Post by No Personality on May 7, 2012 18:17:14 GMT -5
Lords of cinema, forgive me- for, I have sinned. A lot. You see fit to bless us with so many wonderful classics, thought-provoking parables, and life-affirming masterpieces. And yet... I choose to watch the bad ones. Almost exclusively. If I am to confess all my sins unto you - whomever haveth decided it concerns - I watched Sliver 3 times last week. And it's pretty bad. But, consigned be me to the eventual torment of hellfire and assured damnation, I liked it. However, I make an appeal to you in your hour of scornful judgment: I haven't lost myself or sold my soul to the forces of darkness yet. I didn't like all of it. In fact, if I may... not only did I hate a reasonable amount of it, but I feel as though I only enjoyed what any rational person might have. Ehhhh, fuck that! Do rational people enjoy films such as "The" House of the Devil and Trick 'R Treat (2009)
!!! Who's kidding who here? The world's already entirely lost its' ability to claim it has taste; how DARE anyone else judge me?
So... it's out in the open now: I am utterly fascinated by this movie. Sliver was a very odd attempt by Paramount to recreate Basic Instinct. What's most odd about it to me is that Sharon Stone would do yet another Joe Eszterhas screenplay after Instinct had been criticized by so many different people. Was she trying to get typecast?? As a matter of fact, I can't remember any other major role she had in the 90's besides (fairly cheesy) action films and thrillers like this. Yet, she kinda used sex to become a movie star in an era where several people have said there were no more glamour icons. She was sort-of the Madonna of "challenging" roles for women; I don't think many men found her sexy as they did ballsy. And though she may have, in a sense, set women back - she certainly made history and blazed trails for onscreen nudity in Hollywood. Though I almost feel ashamed to say, apart from that, I don't really know what she's famous for. And there would seem to be good reason for that. Look at how quickly the world forgot this movie.
Why did the world forget Sliver? The few critics who almost liked it panned it more for its' ending than for anything else. I'm going to spoil it for you: Tom Berenger - in jogging hoodie sweatsuit, no less - is the killer... that we see onscreen. But, rumors persisted that he wasn't originally the killer in the screenplay. Or the first final cut of the movie. Wiki tells us the switch happened after the MPAA forced the filmmakers to cut down so much of the... nudity (that's right, folks) that it became necessary to change the killer's identity. In a series of reshoots. Nudity is, apparently, a major plot element of the movie. Now that I've seen the infamous (strictly to the frigidly uptight MPAA) uncut version, I should be able to tell you how what we didn't see made it important to make someone else the killer. Well... it's going to sound silly if I try to play detective but, here's how I see things:
William Baldwin was the only other major suspect. The uncut ending parades a slew of his flings with every single single lady under 40 in the building in graphic video form. To a cop, this means he knew them all and, since they all died, somehow he has motive. Beyond that, you got me. I mean, if the cops knew about the fact that Carly and Naomi Singer both looked like his mother and she died, I suppose they might think he was trying to psychologically kill her again. And again. Which, by the way, is freaking hilarious. Especially since he didn't actually kill his mother. She died in a common, routine household accident (and we're given no reason to think otherwise). But, really. Just because he was a giant manwhore doesn't mean he had any motive to kill these women. Unless there's something I'm missing; remember, I'm not only not a detective but, I'm no psychologist either. Furthermore, the ending that exists in the movie now is actually a decent payoff to Baldwin's pitiful "my mom was on the soaps" monologue. I'm not much of a hounddog for the Baldwin Brothers as a pack but this moment is the only one that almost made me a little soft in the heart for the guy.
