Word: thrillers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Academy Awards seems to be getting in touch with the times. For the first time in 20 years, they gave the Best Picture award to a thriller. But not just any thriller--this one had a cannibal and suits made from human skin. We were beginning to think that, for a film to win, it would have to be based on a true story (Amadeus, Out of Africa, Gandhi). For a while there, it seemed that the Academy had abandoned fiction altogether. And then, they suddenly raised Silence of the Lambs to the level of a Best Picture...
BASIC INSTINCT. This confused thriller, about a detective (Michael Douglas) and a bisexual novelist (Sharon Stone) who may do her sharpest work with an ice pick, has some steamy skin scenes; that's what all the ratings ruckus was about. (The film lost less than a minute and got an R.) But there's something wrong with a whodunit if, at the end, viewers are still asking, "O.K., who done it?" The answer is director Paul Verhoeven. And the next question...
...current displays of star power, the most profligate is Death and the Maiden, which opened last week. A political thriller cum debate by Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman about the difficulties of shifting from dictatorship to democracy, it stars five-time Oscar nominee Glenn Close as a woman raped and tortured by the old regime who wants to hunt down her abusers. Oscar winner Gene Hackman plays the genial doctor who may or may not have been the blindfolded woman's chief tormenter 15 years ago. Oscar winner Richard Dreyfuss portrays her husband, a liberal politician who seeks to preserve...
...Montrealers, you see, are not inscrutable. They just would not work as villains. A Michael Crichton thriller in which the heavy is a crafty Quebecois? Not a chance. Instead Crichton rides the zeitgeist to the top of the charts with Rising Sun, a best seller whose No. 1 villain is quite simply Japan and things Japanese...
RISING SUN by Michael Crichton (Knopf; $22). Japan-bashing has never been more exquisitely calibrated for best-sellerdom. There is a whodunit at the heart of this commercial thriller, but the identity of the bad guys is never in any doubt. Lay out some plastic for this novel before publishers' row becomes a subsidiary of Sony...