This weekend Ewan McGregor discovers fooling around with someone through a sex club isn’t exactly the baggage-free lifestyle it’s cracked up to be. I guess his character doesn’t watch enough movies, because we’ve certainly learned that lesson time and time again. Sex club, random encounter, or even pre-planned love affair, it rarely turns out as something good, and can turn downright nasty.
In fact, while you’d expect love affair movies to be romances or dramas, more often than not they enter the realm of psychological thrillers. I guess that’s because once someone’s physically screwing another person it’s not too hard for them to have their mind fucked with as well. At least that’s what the movies highlighted this week have led us to believe. Too bad McGregor hasn’t seen these flicks. They might have saved him a world of trouble in Deception.
Enjoy this week’s Double Feature with a loved one (not a lusted after one), and hold them really close after each film reminding them how much you love them and you would never do the things you just saw in the movie… lest they also act like the movies show us.
Derailed
The most obvious genius move in setting up Derailed is the casting of “good girl” Jennifer Aniston as the love interest / other woman. Everyone things good old Rachel is so innocent, but let’s be honest – she was a bit slutty, even on Friends. Hell, she went after her own assistant at one point, so why should it come as a surprise that Clive Owen’s short lived tryst with her here winds up being a horrific event with dire consequences? Still, when Owen’s character meets Aniston and the two move towards a seemingly-innocent affair, it doesn’t seem like they are headed anywhere close to the train wreck that comes, with Aniston’s Lucinda brutally raped, impregnated, and Owen’s Charles blackmailed over and over again. This is the movie that made me despise Vincent Cassell, who plays an antagonist who is always one step ahead of both Owen and the audience with such smarm and egotism you can’t help but want him to get his comeuppance at the end, even if it doesn’t seem like he will for a good deal of the film.
Fatal Attraction
While Derailed’s Cassell may be evil, he’s nothing compared to Glen Close in this movie. If you ever even start thinking of looking at another woman, this is the cure, and, frankly, it’s one of those catch-all cures that pretty much nobody is resistant against. I mean, Tom Hanks (of all people) even describes it as having “scared the shit out of every man in America” in Sleepless in Seattle - and with good cause. Michael Douglas has no idea what he’s in for when he sleeps with Close’s character, but it doesn’t take long for her to become a stalker, boiling bunnies and kidnapping children. Personally, I’ll take the original suicide ending over the more Hollywoodized need to bring the stalkerish lover to justice. Let’s be honest – there really doesn’t need to be any justice when a guy sleeps with a half-crazed woman. She’s nuts, he’s guilty, bring on the craziness as a reminder to every person as to why they should stay faithful to their spouse.
Other affairs gone badly: Play Misty For Me (1968), Disclosure, Closer, Fracture, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Crush, The Natural, and if you really want camp - The Amy Fisher Story telefilm.
Enjoy our Double Feature suggestions? and maybe we’ll use them in a future column.
