Movies Watched -- Basic Instinct (1992)

Added on by C. Maoxian.

128 minute running time so 28 minutes too long … as if Hitchcock had made a soft-core porn thriller … this movie made a 22-year-old boy I know pretty horny at the time, but it just makes me laugh now … Verhoeven really went to town with all the Hitchcock stuff, the music, San Francisco, the blonde, the brunette, the rivalry, etc. Gorgeous police shrink has fake eyeglasses, Newman as D.A. in the classic leg-crossing scene, black and white Lotus Esprits (see why we had that poster of a red one on the bedroom wall?), lesbian love (super risqué in 1992), Lieutenant sniffs Douglas’s gun after the I.A. guy is shot (big laugh), no way a cop could afford that apartment in S.F., even in the early 1990s, lots of mentions of cocaine, Pizza Hut box for product placement, Michael Douglas age 48 in da club wearing a V-neck sweater with nothing underneath (another big laugh), Miss Crawford County, Pennsylvania’s bod still good at age 34, Douglas beat the hell out of that Mustang driving it up those S.F. steps, and he’s just fine after being hit by a car and then backed over … “magna cum laude pussy” (another big laugh), “She’s evil! She’s brilliant!” (another big laugh). Michael Douglas has a fantastic smoker’s voice, so much so that I think he got throat cancer (let me google that), so yeah, this is a classic in many ways (but not a John Farr reco). It’s way too long and dumb to get a green-go, though it’s good for laughs 30 years after the fact, and should be seen for nostalgia reasons.

Exactly what do you have in mind, Newman?.