Kubrick had a habit of shooting ridiculous volume of film, including 90 different takes of Tom Cruise walking through a doorway. The symbolism Kubrick uses and the character behaviour, even right down to the title are a mesmerizing look into this secret organization and for one who likes a good conspiracy story this was amazing. A fascinating read is linked here for more detail on all the symbolism. Definitely koo koo, but well worth a read

http://kentroversypapers.blogspot.com.au/2006/03/eyes-wide-shut-occult-symbolism.html

Rating - 8===============D

One thing I haven’t mentioned to date, and it’s a big one. Cruise is out of his depth in this film, but if my suspicion is correct Kubrick wanted this seen by as big an audience as possible and there was no better way than to get the biggest movie star on the planet involved. Cruise tries his best, but he is no match for the requirements of this role. Kidman does well in her bit, but this movie is on the shoulders of Kubrick and Cruise and only one of them does their job effectively. An example of this is the obvious sexual nature of the Cruise character. Seemingly everyone wants to do him or thinks of him in a sexual manner. Cruise doesn’t help the viewer here, although you think he would. Those eyes are just vacant instead of steaming with sensuality. Still it was entirely interesting, has a definite sexual theme and will get more interesting as I know more about the symbolism and watch it again.

Ultimately I am probably going to reward this for the multiple viewings I’m likely to have, rather than for the one I did.

Overall score of 84%

 
16 Points

Y tu mama tambien - Karma Police (Rotten Tomatoes 91%)

Is movie about Adultery/Sex?

Featuring a couple of horny teenagers who are obsessed about sex, then yes we can say it is about sex.

If about Adultery, is there a big development?

Only as a plot point. Luisa is cheated on by her husband, sending her into the path of the 2 boys who want to take her on a trip to Heaven’s Mouth.

If about Sex, is it titillating or realistic?

The sex is realistic enough, especially with the boys not lasting very long in any sexual encounter. The teenage unfaithfulness is explored well and although the final sex scene with Luisa getting the 2 boys to get it on is forced and telegraphed, it doesn’t detract from a fine movie.

Foot fetish? Some nice scenes of Luisa’s feet as she is in the car and otherwise. Definitely a nice bonus.

Quality of Movie. This one ranks well, but not too well. It was enjoyable, had a certain eroticism and a great female lead. The problems I found where with the boys who aren’t terribly likeable and the plotting of the film which is clumsy and ultimately lead to an unreal conclusion.

I’m going with the review of Ed Gonzalez of Slant magazine

[SIZE=10pt] Alfonso Cuarón's Mexican rendition of Jules and Jim is as playful and politically scatterbrained as Truffaut's Nouvelle Vague classic but has the raunchier upper hand: Oskar Werner and Henri Serre never would have thought of doing the horizontal tango. Best friends Julio (Gael García Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego Luna) bid farewell to their girlfriends after coordinated bouts of comic coition. The lonely boys drop E and smoke up while setting their sights on Spanish beauty Luisa (Maribel Verdú), the wife of Tenoch's loutish cousin Jano (Juan Carlos Remolina). During a family wedding—attended by Mexico's heavily-guarded president (lest we forget this is a subtly political film)—the horny lotharios plan a road trip to the fictional beach Heaven's Mouth. Jano's disclosed extra-marital affair conveniently spurns Luisa to join Julio and Tenoch's weekend excursion, during which both men are dumbfounded by her out-of-nowhere Jeanne Moreau routine. Julio and Tenoch are no different than their oversexed American counterparts though Cuarón's libertine fantasia is perhaps trashier and more in love with itself than any American Pie or Threesome. At the very least, it's certainly more conscious of and embraces the queer desire that bubbles beneath many hetereosexual friendships. Julio and Tenoch are the strictest of competitors, and in the film's most delirious sequence, they whack off while lying on diving boards, trying to see who can cum first. The film's money shot: their semen gloriously falling into the water below. While Tambien's narration is as decidedly distancing and off-putting as Jules and Jim's, it's a necessary evil. Though self-important, the film's narration is the only indication Cuarón takes the story's slim political aspirations seriously. Character trajectories are a bit obvious: Luisa goes from kitten to sly fox, getting the upper hand and pointing out Julio and Tenoch's hypocritical foibles (as well as their latent gay lust). Emmanuel Lubezki's camerawork is grainy and textured; his palette heightens the haziness of the trio's trip to nowhere when Julio's turn onto a random road accidentally leads them to the real Heaven's Mouth. Unknown to Julio and Tenoch because of its sacredness, the beach is a secret place tucked away from an imposing imperialism. Pigs invade Julio and Tenoch's campsite and the loss of a fisherman's waterside home suggests that this little piece of paradise will ultimately be lost to foreign commerce. If Luisa's sexual voraciousness seems inexplicable, there is method to her madness; her tartness becomes part of a Madonna/Whore complex laid bare by a final revelation. She turns her boys into men just as Julio and Tenoch accept themselves as "milk brothers" (they both ejaculated inside each other's girlfriends). Y Tu Mamá También (because Julio did Tenoch's mother) is really two films in one. Cuarón's sexual and political lines don't mesh deeply enough yet the film's colorful celebration of unbridled teen lust will set gringo hearts afire. [/SIZE]
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Other Comments

It was nice to see someone take a movie that wasn’t part of Hollywood, so I have rewarded that. There are lots of things right with this movie, but there was also a sense of frustration in seeing some parts clearly not work.

