*** Official "FEMME FATALE" Discussion Thread (1 Viewer)

[Ashley Seymour]

This film blew through Edwards Cinemas and hit the $2 theater where I saw it with my wife last night.
Ebert gave it four stars. Roger so wants to be cool that any soft-core porn film with a name director, an awesome looking woman/women that shows quite a bit of skin and is seductive, has high production values and has a convoluted script - will get his politically correct thumb up.
I have nothing againt a good soft-core film. Stamos is a goddess and is a surprisingly good actress, but I am not one to see a great deal of high art here. Even as soft-core I would have enjoyed a few more scenes of Stamos with guys. I am not as much into girl/girl scenes as most guys appear to be.
She does do a strip/seduction scene that may be the best ever filmed. God this woman does have a body and knows how to use is to get a rise out of ... oh well, you get the picture.
One of the my favorite lines in film is from Goldfinger when Bond wakes up after being druged and asked who the blond is. "My name is Pussy, Pussy Galore."
I now have a new favorite line. Stamos is doing a flat out nasty dance in a black thong, stockings and push up bra to seduce either Banderos or a guy she has picked up in a bar. In the wild, two elk with joust and lock antlers till one wearies and retreats. Banderas in a jealous pique lays a pool cue up against his competitors face to stem the rising tide of testosterone that is about to errupt. That is about all the foreplay that Stamos character needs and she is ready for the rut. She turns her back to Bandaros and says the following memorable line:
You don't have to lick my ass, just fuck me.

Oh, and the thing with the clocks was intersting too.

 

[Vickie_M]

Ebert gave it four stars. Roger so wants to be cool that any soft-core porn film with a name director, an awesome looking woman/women that shows quite a bit of skin and is seductive, has high production values and has a convoluted script - will get his politically correct thumb up.

Or maybe, just maybe, he thought it was a pretty good movie.

As did I.



Minus 10 points for using the term "politically correct" in a thread about a sexy thriller.

 

[Edwin Pereyra]

Same here.

~Edwin

 

[Ken_McAlinden]

Spoilers follow:


Watching the DVD, there's something interesting about the film that I had not noticed before and on which I haven't heard anyone comment. After Laure is thrown over the railing into the lobby of the hotel, there is a close-up of her face that shows her eyes moving frantically behind her closed eyelids as if she were in REM sleep. This seems to suggest that what follows may be a dream within a dream. Since the rest of the film is pure coincidence and artifice, this is not all that big of a leap. You don't have to accept this interpretation, since it is never made explicit, but it seems to be consistent with DePalma's "thesis".

If this is covered in the documentaries on the DVD, I apologize as I have not watched them yet.

Regards,

 

[Jodee]

I really liked this movie (just watched the DVD) although there were a few things I did not understand.

In the first "version" of events (dream), Antonio Banderas receives the phone call to get the picture, and then he gets the picture which is subsequently printed on the poster.

But in the second version (reality?), he gets the call about the picture and it immediately overlooks the scene where the two women are meeting and thet poster goes up (although a different one) and the other woman is chased by the jewel thieves who see the poster.

Was I just missing something? I thought this movie would have been perfect if the two scenes had lined up together perfectly but the second scene did not make sense time-wise from the "first" time it happend.

 

[Rich Malloy]

I've always liked De Palma, but I've always felt very guilty for doing so... but no more! Guilty pleasure or not, this guy's one helluva filmmaker.

I nearly saw this one at the theaters, but changed my mind last minute (something about Antonio Banderas and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos' names on the billboard). I wish I'd bought that ticket now, but I'm just glad I finally got a chance to see it, if only on the small screen.

I finally understand why Pauline loved this guy so much.

 

[Edwin Pereyra]

When it comes to Brian DePalma, there is no such thing as a guilty pleasure.
~Edwin

 

[Seth Paxton]

Right, DePalma is filmspeak for guilty pleasure, it's redundent.
Actually I really do respect his earlier work, even though it was just his interpretation of Hitchcock, complete with plots and shots.
However, lately he has stumbled and I found FF to be as much parody of himself as him at his best.
I cannot disagree strongly enough about Stamos as an actor. I thought she was the worst part (and yet also the best part :b ). Antonio, now he was solid. And I love the DePalma regular, Gregg Henry (Body Double, Scarface, Raising Cain, FF). He was great in Payback too.
The only problem I had with the film was in how he scripted the scenes themselves. The order of scenes, the overall story, I was fine with all that. But when the alarm goes off and the guy A) doesn't run in right away and B) stares at a guy peaking out of the stall at him without reacting - well, those sorts of things bugged me. There was no reason why it couldn't have been rewritten so that the scene was more realistic in character behavior.
Visually, DePalma is great. He doesn't just ape Hitchcock, he understands Hitchcock. He seems to know why certain shots are more dramatic or engaging. He has yet to let me down in that respect, and that includes the great opening to Snake Eyes and the tracking/following shot for "Dance the Night Away" in Mission to Mars.
But the dialog and action within the scenes was so often a let down that the film just didn't work for me. I scored it around a 5.5 or 6 which puts it in "just rental" (though I bought it blind and will keep it).
This film was nowhere as tight as Dressed to Kill or Blow Out.
Jodee's right about that timing issue, it was heavily altered even though the film was going with the premise that she saw the future, even to the point of being exactly 7 years out. That's another example of where I thought DePalma just wanted things to fit so he forced it.
A rewrite could have avoided forcing it and elevated the film's status.
Another thing that bugged me is that not only would they have not let the girl leave with the "fake" jewels, but that that angle was stupidly uneccessary. Stamos was double-crossing him anyway. The reason they thought she had taken the real jewels is because she got away with the jewels she was stealing. If she was doing the double cross then there would be no reason for her to reveal it to the "boss" until after they all got out of there.
Again, DePalma makes his characters go against their own motivation/logic simply because he wants to force in the later dramatic reveal that the girls were in it together. There were much more consistant ways to do that.
The thrill of something like Blow Out was that the script unfolds in a much more realistic manner for the characters, which enhances the tension. FF gets too silly with such mistakes which draws away some of the drama for me.