Brian's Thoughts on Movies

 Basic Instinct made a loud cultural noise when it was released in 1992, right before the term "political correctness" began to be used widely.  It is a dark story conceived by screenwriter Joe Esterhas  about the investigation into the murder of a former rock star in which the prime suspect is a manipulative,beautiful, and openly bisexual woman who wrote a novel about the same thing.  A lot of suspense films at the time earned their scares by setting up scenes of killers surprising their overpowered victims (Cape Fear, Hand that Rocks the Cradle, Misery, Sleeping with the Enemy).  The protagonist was usually trying to escape the antagonist but Basic Instinct inverts this by having the "hero" deliberately goading the "villain" to come after him. Spoilers for both Basic Instinct films: Dutch Director Paul Verhoven, a man who likes to push the envelope and whose films are often guilty pleasures, interprets this material as a tasteless but engrossing enterpri

 In the 1980s when I was both a teenager and as a burgeoning film fan there was no comedy star I found more entertaining than Chevy Chase.  Chase was smart, knew how to play irreverence and sarcasm better than anyone, and had a writer's sense of how to build and payoff a joke.  He was also an expert with physical comedy, perhaps highlighted best by the pratfalls he took while playing Gerald Ford as a clutz on Saturday Night Live.  Chase wrote a chapter in a book called "Tools of the Trade" on it in which he explains how to fake getting slammed in the face with a door (a trick I pulled on my mother to her horror one time).  Chase could play terrific tricks with his face, switching quickly from one expression to another to great effect.  In the 80s even the films he was in that did not work well always had funny moments (a moment in the otherwise dull Spies Like Us has him using every trick he can think of to cheat on a test). Fletch, Foul Play, Seems Like Old Times and the