ARCH? CAMP? Maybe, but it seems intentional here.

Does anyone else get the feeling this film was made with a campy, over-the-top, or arch quality? Ya know, like AMERICAN PSYCHO, satire. There are just too many details in SLIVER that deliberately take this movie out of everyday reality and locate it in overcranked, lampooning-the-genre country. The much derided dialogue becomes fantastic if viewed this way - the very model of heavy-handed. There are other details too to build on it all being deliberate. For example:

Billy Baldwin's first scene has his character Zeke wearing a t-shirt with an image of roses. He later sends Carly physical roses as well as early days clip art of same. He never stops saying how good she smells. These traits are soooo on-the-nose creepy that I can't help thinking Eszterhas and company were going for kitsch, not heat, all along. Zeke is like another kind of Patrick Bateman, out-of-touch, oversexed, with an iceman-detachment from the world.

Another great through-line is Carly's deadline for the Dean book. How many times does she get nagged about this trivial plot detail over the phone or in the flesh? With this one recurring line, we get an encapsulation of Carly's frustrations at work without spending too much time in scenes set there.

A word on Carly while I'm taking the time to write on a movie that maybe doesn't deserve it - Carly's character wants to live. She wants to get tickets to Pearl Jam. She likes running in Central Park. She likes listening to Massive Attack. This is the supercharged story of Carly's achieving sexual fulfillment. It's about a fetching divorcee adrift in the big city. What were people expecting when they saw this movie? A sexual odyssey?

I only wish the film had done a little better at the box office or been a little bit more notorious like SHOWGIRLS so Noyce might feel less ashamed of the product and remedy a destroyed third act with some of the unused footage.