Classic Movie Review Fatal Attraction

Fatal Attraction (1987) 

Directed by Adrian Lyne 

Written by James Dearden 

Starring Michael Douglas, Glenn Close, Anne Archer 

Release Date September 18th, 1987 

Published September 17th, 2017 

Fatal Attraction stars Michael Douglas as a seemingly happy husband to Ann Archer and father to an adorable 6-year-old daughter. So why, if he’s so happy, does he decide to cheat on his wife? This questions comes to consume the mind of Alex (Glenn Close), the woman Douglas’ Dan decides to sleep with one night while his wife and daughter are away visiting family in the suburbs. Alex can’t understand why Dan would choose to sleep with her and then retreat back to his marriage.

That Alex is also mentally unbalanced does not help matters. Moments after Dan attempts to leave Alex for good and return to his normal upper middle-class life, Alex attempts to kill herself and Dan, not wanting anyone to find out about his fling, decides he needs to stay the night again to make sure Alex doesn’t die and thus potentially reveal his infidelity in the process. This is a decision he will come to regret as saving Alex’s life only furthers her obsession with him.

Will Dan get up the courage to tell his wife what he has done? Will he do it before Alex’s unhinged behavior becomes dangerous to Dan’s entire family? These are the questions of a very minor, very forgettable sub-genre of thrillers. And yet, somehow Fatal Attraction became a massive hit in 1987 and remains part of the cultural zeitgeist 30 years later. Actress Glenn Close as recently as the 25th Anniversary of the film’s release was still being told that she’d terrified men who saw the film.

Why? Why this movie? Why Fatal Attraction? What is it about this sleazy genre thriller that has lasted this long? What is it that keeps this film in our pop culture memory? It baffles me because I have seen knock off after knock off after knock off of the Fatal Attraction formula and none of them are any good. Certainly there is something to be said for being an original but shouldn’t the movie be better than this to last this long?

Fatal Attraction is a cheap, sleazy, silly thriller with over the top performances and capable but not outstanding direction. Adrian Lyne is a director obsessed with sexual politics but he doesn’t have much depth to his obsession. Lyne’s style is to ask big questions but not give the questions much weight beyond the plot in progress. The big question of Fatal Attraction is ‘What would you do if you were Dan?’ That’s not a very interesting question. Everything that happens to Dan is his own fault and while Lyne seems to want us to sympathize with him as Alex goes on the attack, it’s almost comical how unsympathetic Dan is.

Read my full length review in the Geeks Community at Vocal. 

Horror in the 90's Jacob's Ladder

Jacob's Ladder (1990) 

Directed by Adrian Lyne 

Written by Bruce Joel Rubin

Starring Tim Robbins, Elizabeth Pena, Danny Aiello

Release Date November 2nd, 1990 

Box Office $26.9 million 

Director Adrian Lyne is known best for his sexy, sweat-soaked thrillers about cheating husbands, scheming women, and rich guys who pay for sex. So, seeing that he's also the director of a gritty, Vietnam era horror movie like Jacob's Ladder is a little jarring. Now, of course, he does throw in needless nudity, Elizabeth Pena's breasts are lovingly captured on screen for no particularly good story reason, but otherwise, Jacob's Ladder is a grand departure for the tawdry director of admittedly zeitgeist grabbing sex thrillers. 

Jacob's Ladder tells the story of a deeply haunted Vietnam vet named Jacob, played by Tim Robbins. Jacob nearly died in Vietnam after his unit was the subject of a violent surprise attack. Jacob himself was stabbed in the gut and had to have his intestines pressed back into his body before he could be taken back to the base hospital. Jake remembers being gutted by a bayonet but he also has another memory that he cannot quite reconcile. Just prior to his being stabbed, Jacob's unit seemed to be having severe hallucinations and overdoses. 

Is it a dream or a memory? Jacob cannot tell. However, when Jacob survives a pair of attempts on his life and compares notes with some of the members of his unit, it appears that there may indeed have been more to this firefight than a surprise attack. Meanwhile, Jacob isn't sleeping, he's in desperate pain from a back injury. Thankfully he has a benevolent chiropractor named Louie (Danny Aiello) who acts as friend, confessor, therapist and guardian angel. Louis is seemingly the only one able to comfort the ever-tormented Jacob. 

On top of his traumatic near death in Vietnam, Jacob lost a son before the war. Gabriel (Macauley Culkin), was struck and killed while riding his bike. Jacob's life has been a mess ever since. Despite having two other children, Jacob fell apart, his marriage to his wife, Sarah (Patricia Kalember) fell apart and then Jacob nearly died. It's no wonder that he can barely function and gave up life as a Park Avenue Shrink for a relatively more peaceful and less stressful job as a postal worker. Boomers and Gen-X'ers are making dark jokes right now, millennials are a bit confounded and thinking yes, being a postal worker would be less stressful.  Both sides are right. 

Anyway, that's Jacob's Ladder. Jacob barely functions, survives a few attempts on his life, has a couple more near-death experiences and begins seeing demons. He has meltdowns at any function he attends, when he's not sick he's obsessed with his time in Vietnam. He's slowly destroying his relationship with his girlfriend, Jezzie (Elizabeth Pena), while she may have a secret related to what is happening to Jacob. What is real and what is a hallucination begins to intermingle into a confusing mélange of disconnected horror images that all mean nothing when the ending is revealed. 

