My Saturday night movie watching--Two Weeks Notice and Basic Instinct

Saturday evenings are often good opportunities to catch up on movies I've missed or ones that I want to see again (infrequent occurrences but they do happen). Last night was one of those evenings. I watched Two Weeks Notice (2002) with Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant for the first time (I don't know how I missed it when it first came out), and after that I watched Basic Instinct (1992) with Sharon Stone and Michael Douglas for the second time. While both movies belong to different genres--romantic comedy and noir erotic thriller, respectively, and both are very good, the portrayal of women in each film is quite different. Sandra Bullock's character is far more realistic and nuanced than Sharon Stone's character, oddly enough for a romantic comedy, and far less cool. In Basic Instinct, Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone's character) is a writer of murder/crime books, with firsthand knowledge of murder. She is a psychopath and pathological liar, brilliant yes, but completely without morals. I can understand an actress wanting to play that role, but the character remains unexplored--a superficial view of a murderess who surrounds herself with other female murderesses. In 1992 when the movie was made, this was probably heavy stuff--a female murderess, extreme behavior, graphic sex scenes, bisexuality, cocaine use, reckless driving--all thrown in the mix. God knows we have had a plethora of murder/slasher films (too many of them) where the psychopath is always a man with a penchant for raping and torturing/murdering women. So now we had a female psychopath. But Basic Instinct makes the female psychopath cool. When I first saw the film in 1993, that thought didn't dominate my impression of the movie. It did last night, and now that I'm older, I waver more about the implications of making a psychopath (male or female) cool. Because psychopaths are not cool--that's an unrealistic presentation of them. They're frustrating and annoying to be around and to deal with. They make you feel uncomfortable in their presence, like you are pinned to a dissecting board, waiting for the worst. There is a certain 'creep' factor associated with them, as in--they are creeps and they make your skin crawl. They are often intelligent, charming, attractive, unattainable to most, narcissistic, amoral, pathological liars interested in playing games with people. They are ultimately destructive individuals and that is their aim. But they are not cool, rather anything but. I have met men (and perhaps one woman) with psychopathic tendencies (intelligent and amoral pathological liars) but they were neither interesting nor attractive people, and after a short time, their superficiality was a turnoff. After a few encounters, you avoid them at all costs. For most men, I would guess that a female psychopath would be the same after a while, after the initial attraction wore off. Few people talk about their experiences with a psychopath, unsurprisingly, since most of those interactions don't go well for the non-psychopath. Most psychopaths are probably not killers, but a number of them can be violent if it serves their purposes. So why does Michael Douglas' 'prone-to-violence' character Nick Curran risk his life by getting involved with Catherine Tramell? Because he has an addictive personality--he's obsessed with her. The film's atmosphere has been compared to that found in some Hitchcock films. I was rather reminded of both Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill (1980), with Michael Caine, Angie Dickinson, and Nancy Allen, (a lurid film if ever there was one), and of Harold Becker's Sea of Love (1989) with Al Pacino and Ellen Barkin. Sea of Love is a much better (but underrated) film than either Dressed to Kill or Basic Instinct, mostly because it had a logical plot, gritty NYC atmosphere, and characters you actually cared about. If you're looking for an erotic murder/crime film that makes sense, where policemen behave rationally (or at least try to), this is the film for you. Basic Instinct is not (in my opinion); it is rather a superficial illogical thriller with a lot of sex and violence thrown in. Guaranteed to earn tons of money at the box office, which it did, thanks to the presence of actors like Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone and some soft-core sex scenes. At this point in my life, I'd simply say--sex sells--the sex scenes are what made this film so popular. None of the characters even remotely interested me, in terms of the types of people I'd like to get to know in real life. But it's a wild ride toward what for me was the obvious conclusion, so in that sense it was enjoyable.

So that is why Two Weeks Notice won out over Basic Instinct for me last night. Because despite the fact that I had few expectations of a romantic comedy being well-written (intelligently-written), non-superficial, and with interesting and witty characters, I was pleasantly surprised. Sandra Bullock's character Lucy Kelson in Two Weeks Notice was intelligent, witty, engaged and attractive. I would want to get to know her. She wanted to make something of her life; she stood for something. Working as a pro bono lawyer when we first meet her, we understand that she has inherited her parents' commitment to working for justice and good (often underdog) causes. So when she meets charming, handsome, and superficial millionaire George Wade (played by Hugh Grant) who mostly cares about what suits/ties to wear and the next woman he will bed, sparks fly and we know how it is going to end since it's a romantic comedy. They're diametrical opposites who are attracted to each other, who like each other and who are willing to change a bit for the other, albeit not immediately and not without major resistance. It surprised me, considering the awful romantic comedies I've seen lately (you can ask me for a list--many of them with Jason Bateman and/or Jennifer Aniston), that this one was so good and so well-written, with characters I could root for. It was actually a lot of fun joining them on their journey toward maturity, watching them admit that they were human and could change. Of course I know that the basic plot was inherently unrealistic; how often are pro bono lawyers offered a 250,000 dollar a year job at a major corporation, how often does said lawyer end up in almost daily communication with her boss, etc. But I can suspend my requirement for logic and my skepticism and just accept the (often far-fetched) premise when we're dealing with romantic comedies. That is not the case with crime thrillers and series; I expect a certain amount of logical thought and reasonable responses to certain events. When I don't get that, I get disappointed, and that happens with a lot of crime movies/series these days.