Fatal Attraction Pt 1: Everything AND the Kitchen Sink

Three-Part Mini-Series
Every once in a blue moon we'll take a movie and baton pass it around the team and really dive in. This time Nathaniel's going solo. But if you like this approach to investigate a movie we've gone long and deep before on the following films: Rebecca (1940), West Side Story (1961), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966), Rosemary's Baby (1968), Cabaret (1972), Silence of the Lambs (1991), Thelma & Louise (1991), Aladdin (1992), and  A League of Their Own (1992) -Editor

by Nathaniel R

Did you know/remember that Fatal Attraction was released in Paramount's 75th year? I did not but it's a detail that feels somehow right. Founded in 1912, the second oldest of Hollywood's few surviving major studios (Universal predates it) celebrated its diamond anniversary in zeitgeist style with one of its all time most profitable and leggiest hits. The Adrian Lyne thriller, which we'll discuss in three installments, was the second highest grossing film of 1987 and left the kind of cultural footprint that most movies can only dream of; it kept people talking for months on end, it ignited Hollywood's late eighties /early nineties erotic thriller craze, it made Glenn Close into a superstar by casting her against type (this detail is mostly forgotten but we'll get there), indirectly helped Michael Douglas win his Wall Street Best Actor Oscar, and took a B genre film all the way to the Oscars with six nominations.

While box office success and Oscar success (objective, mostly) has never automatically correlated with quality (subjective, mostly), you did once-upon-a-time have a much greater chance of the former by doubling down on latter. Which is just what Fatal Attraction did. All these years later, it really holds up as an example of Hollywood making grade A art with a B genre. So let's see why in scene-by-scene form...

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Ellen Mirojnick: From "Fatal Attraction" to "Oppenheimer"

by Cláudio Alves

There is little heroic about J. Robert Oppenheimer, whether in real life or on the big screen. Yet, in Christopher Nolan's latest, the commonplace act of getting dressed for the day is treated with the gravitas of a superhero movie's "suit up" scene. If nothing else, the moment highlights Ellen Mirojnick's work, another feather in the costume designer's cap. As with every one of the picture's elements, each choice is carefully deliberated, a negotiation of intimacy and immediacy that tries to transmit a first-person take on the period film. Two-piece tan suits rhyme with sky blue shirts, echoing the Los Alamos landscape, while a turquoise-inset silver belt buckle and porkpie-crowned cowboy-rimmed hat wink at Western iconography. It's a uniform as much as a costume, the men's "mythic look" as described by Mirojnick, who kept hats out of the other character's looks to make her protagonist stand out. 

This could be a lucky year for Mirojnick, awards-wise. Oppenheimer just might result in the designer's first Oscar nomination. Considering her vast career, it's hard to believe she's yet to be honored by the Academy…

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The New Classics: The Wolf of Wall Street

By Michael Cusumano  

Scene: Quaaludes
It’s difficult not to lapse into hagiography when talking about Scorsese so I will simply say this and attempt to reign in the fawning as best I can: As much as anyone in the medium’s history he understands that the power of film isn’t in the text. It’s not in constructing an argument like an essay or a speech. It's in the images. 

Like all of Scorsese’s period pieces, The Wolf of Wall Street covers mountains of information in its headlong dash through the years, but what makes these films great are the moments when they distill all that material into a memorable frame. The technical gambling know-how makes you buy into the world of Casino, but it’s an overhead shot of a reckless Sharon Stone making it rain chips at the craps table that leaves a mark on the audience...

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Vamp Glenn, Crook Michael, and Killer Viola!

If The Film Experience were its own media empire the first thing we would do is some sort of annual gallery of celebrities a la Vanity Fair or the New York Times. For this year's New York Times video gallery ["Vamps, Crooks and Killers" (photos) "Touch of Evil" (video)] the Times has famous actors playing famous film baddies or villainous archetypes. We've mentioned we love this actors as actors business muchly before. It always thrills. 

Here's Glenn Close as Theda Bara the vamp and Viola Davis as Nurse Ratched (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) for appetizers.

The Close image reminds us that Glenn has always been thisclose to being a cartoon character who just happens to be made of flesh and blood. That's how most iconic film stars and characters come across... at least after decades in the pop cultural air, though it didn't take Close that long to achieve it.

Doesn't the Nurse Viola Davis Ratched immediately make you want to see her in a villainous role? It hadn't even occurred to me before but it'd be super scary to watch her soulfulness curdle in some choice role. I bet she'd be great. On her performance in this video she says...

I tried to channel all the parts of myself that are probably not pretty. That are not necessarily nice."

Rooney Mara, Michael Shannon, Kirsten Dunst, Brad Pitt and Mia Wasikowska, after the jump...

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