Find my full length review at Horror.Media 

Classic Movie Review Indecent Proposal

Indecent Proposal (1993) 

Directed by Adrian Lyne 

Written by Amy Holden Jones 

Starring Demi Moore, Robert Redford, Woody Harrelson 

Release Date April 7th, 1993 

Published April 19th, 2023 

Indecent Proposal tries to skirt the issue of its sweaty desperation with a softcore stylishness that had become a cliche trait of director Adrian Lyne well before he recaptured the zeitgeist with this movie. For all of the talent he clearly has and the discourse his movies have inspired, the one consistent thing about Lyne is that he enjoys watching attractive people cavort in little to no clothing while sweating profusely. If you can rely on Lyne for anything, it's getting well known stars to doff their duds to provide late night masturbatory thrills. Not there is anything terribly wrong with that. 

It's the pretense that Lyne has about his movies. Lyne appears to have quite a high opinion of his movies which, without the imprimatur of big movie stars, would be late night cable fare. High minded as Adrian Lyne may be, it's the smut that really revs his engine. In Indecent Proposal he is desperately reaching for a respectability always slightly out of reach, probably because his other hand is reaching for a particular body part that his work aims to stimulate far more than has drama might stimulate the brain. 

That said, there is no denying Lyne's talent for base mass appeal. Lyne's lurid fantasies, just on the dark side of morality, always seemed grab hold of the culture, even if only for a short time. With Indecent Proposal, Lyne made an impact with a very simple premise: What would you do if someone offered you a million dollars for sex, with the permission of your partner? I'm being quite loose with that question. The reality is it wasn't much of a question for the masses but, rather, for the male audience. Would you let your wife sleep with another man for $1 million dollars? 

Indeed, the woman in question, played by the gorgeous Demi Moore, is rather superfluous to the drama of Indecent Proposal. She's the object in play between two arrogant, possessive and deeply insecure men. That might not sound so bad except that neither the movie or the men involved, played by Woody Harrelson and Robert Redford, are remotely aware of how insecure they come off. Each wants to play the 'alpha' male with Redford's fortune proving to be the deciding factor as to who is indeed the bigger dog in this yard. 

The opportunity to explore male insecurity is thwarted by a narrative more interested in moral failings like greed and infidelity than in examining where the real failings of these characters exist, in their massive, unfulfilled egos. The film romanticizes Harrelson's jealous possessiveness, as if he hadn't encouraged his wife to sleep with Redford and was a victim of her greed and his own indecisiveness in the face of a moral quandary. Jealousy is not a cute quality, it's romantic, it's ugly and creepy and while it happens to everyone, it's not a good quality and it makes Harrelson's character more of a creep than the heartbroken romantic of Lyne's conception. 

Find my complete review at Geeks.Media 

Movie Review: Unfaithful

Unfaithful (2002) 

Directed by Adrian Lyne

Written by Alvin Sargent, William Broyles Jr. 

Starring Richard Gere, Diane Lane, Olivier Martinez, Michelle Monaghan, Chad Lowe 

Release Date May 10th, 2002 

Published May 9th, 2002

I have never understood people's desperate need to get married and buy a house in the country. Being a city person, I just can't imagine leaving behind the constant motion for the quiet serenity. There is something very dull sounding about spending the rest of your life with someone so far away from where there are things to do. Maybe that is what drives Diane Lane's seemingly happy, married mother of one to risk her marriage on a stupid fling. Or maybe she just needed to be in a city.

In Unfaithful, Lane is Connie Sumner, mother of one son named Charlie (Malcolm in the Middle's youngest, Eric Per Sullivan) and wife of Edward (Richard Gere), a businessman whose business is never really explained. The marriage is typically mundane. Edward takes the train into work every day and comes home at the same time every day. Connie doesn't work as often as Edward; her job obtaining items for auctions brings her into the city maybe once a week. 

On one particularly windy day, as Connie is shopping for her sons ninth birthday, the wind literally blows her into the arms of a handsome rare books dealer named Paul Martel (Oliver Martinez). Paul is a good ten years younger than Diane, but his lust for her is quite obvious. Maybe having a younger man find her attractive (or maybe Paul's cheeseball game, in which he gives her a book that he has planted in a particular spot for just this occasion) something stirs in Connie and her intrigue will lead her to stray from her marriage.

Edward is not entirely clueless. In fact, after Connie's first meeting with Paul, Edward senses something is wrong. Eventually Edward's suspicions grow to the point where he hires a private detective to follow his wife. Of course, he finds out what he suspected is true and this leads to a plot twist that is surprising, not for shock value but for how studied and quiet it is.

Director Adrian Lyne does something interesting with Unfaithful. A less-skilled director would have made Unfaithful into a predictable thriller with either the husband or the lover as some kind of psycho who flies into a rage and tries to kill everyone. Lyne, however, is more interested in the effect on the marriage. All of the actions taken by the characters are a logical extension of real emotion and not mere plot manipulation. Even toward the end, when the film takes its twisted turn, the actions still feel realistic.

Diane Lane is receiving the best reviews of her career for this role, and they are deserved. Gere is also strong, but the film's best element is director Adrian Lyne, whose lovely camerawork and studied pacing brings a realistic portrait of a troubled marriage that shouldn't be troubled.

Unfaithful is an interesting portrait of the need to break routine and cause change in one's life even if that change is painful and unnecessary. No matter how much two people love each other, there is only so much they can do together without getting bored. That may not be romantic or moral, but anyone who has ever been in a long-term relationship can understand the need for personal time and space and the need to have something that is entirely your own. This doesn't justify cheating on a wife or a husband but a film like Unfaithful provides a logical explanation of this destructive behavior.