Is the movie implying that we're supposed to fear people who lie, in general? And are not Carly? Or kindly, balding old men? Because the movie never had a chance of being an effective thriller without one single person to fear. Baldwin's too relentlessly bedroom-eyed and pathetically skinny to be intimidating in the slightest. He also sucks at yelling and speaking with command in his voice. Which makes sense for the part of his personality that is consumed with in-the-shadows, Bruce Wayne brooding / mystique. Tom Berenger? Yeah, right. He actually at one point compares himself to Truman Capote, which right there drains all the John Wayne meets Clark Gable manliness cache the guy might have been going for- and even he was scarier. Colleen Camp? ... Yeah, I just had to do that (understandable if you've ever seen Wicked Stepmother). The spotlight is turned off most of the women. Though not all, since the single creepiest shot of the movie is reserved for ultra-corny Foreign Chic Fashion (Model?), Vida- played by Polly Walker who I've never heard of before this movie or since (and looks like a chubbier version of one of - to keep the Batman thing going - Jack Nicholson's Dead Joker-Girls).
So, yeah, I bought the ending. It leaves a heavy feeling of things being unfinished but it also has its' own message. And a good one. It just needed a far bigger scene of destruction and demolition than the one we got. Carly needed more firepower and to either set the whole building on fire after disabling the hallway sprinklers (that'd show him) or to really bomb that Control Room. I'm telling you, people: explosions are cathartic. Explosions bring closure. Women, when your man cheats on and lies to you: blow up his favorite technological possession, it's more thrilling than rebound sex and less fattening than chocolate. What was he going to do- kill her? (HA!!) Actually, that's another good reason why he couldn't be the killer. Tom Berenger had already been framed, the movie couldn't risk him thinking he could just kill her now. She had to be at the D.A.'s the next morning and CCH Pounder saw Carly and Baldwin together; there's no way he could have covered this up. For Carly's empowerment, though, she always had the option of leaving the building and telling the police that Baldwin had secret cameras in all the tenant's bathrooms.
It's safe to say the movie's got a few holes in it. The buildup to discovering Berenger is the killer, for example. Though a bigger one is anyone out-of-the-blue claiming Gus, the old professor, was murdered. Naked... In the shower... Again, hilarity abound in that theory. I mean, let's forget (for a moment) that the only credible red herrings are straight men with actual reptuations for plumbing anything with a vagina. (Except Colleen Camp; awww...) If we assume the killer is Baldwin, with his abundance of mommy issues and his mother having died in the shower, how does this scenario work out exactly? That he just goes nuts whenever he sees someone in a shower; showers turn him into Michael Myers? He saw Gus in the shower on his monitor and was called to leap into action like a comic book character by his fractured psyche? I got a million more. But for every thing it does wrong, the movie does something right. I forget this one frequently but, did anyone else notice the movie tells us the cameras are hidden in the faux-Lalique glass covering the wall lights? Pointed out by the movie's most expendable character, Martin Landau (tee hee).
None too surprisingly, one of the movie's major saving graces is its' sex. Or, more accurately, Sharon Stone's performance during the sex scenes. The movie is either pretty thoroughly miscast or so poorly directed, that nearly everyone gives a lousy performance (except for CCH, she's incapable of bad acting). And after quite carefully looking the movie over, I would say Sharon is easily the weakest link. Outside of the sex scenes, she can't seem to do anything right. I'm pretty sure some of it falls on the director's head but she fails at flirting, looking genuinely surprised, laughing believably, maintaining suspicion, generating sincere vulnerability, and she's uncharacteristically heavy during the movie's gift-wrapped slasher movie set-pieces. Though this makes her ahead of her time, since this is pretty much the kind of performance new-millennium survival horror movies dream about. In my experience, the true key to acting in a slasher movie for women is: less is more. (Not that the new-millennium movies would know that... or anything else.)
But, during the sex scenes, Ms. Stone proves she has depth. And she stops trying to play that "I'm a little girl" thing she does here because her character is trying to regain power after the termination of her troubled marriage leaves her feeling frumpy and worn out. Baldwin has to suss out her more sophisticated side but she does, in my opinion, completely transform during the sex. The coyness of her awful flirting scenes comes down like a brick wall (with all the resounding thunder of an actual multi-ton brick structure hitting the ground) and she makes us believe that Baldwin has actually managed to hit something emotional in all his drilling. When she cries and pants like she's having difficulty breathing, yet keeps it all in context of pain being relieved by the sex rather than caused by it, that's up-front payment and set-up for several scenes to follow where she would otherwise likely have dumped Baldwin altogether or had stronger words for his questionable behavior (and motivation). Instead, she spends most of the Gathering Suspicious Clues portion of the movie in an afterglow daze. To a point, I'd say this is forgivable.
