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Jagged Edge 1985
For some reason I had a desire to watch this again recently, has been a long time since I had seen it.
Basic plot has Jeff Bridges as a guy who is suspected of killing his wife. Glenn Close is hired to defend him. As the case progresses, Close starts to fall for Bridges, leading to some obvious complications, and the possibility that she may have fallen in love with a killer.
It was written by Joe Esterhaz, and shares many traits with Basic Instinct. It does have a somewhat pulpy feel to it, of course it has lost a lot of its shock value now.
But its still a decent courtroom drama with a twist. There are some interesting little diversions along the way, namely a sub plot regarding Peter Coyote's prosecutor/DA having buried evidence in a previous case. Bridges character is cleverly written and portrayed so as to blur the lines as to where the viewers sympathy lies.
And nowhere is this more evident than in the final scene...
Basic plot has Jeff Bridges as a guy who is suspected of killing his wife. Glenn Close is hired to defend him. As the case progresses, Close starts to fall for Bridges, leading to some obvious complications, and the possibility that she may have fallen in love with a killer.
It was written by Joe Esterhaz, and shares many traits with Basic Instinct. It does have a somewhat pulpy feel to it, of course it has lost a lot of its shock value now.
But its still a decent courtroom drama with a twist. There are some interesting little diversions along the way, namely a sub plot regarding Peter Coyote's prosecutor/DA having buried evidence in a previous case. Bridges character is cleverly written and portrayed so as to blur the lines as to where the viewers sympathy lies.
And nowhere is this more evident than in the final scene...
The killer is unquestionably Bridges. But another possible killer is introduced earlier, and though this turns out to be a red herring, such was the likeability of Bridges character and the fact that Close had fallen for him, for some viewers when the killer is unmasked at the end it seems they had effectively projected the face of the other character over Bridges, and convinced themselves Bridges was not the killer. The fact that the other character bore a resemblance to Bridges, and also that the reveal was very brief helped to blur the lines. It was a case of people seeing what they wanted to see. Of course with video/dvd etc its now much clearer...but when the film was first shown at the cinema there was much debate as to who people thought the killer was.
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For some reason, his work is hated by many and gets slated. Perhaps he is bad or something, and certainly Showgirls seems like junk to me, other things (including the much maligned film about the film of the water polo clash in the Olympic games, Children Of Glory, are very enjoyable. He wrote Basic Instinct as well of course.
After its enormous success he was in a restaurant with a big hollywood boss and was asked to suggest another idea, and he wrote on the back of a menu about a female lawyer who falls for the man she is defending for murder. The woman, though she must be beautiful, must not appeal to men because the audience have to be a bit against her. The executive liked it, and bought it for several million dollars.
OK perhaps that is a spoiler for the book, but there is a heckuva lot more.
I think there are two reasons he gets slated, one is that he had a bustup with Mel Gibson after beginning a cooperation with him but then splitting up because he said that Gibson was anti-semitic (Joe's father was as well, and Joe split from his father over it), and also he wrote a book about what he thought were the bad aspects of Hollywood.