Insomnia File #39: Disclosure (dir by Barry Levinson)

Posted on March 19, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

What’s an Insomnia File? You know how some times you just can’t get any sleep and, at about three in the morning, you’ll find yourself watching whatever you can find on cable? This feature is all about those insomnia-inspired discoveries!

On Tuesday, if you were having trouble getting to sleep around one in the morning, you could have turned over to Cinemax and watched the 1994 film, Disclosure.

The majority of Disclosure takes place at DigiCorp, which is some sort of technology company that Bob Garvin (Donald Sutherland) founded because, as the movie explains it, he only has $100 million dollars but still dreams of being a billionaire someday. With a huge merger approaching, Garvin announces that he will be promoting Meredith Johnson (Demi Moore) to run the new CD-ROM division. This shocks a lot of people, as everyone was expecting the promotion to go to Tom Sanders (Michael Douglas). However, Garvin explains that, ever since his daughter died, he’s wanted to promote a woman.

(Presumably, if a male relative had died, Tom would have gotten the promotion. I have to admit that I kept waiting for the film to get back to the subject of Garvin’s dead daughter but, apparently, that was just an odd throw-away line.)

Tom and Meredith have a history. They were once lovers, though Tom is now happily married to Susan (Caroline Goodall) and has a family. Meredith takes one look at a picture of Susan and says that Tom must miss being able to take his lover from behind whenever he felt like it. Tom says, “Mrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me.” No, actually, he says, “No, no, no, no, no, no…..” It all ends with Tom fleeing Meredith’s office while Meredith, in her bra, chases after him, shouting threats all the way. The only witness to this is a cleaning lady who sadly shakes her head before returning to her dusting.

Tom is so traumatized by the experience that he has a bizarre nightmare in which Donald Sutherland says that he likes his suit and then attempts to lick his face. Tom’s trauma continues when he goes to work the next day and discovers that Meredith has accused him of sexual harassment! Tom responds by suing the company and it’s time for an epic courtroom battle, one that will deal with one of the most important issues of our time….

….except that never happens. Here’s what is weird. For all the talk about abuse of power and all the scenes of a remorseful Tom apologizing to both his wife and his secretary for his past behavior, the whole sexual harassment plot turns out to be a red herring.

Instead, the film turns into this weird techno thriller, one that involves Tom trying to figure out how to make a better CD-ROM. That may have been a big deal back in 1994 but today, you watch the film and you think, “Who cares?” (Even better is a scene where Garvin brags about how his company is on the cutting edge of fax technology.) Once Tom realizes that Meredith only accused him of sexual harassment to keep him from building the perfect CD-ROM, we get a scene of him using a virtual reality headset to search through the companies files. At one point, he spots a bot with Demi Moore’s face destroying files and he shouts out, “She’s in the system!” It’s just strange.

The film’s plot is often incoherent but the cast keeps things amusing. Michael Douglas spends the first half of the movie looking either annoyed or terrified. Things pick up for him in the 2nd half of the movie. Whenever he gets good news from his lawyer, he jumps up in the air and goes, “Yessssssss!” and it’s so dorky that it’s kind of endearing. Meanwhile, Demi Moore doesn’t even try to make Meredith into a credible character, which is actually just the right approach to take to this material. There’s no room for subtlety in a film as melodramatic as this. Finally, Donald Sutherland is his usual avuncular self, smirking at all the right moments and suggesting that he finds the movie to be just as amusing as we do. For all of its plot holes and problematic subtext, Disclosure is an entertainingly stupid film. A lot of the credit for the entertaining part has to go to the cast.

As I said, Disclosure is just strange.. As with most films from the 90s, its sexual politics are all over the place. On the one hand, Tom learns that even inadvertent sexism can make the women who wok with him feel unsafe. On the other hand, the only woman with any hint of a personality is portrayed as being pure evil. In no way, shape, or form is this a movie to be taken seriously. Instead, this is just a weird film that cries out, “1994!”

Previous Insomnia Files:

A Movie A Day #103: Mobsters (1991, directed by Michael Karbelnikoff)

Posted on April 20, 2017 by Jedadiah Leland

The place is New York City. The time is the prohibition era. The rackets are controlled by powerful but out of touch gangsters like Arnold Rothstein (F. Murray Abraham), Joe Masseria (Anthony Quinn), and Salvatore Faranzano (Michael Gambon). However, four young gangsters — Lucky Luciano (Christian Slater), Meyer Lansky (Patrick Dempsey), Frank Costello (Costas Mandylor), and Bugsy Siegel (Richard Greico) — have an ambitious plan. They want to form a commission that will bring together all of the Mafia families as a national force. To do it, they will have to push aside and eliminate the old-fashioned mob bosses and take over the rackets themselves. When Masseria and Faranzano go to war over who will be the new Boss of all Bosses, Luciano and Lansky seen their opportunity to strike.

