So, as I have mentioned, I am trying to fill in a lot of bubbles on a fill-in-the-blanks poster of must see movies. Sure, there are some on there that I will still skip (lookin’ at you, Human Centipede), but there are sections for erotic dramas and the like. Among them is 9 1/2 Weeks, a movie featuring Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger in a time well before either of them won an Oscar. Quite frankly, my general impression of both those actors when this movie was new was kinda low, but keep in mind, I was mostly a kid of about 12 who read a lot of movie reviews in the local newspaper, and I don’t recall Basinger or Rourke making all that many acclaimed ones back then. But I could be very wrong. Regardless, that was me as a kid. Me as a fortysomething adult is wary of a movie like this one for very different reasons: I want to make sure I am watching it for the right reasons and not because there’s possibly a lot of erotic stuff involving attractive women.
I mean, I want the movie to be good more than anything else. But it’s leaving HBO Max at the end of the month, so here we are.
Elizabeth McGraw (Basinger) is a divorced art dealer. She has a chance encounter or two with John Gray (Rourke), and the two begin dating. Then the sex starts. And…yeah, this movie is dumb.
I mean, I said outloud at one point, “Jesus Christ, this movie is dumb.”
There wasn’t much I liked here. Basinger’s performance is rather flat. Rourke seems to underplay everything. I had no idea what they saw in each other beyond the obvious (heck, I barely recognized Rourke given what he looks like now), and the more the movie went on, the more I wondered why the hell Elizabeth stayed with this control freak. At around the halfway point, he rapes her. Not like they were playing and pretended it was rough, but he actually appears to sexually assault her for the “crime” of going through his stuff while he was out. And yet…she stays. This is the kind of thing that won’t fly today, that a rape was so “good” that a woman will stay with her attacker.
From there, he does a lot of things that would probably embarrass a normal person, and she finally breaks down in tears when she realizes what was obvious to me from the moment he left her on a ferris wheel by herself: John Gray is an asshole.
Wait, his name is Gray? Did he inspire Fifty Shades of Gray? I know that one only by its reputation.
And the sex scenes, when they weren’t at best laughably silly, were not all that erotic.
Yeah, this movie sucked. I don’t have much to say because there isn’t a whole lot going on. A woman dates a man who won’t tell her much about himself until she’s packing up to leave him at the end of the movie when it becomes obvious to her what should be obvious to the audience, namely that he’s no good, and she needs to get as far away from him as she can.
Grade: F
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