A collection of spoiler-heavy mini movie reviews.
365 Days
2020 – Director: Barbara Bialowas & Tomasz Mandes
I’ve been wanting to write a review of this dreck since my wife and I finished watching it. It was on the Netflix Top-10 for a good length of time and I assume that a few of her friends recommended it to her because I see no other reason to be attracted to it save for fleeting exhortation (more like extortion). What draws women to this kind of subject matter? The “50 Shades”-style “meek woman who doesn’t understand her own sexual power seduced by an overly-aggressive and socially-distant hunk of man-meat” story is all well-and-good for your dime-store Harlequin romance (and I’ve read a couple of those in my time), but as a movie – to make it work – you have to decide what side of the subject-matter line you toe. “365 Days” is pornography. And it’s hilarious, that right now, you can go on your regular Netflix account without any additional parental lock and watch a movie where there’s a full face-fuck blowjob scene with a fake dick and everything; frequent nudity (male & female); and enough bumping-and-grinding to give Sonny Jim (sic) that first uncomfortable feeling in his pants. And much like pornography, the story takes second-fiddle to the diddling, and what we are left with is a provocative experiment in adult-only content on the platform and not much else. For some, that will be enough.
The plot? Preposterous! Italian actor (and former gardener) Michele Morrone plays the leading anthropological specimen: the son of a crime boss somewhere on the spaghetti peninsula. After an assassination attempt where his father is killed, Massimo (Morrone) sees a vision of a woman (Polish actress Anna Maria Sieklucka) that he assumes is his guardian angel, only to spot someone at the airport named Laura who looks exactly like his vision and kidnaps her thinking he’s found his dream girl. And Laura is beautiful, and – wouldn’t you know it – sexually-frustrated, especially from the other executives at her firm who don’t appreciate her (which we get by her going home to masturbate after a particularly-trying day at the office). Massimo tells her that he will release her in a year if he can’t make her fall in love with him, only for them to end up banging like field mice less than a week after she is taken. But wait, not all is well in paradise! For you see, Massimo was set to marry the daughter of a rival Mafia boss (to join the two families) until he met Laura. Now, in the middle of a gang war set off by the murder of his father and distracted by the best sex he’s ever had, little does he know that his ex is secretly plotting her revenge blah blah blah.
What worked? Well, all the actors are really good looking and are shown in various states of undress. The simulated sex is performed with gusto. And some of the lines, like Massimo’s insistence on calling Laura his “babygirl” like, every five seconds, are laughable (don’t forget to listen closely to the song lyrics, too). What didn’t work? The rest! After a spicy first act that culminates in the face-fuck on an airplane (I could have sworn the girl was Aidra Fox, but apparently I am wrong: she’s just another pretty Eastern-European girl) – cut in montage with Laura paddling her pink canoe – she is taken and wooed by the single most obnoxious and abusive man who has ever forced another woman to fall in love with him: more so, even, than Christian Grey. He slaps her around; threatens her; keeps her under lock-and-key; and then he gets his dick sucked by ANOTHER chick while Laura is tied-up in a bed and made to watch, and all of a sudden the shot sequence suggests that Laura changes her tune to him what, after seeing how manly he is? His big dink? Or how vulnerable he is? 365 Days would like you to think it’s working towards some greater calling, what with its various fairy tale allusions (“Beauty and the Beast” references abound), and IMDB trivia that stated the film’s female writer was about to stand in as the one giving Massimo the blowjob on the plane because she wanted to make sure the proper “emotion” was conveyed (damn, I could have directed this movie). I have no doubt that the filmmakers intended there to be more to the movie’s characters than surface-level, but then it all becomes surface-level under the facade of its adult content and statuesque, monotone line-readers. And if all of that wasn’t bad enough, Laura is killed off-screen at the end of the movie in one of those fake-out “limo drives into a dark tunnel but doesn’t come out the other side” shots (“The International” with Clive Owen comes to mind). 365 Days is unintentionally-hilarious and intentionally-titillating. I’m sure that sexually-charged fare like this are a dime-a-dozen on Italian and/or Polish Netflix (they are far more liberal over there), and its success in North American all-but-guarantees a slew of copycat sex movies on their way DIRECTLY TO YOU. Prepare Yourselves!
