Hulu review: Adrian Lyne’s “Fatal Attraction” (1987)

After Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) engendered the summer blockbuster and George Lucas’s Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977) changed franchise merchandising forever, the American New Wave came crashing down in a cascade of Reaganomic conglomeration.

The profit motive has always been the driving force behind filmmaking, but in the “Greed Is Good” 1980s, with the Cold War between Western capitalists and Eastern Communists heating up to a fever pitch, almost nothing of artistic note was released the entire decade.

It is as low a valley in cinematic history as the ultraconservative Eisenhower years at the end of classical Hollywood’s golden age, when the studios invested more into spectacular gimmicks than artistic expression to compete against television for viewership.

So, through no fault of its own, Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction (1987) is oft overlooked in critical circles because of the decadent zeitgeist surrounding it, but, like its leading lady, it does not deserve to be ignored.

If you don’t know what to watch next, Fatal Attraction is available to stream on Hulu. The psychological thriller was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture as well as Best Director.

Best Adapted Screenplay nominee James Dearden reimagined the script from his own British short, Diversion (1980).

Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas, who won Best Actor that same year for none other than Gordon “Greed Is Good” Gekko in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987)) is a New York attorney with a loving wife named Beth Rogerson (Best Supporting Actress nominee Anne Archer).

While Beth and their daughter, Ellen (Ellen Hamilton Latzen), spend the weekend in the country with Beth’s parents, Howard and Joan Rogerson (Tom Brennan and Meg Mundy), Dan indulges in an affair with editor Alexandra Forrest (Best Actress nominee Glenn Close).

Dan dismisses the tryst as a one-night stand, but the stalkerish Alex develops a psychotic obsession with him that threatens to destroy his life as he knows it.

Between Fatal Attraction and Lyne’s companion piece, Unfaithful (2002), wherein the wife (Oscar nominee Diane Lane) is the cheating spouse and the husband (Richard Gere) kills the homewrecker (Oliver Martinez), the filmmaker is the king of the erotic domestic noir.

The three women nominated under his directorship (Close, Archer, and Lane) speak to the humanity and multiplicity with which he characterizes them.

They fluctuate from Close’s hysteria to Archer’s heartache to Lane’s shame, and all of them suffuse these respective, pulpy dramas with a cathartic, tragic whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Close is an artist who deserves greater stardom than she’s been given (like a damn Oscar, for starters), and, unfortunately for her (but thankfully for the rest of us), she created in Alex a villain so classic, nay, so iconic, it typecast her for the remainder of her career.

Alex is all at once a revelation and an enigma, who can communicate so much through a look on her face but can raise just as many questions with what’s left unsaid.

Such subtext, read from between the lines of dialogue, suggests a force of nature of psychopathy so much more than just an over-the-top cautionary tale for adulterous men.

And her fellow nominee, Archer, is written at the apex of this love triangle from Hell, the altruistic promise-keeper to Douglas’s narcissistic oath-breaker, the pragmatic protector to Close’s sadistic predator.

Foreshadowing is the piano we see hanging by a frayed rope above the cast’s heads in a suspense picture, and Archer is the one hacking away at it with a knife.

When Dan tells Alex he’ll kill her if she tells Beth about them, he doesn’t because he’s the one to tell Beth; when Beth tells Alex she’ll kill her if she ever comes near her family again, Alex calls her bluff, Beth stays true to her word, and the “fatal attraction” is consummated.

Bolstering the production’s writing, directing, and editing is Michael Kahn and Peter E. Berger’s award-nominated editing. Their cuts are as sharp as the edge of Alex’s blade, pricking shocked gasps out of you even after repeat viewings.

The jump scare where Beth emerges from the shadows behind Dan to touch his shoulder as the camera slowly closes in on him, Alex’s crazed cassette tape playing on voiceover, is captured not through a loud noise or a heavy-handed musical cue, but with Hitchcockian claustrophobia.

Although Douglas wasn’t up for an award here, he is very much in his element.

If this is a companion piece to Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct (1992), wherein he also juggles a devoted brunette (Jeanne Tripplehorn alongside a homicidal blonde (Sharon Stone), then is the master of playing the sleazy everyman.

This morally gray characterization is what distinguishes Fatal Attraction from, say, Steve Shill’s Obsessed (2009), because Dan and Alex actually have sex, thus painting the film’s antihero and antagonist in unsympathetic and sympathetic shades, respectively; we voyeuristically share in Alex’s motivations, and this conflicting internalization sparks hotter tension.

As unfeelingly as Dan uses Alex for his own greedy pleasure before throwing her away, the film does seem to demonize Alex for feeling too much. Psychology academics diagnose Close’s performance as symptomatic of borderline personality disorder.