Rating 8================D

An overall score of 85%.

 
17 Points

Crash - Tremendous Upside (Rotten Tomatoes score of 75%)

Is movie about Adultery/Sex?

Sex, very, very, weird sex.

If about Adultery, is there a big development?

Of course as the main couple are married and have affairs, adultery is explored as well, but the developments aren’t really because of the adultery.

If about Sex, is it titillating or realistic?

I don’t know about realistic. Having sex with car crash victims or enjoying sexual pleasure from car accidents has to be on the fringe of even the weirdest sexual perversions. This film is probably vile, reprehensible and disturbing to most mainstream audiences and that what makes it such interesting viewing. You just won’t see a genre of films like this.

Foot fetish? – A couple of foot shots, but nothing too out of the ordinary. Foot fetishism compared to the fetish in this movie is like comparing the hill in your neighbourhood to Mount Everest.

Quality of Movie – This is where it gets interesting. It was memorable, provoking, but I think enjoyment is hardly what you feel after having watched this. Cronenberg does push his audience, which is what great film makers should do. Sometimes it is a beautiful disaster, other times it works brilliantly, but at least they are trying.

I’ll leave it to Edward Guthmann to help me explain further

[SIZE=9.5pt]I'm not quite sure what David Cronenberg is trying to say in "Crash," but whatever it is, he deserves a lot of credit for having the nerve to put it on screen and face the consequences. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=9.5pt]A surreal meditation on sex, death and the eroticism of destruction, "Crash," opening today at Bay Area theaters, focuses on an underground cult of car-crash fetishists. Transformed by scrapes with death, they sexualize each other's scars and limb injuries, re-enact famous celebrity collisions -- [/SIZE][SIZE=9.5pt]James Dean[/SIZE][SIZE=9.5pt]'s, for starters -- and then have it off inside or next to the smashed-up mechanical corpses. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=9.5pt]Not surprisingly, "Crash" raised a huge stink at last year's Cannes Film Festival, where it repulsed a big chunk of its audience but won a special jury prize for "originality, daring and audacity." "Crash" also outraged [/SIZE][SIZE=9.5pt]Ted Turner[/SIZE][SIZE=9.5pt], whose [/SIZE][SIZE=9.5pt]Turner Entertainment[/SIZE][SIZE=9.5pt] owns the film's distributor, Fine Line Pictures, and held up the film's release. [/SIZE]

RIGOROUSLY ORIGINAL FILMS[SIZE=9.5pt]For Cronenberg, a Toronto writer-director who never wastes a minute trying to approximate anyone else's idea of cinema, that's par for the course. In a series of haunting, rigorously original films, in particular "Dead Ringers" and "The Fly," he scrapes deep into his imagination and offers a vision of people at war with technology and their own perverse natures. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=9.5pt]"Crash" is based on a 1973 novel by British novelist [/SIZE][SIZE=9.5pt]J.G. Ballard[/SIZE][SIZE=9.5pt] ("Empire of the Sun") and stars James Spader as [/SIZE][SIZE=9.5pt]James Ballard[/SIZE][SIZE=9.5pt], a TV commercial producer who shares a kinky, sexually open relationship with his wife, Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger). After he and [/SIZE][SIZE=9.5pt]Helen Remington[/SIZE][SIZE=9.5pt] (Holly Hunter) survive a head-on collision and form a bizarre bond during their hospital recovery, they join a network of crash survivors. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=9.5pt]The cult's leader is Vaughan (Elias Koteas), a charismatic, wound-covered loon who haunts hospitals and crash sites for possible recruits, sees the auto wreck as "a liberation of sexual energy" and obsesses over such celebrity auto fatalities as [/SIZE][SIZE=9.5pt]Jayne Mansfield[/SIZE][SIZE=9.5pt], [/SIZE][SIZE=9.5pt]Albert Camus[/SIZE][SIZE=9.5pt] and [/SIZE][SIZE=9.5pt]Princess Grace[/SIZE][SIZE=9.5pt] of Monaco. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=9.5pt]Cronenberg sets his fantasia in a gray, semi-futuristic world and brings to it a slow pace and characteristically muted, enigmatic tone. There's little dialogue or character motivation in "Crash," and almost none of the deliberately telegraphed "meaning" that most directors use to placate their audience. It takes work to burrow through the puzzle of "Crash," and a bit of courage, at that, to sit through it. How many of us, after all, share Cronenberg's fascination with body decay and sinister motifs of technology? In "Dead Ringers," he found kinky allure in a gynecologist's tray of clawlike tools; this time he lavishes his gaze on gashes, sutures and a variety of post-crash braces that his actors wear like fetish garb. [/SIZE]