I love a good gangster movie, which is one reason that I have never cared much for Mobsters. Mobsters was made in the wake of the success of Young Guns and, like that film, it attempted to breathe new life into an old genre by casting teen heartthrobs in the lead roles. There was nothing inherently wrong with that because Luciano, Lansky, and Seigel were all still young men, in their 20s and early 30s, when they took over the Mafia. (Costello was 39 but Mobsters presents him as being the same age as they other three.) The problem was that none of the four main actors were in the least bit convincing as 1920s mobsters. Christian Slater was the least convincing Sicilian since Alex Cord in The Brotherhood. As for the supporting cast, actors like Chris Penn and F. Murray Abraham did the best that they could with the material but Anthony Quinn’s performance in Mobsters was the worst of his long and distinguished career.

Fans of Twin Peaks will note that Lara Flynn Boyle had a small role in Mobsters. She played Luciano’s girlfriend. Unfortunately, other than looking pretty and dying tragically, she was not given much to do in this disappointing gangster film.

Back to School #48: Scent of a Woman (dir by Martin Brest)

Posted on September 12, 2014 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Along with my current series of 80 Back to School reviews (48 down, 32 to go!), another one of my long time goals has been to watch and review every single film to ever be nominated for the best picture. So, imagine how happy I was to discover that by watching the 1992 film Scent of a Woman, I could make progress towards completing two goals at once! Not only was Scent of A Woman nominated for best picture of the year (losing to Unforgiven) but it also features a major subplot about life and discipline at an exclusive New England prep school! Even better, it’s been showing up on Showtime fairly regularly for the past month or so.

“Wow,” I thought as my boyfriend and I sat down to watch this movie, “could life get any easier? Or better?”

And then we watched the film.

You know how occasionally you watch a film just because you’ve heard that it was nominated (or perhaps even won) an Oscar or because it has an oddly high rating over at the imdb or maybe because someone said, “Roger Ebert loved this film so, if you don’t watch and love it, that means that, by that standard of the current online film community, you really don’t love movies?” And then you watch the movie and you’re just like, “What the Hell?”

Well, that was kind of my reaction to Scent of a Woman.

Look, the film’s not all bad. It has a few good performances. It looks great. It’s certainly better than Gigli, the film that director Martin Brest is perhaps best remembered for. It features a great scene where Al Pacino (playing a blind man) dances the tango with a woman that he’s just met. (Then again, I have a notorious weakness for dance scenes…) It’s not so much that the film is bad as much as it’s just that the movie itself is not particularly good.

Charlie Simms (Chris O’Donnell) is a scholarship student at an exclusive prep school in Massachusetts. Much like Brendan Fraser in School Ties, 1992’s other prep school melodrama, Charlie is a poor kid attending the school on a scholarship. While his rich friends prepare to go home for the Thanksgiving weekend, Charlie knows that there’s no way that he can afford to fly back to Oregon. In order to raise the money so that he can at least go back home for Christmas (how poor is this kid’s family!?), Charlie gets a temporary job for the weekend. His job? To look after Lt. Col. Frank Slade (Al Pacino), who is blind and yells a lot.

Anyway, as you can probably guess, Frank convinces Charlie to drive him to New York and they have all of the adventures that usually happen whenever a naive teenager spends the weekend with a suicidal blind man. Frank bellows a lot and tells about how, through his sense of smell, he can always tell when there’s a beautiful woman nearby. Frank also yells a lot. Did I already mention that? Because, seriously, he yells a lot.

Charlie has other problems than just Frank. It seems that a rather mild prank was pulled on the headmaster (James Rebhorn) of Charlie’s school. As a result, a bucket of paint was poured down on both the headmaster and his new car! Now, the headmaster is looking for those responsible. He just needs two witnesses. He’s already gotten one student to confess. And now, he’s blackmailing Charlie with a letter of recommendation to Harvard. All Charlie has to do is name names and his future is set…

Will Charlie name names and sacrifice his honor just to get into a college that could assure him a great life? Or will Frank convince Charlie that honor is the only thing that matters? And finally, will the film end with a big hearing in front of the entire school in which the headmaster attempts to badger Charlie, just to be interrupted by a sudden appearance from bellowing Frank Slade?

Will it!?

You can probably already guess and, since we have a no spoiler policy here at the Lens, I’ll just assume that you guessed right. (Or you could just look at the picture at the top of this review…)

The prep school subplot pretty much just adds to the film’s already excessive running time. But it is interesting to watch because the other student — the one who names names — is played by a very young Philip Seymour Hoffman. (Or as he’s credited here, Philip S. Hoffman.) This was one of Hoffman’s first screen roles and he gives a memorable performance as an unlikable character. If you were to have seen Scent of a Woman in 1992, you would not have guessed that Philip Seymour Hoffman would eventually be an Oscar winner but you would know that he was a very talented character actor.

Otherwise, Scent of a Woman is a fairly forgettable movie. If I hadn’t known ahead of time that it was nominated for best picture, I never would have been able to guess. I’m not enough of an expert to be able to name every good 1992 film that was not nominated to make room for Scent of a Woman but I imagine that when that year’s Oscar nominations were announced, there were quite a few people left scratching their heads.