Basic Instinct 2 (2006)

This movie belongs here marginally. But even so, here is where it belongs. Do you know what really, REALLY bugs me about this movie? The fact that it really could have had been an awesome MILF-Thriller.
First and foremost I can’t help but saying that this movie marks the most monumentally outrageous, non-chemistry couple of all times. Sharon Stone (Catherine Tramell – quite like the overconfident young diabolic bombshell from Hell, from Basic Instinct) and David Morrissey (Dr. Glass – cold, tasteless and transparent as his classy, glass office) are otherworldly remote from each other. The possible casting failure of Morrissey is just fairly considerable (no news from him since then. Bummer.) Like two actors, in two different movies, which are Basic Instinct and this flick that didn’t turn out so well – not even in the consuming US box office. The main stars don’t meet on screen, don’t meet artistically, don’t meet as figures, don’t really meet in attitude, don’t meet when they meet, don’t meet when they speak and worst of all – they don’t meet when they fuck. I mean I have heard and I knew that “Antithesis bears Attraction” but this seems like the destruction and disproval of all I had heard and known.
All the amazing material from the first BI, now can be considered a tearful case of disappearance investigated by the CSI. All the hands-on magic and suspense, all the talent and ideas of the BI1 set of contributors (Verhoeven, Goldsmith, Eszterhas) are absent, if not awkwardly overlooked. Someone has to teach all these – rather capable of course – Michael Caton-Jones directors, that a sequel owes to be something further and better, not just something suchlike or totally dislocated from the original, with the always easy excuse of the “director’s personal view and vision”
It is not easy to ignore Sharon Stone but it’s not hard to notice the fake, hyper-bitchy, over-sexiness that she pulls through all way long in this painfully slow and nerveless film. No murderous confidence, no authentic manipulations, not that cold iron will, not really interested in psy-machinations anymore and with no useful help from the writers. In some scenes she shines, but mostly she just acts moistly, like the plastic, pathetic, loveless middle aged used-up executive whore from Catwoman, ready to succumb to drugs, alcohol and smokes, just to forget her past, present and future. Why not? Because, the supposedly deep psychological backbone of the script, may be sometimes catchy, but not good enough to support Killer Stone, or anyone else.
The whole script is a mediocre mess of improbable and aimless spins and turns, ups and downs (after fourteen years, we didn’t even get to see any of the other, the most wanted “ups and downs”) without really grasping the viewers’ eye and needed anxiety of a dark and dirty mystery film. It is the usual made-up illusion of an open-ended and thoroughly full of branches and interpretations plot, where there is no such thing available.
Supporting turns by David Thewlis and Charlotte Rampling, waste these fine actors on talky exposition scenes and cliché-heavy posturing, without adding all that a great colour in this blunt, dull and cloudy atmosphere of the movie.
Don't watch this film for carnal thrills and spills - there are none noteworthy and what there is, well, it is pretty lame, unintentionally funny and all that clumsy.
If Stone Cold Vanity partially inspired Sharon Stone to remake her powerful, domineering image with this movie, you must be stone called crazy to believe that any face, shot, margin, shade, resource and aspect of this movie is not centred on her. Frankly, she doesn’t seem to appreciate it all that much and the result is that everything else in this movie suffers more or less.
Basically, follow your instinct and see where the movie will lead you, but don’t make the mistake expecting some cult-status wet, overshadowed, urban and long lost Verhoevenian paradise.

You Got Served (2004)

Back in the old days we had the martial art competition b-movies usually ending up in one on one showdown. Interesting, even if not original, after the first hundred times. The trend of crowdie dance competition movies that followed, put the 00s era one step closer to boredom and repetitiveness, and without the interesting mentors that marked the aforementioned genre.
Everyone has a small part in the crazy dance floor: Blob-made story of street glory, teen-tin-seem script writers with MTV life experience and lower than average sex life expectancy, ghetto with no innuendo, breaking-ma-nerves brake dancers, high school chicks one step from total bitching even if they try pretty hard not to show it, street wise-assness, sub-zero amateur performances, show off moves with heavy continuity and direction issues, romance from the can, good fellas gone bad, kingpins, macho niggas, milk-white pricks and all the gangsta clichés from da hood parading in the most mediocre, light, tasteless and odorless fashion. I mean, I usually get terribly bored in such movies, but actually the genre has showcases that demonstrate real dancing fever and dark back alley social colors like Dangerous Minds, Save the Last Dance 1 & 2 and much more. This is just way less than enough, even for the passionate fans of dance and dancers alike. Not even a colourful dance video clip and certainly a bad basket case of a movie, You Got Served gets the viewer served in every single line and scene.
“Who’s bad”?
Well, this one – but in a really bad way.

Anaconda (1997)

I admit that initially the trailer led me to pretty high action expectations, but fortunately I was saved by an unmistakable rule of a thumb, before going to feed the “snake” with eight euros: no matter what, when the main actors of a movie are not actors at all, you know you are heading to a dead end in the jungle. Here is a slithering example of casting disaster. Along with the usual bait is Jennifer Lopez, who is just the cute face of the vogue that goes well with any dish – something like a Coke with a great ass – and as for Ice Cube, I think that sugar cubes have a sweeter impact and act a lot better. Owen Wilson doesn’t act that silly yet – so he is irrelevant, Eric Stoltz is asleep in the whole movie – well so much of this lucky bastard – and Jon Voight is the prick that everybody suspected he would be – maybe the only non-void and interesting figure along with the Danny Trejo appearance.If you think that you will witness breathtaking action and eye-popping special effects, you have just been snake-charmed by something long and gruesome that isn’t even close to a snake. An anaconda couldn’t and wouldn’t ever push its luck that far, stalk certain targets with such determination or storm in a bolt-action chase. Actually its top-speed crawl is slower than any healthy man’s pacing. Plain and simple – what we have here is just an unusually – even for Hollywood – blown out of proportions movie demonization of an animal, that contrary to the first Jaws – for example – it is all the way the opposite to ANY cinematic achievement. The three (one movie-two tv) sequels that emerged right out of the Big Bad B Bog are just hilariously despicable.Please, don’t let boredom constrict you.