Fatal Affair
2020 – Director: Peter Sullivan
Omar Epps! What have you been up to, buddy? Feels like I haven’t seen you around since the 90’s. He’s been on TV, that’s why. And your pal Jay doesn’t really watch TV: he doesn’t have any cable, and when his wife’s around then she’s the programming director. But “Fatal Attraction”-style thrillers are my “candy” so I was able to convince her to squeeze-in one of my selections, which wasn’t too hard once I reminded her that she made me sit through 365 Days AND the entire first season of “The Order”. I really do enjoy these kinds of movies: “Disclosure”; “Basic Instinct”; “Obsessed” with Ali Larter from Heroes (my personal favorite, especially the car scene, for obvious reasons), to name a few. These are star-vehicles for well-known celebrities to work against-type. Fatal Attraction, with Glenn Close and – the King of Putting His Dick Where It Doesn’t Belong – Michael Douglas, seems to be the de-facto example most people lean on: a one-night-stand makes Close go crazy for the married Douglas and she sets out to make his current life a living Hell so they can be together. In “Fatal Affair”, it’s Epps’ obsessive-compulsive David versus Nia Long’s Ellie. Trick is, David has been lusting for Ellie since high school, and when he has his opportunity to get close to her as an adult (she’s a lawyer and he’s a “hacker-for-hire” working on one of her cases), they go for drinks and get hot-and-heavy in the bathroom for the fleeting moment she succumbs. But they don’t consummate: just second-base stuff. Enough to make Ellie realize her mistake (she has a family) and to send David on a downward slope of progressively-alarming advances. Rest assured, he uses his “hacker skillz” to break in to Ellie’s home, too, which is common now when the main character lives in one of those digitally-controlled houses with the keypad lock and the thermostat you control on your phone (but it’s nowhere near the level of this year’s “The Invisible Man”, which has already set the new standard for how home invasion films in the digital age should work).
Since these films are my “candy”, I had an OK time watching Fatal Affair. Epps does what he can with a garden-variety role (and even chews on some truly cringy moments, like when he corners Ellie months after their fling to tell her to “remember, I’m there for you”), it’s shot professionally, and it’s less than 90-minutes long (which is always a plus in my books). I think the worst part about it was Nia Long! As Ellie, Long has more lifting to do acting-wise as the victim than Epps does as the psycho: we have to believe that she is terrified of this guy, especially when the stakes are raised. I mean come on, he married a woman who looked like her, SO HE COULD BE WITH HER. Long plays it more like David is an irritant than a legitimate threat: sort of like the flaky hot girl who gives you her number to get you to go away and then never responds to your texts. And when shit starts to hit the fan (like when David dates her best friend and manipulates her into thinking that Ellie herself is the psycho: another plot point that Invisible Man did better), Long is boring. She hardly emotes and delivers her lines in a comatose fashion – just spinning her wheels – like she doesn’t even want to be there (maybe she didn’t? Despite its technical-proficiency, this is still a Netflix movie made for $20 on the weekend). However, with her fierce facial expression and detached acting style, maybe Long’s Ellie would function better as the stalker in a gender-reversed version of the film? We’ll never know: this is the one we got.
BUT WAIT. I said there was sex in this, right? Isn’t that why I’m writing this whole thing? Isn’t it why YOU have read all the way to the end? Yes, Fatal Affair has sex. You won’t be seeing Michael Douglas going down on anyone or an unknown Italian stallion rough up some poor Polish flavour-of-the-week – it’s all presented like a Maria Ford porno from the 90’s – but it is there, and Netflix knows what you want because the movie STARTS with it. And like “Red Shoe Diaries” or any other softcore late-night Show Case bullshit, you know exactly how the scene order will play out. I even said to my wife, I said, “Wife, we had the sex scene between Ellie and David; we had the sex scene at the beginning between that anonymous couple (that turned out not to be so anonymous); but what we’re missing is the sex scene between the lead actor and the second-fiddle major female supporting actress (the best friend).” She told me to shove it. LITTLE DID SHE KNOW, however, that only minutes later David and the best friend are getting it on. It’s entirely-predictable fare: far removed from the S&M zaniness we got from 365 Days. In fact, if they wanted to make it a bit more twisted they could have had Epps acting as if he was Ellie’s daughter’s father, maybe with a flashback to his marriage to Deborah (the woman who looks like Ellie), being unable to conceive? Give Epps a bit more “madness” to communicate, in that it’s not just about Ellie, but the idea of the perfect family that he never got? But if you’re looking for a more-intense couples movie that won’t suck the air out of the room – that’s a little edgy but not so much that you get a fucking, fake-dick sex scene out of it – then be my guest.
//jf 8.19.2020
theory of a daskeman 