DISTURBING SEX[SIZE=9.5pt]Even the sex in "Crash" is disturbing and confusing -- acts of desperation, performed ritualistically in wrecked [/SIZE][SIZE=9.5pt]autos[/SIZE][SIZE=9.5pt] with no sense of lust or satisfaction. Spader does Hunter, Hunter does Rosanna Arquette, Spader does Koteas (sharing the film's only mouth-to-mouth kiss) and Unger, an elegant sex bomb with zonked-out eyes, does everybody -- including Koteas in a bruising car wash sequence. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=9.5pt]Instead of facing each other, these crash-sex cultists prefer their sex from behind. Perhaps it's a metaphor for the depersonalizing of the postmodern world, and perhaps it's Cronenberg's way of suggesting our devolution as a species. I couldn't tell you, because "Crash" doesn't drop answers in our laps and doesn't offer the audience the sort of comfort zones and easy resolutions we're accustomed to. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=9.5pt]That's its essence, its strength -- and a source of frustration.[/SIZE]
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Other Comments – I will give this movie a lot of bonus points for showing a movie about really bizarre sex and a film that pulls no punches. This is one of 3 films that have male homosexual scenes and all of them have merit, but there was only one doodle shot in all of them (Kinsey). Film makers can help break down societal taboos unlike few others and the more we see accepted same sex relationships and occasionally graphic sex scenes, the better off we’ll all be. Back to Crash, I have no doubt that Spader must see all kinds of weird movie scripts land on his door that have him in mind. Given his body of work, it’s almost a skill to see what boundary he can push next.

Rating 8=================D

I do rate this well. Maybe not in the top quarter, but definitely in the top half. When a movie can be a true original, about sex and engrossing, it will always be worth seeing

This gets an overall score of 86%

 
18 Points

Shame - Aerial Assault - Rotten Tomatoes score of 80%

Is movie about Adultery/Sex?

Definitely a story about Sex and addiction

If about Adultery, is there a big development?

Apart from his buddy cheating on his wife with Fassbenders sister, not really a prominent theme.

If about Sex, is it titillating or realistic?

Some of the acrobatic sex is a bit far fetched, but on the whole it portrays sex and the effect it can have on someones life

Foot fetish?

Nothing memorable occurred in this movie.

Quality of Movie - This got 80% on the rotten tomato meter, but I think it’s a little better than that.

This is an intense and very interesting movie, which is a wonderful starring vehicle for the brilliant Michael Fassbender. The problem for me with this movie is the Carrie Mulligan character. She is wonderful when singing New York, New York, but outside that she is miscast. She is very brave though in going for an entirely unerotic nude scene. This isn’t a terribly erotic movie and shows the pain that comes from addiction. The scenes of Fassbenders anguish from the gaybar to trying to connect normally with people are deeply moving. Here’s Eberts opinion.

[SIZE=11pt][/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]There's a close-up in "Shame" of [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Michael Fassbender[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]'s face showing pain, grief and anger. His character, Brandon, is having an orgasm. For the movie's writer-director, [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Steve McQueen[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt], that could be the film's master shot. There is no concern about the movement of Brandon's lower body. No concern about his partner. The close-up limits our view to his suffering. He is enduring a sexual function that has long since stopped giving him any pleasure and is self-abuse in the most profound way.[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Brandon is a good-looking, fit man in his early 30s, who lives alone in a sterile condo in Manhattan. He works in a cubicle with a computer. Never mind what his company does. It makes no difference to him. Sometimes in the evening, he and his boss, David ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]James Badge Dale[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]), go out to drink in singles bars. David is a little hyper with his pick-up lines. Brandon just sits there, his face impassive, and has better luck. He doesn't hope to get lucky. He doesn't think of it as luck. Sex is his cross to bear.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]I remember when the notion of sexual addiction was first being mentioned. People treated it as a joke. It was referred to in late-night monologues. The American Psychiatric Association in 1987 defined it as a mental disorder involving "distress about a pattern of repeated sexual conquests … involving a succession of people who exist only as things to be used." [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]The APA is no longer certain it is a disorder. Whatever it is, Brandon suffers from it. In "Shame," however, he himself is the only thing being used. One or two of his sexual partners may be attracted to him in the sense that some men are attracted to nymphomaniacs. There is such a sadness involved.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]"Shame" makes into a lie the universal assumption in movies that orgasms provide a pleasure to be pursued. The film's opening shot shows Brandon awake in the morning, staring immobile into space. He could be a man prepared to commit suicide. He gets out of bed, goes into the shower and masturbates. It will be the first of his many orgasms, solitary and with company, that day. He never reveals emotion. He lives like a man compelled to follow an inevitable course. [/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]He is cold to people. To prostitutes, to co-workers, to strangers. On the subway, he trades eye contact with a woman who may be flirting. Is he flirting? To boldly maintain eye contact is a form of flirting and an aggressive challenge. But he doesn't smile. His is a dreadful life.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]One day he comes home and someone is there. We think it may be an intruder. It is Sissy ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Carey Mulligan[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]), his sister, although for a time, we don't know that. He flies at her in a rage, telling her to get out. She has nowhere to go. He doesn't care.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]His shame is masked in privacy. He wants no witnesses to his hookers, his pornography, his masturbation. Does he think he is incapable of ordinary human contact? In time, we will suspect that Brandon and Sissy shared childhood experiences that damaged them. McQueen wisely is not specific about the incidents.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Brandon lives in a cold, forlorn Manhattan. When he is in a group, he is alone. The sidewalks seem unusually empty. He knows where to go in order to have sex. In one sequence, that involves a gay bar. He isn't gay, in my opinion, but then how is he heterosexual? He loves no one, is attracted to no one, is driven to find occasions for orgasm — whether alone or in company hardly seems to matter.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]The introduction of Sissy allows the film some spontaneity and life. She is as passionate and uninhibited as he is the opposite. She needs him desperately. He fears need. They rage at each other. She works sometimes as a cabaret singer, and in one scene, she performs a song heartbreakingly in close-up. This close-up also shows pain and grief, but no anger.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Not many actors would have the courage it took Michael Fassbender to play this role. He showed similar courage in McQueen's "[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Hunger[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]" (2009), about the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands. The actor and director seem to have found a common resolve in these films to show the thing itself, unalloyed by audience-pleasing techniques. Brandon can't even be said to visibly suffer. He is compelled to repeat the same behavior over and over, and all he gets from it is self-loathing. "Shame" is the correct title.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]"Shame" contains unblinking truth. I have no doubt it depicts behavior that can be accurately called "sex addiction." The film suggests no help for Brandon, although toward the end, he moves somewhat in the direction of being able to care for another human being. For him, that involves being able to care for himself, despite the truth that he feels unworthy to be known. This is a great act of filmmaking and acting. I don't believe I would be able to see it twice. [/SIZE]

