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And, uh, we're, we're talking about basic instinct for some reason that I used to know and understand, but which is now escaped me completely.
Yeah.
Let me, let me, let me read it.
Let me, let me, let me alter this conversation ever so slightly.
We're talking about both Basic Instinct 1 and Basic Instinct 2.
We are!
We are doing that!
I think one of these movies requires a little bit more of our attention than the other, but we can maybe discuss that down the line.
As we get to it.
A slight quality differential, I think, maybe?
It drops off a little bit?
Very slight.
Very slight.
Or it rises to new heights.
Who knows which of these films is better, you know, based on... Who knows?
Yeah.
I think it depends which order you watch them in, you know?
If you watch the second one...
I actually have a narrative about that, but I actually watched the second one first, because I watched them both yesterday, and I watched the second one first on the logic that I'd already seen the first.
And so I thought, well, if I'm going to watch one and have more attention paid to it, I'd rather it be the one I haven't seen before.
And boy, Does the first movie look so much better after watching the second immediately prior, you know?
Which, I'm not necessarily arguing the first film is good in any kind of artistic sense, although I think it has its moments.
But man, the flip side would be if I'd watched both of them in the right order, then two would have just been absolutely interminable.
So, spoilers, Basic Instinct 2 is very, very, very bad.
Yeah, yeah.
If you're going to watch them both, listeners, I suggest you do what Daniel did and watch the second one first, because then it's like a very long, very weak prologue to the actual story, you know?
Yeah, no.
So anyway, we should actually do the introductions and get on to talking about this at some point.
Well, how dare you.
As if.
Yeah, so Basic Instinct is a film written by Wow, literary giant of 20th century dramaturgy, Joe Esterhaus, and directed by Paul Verhoeven, who has made some good films.
Yeah, indeed.
And starring Sharon Stone.
This was really her breakout role.
She'd had some good roles before this, but this was really her breakout role.
They basically asked every actress in Hollywood who was big in the early 90s, And they all said no before they got to Sharon Stone, who very, very cannily said yes and took on this role.
And this, well, I mean, I'm getting ahead of myself, but this really is just the Sharon Stone Show.
Also starring Michael Douglas, George Zunzer, and some other people.
And this was released in 1992, at which time I was 16, and I was just leaving school, so that was an interesting year for me.
And yeah, that's the first movie.
Very famous, very big movie in its day, very culturally significant.
It's one of those movies that wasn't just big, it wasn't just a blockbuster success.
It was also one of those movies that was culturally significant.
To the extent that we had the discourse before Twitter, this movie was part of the discourse.
It was the monoculture back then.
In very many complicated ways, which we're only going to brush over.
But yes, no.
This movie made $352.9 million.
Back when that was real money.
Which in those days was a lot of money.
Which in those days was like, it was the fourth highest grossing film of, you know, of 1992.
Yeah.
Which, you know, sorry, I'm going to look up the highest grossing films of 2019 just to give you a sense of scale here, you know.
That's a good idea.
Well, while you're doing that, I'll give the listeners a... The fourth highest grossing film, Domestic Boss Office.
Seems I won't be doing anything while you're doing that, so just go ahead.
A domestic boss office in 2019 was frozen too, which made $430 million domestically, you know, based against it to be $352 million worldwide.
So that tells you, you know, and this is not adjusted for inflation, et cetera, et cetera, but it does give you a sense of just how much the box office receipts have inflated over the course of the last 20 years or so.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, Yeah, it's a different world.
In many ways, things are quite different.
So yeah, and of course, being a massive success, it immediately spawned a sequel.
And by immediately, I mean 15 years later, there was a sequel called, imaginatively enough, Basic Instinct 2, which was directed by somebody called Michael Caton-Jones, who has actually made a few films you might have heard of, like Memphis Belle.
You might have heard of that.
And a couple of other very worthy British films.
Um, and done some TV and, you know, like, like a lot of British directors, he's, he, he's done lots of very worthy TV and some, uh, very worthy movies about the second world war that you might've heard of, but, but never seen.
