The Digest
Posing as photographer at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, Laure Ash (Rebecca Romjin-Stamos) is able to lure the sexy and famous model Veronica (Rie Rasmussen) into a bathroom stall for a quick tryst before the movie starts. The purpose of this seduction is to remove the 10 million dollars worth of diamonds that Veronica is wearing as part of her dress. Laure gets the diamonds and then double-crosses her partners. She goes back home to Paris, but now must get out of the country in attempting to do so; she is mistaken for a grieving woman named Lily (also Rebecca Romjin-Stamos).
Lily has lost her husband and only child and can't go on, so distraught she takes her own life, given Laure the answer to her prayers, she now has a new identity. She gets on a plane and heads to America. On the plane she meets an American businessman (Peter Coyote). They fall in love and live happily ever after... until she has to come back to Paris. She has spent the past 7 years carefully hiding her identity because of her past. All that is shattered within hours of her arrival when a paprazzi named Nicholas Bardo (Antonio Banderas) tricks her into helping him and he gets a partial shot of her face which he promptly sells to the tabloids.
Now the careful facade of her life is crumbling around her and she must either salvage it or completely destroy if in a blaze of glory, either way she is not going down without a fight and she's taking Nicholas with her.
The Dish
What in the hell did I just watch? I'm still asking myself that question. I don't know why I was surprised.
I've seen Body Double which could very well end up on my "worst movies in all of creation" list. That movie followed by another DePalma gem Blow Out. This man can make some stinkers and that's the truth.
He knows how to script and direct a love scene, that's for sure, but his ability to distract the audience from the bad story and acting by using sex is getting really old. I wasn't alone in my feelings. The audience groaned or laughed during scenes that were supposed to be climatic and serious. This is not a good sign.
I wasn't thrilled or engaged to be quite honest. I lost interest in what was going on with the characters and didn't really care what happened to them. At one point I think I wished they would all just shoot each other. The two “evil black guys” that are after her did nothing but make me roll my eyes and suck my teeth. They were parodies of villains and a waste of celluloid.
None of the acting stood out, it was all sub par to me. The biggest thrill for me was getting a peek inside the Cannes Film Festival- goodness, I'd love to go there.
The Directive
This is a movie for insomniacs. If you happen to be up at 2 a.m. on a Thursday night, you'll probably catch this one on cable. You shouldn't be encouraged to see it otherwise.
I think it should be called "Film Fatale" since the movie nearly bored me to death
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Copyright Kamal "The Diva" Larsuel-Ulbricht, 2002
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