Another film watched in preparation for a "How Did This Get Made" podcast episode, bizarrely I had this on DVD... why? I've no idea. Anyway, I've watched it last night and though tonally it's pretty strange - it's mostly a film that time has not been kind too.
Michael Douglas (right in the middle of his sex/thriller run) plays Tom Sanders, a manufacturing executive in a Seattle tech company that's about to go through a lucrative merger. A few days before the Merger is due to go through, a Vice-President role, which Tom was up for goes to Meredith Johnson (Demi Moore) a former lover of Tom's before he settled down. On her first evening, Meredith calls Tom to her office and tries to rekindle their physical relationship, which he declines. The following morning Meredith accuses Tom of sexual harassment in the workplace, which he counters by contacting a solicitor and accusing her of the same thing.
The film is now 24 years old, so it's not surprising that a film that was at the cutting edge of technology at the time is now hilariously out of date. Much of the plot revolves around the construction of CD Disk drives. There are email, web sites and video calls all of which look incredibly primitive to today's eyes but most bizarre of all is the VR representation of the company's main storage drive - which is then deleted in one of the funniest dramatic sequences of all time, towards the films climax. Humorous as all this is, it's not really fair to criticise the film for it a quarter of a century later.
It's much fairer though to criticise the film for its strange tone. Ostensibly advertised as an erotic thriller, though there's only one sex scene and it's not particularly titillating. The film then spends a lot of time pretending it's a legal drama, then a tech thriller before finally ending with the merger nonsense. I'm not sure it does a great job of explaining what's actually happening in the scheme that the film hinges on. I think I worked it out afterwards but I did have to sit and think about it for a while. Throughout all that, there's odd moments of humour - occasionally almost slapstick that jar with the rest of the film.
I don't want to get too down on the film as it was successful at the time, but I have to say that "mild boredom" was my most common experience throughout the runtime and I won't be back to see it again any time soon.
Michael Douglas (right in the middle of his sex/thriller run) plays Tom Sanders, a manufacturing executive in a Seattle tech company that's about to go through a lucrative merger. A few days before the Merger is due to go through, a Vice-President role, which Tom was up for goes to Meredith Johnson (Demi Moore) a former lover of Tom's before he settled down. On her first evening, Meredith calls Tom to her office and tries to rekindle their physical relationship, which he declines. The following morning Meredith accuses Tom of sexual harassment in the workplace, which he counters by contacting a solicitor and accusing her of the same thing.
The film is now 24 years old, so it's not surprising that a film that was at the cutting edge of technology at the time is now hilariously out of date. Much of the plot revolves around the construction of CD Disk drives. There are email, web sites and video calls all of which look incredibly primitive to today's eyes but most bizarre of all is the VR representation of the company's main storage drive - which is then deleted in one of the funniest dramatic sequences of all time, towards the films climax. Humorous as all this is, it's not really fair to criticise the film for it a quarter of a century later.
It's much fairer though to criticise the film for its strange tone. Ostensibly advertised as an erotic thriller, though there's only one sex scene and it's not particularly titillating. The film then spends a lot of time pretending it's a legal drama, then a tech thriller before finally ending with the merger nonsense. I'm not sure it does a great job of explaining what's actually happening in the scheme that the film hinges on. I think I worked it out afterwards but I did have to sit and think about it for a while. Throughout all that, there's odd moments of humour - occasionally almost slapstick that jar with the rest of the film.
I don't want to get too down on the film as it was successful at the time, but I have to say that "mild boredom" was my most common experience throughout the runtime and I won't be back to see it again any time soon.