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Created Jul 06, 2013 01:20PM PST • Edited Mar 23, 2019 05:48AM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Really Great 4.5

   In the Cut deserves more than mere notoriety for a provocative title and Meg Ryan’s erotic performance, though the latter is monumental – No more RomComs for the RomCom Queen. – and vividly memorable.

   Slow starting, moody, Jane Campion’s movie finally turns fully creepy 30 min in, not a moment too soon. Meg turns sexy at the same time. Coincidence? I think not.

   The story hunts for a serial killer amidst lots of really hot guys, who buzz around two really horny girls in a movie directed by a Jane, written by a Susanna and produced by a Nicole. No glass ceiling here. Campion, Moore and Kidman bring a feminine POV to intense desire and crazed behavior.

   Nicole Kidman’s Queen Bee producer’s position pretty much assures that. Plus, Meg Ryan & Jennifer Jason Leigh are the perfect actresses (actors?) to play sex-crazed beauties in one of New York’s rougher precincts.

   Campion, Moore, Kidman, Ryan and Leigh could be the moniker of the world’s sexiest agency. They do things their way, e.g., you know it’s a woman director when the leading lady doesn’t wear a pushup bra.

   While a serial killer motivates the story, the fact that everybody’s horny humanizes it. That they don’t handle it well makes it fully human, e.g., Meg indulging a sexual sweet-tooth by giving herself to a man she shouldn’t. Then Jane Campion sends this proper-girl-gone-wild into an NYPD detective’s squad room. Think boiling cauldron of testosterone. Alarmed and arch towards the assholes she encounters there, she nonetheless acts out a fantasy experience that’s roughly equivalent to catnip for horny women. Roughly.

   Intensely female, intensely erotic, intensely New York, intensely a genre picture, In the Cut is intensely intense. You could even call it an intense classic. OK then, let’s summarize…

   A hot movie about dying for love starring a hot Meg Ryan makes In the Cut an intensely intense classic.

4. Acting

   Great 4.0

   Meg Ryan’s Frannie Avery was the role that signaled her retirement as America’s RomCom Sweetheart. Past 40 when she made In the Cut, she goes all in by letting it all hang out. We’d heard her voice an orgasm all those years ago to Rob Reiner’s Mom in When Harry Met Sally…. Frannie vocalizes another Meg Ryan orgasm, here to Mark Ruffalo’s real man. This one sounds nothing like Sally.

   How great is Ryan’s performance? Really great, both in terms of body and soul.

   Jennifer Jason Leigh delivers a delightful performance as a cat on a hot tin roof, notwithstanding that she’s got a New York full of tomcats all around her. The movie opens on JJL’s lovely face, prettily cupping a mug to the feminine caresses of Que Sera Sera. From that delightful start, she goes on to give a performance that oscillates over to crazed, after passing desperate-for-a-dick, before swinging all the way back to delightful. Deliriously good is what it is.

   Ruffalo’s virile Detective is as far into leading man territory as this diffident dude goes. He’s like a lite-beer Brando. He does flash some dick, which Marlon surely would have respected.

   The uniformly excellent supporting cast includes:

   • Nick Damici’s an Italian actor playing a Latino detective who sounds Italian. You got a problem wid that?
   • Sharrieff Pugh’s aspiring writer, who’s motivated by the prospect of getting into his prof’s pants.
   • The “fabulous” Kevin Bacon’s living mannequin. A bit crazed, he doesn’t take rejection well.

5. Male Stars Great 4.0

6. Female Stars Really Great 4.5

7. Female Costars Great 4.0

8. Male Costars Great 4.0

10. Film

    Really Great 4.5

    Jane Campion directs a masterpiece of urban angst. The fact that film and underlying novel were created from a female perspective makes it somewhat unique and more than somewhat fascinating. Expertly spinning a writerly tale about a lover of writing makes it more than just a pedestrian genre film.

    Four Detectives among the 15 Creative Consultants give it gritty verisimilitude, and not just at crime scenes. To wit, the bad boy banter in the squad room and at the bar carries a whiff of nasty authenticity.

    Ample literary touchstones gives it elevated allusions. Virginia Woolf’s “high modernist” novel To The Lighthouse being given a key spot in the story ensures that. The lighthouse proves useful as a double entendre when drawn as phallic symbol on a classroom whiteboard.

    “Poetry in Transit” for a NY Subway rider adds to the wordsworthiness of it all. Indeed, our literary heroine finds poetry everywhere, innately grokking the meaning of seemingly random words.

    Vivid phone sex adds to its earthiness and could serve as a primer for how to talk a woman to orgasm.

11. Direction Perfect 5.0

    Coming an even decade after The Piano made Jane Campion a star director, In the Cut failed critically and commercially. Failed with the professional critics that is. Fuck `em all.

    Viewed with fresh eyes, it deserves a Perfect grade for directorial accomplishment.

12. Play Really Great 4.5

    Well constructed murder thriller, with the heroine surrounded by three legit suspects, one of whom is a serial killer. The screenplay suggests that the one she’s drawn to could be staging killings and muggings just to get to her. She knows this but allows herself to be seduced anyway. Hitchcock would approve.

    That said, a procedural can’t evade being predictable, e.g., there comes a point when you say about a key character: She’s dead.

    Some lines rise above mere procedural interplay. “Well, I like to be ironic” is the goal of a generation.

13. Music Really Great 4.5

    Music includes a 14-strong string section. Can you say EMOTIONAL.

    Two highlights from the Strong Soundtrack of 11 Songs

    • Que Sera Sera (Whatever Will Be Well Be) movingly opens the film, sung by Pink Martini.
    • Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me) by The Temptations doesn’t need a female singer to move the women in this movie.

14. Visuals Great 4.0

    Lots of drivers for this NY based movie.

15. Content

16. Edge

    Horrid 3.7

    What does Rated R mean for In the Cut? Horridly edgy: ample sex, savage violence, nasty rudeness.

    Given that many people are drawn to the movie by the sex, be aware that it rates the least of the three edginess categories, 3.2 versus 3.8 on the violence scale and 4.0 on rudeness.

    That said, the movie is sexually notable as much for flashes of dick as for Meg Ryan’s erotic exposé.

17. Sex Erotic 3.2

18. Violence Savage 3.8

19. Rudeness Nasty 4.0

21. Reality

    Surreal 2.2

    Serial killers just aren’t as common as you might think from movies like this, or the novels from which they’re drawn, and especially the countless TV shows fixated on the phenomena.

    In the Cut’s underlying reality of 21st century female sexuality is more interesting anyway. No doubt a graduate thesis could be written about it, just not here.

22. Circumstantial Surreal 2.6

23. Biological Glib 1.8

24. Physical Surreal 2.3