Other Comments

The accents of both Fassbender and Mulligan fail a few times, which is explained in script nuances as they moved from Ireland as young adults. Mulligan however makes several bad slips that don’t pass the standard required. Another interesting thing here is how unerotic the sex appears at all times in this movie. I know it is deliberate, but they could throw the horn dogs something surely? This movie is not an easy watch, but definitely on topic

Rating 8==================D

This gets an overall score of 87%

 
19 Points

Kinsey - Val Rannous - (Rotten Tomatoes score of 90%)

Is movie about Adultery/Sex?

This movie is purely about sex, Dr Sex in this case Alfred Kinsey.

If about Adultery, is there a big development?

Not really a big development, just observations about separating sex and love from Kinsey.

If about Sex, is it titillating or realistic?

The sex in this is mainly discussed rather than performed. We do see some scenes of Laura Linney with Liam Neeson and Laura Linney with Peter Sarsgaard and Liam Neeson with Peter Saarsgaard. Nothing too explicit and definitely not titillating.

Foot fetish? – I don’t recall seeing anything of value in this area. As it is set in ye olde days, skin is minimal except for a fully naked Peter Sarsgaard.

Quality of Movie – This is difficult as it is a movie about sex, but mainly cerebral rather than visual. Nothing wrong with that as it keeps to the topic very well. This movie thoroughly fascinated me and it wasn’t what I was looking for. I’d only heard of Kinsey like most of us as the professor of sex, but this movie captured all I needed to know and is successful on many levels.

As per usual, I’ll go to Ebert who deconstructs this film very well.

[SIZE=10.5pt]Talk like that made people really mad at Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey. When his first study of human sexual behavior was published in 1947, it was more or less universally agreed that masturbation would make you go blind or insane, that homosexuality was an extremely rare deviation, that most sex was within marriage and most married couples limited themselves to the missionary position.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Kinsey interviewed thousands of Americans over a period of years, and concluded: Just about everybody masturbates, 37 percent of men have had at least one homosexual experience, there is a lot of premarital and extramarital sex, and the techniques of many couples venture well beyond the traditional male-superior position.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]It is ironic that Kinsey's critics insist to this day that he brought about this behavior by his report, when in fact all he did was discover that the behavior was already a reality. There's controversy about his sample, his methods and his statistics, but ongoing studies have confirmed his basic findings. The decriminalization of homosexuality was a direct result of Kinsey's work, although there are still nine states where oral sex is against the law, even within a heterosexual marriage.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]"Kinsey," a fascinating biography of the Indiana University professor, centers on a [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Liam Neeson[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt] performance that makes one thing clear: Kinsey was an impossible man. He studied human behavior but knew almost nothing about human nature, and was often not aware that he was hurting feelings, offending people, making enemies or behaving strangely. He had tunnel vision, and it led him heedlessly toward his research goals without prudent regard for his image, his family and associates, and even the sources of his funding.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Neeson plays Kinsey as a man goaded by inner drives. He began his scientific career by collecting and studying 1 million gall wasps, and when he switched to human sexuality he seemed to regard people with much the same objectivity that he brought to insects. Maybe that made him a good interviewer; he was so manifestly lacking in prurient interest that his subjects must have felt they were talking to a confessor imported from another planet. Only occasionally is he personally involved, as when he interviews his strict and difficult father ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]John Lithgow[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]) about his sex life, and gains a new understanding of the man and his unhappiness.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]The movie shows Kinsey arriving at sex research more or less by accident, after a young couple come to him for advice. Kinsey and his wife Clara McMillen ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Laura Linney[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]) were both virgins on their wedding night (he was 26, she 23) and awkwardly unsure about what to do, but they worked things out, as couples had to do in those days. Current sexual thinking was summarized in a book called Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique, by Theodoor Hendrik van de Velde, a volume whose title I did not need to double-check because I remember so vividly finding it hidden in the basement rafters of my childhood home. Van de Velde was so cautious in his advice that many of those using the book must have succeeded in reproducing only by skipping a few pages.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]One of the movie's best scenes shows Kinsey giving the introductory lecture for a new class on human sexuality, and making bold assertions about sexual behavior that were shocking in 1947. His book became a best seller, Kinsey was for a decade one of the most famous men in the world, and he became the target of Congressional witch-hunters who were convinced his theories were somehow linked with the Communist conspiracy. That patriotic middle Americans had contributed to Kinsey's statistics did not seem to impress them, as they pressured the Rockefeller Foundation to withdraw its funding. One of the quiet amusements in the film is the way Indiana University President Herman Wells ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Oliver Platt[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]) wearily tries to prevent Kinsey from becoming his own worst enemy through tactless and provocative statements.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]The movie has been written and directed by [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Bill Condon[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt], who shows us a Kinsey who is a better scientist than a social animal. Kinsey objectified sex to such an extent that he actually encouraged his staff to have sex with one another and record their findings; this is not, as anyone could have advised him, an ideal way to run a harmonious office. Kinsey didn't believe in secrets, and he brings his wife to tears by fearlessly and tactlessly telling her all of his. Laura Linney's performance as Clara is a model of warmth and understanding in the face of daily impossibilities; she loved Kinsey and understood him, acted as a buffer for him, and has an explosively funny line: "I think I might like that."[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Kinsey evolved from lecturing to hectoring as he grew older, insisting on his theories in statements of unwavering certainty. His behavior may have been influenced by unwise use of barbiturates, at a time when their danger was not fully understood; he slept little, drove himself too hard, alienated colleagues. And having found that people are rarely exclusively homosexual or heterosexual but exist somewhere between zero and six on the straight-to-gay scale, he found himself settling somewhere around three or four. The film's director, Bill Condon, who is homosexual, regards Kinsey's bisexuality with the kind of objectivity that Kinsey would have approved; the film, like Kinsey, is more interested in what people do than why.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]The strength of "Kinsey" is finally in the clarity it brings to its title character. It is fascinating to meet a complete original, a person of intelligence and extremes. I was reminded of Russell Crowe's work in "[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]A Beautiful Mind[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]" (2001), also the story of a man whose brilliance was contained within narrow channels. "Kinsey" also captures its times, and a political and moral climate of fear and repression; it is instructive to remember that as recently as 1959, the University of Illinois fired a professor for daring to suggest, in a letter to the student paper, that students consider sleeping with each other before deciding to get married. Now universities routinely dispense advice on safe sex and contraception. Of course there is opposition, now as then, but the difference is that Kinsey redefined what has to be considered normal sexual behavior.[/SIZE]
Click to expand...
Other Comments

