So Exciting That It Took Down An A-Lister!

Just a friendly reminder that if you like to hear chicks discuss Scarlett Johansson luring naked men to sexy death in alien space goo, then this week's podcast episode of The Feminine Critique is for you. My partner in crime Christine joins me as we tackle Jonathan Glazer's recently divisive indie hit Under the Skin and his unnecessarily controversial (but super good) 2004 film Birth.

Head over to iTunes to hear that plus a whole lot more talk on all things film, including just how awesome Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is and the true glory of watching a gorilla drink a martini.

C'mon. You can't tell me that isn't the best thing you've seen in your life. I mean, you CAN tell me, but there's no way in Africa that I'll believe you.

Jigsaw Cleaning, Kidman Weeping, & Baldwin Malicing

Back in high school and college (oh fine: and last week), my gal pals and I would periodically revise our very detailed, very organized lists of prospective famous boyfriends that we would like to have. Categories were specific: Olympic Athlete (figure skater Elvis Stoijko), American Athlete (former utility Met Joe McEwing), Silver Fox (Steve Martin now that Leslie Nielsen moved into the category of Dead Crush), and so on. One of the most contested labels was The Guilty Pleasure, not to be confused with the Conventionally Unattractive (Jon Lovitz continues to hold that spot). The Guilty Pleasure, you see, might have the body of an Adonis and face of a Pitt, but admitting that you would like to sleep with him is not something you're comfortable with wearing across a t-shirt.

For most of the late 90s into early 21st century, my guilty pleasure was Alec Baldwin.

Multiple Emmy award winner Alec Baldwin? Jack Donaghy himself? The man who launched a supremely awesome Geico commercial? What's there to be guilty about that, you ask.

Ah, youth. Travel with me to a different time, one when cell phones were mocked for being more than Q-tip sized and Temptation Island was positively scintillating. This is a world where people associated Alec Baldwin with his steely-eyed overhamming in The Juror and other similarly forced sexytime thrillers. Young women in 2002 didn’t have crushes on Alec Baldwin.

Well, SOME did, and I was one. But to say that now means nothing. He’s JACK DONAGHY. An SNL treasure! 

I don’t know what the point of this intro was, other to say that I liked Alec Baldwin before it was cool to do so.

Now about Malice...

Quick Plot: Well, 'quick' is sometimes an impossible thing. Without spoiling anything, let's just say that Malice is about a married couple (Bill Pullman's nerdy college dean Andy and Nicole Kidman's baby-coveting and but uterus-hurting Tracey) whose lives change forever after they rent the third floor of their fixer-upper colonial house to Alec Baldwin's Jed, a hotshot surgeon with a high tolerance for bourbon and high opinion of himself. Meanwhile, a serial rapist is attacking some of Andy's female students, including a dirty blond post-Hook pre-Brad Pitt Gwyneth Paltrow.

Maybe these storylines are connected. Maybe they are not. Maybe there's a reason why a well-respected heart surgeon can't afford to rent his own place. Maybe every New England college has its own rapist. Maybe there was some sort of bonus for any actor in the film who attempted a New England accent and Bebe Neuwirth as the fairly incompetent police detective was the only taker. 

Or maybe, just maybe, every film needs an extended Anne Bancroft cameo.

You might think I’m dancing around synopsizing Malice. You might be right.

Oh, that time I didn’t need the maybe. You are indeed more than right.

Malice is essentially a film built on misdirection, so to go into any detail risks not just a few spoilers, but also ruining the very effect of the film. Depending on your mood, you might find some of its tricks to be forced or unnecessarily complicated, but there’s also something truly exciting in catching twists that you never thought to expect. Sure, seven Saw films have taught us to perk up our sensors when Tobin Bell strolls into a scene, but that doesn’t mean we know what his subplot has to do with our main characters. Seriously, I almost guarantee that.

High Notes

Aforementioned extended Anne Bancroft cameo. Seriously, after a rough night of prayer to the porcelain god, I’d thought I'd sworn off drinking scotch for good but I would give up my beloved beer forever if it meant I got to share a bottle of single malt with that dame

Low Notes

The more you think about certain details involved in the secrets of Malice--the history of a certain marriage, a double life that doesn’t seem logistically possible, the fact that a major crime may have only existed in the screenplay to incidentally reveal a key character detail--the harder it is to accept a lot of the story. So like most difficult things in life, just don’t think about it

Lessons Learned

If you play with plastic bags, Nicole Kidman will tie you up and feed you to the kid monster

Nothing turns Bill Pullman on like eating Chinese food in bed

Office supply rooms for college administration offices generally resemble medieval dungeons

Chekhov’s Rule of Creepy Dummies Employed by the Police Department

Aside from being extremely creepy looking, never rule them out from the action until the last reel is rolled

Rent/Bury/Buy

Malice harkens back to that early ‘90s era of mainstream thrillers advertised with attractive floating heads and insured by Alec Baldwin’s night forest of chest hair. With a script co-written by Aaron Sorkin, it’s a film that tries a little too hard but dangit if it doesn’t have fun making the effort! So long as you go into the film with little to no knowledge of the plot, I think you’ll find it as rewarding an experience as I did. And not ONLY as a reminder that Alec Baldwin was once a worthy guilty pleasure.