Uh, and, uh, yeah, he ended up directing this.
And again, there's stories here that I hope we'll get to, but, um, he directed it and it was written by somebody or other, somebody or other who wasn't Joe Estihas.
Um, and it stars.
It stars Sharon Stone again, of course, returning as the same character from the first movie.
And bizarrely, absolutely bizarrely, I didn't know this movie existed until we started talking about, as we are wont to do listeners, we started talking about 90s movies on our WhatsApp back channel.
And we started talking, you know, somehow we got into the subject of basic instinct.
And I can't remember why, but I googled it to look something up.
And I discovered then, then, That there was such a thing, that there was such an animal as Basic Instinct 2.
I'd never even heard of it.
I didn't know it existed.
I'm looking at it and it says, you know, Sharon Stone, co-starring David Morrissey, David Thewlis, Charlotte Rampling, and Heathcote Williams.
What the fuck is this?
So just for the Americans in the audience, could you kind of expound a little bit on why you find that astonishing?
Because I think a lot of Americans are just going to go like, oh, a bunch of British actors.
I'm sure they're just a bunch of boring PBS crap.
You know, as opposed to, you know, actually respecting the quality of acting talent that's in Basic Instinct 2.
Yeah, there's quite some talent involved, which you wouldn't know, really, from looking at it.
But, yeah, Thewlis is probably the one who's best known to international audiences because, of course, he was in Harry fucking Potter.
He was one of the good guys, one of the good wizard teachers in Harry Potter.
He was Lupin in some of the Harry Potter movies, yes.
Yes, he was, yes.
He's great.
I love David Thewlis.
He's a really good actor, but yeah, he was in Harry Potter, because of course he fucking was, because the entirety of British show business was in Harry Potter.
But yeah, that was probably round about the time this was made, wasn't it?
It's probably round about Prisoner of Azkaban time.
Yeah, it's 2006.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah, because that's the one he comes in in.
He comes in in the third one, Prisoner of Azkaban.
See, I'm accidentally revealing that I know more about Harry Potter than I would like people to realize.
So, yeah, that was round about the time, I suppose, that he was becoming, to an extent, a name and a face in movies, owing to Harry Potter.
Yeah, so that's probably why.
And he plays the cop.
Because it's set in England, too.
It's set in England.
It's set in London.
Bizarrely.
Again, it's set in England.
And she's in England, and Theolis is the cop who's, you know, it's like a Scotland Yard detective.
He plays him as Welsh for some reason as well, who's after her.
And David Morrissey is the lead.
He's kind of the Michael Douglas substitute.
He's the male lead.
And David Morrissey, he's a really good actor, but he's like British television, serious British BBC drama sort of actor.
And he was in Doctor Who, of course, as well.
Again, that's the thing probably most people will know him from listening to this.
He was in a Doctor Who back in the David Tennant days where they tried to make you think for five minutes that he might be the next Doctor Who, but he wasn't.
Instead, we got Matt Smith.
Instead, we got Matt Smith.
So, yeah, thanks for that.
Thank you.
Thank you for not...
Can you imagine?
Definitely don't cast David Morrissey.
Matt Smith's the one you want.
We really dodged a bullet on that one.
Yeah, yeah.
So, yeah, really good, serious, worthy British actor.
You know, does lots of serious stuff.
And he's in this.
He's playing the psychiatrist that she sort of has a complicated psychological, psychosexual game with in the movie.
I'm really talking it up.
It's a bad, bad movie.
It's a really bad movie.
Charlotte Rampling.
Charlotte Rampling, I'm really hoping people don't need me to explain Charlotte Rampling.
And Hethcote Williams, Hethcote Williams is an avant-garde poet.
He's an avant-garde poet and playwright, you know, and of course an actor as well.
Basically, how can you define Hithcote Williams?
He's absolutely the last person you would ever expect to see in Basic Instinct 2.
I can't think of any better encapsulation of Hithcote Williams than that.
So yeah, I discovered that Basic Instinct 2 was a thing and that it was starring all these very worthy, prestigious British actors and playwrights and poets and things.