Statistically speaking, the mentally ill are more likely to be victims of violent crime than perpetrators of it, which is why the original “Madame Butterfly” denouement, though anticlimactic, is preferred by many critics (including Close herself).

Also, women are less often stalkers than men.

That is why, for all its flaws (one of which is the pains it takes to age Jennifer Lopez’s student (Ryan Guzman) so their fling is less morally ambiguous), Rob Cohen’s The Boy Next Door (2015) is a more realistic interpretation of the Fatal Attraction formula than Fatal Attraction.

The intersection between Alex’s mental health and gender is all the more unfortunate when one considers how the film punishes her and her unborn child, even though Dan is the one who plays with her life like it’s nothing.

And the Fatal Attraction formula isn’t even the Fatal Attraction formula – Clint Eastwood’s directorial debut, Play Misty for Me (1971), did it first.

In it, Eastwood hooks up with a knife-wielding Jessica Walters, who slashes her own wrists when he dumps her and then comes after his love interest (Donna Mills)… sound familiar?

Especially after the more sensationalistic finale made it into the final cut, Fatal Attraction all but plagiarizes Play Misty for Me.

But the thing about Fatal Attraction is that it surpasses the campy, auteuristically amateurish Play Misty for Me, and Obsessed and The Boy Next Door are surpassed by both.

As with David Fincher’s Gone Girl (2014) to come after it and Sir Alfred Hitchcock’s films to come before it, Fatal Attraction isn’t taken more seriously because it’s a genre movie.

But it ought to be reevaluated as one of the only truly “great” releases of its time, for its attention to detail in addition to its transcendent filmmaking.

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Kirk Douglas dies at 103 years old

Actor Michael Douglas posted on Instagram that his father, Golden Age Hollywood star Kirk Douglas, died today at 103 years old, according to ABC News. Born Issur Danielovitch on December 9, 1916, in Amsterdam, New York, Douglas changed his name before enlisting in the Navy for World War II; he made his Broadway debut in a musical prior to the war, and after he was injured and discharged in 1944, he returned to acting. Nominated three times throughout his career, he was finally given an honorary Academy Award in 1996, the same year he suffered a stroke which impacted his speech.

Harvey Weinstein accuser testifies against disgraced film mogul in court

Thirty-four-year-old former actress Jessica Mann testified Friday that sixty-seven-year-old Harvey Weinstein assaulted her more than once after meeting her at a party in 2013, including raping her in a Manhattan hotel room, according to The Daily Beast. Weinstein, who dozed off repeatedly during Mann’s testimony, has pled not guilty to five criminal sexual charges, including three related to his alleged incidents with Mann, and two involving Miriam Haleyi, a former production assistant on Bravo’s Project Runway (2004-). Mann’s second day of testimony was cut short Monday after she burst into tears while reading an email to an ex-boyfriend from May 2014 wherein she first accused Weinstein of sexual assault.

Steven Soderbergh’s “Contagion” (2011) goes viral in wake of coronavirus outbreak

With the coronavirus breaking out from China, Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011), a thriller about an apocalyptic epidemic, has been downloaded enough times to crack the top ten of the UK iTunes movie rental chart, ranking it alongside more recent hits, according to The Guardian. The deadly virus in the film also originates out of China because of a bat, as more than one Twitter user have pointed out. This example of “life imitating art” calls to mind the three-day conference the Pentagon hosted with Hollywood screenwriters and producers after the September 11 attacks to brainstorm possible worst-case scenarios for future atrocities.

Amazon Prime review: Victor Fleming’s “Gone with the Wind” (1939)

Even though 1946 was commercially the most profitable year in film history as GIs came home from the war in a celebratory mood, 1939 was artistically the richest for classical Hollywood.

Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) exemplifies filmmaking as the great American art form; Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939) represents all the Western culture and history European refugees brought to Golden Age Hollywood in the wake of World War II; Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939) did for color film what Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer (1927) did for talkies.

Conceivably, it was because it was the year Adolf Hitler invaded Poland, and the world, already in the throes of the Great Depression, needed an escape more than ever, so these creatives were inspired to lead the way to a more beautiful reality through the visceral medium that is cinema.

Whatever the case may be, it was Fleming’s own Gone with the Wind (1939) which took home the Academy Award for Best Picture that year.

If you don’t know what to watch next, Fleming’s other Technicolor classic is available on Amazon Prime.

The epic historical romance is an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1936 Margaret Mitchell novel of the same name (with scriptwriter Sidney Howard taking home the Oscar).

In addition to its ten Academy Awards, including Best Director, the film is also the highest-grossing movie of all time (when adjusted for inflation).