I guess it's like an equation. That if Baldwin brings out the best in Stone's performance, Berenger brings out the worst. From the moment she meets his character, the wannabe Suave and Debonair (more like over the hill, leather skinned, and severely slowed down by smoker's cough) Jack Landsford, she couldn't be sending a more clear signal: she's not interested. In fact, while he vigorously persues her, she pretty much just uses him to sharpen her flirt. That's all I can come up with since she knows full-well that she's looking for something younger to spice up her life (remember that before even moves into the building, she insists that opera and ballet are too old-timey for her and she'd rather go to a Pearl Jam concert- even though she obviously knows nothing about the band). She's not supposed to have any chemistry with him but the movie keeps forcing them together in far too many awkward situations. All of which require her to giggle like a cartoon pipe with a gas leak and act like a shy high-schooler. Which is the last kind of person in a romantic situation I would want to be or sympathize with.
But, true to form, I've managed to find something attractive in Berenger's broken down, former-Desperado / Lone Wolf character. Well... not really. In real life, this guy would clearly not look this much like a one-time Hollywood movie star (or like Brad Johnson's older brother). It's Tom Berenger, the actor. After walking onscreen as a guy seemingly desperate for Carly's professional approval, to see him go from tall and tanned, deep-voiced, manly charmer (some of that is the movie's would-be embellishment) to jealous little brother whining about her having a telescope and childishly berrating her with "peeper! Peeper! Peeper!" legitimately turns back his clock a good 20 or more years. For the rest of the movie, he's never able to shake this moment off for me. Maybe some of this sudden (partial) irresistability is inspired by just how much Baldwin turns me off. You have to admit, they are a strong contrast. Though neither are my type. It's remarkable how few men in the movie are even close to Baldwin's age, the movie almost finds itself in Rosemary's Baby territory (both that film and this were based on Ira Levin novels).
If only I were done talking about Berenger. Sliver may be an erotic thriller in an assembly line, and there's no problem with that (unless you're a weirdo and think Fatal Attraction - the one that started it all, sorta - was a true blue horror film in some kind of Hollywood drag, and even then it wasn't the slightest bit shy about either its' sex or violence) but it also has the unfortunate distinction of being a trendy technological thriller. Not nearly the first, but all of them dated from minute one. A trend that started somewhere around 1990's quite good Hardware and died in 1995 after an overkill of Virtuosity's, Johnny Mnemonic's, and, ghaah!, Vibrations's (lucky you if you've never heard of that one). It's barely able to coast away from the old fashioned computer equipment (and, for a second you can see, a visible power glove: ouch!) and back into the whole theme of people invading each other's privacies with gossip and voyeurism. It's pretty darn pathetic how apparently every single kind of person in Carly's building or in the entire town is rabidly obsessed with talking like they're in a salon.
Maybe I'm partially blind but I don't exactly see what in this mix makes everyone want to be such a drama queen. Baldwin's character introduces the idea of playing games and I guess that's what the movie's about- in a way. The main thread that ties all the looser pieces together. He likes sex games and *is* young. Berenger is extremely steeped in his own little game and interestingly enough, he's about as far from Carly's age - being older - as Baldwin's character is - being younger. Berenger's game is about proving his vitality. He scores the single largest number of groans in one scene alone with this whole thing in effect- he literally starts screaming at Carly, after having broken into her apartment, to get her to pay attention to what he has to say even though - whether he's right or not - she just plain doesn't give a damn. Like most everything else to do with him, she's not interested. I think I already covered her game, to get men's attention. I'm actually not judging her in any way. Vida has a game too. Her main focus seems to be drugs, and it's pretty obvious how that can be turned into a game. Of chance.