If there is a weakness here it is the annoying and terrible performance of Chris O’Donnell, who simply cannot act. That is more than made up by a stellar performance from Neeson who brilliantly portrays Kinsey as a man who has no understanding of human emotions at all. The star however is Laura Linney who brings grace, humor and reality to a tough role.

Rating – 8===================D

I do rate this highly, and it wasn’t what I was expecting,

This gets an overall score of 88%

 
20 Points

Sex, Lies and Videotape - Nick Vermeil - Rotten Tomatoes score of 98%

Is movie about Adultery/Sex?

This has a combination of adultery and sex, without being graphic.

If about Adultery, is there a big development?

Definitely has some plot developments in the final chapter relating to the adultery.

If about Sex, is it titillating or realistic?

Sex is definitely realistic, but it is mostly implied and what is shown isn’t graphic at all.

Foot fetish?

We do get a glimpse of Andie McDowells feet, but she is not that attractive and neither are her feet.

Quality of Movie

This is an excellent movie with quality performances from all except McDowell, who plays the prude.

Spader is excellent as the insecure guy who somehow gets women to confess to him on tape.

The Rotten Tomatoes rating of 98% is high and while I wouldn’t go that far, it has plenty of frank talk about sex and most of the sex is in the head. Steven Soderbergh made his real film debut here and showed a distinct, intelligent and provocative style that he continued to build on later.

I’m choosing Ebert again for my review, which has it spot on.