It’s 1861 Georgia, and sixteen-year-old Southern belle Scarlett O’Hara (Best Actress Vivien Leigh) has a crush on Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard), who, despite leading her on, has eyes only for his cousin, Melanie Hamilton (Best Supporting Actress nominee Olivia de Havilland).

As Scarlett manipulates her way closer to Ashely over the next twelve years, she encounters the Charlestonian rogue Rhett Butler (Best Actor nominee Clark Gable), who loves her as obsessively as she loves Ashley.

All around them, the American Civil War and Reconstruction take the torch to the only way of life Scarlett has ever known, until, like the passage of time, it, too, is gone with the wind.

No other anecdote from the tempestuous production better encapsulates the contradictory cinematic importance as well as intersectional regression of the feature than Hattie McDaniel’s Best Supporting Actress win for the role of Mammy, the O’Hara family’s housemaid.

Though she was the first black person to win an Oscar in the history of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (and a woman at that), she was segregated from the rest of the white attendees.

Furthermore, the “Mammy” media stereotype, named for her character, is not a positive representation.

The gender politics are just as turbulent. The iconic image of Rhett sweeping Scarlett off her feet immediately precedes a rape.

Bracketing this mis-romanticized moment in filmic history are scene after scene of the entitled leading man threatening or otherwise verbally abusing  the strong, financially independent leading lady, and worse still, it’s almost as if Scarlett deserves it because she’s such an antihero.

The nearly four-hour affair is technically dated as well. It belongs more to its producer, David O. Selznick of Selznick International Pictures, than it does its filmmaker.

Indeed, Oscar notwithstanding, Fleming’s directorial style is dwarfed next to Selznick’s megalomaniacal sweep.

Gone with the Wind is very much of its time, between its thesis that liberated American slaves were happier in subservient roles, Rhett’s spectacularized, brutal “punishment” of Scarlett, and its self-indulgent, melodramatic production value, but it is still a cinephilic must-watch.

Without it, Selznick might not have been able to recruit Sir Alfred Hitchcock stateside for Rebecca (1940), the auteur’s only Best Picture winner, and we might not have borne witness to the greatest Hollywood works ever created.

And without Hitchcock, we wouldn’t have auteur theory as we know it today.

Then again, the part the producer plays in a picture’s success is frequently overlooked and underappreciated (especially up against the director).

Darryl F. Zanuck, for instance, is the wunderkind behind many of the studio system’s early successes, such as William A. Wellman’s The Public Enemy (1931). As pedestrian as Fleming is here, Selznick’s genius makes up for it and then some.

Even under Fleming’s studio-interfered direction, Leigh delivers the first of two companion pieces which define her star persona. The second is Blanche DuBois in Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), for which she earned her second Oscar.

Her progression from the vital, self-preservationalistic Scarlett to the poorly aged, defeated Blanche mirrors the multifacetedness of her artistry, personalized by the bipolar disorder she lived with all her life; truly, she was a worthy equal to her spouse, Sir Laurence Olivier (whose classicalism is as esteemed as Marlon Brando’s Method in A Streetcar Named Desire, and who starred in Rebecca alongside de Havilland’s sister, Joan Fontaine).

Gone with the Wind is nothing if not a technical magnum opus, even if it only redeems itself dramatically through Leigh.

Its cinematography, editing, and art direction were also showered with statuettes, and two honorary awards were set aside for the film’s use of coordinated equipment and color.

Sherman’s burning of Atlanta is an ode to practical effects – at eighty years old, the setpiece is more gracefully aged than many of the computer-generated fantasias churned out in our time.

And Gone with the Wind, as socio-politically indefensible as it is, is still a towering cinematic triumph. It is as watchable now as it was in 1939, all five acts of it, and it does illuminate how the penal code substituted slave labor for Scarlett.

Between this and D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), another influential (and problematic) Civil War epic, Gone with the Wind and the survivalistic woman at its core marks the superior film.

It is a treasure from a lost moment in filmmaking, back when the studios were dream factories crafting fantasies with all the dependency of a Fordist assembly line, long before they became conglomerate-owned toy manufacturers rebooting and remaking focus group nostalgia.

It is a totem of a bygone era that united strangers all across the globe by the millions in a time of diplomatic and economic strife. It is a product of its time in all the worst and best ways, a filmmaking gilded age gone with the wind.