This is all well and good but one of the major flaws of the movie is the ham-fisted way it involves everyone in its' very unnuanced portrait of voyeurism. In fact, to make up for this, the movie tries to dazzle us with its' flashy technology and the classy lifestyle trappings of the people at Carly's job and the other tenants of the building. I didn't want to be that wordy but you know what I mean. If Hollywood movies of the early 90's were actually as classy as they all looked, they would have turned off the mostly middle class audiences who paid to see something as crass and unsophisticated as Basic Instinct actually was (though don't get me wrong- that is definitely a film worth checking out). There should definitely be more details explaining why Baldwin's character is so drawn into this kind of thing (other than the fact that his mother was a soap actress). Or why everyone else accepts him spreading rumors without thinking him catty. This is again why I more than approve of the "get a life" ending. There's definitely a tiny seed of what would become reality TV here, and pre-Mtv's The Real World. If you can believe it. Making it all the bigger shame the movie can't do much with it.
Yeah, the movie's strengths (in my opinion) have absolutely nothing to do with its' alluring tagine. And try all it might, it doesn't drum up any intensity or fun sleaze through its' video footage of bickering or amorous tenants throughout the building. Instead, it feels like a commercial for one of those interactive role-playing Video Games on CD player things. (You have no idea what I'm talking about, do you? I wish I remembered but there was this long string of informercials for a couple of years back in the 90's on, like, The Sci-Fi Channel and The Travel Channel of this product that allowed you to play these, apparently, amazingly-elaborate games on some kind of CD / virtual reality player.) Anyway, not at all like true reality. So, this section of the movie (where Baldwin introduces Carly to the world of spying on people) is suffocatingly bad, otherworldly, and practically unwatchable. Of course the movie tries to portray this as dizzying and all-consuming. Yeah... not exactly. It's a ship that then crashes on the rocks of something like Colleen Camp's cackling chatty hen. These two worlds don't go together and they don't blur our reality as an audience.
However, the movie actually does work (as an entertaining misfire) for quite a long while. The less it bothers with trying to be cutting edge (in terms of technology) and the more it drops Carly into the middle of the building's assortment of classy people with amusingly cliched problems treated with an absurd nonchalantness. The first 2 thirds of the movie is split between Carly getting a man and Carly getting busy making friends with the equally nosy tenants. Again, Stone is the only real problem that isn't overcome. And, in fact, I might be able to say that she poisons Berenger's performance. He may be pathetic from minute one and his intense jealousy doesn't help make him anymore charming (to anyone but me) but he is honestly trying to be himself and get her to like him without playing tricks on her. His only real problem is that the plot is using him. He starts doing ridiculous things just to get Carly to doubt Baldwin and, like I said, Baldwin's the catalyst to her performance improving and me actually finding a way to give a damn about her character.
It takes awhile but I think the movie finds a good reason for Carly to be worth the story's attempt to be dramatic. It's very personal for me, but I've always been interested in stories that in effect use love or sex or a new relationship (especially with a man) to take a character who isn't happy out of their boring or crappy existences. Of course, Sliver doesn't do this quite as well as something like Gregg Araki's The Living End, which is a fully realized fantasy. It's just a surprise for me that a movie that falls as hard as this at least has a fairly decent handle on how earth-shattering great sex with a passionate young man can be. And funnily enough, right after he starts rocking her world, Baldwin's freak of a character starts telling her how screwed up he is and she almost instantly forgives him. The movie doesn't pull off very much but if Baldwin were lighting up my life and looked like Glee's Darren Criss (who's only 4 years younger than me), I'd forgive him for anything just shy of cheating on me.
