Members Bonuses- Basic Instinct

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Basic Instinct

I never really intended to cap this movie. I just wanted to revisit it after Tuna dumped on it, but how can you resist a few caps? I didn't do a thorough job because this movie has been done from a-to-z by the best guys out there. As I recall, Aesthete, Tuna, and RDO all did an especially good job if you want to look it them up in the back issues. But I did do a few of the scenes I especially like, or the ones less capped.

In a nutshell, Tuna was right. The screenplay to Basic Instinct was written by Joe Eszterhas, who was the highest paid writer in the history of Hollywood, and whose scripts are filled with holes wide enough to fly a 747 through. I've discussed before the logical inconsistencies in "Jade" and "One Night Stand". "Basic Instinct" probably has the biggest ones of all.

All of the tension of the movie is based on whether the murders were committed by Sharon Stone or by someone trying to frame Sharon by killing her boyfriend in a manner re-enacting the murder in her novel.

Right? Wrong. As usual, there are gaping errors.

1. Stone's new novel, the one Douglas reads by accident, describes the exact circumstances of Gus's murder BEFORE it happens. The description includes the exact details - the legs sticking out of the elevator, for example. How could that be the case if Tripplehorn was the murderer? Are we to believe that Stone has the gift of prophecy? Of course not, she must be the murderer. Douglas is a detective, and he knows everything we know. The unpublished novel is the "smoking gun" that Stone did it. Douglas knows that Stone is the murderer FOR SURE the minute he sees Gus's legs hanging out of the elevator. Yet a minute later he guns down Tripplehorn.
2. Speaking of which, Stone had no way to know Douglas would shoot Tripplehorn. How did she know Tripplehorn would hesitate to raise her hands, or reach in her pocket to give Douglas those keys. Most important, she saw Douglas read the unpublished novel, so why would she think that Douglas would shoot Tripplehorn after seeing Gus dead in the elevator? Makes no sense.
3. And why did she have those silly keys with her anyway, and why did she need to reach in her pocket for them at that very moment, while he was pointing a loaded gun at her?
4. Three words in the script: "under a pseudonym". Take out those three words, and more of the dramatic structure makes sense, but leave them in and the plot falls apart. If it was a copycat, how could the killer know that the murder victim was the boyfriend of the author? She wrote the novel under a pseudonym so that nobody would associate her, sophisticated heiress and magna cum laude in psychology, with the author of a really trashy novel. Oops! So, the cops investigating the murder should have known immediately that the only possible suspects can be Stone and the few people who know that Stone is also the author. The very first matter of business would be, and any good detective would say, "find out who knows". But none of them ever mentioned that!
5. Is it plausible to find so many clues pointing back and forth, first to one woman, then the other. Don't all these tennis-match neck turners stretch our credulity too far, and tend to contradict each other eventually? For example, Stone's lesbian girlfriend tries to kill Michael Douglas. We viewers know this for a fact. Douglas knows this for a fact. Yet Douglas never asks himself, "OK, if Tripplehorn committed the murders, why did the girlfriend try to kill me?" Stone already said that this woman had seen her fuck a zillion other guys without getting jealous. Why would she have anything special against Douglas if you assume Tripplehorn is the murderer? The only possible explanation resides in Stone being the murderer and somehow manipulating the emotions of the lesbian girlfriend. All of these neck-turners are just little devices, with no thought given to whether they hold up in light of the other plot elements.
6. The final scene, the one after the blackout, is dumb. Stone is the murderer, but she wouldn't kill Douglas with the ice pick again. That would fuck up her alibi for all the other murders, which are now believed to have been committed by the late Tripplehorn. She might kill Big Mike, but she'd have to find a new and more brilliant way to do it.
7. Equally important, we actually see the murder in the first scene and there is no similarity between the breasts of Jeanne Tripplehorn and the murderer, so we already know it couldn't have been Tripplehorn. We are left with an impression that it might not have been Stone, because they obscured her face, but it surely wasn't Tripplehorn in that scene. Blame the director for that one.

The director in question, and I always forget about him when I talk about the guys with the biggest gap between their best and worst movies, is Paul Verhoeven. At his peak, Verhoeven directed respected films like "Soldaat van Oranje" and "De Vierde Man". In the middle he directed some of my favorite fun junk movies like "Starship Troopers", "Robocop" and "Total Recall". On the lower end, he directed "Showgirls". His range is from 7.5 to 3.54. In all fairness, though, the direction of "Showgirls" is OK. The visuals are often dazzling. The only really dumb thing he did was to cast Elizabeth Berkley. The real culprit in "Showgirls" was the screenwriter. Can you guess who it was? None other than omnipresent Joe Eszterhas. In addition to everything else I said about Eszterhas, you probably should know that he wrote also the scripts for "Sliver", and "An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn". I don't know about you guys, but I've always been a big fan of the late Otis Redding, and it depresses me to no end that they hired Eszterhas to write the screenplay for that new movie about Otis starring Cuba Gooding, Jr.

