Two late-night ventures into … boredom?

So, I survived my late-night showing of two films that I wasn’t exactly begging to see, “Ask the Dust” and “Basic Instinct 2.” Following are my reactions:

“Basic Instinct 2,” 7:30 pm.: This sequel to the 1992 film that gave Sharon Stone a career works off the same formula: Smut novelist Catherine Trammel is suspected of murder (again), a shrink (David Morrissey) is assigned to evaluate her and their meeting leads to a dangerous game of risky behavior.

Throughout this would-be sex mystery, Stone’s character is more powerful than an X-Man , managing to be everywhere at once, working all the other characters against each other so that she can … what? Feel in charge? Work off her hatred toward men? Write another best-selling piece of offal that has about as much appeal as three-day old menudo ?

All this Michael Caton-Jones ( “Memphis Belle” ) film proves is that Stone has developed an uncommon acquaintance with Botox and that her character is able to make everyone around her act like the sap that Hollywood takes its audience for.

“Ask the Dust,” 10:15 p.m.: Working from the book by John Fante , Oscar-winning screenwriter Robert Towne gives us a confused, meandering ultimately pointless look at post- Prohibition /pre-World War II Los Angeles. Focusing on a would-be great novelist named Arturo Bandini (Colin Ferrell), Towne isn’t able to make anything out of his love affair with a waitress (Salma Hayek) or anything else. The two fight from the beginning, each doing unforgivable things to each other before … well, you can guess, right?

Or is it merely in movies that such mutual abuse is a mask for true love?

Meanwhile, Bandini struggles to make a living. He scores an occasional paycheck from the great magazine editor H.L. Mencken , meets a slightly crazy housekeeper (Idina Menzel) with physical and emotional wounds, composes prose that he throws away and, in general, rues that he’s unable to write about a life that he hasn’t experienced – but he can’t experience anything if he’s sitting behind a typewriter. Oh, the irony.

Hmmm, he was living out “Catch-22” a couple of decades or so before Joseph Heller even dreamed the phrase up. If he’d had more imagination, he might have beaten Heller to the page.

So what did my night teach me?

One, run whenever Sharon Stone sways into a room. Two, don’t ever let your children attend the school that taught Stone how to deliver a line (each and every one with a breathless intensity that makes Marilyn Monroe sound like Sarah Vowell).

Three, maybe we’ve tended to overpraise Robert Towne in the years since he wrote “Chinatown” (1974). Four, never go to a late-night film that forces you to check your wristwatch four times over the final half-hour’s running time.

Below: Sharon Stone signs autographs during the German premiere of her new film, “Basic Instinct.”

AP photo