User Reviews

This was an unimaginably awful movie. The plot was terrible and the dialog stilted as well as often difficult to hear. In fact, it was so bad I wasn't able to finish watching it. Kim Basinger plays Maria, a woman who becomes unhinged after years of unsuccessfully trying to have a child and multiple miscarriages. She decides to go to a town on the German-Czech border and buy a black market baby from a prostitute. For some crazy reason, she decides to enlist a complete stranger -a drug addicted dwarf she picks up on the side of the road- to help her. And instead of buying a baby, he "rents" a baby from a prostitute for an hour, then steals her. Now, all of that is hard enough to buy into, but it just goes down hill from there. Maria has gone to great lengths to get a baby, but has brought no supplies; no car seat, diapers, food, bottles...nothing. She ends up in a hotel with the baby, but there really isn't anywhere in Germany she couldn't have reached with a day's driving, so why wouldn't she have gone home? Now, here is the most implausible part to me...the Russian Mafia, and the baby's mother, come after Maria. The baby's mother is a 14-15 yr old prostitute, in a low class brothel. She has been a prostitute for long enough to have a 3-6 month old baby, so at least since she was 13 or 14. She keeps the baby hidden in a closet, with tape over her mouth to silence any crying. And, Mama prostitute, while reluctant, is willing to rent her infant daughter for an hour to a man she(Mama) believes is going to rape the baby. Which implies she either doesn't care all that much for her child, or indicates an extreme level of desperation. Maybe a little of both. This is not a young woman with resources; if she had any she wouldn't be living as she does. Therefore,I find it hard to believe that anyone in the Mafia would give a damn about her or the baby. In such an organization, Mama prostitute would be pretty much considered disposable, and her baby would have even less value. They might even be glad to have the baby gone - one less thing to distract Mama prostitute from her primary purpose. To track down and capture Maria would take time and money resources that the Mafia would not be likely to waste.

I thought that Kim Basinger was so gorgeous in the scenes from The 11th Hour / I Am Here where she's preparing to go to work at her shipping company in Hamburg. Her blonde hair was nicely sleek and coifed, her cheeks were rosy pink, and her lips were a richly textured, shade or ruby red. She looked both elegant and chic in her black satin blouse, pearl earrings, and black rimmed glasses.

I also love how Kim interacts with people when she's act work. She has a very calm and soft and breathless manner of speaking that's equally soothing and seductive. She does a great job at being detached and distracted from the world around her.

One thing that I love about Kim as an actress is her sensitivity and emotionally fragility. I always in particular, loved the scene in which Kim unbuttons her white shirt, pulls down her white bra, and pulls out one of her breasts. What follows is a protracted scene focused on Kim's hard nipple as she squeezes milk out. Kim is incredibly sexy and captivating in that scene.

My heart literally skips a beat when she first cradles her breast and then delivers a soft, breathless little gasp the first moment that she squeezes. And then as the camera focuses on her naked breast, we can overhear Kim grunting, smacking her mouth, exhaling, blowing, and snorting. It's a a very sensual, passionate, and intense scene.

And Kim does a terrific job conveying a sense of curiosity, hesitation, surprise, vigor, panic, exhaustion, and finally, embarrassment all in roughly 36 seconds. It's a very beautiful and intimate scene because it displays a woman remaining in touch with her femininity and womanhood.

Especially the shot towards the end, where an anxiety riddled Kim sees her the milk residue on her finger tips. You can also clearly tell that Kim is both physically and mentally drained at the end of the scene.