Not that any of that matters to "Basic Instinct". You don't watch this film to see the plot, let's face it. It's one of the five sexiest movies ever made. Sharon Stone is naked throughout. It has sex scenes that border on porn. It has the famous beaver scene. Who the hell cares about the silly plot, anyway?

However, even if you forget about the inconsistencies and just completely suspend your critical functions, you must notice something ... familiar ... Michael Douglas plays a handsome plainclothes homicide detective in San Francisco, and his partner is a more sensible rumpled inglamorous galoot with a big nose. Hey - it's just an episode of "Streets of San Francisco", except they show the crimes and sex on camera instead of off.

If you rent the DVD, watch the "widescreen" side. The "standard" is blurry for some reason.

One last thought. This movie gets my Oscar in the following category: "Most smoking in a movie not involving Eastern Europe, Bogart, or Cheech and Chong"

Sharon Stone today. Tripplehorn tomorow. I certainly don't have to give you the "no nudity" warning, but in all honesty, I have to admit that the last four collages kinda suck. The first three are pretty decent.

First I would like to draw your attention to a program on German TV called Blitz! It deals with items that aren't important enough to make it on regular news and is aired at 7 pm. Normally there isn't much to be found for the Fun House on that show but last week they had an item on how TV stations in the Czech Republic and Russia boost ratings on late-night news and weather reports.

Let's go to the Czechs first. Here is how weather girl Barbara Jaburek presents the late-night weather forecast on a Czech TV station. Amazing, no?

Now let us move on to the Russians. They have a TV channel where newsreader Svetlana Pesotzkaja, whose boyfriend for 5 years left her over this, reads the late-night news like this and the weather report is spiced up with girls who wear these outfits. I've never seen anything like this in "The Free Western World". Look what the Czechs and the Russians have achieved in that department in only ten years! When will we get this in western Europe and the US ?

Blitz is presented by Caroline Beil (non-nude collage 01), who tried in vain not to laugh when she announced this item, saying : "Could you imagine me presenting this show completely naked? Ridiculous of course". She probably laughed because it's not that hard to imagine her presenting a program naked. Take a look a this collage from another vidcapper that I found on Patten's message board and you know what I mean (all credit goes without saying to RolandXox, who created this collage). I don't feel very comfortable about using material from someone else but it fitted the subject very nicely and as far as I'm concerned this is a once only, so please forgive me.

Time to move over now to the 1994 Austrian film "Ein fast perfekter Seitensprung" in which rather heavy actress Elfi Eschke has several nude scenes. Our Greek god of daybreak, the unsurpassed Eos, writes about her as "the passionate exhibitionist Elfi Eschke in one of the many films in which her husband, director Reinhard Schwabenitzky, features her always naked". Finally I decided to play for fake detective myself and I think I've found out the truth about those alleged nude pictures of Charlene Tilton that keep floating around the net. Recently I was going through some old issues (around 1985 ; I only kept the pages with nudity and forgot to write the date on this page) of German magazine Neue Revue when I found this article about a certain Gina Sörensen from Denmark who was presented as a Charlene Tilton lookalike. I think that this girl looks exactly like the girl in the nude pictures said to be of Charlene. You can compare the images in this collage.

That's it for now. I hope you'll find this contribution enjoyable and of any use for the Fun House. Yours truly, ICMS

Page Three Gold feature is Sally Nicholson from 5th July 1979.

Others include Maria Whittaker (#1, #2, #3) (Emma Noble Lisa Erikson (#1, #2)

"Jo Guest and Charmaine Sinclair are both Playboy and Page 3 favorites. Charmaine is a well known European Porn Star which may be why Playboy tried to sell her as Charmaine Garth initially. Charmaine may be better known in the mainstream for her affair with Robert DeNiro."

(#1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10)

El Kabong

Leigh Taylor-Young pics from long ago.(#1, #2)

Another porn babe called Ashley, pictured with her pal Skylar. The text says that Ashley and Skylar are good buddies. They certainly seem close.(#1 #2 #3 #4)

Mindy Ferrar is a former Pet of the Year. (#1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11)

Assorted porn babes, including some classics. Candy Samples Candy Samples Jasmine DuBois Jasmine DuBois Lori Sanders Lori Sanders Nicole Noir Nicole Noir Seka

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(#1, #2, #3)

Sheryl Crow Amy Brenneman Courtney Love

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