I Am a Sex Addict
Directed by Caveh Zahedi

Basic Instinct 2
Directed by Michael Caton-Jones

Indie-film icon Caveh Zahedi’s I Am a Sex Addict arrives on New York screens as a cause celebré. For the past couple of weeks, Zahedi has been feuding with digital mogul Mark Cuban, who owns the art house Landmark Theaters chain. Cuban yanked Addict from a Landmark screen in Berkeley because Zahedi had a deal to offer it as a video-on-demand title through Comcast Cable, one of Cuban’s rivals, at the same time that it played theatrically. (Hypocrisy alert: this is the same Cuban whose 2929 Pictures simultaneously released Bubble to theaters, DVD and video-on-demand.) Non-Landmark theaters offered to stick it to Cuban by screening Addict, and Zahedi was glad to oblige.

By luck, this feud merges neatly with Zahedi’s M.O., which seeks to tear down distinctions between screen life and real life, documentary and drama. Zahedi, who made the sharp but barely seen autobiographical-experimental features I Don’t Hate Vegas Any More and A Little Stiff (co-directed by Greg Watkins), is a hybrid of first-person documentarian Ross McElwee (Sherman’s March) and the young Albert Brooks—a writer, director, actor, blogger and underground celebrity. He hooks audiences with the assertion that “Caveh Zahedi,” his sad-sack narcissist screen character, is a warts-and-all version of himself. 

Addict uses Zahedi’s own life as a married, prostitute-addicted sexual obsessive and serial groper as a pretext to have fun with form. Framing the story with flashbacks, voice-over and straight-into-the-camera narration (a la Alfie), the movie makes fiction/nonfiction distinctions purely academic. As Zahedi himself has observed, he’s as much a performance artist as he is a narrative filmmaker. 

In that spirit, the 43-year-old director plays himself 20 years ago without resorting to special makeup (unless you count a bit of spray-on toupee and a couple of deliberately crude wigs) and restages Paris-based incidents in San Francisco because, as he explains, he’s too poor to shoot in France. 

It’s all meta, all the time. Photos of Zahedi, his wife and his mistress bump against each other over a cartoon representation of his home state, Connecticut, the women’s mug shots literally fighting to knock each other off the map. The movie’s format is so freewheeling that even accidents seem to fit. At one point, Zahedi is trolling the Net looking for a French prostitute to appear in some re-shoots, and learns that, unbeknownst to him, he had cast a French porn star as his wife.

Many of the gags are sophomoric, like Dream On or The Family Guy gone indie-edgy. (Zahedi tells you he’s run out of money, then cuts to a piggybank being smashed.) And the knowledge that Addict is based on a true story can’t change the fact that this is one hell of a sad, often repugnant story that still wants to make its protagonist as huggable as possible. 

Yet the movie still works, thanks to its finger-snap editing and Zahedi’s puppy-reptile charm. He’s the most lovable sex offender since Roberto Benigni in The Monster.

“There was something about masturbating in a confessional that appealed to my sense of transgression,” he tells us. “And it wasn’t long before I’d masturbated in every cathedral in Paris.” This movie should have been called, Coming in a Theater Near You.

Speaking of sex addicts, I went to Basic Instinct 2 to see if it really was as bad as I’d heard. It’s not that bad, but it’s definitely redundant and way past its expiration date. Director Michael-Caton Jones (Rob Roy) has some of original director Paul Verhoeven’s edge but little of his visual flair and none of his nasty-boy enthusiasm. 

This sequel sets its glossy sex and campy pop psychology in London and repeats the outline of the original Basic Instinct, substituting a hot-tempered shrink (David Morrissey, who looks like Liam Neeson’s kid brother) for Michael Douglas’ cop-on-the-edge, and tries to build crime novelist and man-eater Catherine Trammell (Sharon Stone) into a franchise baddie, a la Hannibal Lecter or Tom Ripley. 

But the camp is served cold: Caton-Jones has no comic timing, and the movie’s so ashen that it seems to have been shot on pewter. And after a certain point, you’ve got  to ask yourself, if Trammell’s such an evil genius, why’s she wasting her time entrapping horny dopes who can’t find their asses with a map and a flashlight? She’s pathetic—the devil as underachiever.