Blond Ambition

Nicole Kidman is something an enigma: a once sparkling actress now somewhat hampered by celebrity and Botox, and perhaps more frustratingly, a woman with great taste in scripts but horrible self-awareness for when she's not suited for a role. When cast right, her icy otherness can work wonders (see: Birth, The Others). When put in the wrong role, her alien presence can kill a film with distraction (see: playing a wilting Southern belle despite looking like a runway model in Cold Mountain or worse, cast as the last beacon of real-woman humanity in The Invasion and the abominable Stepford Wives remake).

But like most movie stars, Kidman got to her current salary and script power by starting off as a genuinely good performer who had the elusive 'it' factor. Made in 1994, Gus Van Sant's satiric meta black comedy To Die For was Kidman's big break, and rightfully so. While the movie has some issues (we'll get there), it's hard to deny that Kidman's skill at inhabiting a small-town fame-hungry sociopath ever makes you think of her as, at the time, Tom Cruise's Amazonian wife.

Quick Plot: Filmed as a combination of talking head interviews and straight drama, To Die For opens on the highly publicized funeral of Larry Maretto (Matt Dillon) and the ensuing murder investigation targeting his weather girl wife, Suzanne. We then track back to see their courtship--he a proud bartender set to inherit his parents' successful Italian restaurant, she a prissy junior college graduate with her sights on being the next Diane Sawyer. Mixed into their mismatched love story is Illeanna Douglas expressing eternal doubt as Larry's figure skating sister Janice.

After talking her way into TV weather spots at a local station, Suzanne becomes focused on a video documentary project with high school students, primarily the delinquent Russell, lovelorn Jimmy (a young and earnest Joaquin Phoenix), and insecure Liddy. Afterschool editing gives way to extracurricular parties and all-too-easy seduction, as Suzanne then enlists the smitten Jimmy to eliminate Larry now that he's pushing babies while her career is (at least to her eyes) taking off.

Inspired by a real-life tabloid popular murder case from the early '90s, To Die For feels as if it was once quite cutting edge and now reads as missing the boat. If the 21st century's celebrities are disposable faces that last a day on TMZ and Perez Hilton, then we have to remember that the print media and dial-up connection days of the '90s required more recognizable stars on the cover of The National Enquirer to lure in shoppers at the checkout line. Fresh off the O.J. Simpson Trial of the Century, Suzanne Maretto would have indeed been something of a tabloid star. But in 2012, there's just nothing fresh-feeling about her story. Worse is the fact that by now, there's (sadly) hardly anything shocking about a desperate wannabe TV star offing her husband. Maybe it's the boxful of Lifetime Originals that have been churned out in the 18 years since To Die For's premiere, but the scandal just never comes off with the wickedness it once had.

This isn't to say To Die For isn't enjoyable. Kidman is wonderfully watchable, inhabiting every bit of Suzanne's stone cold ambition. She's aided quite a bit by the very look of the film, one that dresses her in candy Clueless colors and blunt haircuts, never letting her beauty feel anything other than artificial and extremely constructed. Buck Henry's script offers quite a few chuckles and plenty of quirky-yet-believable supporting characters. It's almost no one's fault that To Die For has lost its edge. Time does that. 

Unless we're talking about facial angles. Those things can get quite sharp.

High Notes
This is Kidman's film to lose and she holds on with every cold sparkle in her blue eyes, but credit should also go to the always welcome Illeanna Douglas for infusing every bit of her dialogue with winkable sarcasm

also, ice skating

Low Notes
I'm not sure if the fault lies in Van Sant's cold approach to the material or the simple fact that the concept of celebrity has changed so specifically, but I just found it impossible to actually care about anything that happened onscreen. Kidman is superb and the bevy of great character actors (Kurtwood Smith, Dan Hedaya, and HOLY CRAP David Cronenberg among them) are more than serviceable, but at the end of the day, To Die For did pretty much nothing for me

Lessons learned
It’s not good to tan when you’re on TV

Never trust a woman who programs All By Myself to be played at her husband's funeral, mostly because you'll then be stuck singing it all week

As a character in a film, always be wary when a serene David Cronenberg is cast as your costar. Unless he's quietly eating strawberry ice cream, he generally means you ill will

Rent/Bury/Buy
To Die For is perfectly fine, but I felt rather empty when all was said and done. I don't know that Van Sant made any Big Statements we didn't already know about the hunger for fame, and in today's era of Honey Boo-Boos and Jersey Shores, the film just feels as if it chose the wrong path. It's less that the film is out of date to today's zeitgeist than that it simply feels too obvious today. Regardless, it's still mildly amusing in humor, slightly disturbing in content, and almost sad in showcasing the somewhat lost potential of a certain Australian star.