[SIZE=10.5pt]I have a friend who says golf is not only better than sex, but lasts longer. The argument in “sex, lies, and videotape” is that conversation is also better than sex - more intimate, more voluptuous - and that with our minds we can do things to each other that make sex, that swapping of sweat and sentiment, seem merely troublesome. Of course, this argument is all a mind game, and sex itself, sweat and all, is the prize for the winner. That’s what makes the conversation so erotic.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]The movie takes place in Baton Rouge, La., and it tells the story of four people in their early 30s whose sex lives are seriously confused. One is a lawyer named John ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Peter Gallagher[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]), who is married to Ann ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Andie MacDowell[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]) but no longer sleeps with her. Early in the film, we hear her telling her psychiatrist that this is no big problem; sex is really overrated, she thinks, compared to larger issues such as how the Earth is running out of places to dispose of its garbage. Her husband does not, however, think sex is overrated and is conducting a passionate affair with his wife’s sister, Cynthia ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Laura San Giacomo[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]), who has always resented the goody-goody Ann.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]An old friend turns up in town. His name is Graham ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]James Spader[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]), and he was John’s college roommate. Nobody seems quite clear what he has been doing in the years since college, but he’s one of those types you don’t ask questions about things like that, because you have the feeling you don’t want to know the answers. He’s dangerous, not in a physical way, but through his insinuating intelligence, which seems to see through people.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]He moves in. Makes himself at home. One day he has lunch with Ann, and they begin to flirt with their conversation, turning each other on with words carefully chosen to occupy the treacherous ground between eroticism and a proposition. She says she doesn’t think much of sex, but then he tells her something that gets her interested: He confesses that he is impotent. It is, I think, a fundamental fact of the human ego in the sexually active years that most women believe they can end a man’s impotence, just as most men believe they are heaven’s answer to a woman’s frigidity. If this were true, impotence and frigidity would not exist, but if hope did not spring eternal, not much else would spring, either.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]The early stages of “sex, lies, and videotape” are a languorous, but intriguing, setup for the tumult that follows. The adultery between John and Cynthia has the usual consequences and creates the usual accusations of betrayal, but the movie (and, I think, the audience) is more interested in Graham’s sexual pastimes.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Unable to satisfy himself in the usual ways, he videotapes the sexual fantasies of women, and then watches them. This is a form of sexual assault; he has power not over their bodies but over their minds, over their secrets, and I suspect that the most erotic sentence in his vocabulary is “She’s actually telling me this stuff!” Ann is horrified by Graham’s hobby - and fascinated - and before long, the two of them are in front of his camera, in a scene of remarkable subtlety and power, both discovering that, for them, sex is only the beginning of their mysteries. This scene, and indeed the whole movie, would not work unless the direction and acting were precisely right (this is the kind of movie where a slightly wrong tone could lead to a very bad laugh), but Spader and MacDowell do not step wrong. Indeed, Spader’s performance throughout the film is a kind of risk-taking. Can you imagine the challenge an actor faces in taking the kind of character I have described and making him not only intriguing but seductive? Spader has the kind of sexual ambiguity of the young Brando or Dean; he seems to suggest that if he bypasses the usual sexual approaches it is because he has something more interesting up, or down, his sleeve.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]The story of “sex, lies, and videotape” is by now part of movie folklore: how writer-director [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Steven Soderbergh[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt], at 29, wrote the screenplay in eight days during a trip to Los Angeles, how the film was made for $1.8 million, how it won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, as well as the best actor prize for Spader. I am not sure it is as good as the Cannes jury apparently found it; it has more intelligence than heart, and is more clever than enlightening. But it is never boring, and there are moments when it reminds us of how sexy the movies used to be, back in the days when speech was an erogenous zone.[/SIZE]
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Other Comments

This is the kind of movie I watched in my early twenties hoping for lots of graphic sex and breasts on screen. I didn’t get it. Now that I’ve matured and can understand more of the themes on display, I don’t need the graphicness to be turned on. This is a classy movie that deserves to be in the top group, although I wouldn’t have minded the odd T & A shot of the lovely Laura San Giacomo.

Rating 8====================D

This one is as good as a sex movie can be without showing any real flesh. I give this 89%.

 
21 Points

Boogie Nights - rikishiboy - Rotten Tomatoes score of 92%

Is movie about Adultery/Sex?

Most definitely. Any movie featuring characters in the pornography industry is going to have sex in it. It even features some Adultery for good measure

If about Adultery, is there a big development?

Has adultery in it, but this is a sex movie.

If about Sex, is it titillating or realistic?

The sex definitely has a realistic feel, from the unfaithful wife to the porn set ups and roller girl disrobing for the first time.

Foot fetish?

Nothing obvious

Quality of Movie

This is a high quality movie with depth to each storyline and superb acting from the minor characters right through to the major players. The screenplay is superb and fully brought to life by the actors.

Rotten Tomatoes gives this a 92% rating and I think that is about right. The review that sums up my opinion best is made by the great man Roger Ebert

[SIZE=17.5pt]Boogie Nights (1997) [/SIZE]