Now, I might have taken the movie to task for how little its' technology impresses me. It shouldn't have impressed anyone. Even in 1992, when most of the movie was likely shot. But the movie sure starts on an extraordinarily strong note. Both with a pretty good, bassy Enigma track ("Carly's Song," made specifically for this movie) and a good, thriller-styled slasher killing. We get lots of good and surprisingly ominously framed shots of the building, the pacing to this lush techno music is just a pinch tense as well as distancing, and most importantly since the victim is basically killed by a fall, we get a marvelous glass shattering moment. Very stylish. And it's all good from where I'm sitting because the 80's did the gore. Why shouldn't the 90's capitalize on it with style? Hell, I'd rather see this kind of thing than most of the less spectacular, wannabe-brutal styled murders of the exploitation slasher hybrids from the early 80's (all wanting to be as successful as Friday the 13th and practically none being as fun). Or what passes for sleek in the new-millennium's idea of a slasher (which is pretty much an attempt to recreate that My Bloody Valentine heyday anyway).
The movie also impresses with the rest of its' soundtrack and score, by Cronenberg's regular sniper, Howard Shore. It also has the presence of taste to acquire amazing singles - both the absolute best of their subgenre - by Massive Attack ("Unfinished Sympathy") and Lords of Acid ("Most Wonderful Girl"). The former plays during Carly's crying sex scene and the latter I don't remember in the actual movie but, hey, it's Lords of Acid (and, one of their very best tracks). Shore's score is as airy and breezy as Carly's picturesque apartment (even I'd love to live there). And being as horny and quietly groovy as it is, I'm almost surprised it wasn't chosen over the quirky comic snazz of the theme to 1994's noir-esque The Last Seduction (still probably the best of the 90's erotic thrillers). The somewhat provocative Neneh Cherry also gives us a great little smooth, trip-hoppy number, "Move with Me," which plays at the beginning of Carly's party scene. A good mood-setter for any scene. The weaker, latter third of the movie goes for some more Nine Inch Nails (rip-off) sounding stuff. Industrial lite. Also, for some reason, Baldwin's character even has several blown-up images of the cover to NIN's... well, it most closely resembles Broken but the transparent "n" is just a touch too faint.
As for missed opportunities, the movie has plenty of those. It would strengthen the finale tremendously had Baldwin's Zeke earlier thought to try and ground his "like you watch them on your telescope" counter to Carly's moral "it's wrong" with "they're watching you too" or "they'd watch you too if they had this technology." Which would be a way to call back the sequence where Carly looks out through her telescope into the window of 2 people looking back at her through their telescope. Then, it's sad that the movie doesn't do more with Carly's new, would-be sexual freedom. She tries to "win" Zeke's games repeatedly but he always ends up leaping on top of her or getting his way eventually when she becomes extremely quiet and seems to be playing along. I don't think it would have been too farfetched to see Carly start making some creative sexual demands of her own. Using anything as blackmail / collateral, he has plenty of secrets. And... it would have been nice to know more about Vida. Like there isn't a ton of dirt they could come up with given her profession.
I'm a semi-secret JUNKIE for erotic thrillers, when they get it right (perfect example of how to get everything wrong- 1997's The Landlady). Most of them, on their way to trying to be Hitchcock or Otto Preminger, get it wrong. But that in itself created a brand of over-the-top, polished Hollywood schlock that trickled down into low budget and hit its' stride (with the likes of campy teen fare such as 1997's Devil in the Flesh with Rose McGowan). They can't all be as good as Last Seduction. But they perfected a kind of harmless bad moviemaking that I find impossible to stop watching. (Even when it's unspeakably appalling, as the Alicia Silverstone double feature of 1995: True Crime and The Babysitter. Less works of cinema and more like R.L. Stine books gone horribly awry and captured on film.) Most of Sliver is a disaster in the eyes of everyone who worked on it and that's why I find it compelling, as well as the fact that the world forgot it. As for the rest, because there's always more, the movie was edgier - stylistically - than most Hollywood films of its' time. Hell, most of its' mistakes feel like they were made by someone younger. Though that's no excuse for the director- he was 40 at the time.
