Skip to main content

Friday Flop: Adrian Lyne's 9&1/2 WEEKS

 Kim Basinger, Mickey Rourke. Dir. Adrian Lyne, MGM, 1986


Style over sex, minus substance.

That's a glib summation/dismissal of Adrian Lyne's 1986 blockbuster erotic drama, but it's not unfair or inaccurate. I took copious notes on this movie, most relating to some way Lyne and screenwriter Zalman King failed to make the film daring, dark, perverse, bold, or even a little erotic. 

I noted, many times, that as an artifact of Hollywood's attempt to make sex-movies for an adult audience after home video made hardcore porn available to everyone, 9&1/2 WEEKS fascinates and depresses in equal measure. It's aesthetically fascinating, sociologically depressing. Lyne delivers a hyperstylized, superficial imagining of the US audience's "freaky" side and it's all pretty standard, you're-not-kinky-if-you-use-the-word-kinky kind of stuff. 

Allegedly dom/sub-themed, both the film and the fantasies it trades in define predictable. A little gaslighting, a little humiliation, a little risky public sex, an in-the-pants handjob at a fancy restaurant lifted directly from FLASHDANCE, changing only the method of pleasuring. Even Rourke's transgressions that push Basinger away - trying to involve another woman - play as the most predictable eventuality. 

Lyne wanted to make a "bold", "shocking" sex movie, I can tell, but he tried to do it in Ronald Reagan's America, an age with all the appropriate Victorian hypocrisies in play, with corporate-studio money. That he made any kind of movie at all testifies as to the power of the last hit. After FLASHDANCE, the studio had to give him license, and he delivered again when 9&1/2 WEEKS went on to gross $100M, but if I recall - my internet keeps crashing - MGM cut a few minutes out of the theatrical version, releasing a racier home video. That video proved a popular choice to play at house parties for about a year, there, and then vanished. Because it sucked. 

That's what it comes out to, what my one liner means. Lyne offers a load of tired-looking '80s style that reminded me of LEVI'S 501 jeans spots, neither a lot of nor particularly sexy sex, and just nothing to anchor it to the earth. Like FLASHDANCE, it counts on atmosphere and aesthetics to distract from the rote, trite, superficial story it tells. Unlike FLASHDANCE, I didn't buy it in the '80s and I'm not biting now. 

Sometimes, 35 years changes an unsatisying film to something at least a little better. 9&1/2 WEEKS is not one of those times. It's a bland, boring, failed attempt to shock and titillate and provoke exciting discussion. Truly. This movie may exist because guys hope its female pov will get them to talk about sex. That would align with the rest of its epic lack of imagination.

You see my dilemma. I don't like to do the one-line hot-take. (I like my hot-takes bizarre and at least 15 grafs long.) I don't see the point in investing two hours in one pithy sentence. 9&1/2 WEEKS, however, barely rates as much as I've said in expansion. With its '80s cast and pedigree, its one-time whiff of scandal, its sex-movie nature, its Mtv sensibility, and rockstar cameos (Ron Wood shows up in a party sequence), Lyne's film had all the makings of a first-class, fun Friday Nite Movie. It ends up no more than a perfect bore, a stylish & moody masterclass in tedious filmmaking. Like BATMAN&ROBIN earlier, I'm glad I had the experience, and will be glad to never have it again.

Style over sex, minus substance. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

No Return:Stanley Kramer's IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD

 IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD. Spencer Tracy, Ethel Merman, Milton Berle, Mickey Rooney, Sid Caesar. Dir. Stanley Kramer, MGM, 1963 I do not generally write about films I stop watching halfway. What's the point? I either have nothing positive to say about it or was in the wrong mood. In both cases I'm ignorant of its full length to perhaps do it justice. In the case of Stanley Kramer's 1963 comedy smash, however, I feel compelled to make an exception.  My problem with the movie is not my mood, nor disappointment because it's not the movie I once heard. In fact, my biggest problem is that I haven't heard it described in glowing terms, or any, since I was about 9. See, IAMMMMW used to air anually on one or another of the networks, often in December. My parents didn't care for it and never watched it, but my friends watched anytime it aired and talked about it in rapturous terms. Until about 9-10 years old, when it seemed to drop out of conversation, or conv...
Post a Comment
Read more

An Accidental Franchise: The Rambo movies

 FIRST BLOOD, RAMBO:FIRST BLOOD PT. II, RAMBO III, RAMBO, RAMBO:LAST BLOOD Sylvester Stallone, Brian Denehey, Richard Crenna, David Caruso. Dir. Ted Kotcheff, Tri-Star, 1982 Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Julia Nickson, Martin Kove. Dir. George P. Cosmatos, Tri-Star, 1985 Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna. Dir. Peter MacDonald, Tri-Star, 1988 Sylvester Stallone, Julie Benz, Ken Howard. Dir. Sylvester Stallone, Weinstein Company, 2008 Sylvester Stallone, Paz Vega. Dir. Adrian Grunberg, Lionsgate, 2019 My friend Alice sent me a few movies she got into over the last months. These include Mad Max:Fury Road and The Triplets of Bellevelle, as well as all five of Stallone's Rambo movies. My thoughts on them run below. The problem inherent to the Rambo movies is they each revive a character from a surprise-hit movie, but not his ongoing story, because the first film's genius conceit denied him any backstory. The movies all feature John Rambo, human killing machine, ...
2 comments
Read more

Unwatched Movie Festival: Walter Hill's Brewster's Millions

 After almost five years of movie collecting, I've become that collector with at least one good stack of stuff I've never watched. I had some reason for buying, but I've never gotten to or never finished some. It's embarrassing. It feels wasteful. Decadence does not come naturally to me.  I've got Grumpy Internet today and I've run "out of" movies, which is to say I depleted the newest stack, not that I'm actually "out of" movies. It will take over a month to run all the way out. What better time to dredge up four likely candidates and watch them? Today's Unwatched Movie Fest entrants: Brewster's Millions Bustin' Loose Harper The Enforcer (1950) Brewster's Millions Richard Pryor, John Candy, Lonette McKee, Hume Cronyn. Dir. Walter Hill, Universal, 1985 Walter Hill would seem a strange choice for a screwball comedy adapted from the same 1902 novel as six other classic pictures, and Brewster's Millions makes...
Post a Comment
Read more