[SIZE=12pt] | [/SIZE][SIZE=12pt]Roger Ebert[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Paul Thomas Anderson[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]'s "Boogie Nights'' is an epic of the low road, a classic Hollywood story set in the shadows instead of the spotlights but containing the same ingredients: Fame, envy, greed, talent, sex, money. The movie follows a large, colorful and curiously touching cast of characters as they live through a crucial turning point in the adult film industry.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]In 1977, when the story opens, porn movies are shot on film and play in theaters, and a director can dream of making one so good that the audience members would want to stay in the theater even after they had achieved what they came for. By 1983, when the story closes, porn has shifted to video and most of the movies are basically just gynecological loops. There is hope, at the outset, that a porno movie could be "artistic,'' and less hope at the end.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]"Boogie Nights'' tells this story through the life of a kid named Eddie Adams ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Mark Wahlberg[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]) from the San Fernando Valley, who is a dishwasher in a Hollywood nightclub when he's discovered by a Tiparillo-smoking pornographer named Jack Horner ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Burt Reynolds[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]). "I got a feeling,'' Jack says, "that behind those jeans is something wonderful just waiting to get out.'' He is correct, and within a few months Eddie has been renamed "Dirk Diggler'' and is a rising star of porn films.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]If this summary makes the film itself sound a little like porn, it is not. Few films have been more matter-of-fact, even disenchanted, about sexuality. Adult films are a business here, not a dalliance or a pastime, and one of the charms of "Boogie Nights'' is the way it shows the everyday backstage humdrum life of porno filmmaking. "You got your camera,'' Jack explains to young Eddie. "You got your film, you got your lights, you got your synching, you got your editing, you got your lab. Before you turn around, you've spent maybe $25,000 or $30,000.'' Jack Horner is the father figure for a strange extended family of sex workers; he's a low-rent Hugh Hefner, and Burt Reynolds gives one of his best performances as a man who seems to stand outside sex and view it with the detached eye of a judge at a livestock show. Horner is never shown as having sex himself, although he lives with Amber Waves ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Julianne Moore[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]), a former housewife and mother, now a porn star who makes tearful midnight calls to her ex-husband, asking to speak to her child. When Jack recruits Eddie to make a movie, Amber becomes his surrogate parent, tenderly solicitous of him as they prepare for his first sex scene.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]During a break in that scene, Eddie whispers to Jack, "Please call me Dirk Diggler from now on.'' He falls immediately into star mode, and before long is leading a conducted tour of his new house, where his wardrobe is "arranged according to color and designer.'' His stardom is based on one remarkable attribute; "everyone is blessed with one special thing,'' he tells himself, after his mother has screamed that he'll always be a bum and a loser.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Anderson wisely limits the nudity in the film, and until the final shot we don't see what Jack Horner calls "Mr. Torpedo Area.'' It's more fun to approach it the way Anderson does. At a pool party at Jack's house, Dirk meets the Colonel ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Robert Ridgely[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]), who finances the films. "May I see it?'' the silver-haired, business-suited Colonel asks. Dirk obliges, and the camera stays on the Colonel's face as he looks, and a funny, stiff little smile appears; Anderson holds the shot for several seconds, and we get the message.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]The large cast of "Boogie Nights'' is nicely balanced between human and comic qualities. We meet Rollergirl ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Heather Graham[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]), who never takes off her skates, and in an audition scene with Dirk adds a new dimension to the song "Brand New Key.'' Little Bill ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]William H. Macy[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]) is Jack's assistant director, moping about at parties while his wife (porn star Nina Hartley) gets it on with every man she can. (When he discovers his wife having sex in the driveway, surrounded by an appreciative crowd, she tells him, "Shut up, Bill; you're embarrassing me.'') [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Ricky Jay[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt], the magician, plays Jack's cameraman. "I think every picture should have its own look,'' he states solemnly, although the films are shot in a day or two. When he complains, "I got a couple of tough shadows to deal with,'' Jack snaps, "There are shadows in life, baby.'' Dirk's new best friend is Reed ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]John C. Reilly[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]). He gets a crush on Dirk and engages him in gym talk ("How much do you press? Let's both say at the same time. One, two...") Buck Swope ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Don Cheadle[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]) is a second-tier actor and would-be hi-fi salesman. Rodriguez ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Luis Guzman[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]) is a club manager who dreams of being in one of Jack's movies. And the gray eminence behind the industry, the man who is the Colonel's boss, is Floyd Gondolli ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Philip Baker Hall[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]), who on New Year's Eve, 1980, breaks the news that videotape holds the future of the porno industry.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]The sweep and variety of the characters have brought the movie comparisons to Robert Altman's "[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Nashville[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]" and "[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]The Player[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]." There is also some of the same appeal as "[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Pulp Fiction[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]," in scenes that balance precariously between comedy and violence (a brilliant scene near the end has Dirk and friends selling cocaine to a deranged playboy while the customer's friend throws firecrackers around the room). Through all the characters and all the action, Anderson's screenplay centers on the human qualities of the players. They may live in a disreputable world, but they have the same ambitions and in a weird way similar values as mainstream Hollywood.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]"Boogie Nights'' has the quality of many great films, in that it always seems alive. A movie can be very good and yet not draw us in, not involve us in the moment-to-moment sensation of seeing lives as they are lived. As a writer and director, Paul Thomas Anderson is a skilled reporter who fills his screen with understated, authentic details. (In the filming of the first sex scene, for example, the action takes place in an office set that has been built in Jack's garage. Behind the office door we see old license plates nailed to the wall, and behind one wall of the set, bicycle wheels peek out.) Anderson is in love with his camera, and a bit of a showoff in sequences inspired by the famous nightclub entrance in "GoodFellas," Robert De Niro's rehearsal in the mirror in "Raging Bull" and a shot in "I Am Cuba" where the camera follows a woman into a pool.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]In examining the business of catering to lust, "Boogie Nights'' demystifies its sex (that's probably one reason it avoided the NC-17 rating). Mainstream movies use sex like porno films do, to turn us on. "Boogie Nights'' abandons the illusion that characters are enjoying sex; in a sense, it's about manufacturing a consumer product. By the time the final shot arrives and we see what made the Colonel stare, there is no longer any shred of illusion that it is anything more than a commodity. And in Dirk Diggler's most anguished scene, as he shouts at Jack Horner, "I'm ready to shoot my scene RIGHT NOW!'' we learn that those who live by the sword can also die by it.[/SIZE]
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Other Comments

While this movie is about sex and the industry of pornography, there is so much more depth than that. It is a fascinating character study that never gets boring. If I had to have any criticism it would be that the sex is rather clinical most of the time rather than erotic, which keeps it from the top spot.

Code: 
Rating 8=====================D
Code: 
This deserves a very high score and it gets one. Overall score of 92%.
 
22 Points

That Obscure Object of Desire - John Maddens Lunchbox (Rotten Tomatoes score of 100%)

Is movie about Adultery/Sex?

This is definitely a sexual movie, especially the control of it in a relationship. Conchita is 19, Mathieu is well into middle age. He is used to getting what he wants and he wants Conchita. She turns out to be not such an easy catch.