Netflix greenlights Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein film, with all-star producers

Netflix has acquired the rights to the untitled Leonard Bernstein biopic Bradley Cooper will direct, star in, and produce, from a screenplay he co-wrote with Academy Award-winning scriptwriter Josh Singer, who wrote Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight (2015), according to Deadline. Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Todd Phillips are all set to produce, with Netflix determined to ride its own wave of star-driven prestige success from this year’s Best Picture nominees, Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019) as well as Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story (2019). Cooper’s sophomore effort will cover thirty years of marriage between Bernstein and his wife, Chilean-born actress Felicia Montealegre.

Disney rebranding 20th Century Fox

After buying 20^th Century Fox last year for seventy-one billion dollars, Disney will remove “Fox” from the name of this film division, which will be rebranded as “20^th Century Studios” without the word “Fox” in its iconic logo, according to The Washington Post. Fox Searchlight, the prestige unit, will also be renamed “Searchlight Pictures,” while Twentieth Century Fox Television as well as Fox 21 Television Studios will retain “Fox” in their names for now. The maneuver comes as Disney’s attempt at distancing itself from Rupert Murdoch’s new Fox Corporation, which counts the Fox Broadcasting Network and Fox News among its assets.

Hulu review: Paul Feig’s “A Simple Favor” (2018)

Can you keep a secret?

If you don’t know what to watch next, Paul Feig’s A Simple Favor (2018) is available to stream on Hulu. The black comedy mystery thriller stars Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively. It is based on the 2017 novel of the same name by Darcey Bell.

Stephanie Smothers (Kendrick) is a widowed single mother who vlogs.

She befriends Emily Nelson (Lively), a fashion PR director as well as wife to English professor Sean Townsend (Henry Golding), after a playdate between their sons, Miles Smothers (Joshua Satine) and Nicky Townsend (Ian Ho).

When Emily disappears, Stephanie tries to solve the mystery.

All fictional genres are governed by their respective rules of writing, especially in film, which is edited according to an assembly-line formula as cutting as journalism, but the beats of suspense are arguably the most rhythmically drummed.

Jessica Sharzer’s script marches along its tightrope of tension with nary a misstep, a whole as much greater than the sum of its parts as a jigsaw puzzle. This female-led noir, written by two different women, feminizes a stereotypically misogynistic tradition of storytelling.

And leading the charge is Lively, the femme fatale herself. Even with a male filmmaker behind the camera, she is not objectified under the male gaze – in fact, her costumery, though sexy, is borderline androgynous, stylizing her sex appeal without exploiting it.

Through a look on her face, Lively can charge even just a line of dialogue into a livewire.

Kendrick dynamizes, too, as the unreliable narrator with secrets of her own. She chases her candy-coated vlogger persona with an ominous subtext which unsettles every foundation she lays for this closet where she hides her skeletons.

Stephanie is as psychologically complex as any noir antihero, but in a way that doesn’t masculinize her.

Now, for all the movie’s generic pleasures, its comedy dulls its sharp edges. The climactic fart joke is anticlimactic, and, as with many age-diverse casts, the child actors try too hard (which is not to judge them, but the adults who write and direct their characters).

This isn’t to say humor and crime are mutually exclusive, but, where, say, David Fincher’s Gone Girl (2014) satirizes the “missing white woman” media narrative ingeniously, A Simple Favor is apolitically set in white, upper-middle-class suburbia.

Still, no picture is above reproach, and while A Simple Favor isn’t perfect, like Stephanie and Emily, it’s picture perfect.

Warner Bros. signs deal with AI startup to predict film success

Film company Warner Bros. has signed a deal with Los Angeles startup Cinelytic, which utilizes machine learning to predict film success at the greenlight stage, but the artificial intelligence will assist the studio’s marketing as well as distribution decisions, according to The Verge. The software’s fantasy football algorithm allows customers to pitch a genre, budget, actors, and so forth, tweaking individual elements to see how they affect the hypothetical movie’s performance in different demographics and markets. Scientific studies, however, show that AI only regurgitates self-evident findings (such as “Scarlett Johansson is a bankable star”) which can be discovered without AI.

The advent of “extreme film criticism”

Review aggregate sites such as Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic have also degraded long-form analysis. (Image Courtesy: The Los Angeles Review of Books).

With the rise of home video, film criticism (as per the French New Wave filmmakers behind the Parisian Cahiers du cinema in the 1950s) democratized, and to compete against the amateurs, professionals resort to “extreme film criticism,” according to the Los Angeles Review of Books. When AMC theaters screened all twelve Marvel movies leading up to the release of Anthony and Joe Russo’s Avengers: Infinity War (2018) that April, IndieWire reviewer David Ehrlich as well as The New York Times critic John Bailey subjected themselves to the thirty-one-hour marathon. Even this practice harkens back to François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Éric Rohmer, who would spend entire days at the Cinémathèque Française bingeing the American masterpieces over and over again.