If about Adultery, is there a big development?

Mathieu is widowed and Conchita is single so no.

If about Sex, is it titillating or realistic?

Here’s the catch, he wants so desperately to have sex with Conchita, but she remains just out of reach, he cannot finish the conquest. The movie has both the actresses, yes BOTH the actresses playing Conchita naked a fair bit, as if to tease Mathieu even more. Sometimes they are in the same bed, but when Mathieu tries to force himself on her, she has undergarments that would take 6 men to prise off of her.

Foot fetish? – Both Conchita’s show the occasionally glimpse of foot, most prominently when Conchita is dancing naked for the Japanese businessmen with only her shoes on, but this is a surprisingly restrained Bunuel in this regard as he devotes large portions of movies to the subject at other times.

Quality of Movie – This is one of my top 3 movies of all time. It is an unrestrained joy to see the cat and mouse with Conchita almost always having the upper hand, even when a desperate Mathieu throws a bucket of water on her, or slaps her around. He cannot live without her, he cannot have her. She has him hooked. The 2 Conchita’s are beautiful and it’s a joy to see them. When the absolutely gorgeous Carole Bouquet comes out she is more virginal, but like Catherine Deneuve very icy in her demeanour and yet still out of reach. When Angela Molina comes out you know Mathieu is going to be in trouble. She is more feisty and more likely to push Mathieu even further over the edge.

This is a rare movie on Rotten Tomatoes with a 100% rating

Once again from Ebert

[SIZE=10.5pt]The man is middle-aged, impeccably dressed, perfectly groomed, obviously respectable. He has just barely caught his train. A young woman comes running down the station platform, also trying to catch the train. The man’s face reflects intense annoyance; he whispers something to the conductor, gives him a tip and is allowed into the train's restroom. He emerges with a pail of water, which, as the young lady tries to climb aboard, he pours on her head.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Ah, satisfaction… he settles down in his seat, only to discover intense curiosity among his fellow travelers. One of them, a psychologist who is a dwarf, finally speaks: “I could not help seeing what you did. I can tell from your appearance that you are a gentleman. Therefore, you must have had an excellent reason.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Yes, the gentleman replies pleasantly, I had a most excellent reason. Seeming almost flattered by their curiosity, he tells them a story. And so, on a note both calm and sly, begins [/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Luis Bunuel[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]’s “That Obscure Object of Desire.”[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Bunuel’s characters have been doing battle with erotic desire for more than 40 years now. They tend to be vain and fastidious people, middle-class, concerned with maintaining their self-respect. Yet they have a way of coming off second-best to lust, jealousy and an assortment of peculiar sexual obsessions. And Bunuel, who has just turned 77 years old, seems to learn more about their weaknesses with every year, and to find their passions increasingly funny.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Take, for example, his hero this time, the completely respectable Mathieu ([/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Fernando Rey[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]). He is a widower with no interest in most women; unless he feels true passion, he says, he would just as soon leave them alone. One day a new maid comes to serve him his dinner. She is Conchita: cool, elegant, gently mocking. He is lost. He is hopelessly in love, but his advances serve only to drive Conchita further away.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]He tries what he thinks is a civilized approach, arranging with her mother to provide for the family’s financial needs in return for, ahem… but Conchita protests: “I wanted to give myself to you, but you tried to buy me!” He would by now, indeed, give her anything he has, but she disappears. Then he discovers her again, by accident, in Switzerland. Their life becomes a strange, erotic game of cat-and-mouse, in which the virginal Conchita torments him with her closeness, infuriates him by her inaccessibility. At last Mathieu is ready to settle for anything -- even sleeping with her without touching her. He is totally enthralled.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]Bunuel relishes themes of erotic frustration. His most memorable heroines are those who deny themselves, and we remember the niece sleeping in her hairshirt in “Viridiana,” and Catherine Deneuve's masochistic pastimes in “[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]Belle de Jour[/SIZE][SIZE=10.5pt]” and “Tristana.” This time, though, Bunuel seems to be reaching deeper, to be saying something more. Conchita is not simply denying herself to the man who loves her: she is teaching him a lesson about his own complex nature, about his need for a woman who would be always unattainable.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt]And Bunuel, of course, is exercising his own dry and totally original wit. His film is filled with small, droll touches, with tiny peculiarities of behavior, with moral anarchy, with a cynicism about human nature that somehow seems, in his hands, almost cheerful. His most obvious touch is perhaps his best: to dramatize Conchita’s tantalizing elusiveness, he has cast two actresses to play her. So that just when poor Mathieu has all but seduced this Conchita, the other emerges from the dressing room. Pour a pail of water on her head? Yes, we imagine Bunuel nodding wisely, a man could easily be driven to such an extreme.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=10.5pt][/SIZE]
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Other Comments – The original choice to play Conchita was Maria Schnieder (Last Tango in Paris), but Bunuel could not get her to do the role effectively and he instead used an option he had discussed with collaborators to use 2 actresses. It is a masterstroke as there is a sense of foreboding whichever actress appears and heightens the anticipation of what torture Mathieu will have to undergo next.

Rating As one of my favorite movies it is going to score highly. I will refrain from giving myself top score, but am happy to slot it near and behind another Bunuel movie.

8======================D

This gets an overall score of 94%

 
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Charlie Steiner
Charlie Steiner

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