So, what’s got two
thumbs and really sucks at finding Turkish comedy movies? This guy right here!
(You’ll have to believe I’m pointing my two thumbs at myself right now, as this
really is more of a visual gag that I just didn’t think through when I started
writing this…). Yes, once again we failed at finding another movie on the list,
this time it was Emret Komutanim: Sah Mat (Yes Sir) starring Mehmet Ali Erbil.
The last time we watched a film featuring Erbil was when we sat through
Keloglan and the Black Prince (see here), so maybe having to sit through two
movies from our back up list wouldn’t actually be a terrible punishment this
time. However first up for us was Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls, a movie that had
such bad reviews on release that it led to quite a few of the people involved
having their careers soon go tits up for a while (sorry)….
Written by Joe
Eszterhas (in his second appearance on our list. He also wrote An Alan Smithee
Movie – See here), Showgirls is the story of a drifting dancer, Nomi Malone
(Elizabeth Berkley) who hitches to Las Vegas in the hopes of becoming a
showgirl. She soon finds work at Cheetahs Topless Club, where she gives Zack
Carey (Kyle MacLachlan) a private dance after her girlfriend, Cristal Conners (Gina
Gershon), the diva head dancer of the Stardust casino dance show Goddess pays
for it in a bid to humiliate her. Cristal soon arranges for Nomi to audition to
be in the Goddess chorus line, but even though she gets the job, Cristal
continues to try and humiliate her by getting her to make an appearance at a
boat show, where she is expected to sleep with rich businessmen. In revenge
Nomi seduces Zack and convinces him to give her an audition to be Cristal’s
understudy. When Cristal objects to Nomi’s new role, Nomi pushes Cristal down
some stairs and takes her place as the shows lead. On her opening night Nomi’s
friend Molly (Gina Ravera) meets musician Andrew Carver (William Shockley) who
brutally rapes her. Nomi soon learns that Carver’s fame and power will protect
him, so she sets out to punish his crimes herself. But how will all of this affect Nomi's career in Vegas (and will Berkley's career in Hollywood be Saved by the Bell, or is that too late)?
Paul Verhoeven is a
brilliant director. He managed to make big budget action movies with a
brilliantly satirical edge to them. Robocop, Starship Troopers and Total Recall
are superb movies, each with multiple levels on which you can enjoy them. Whilst
they are all visually beautiful, they also target the soulless greed and social
irresponsibility of big corporations, rampant militarism and the propaganda
machine used to support this, or just the dangers of not wiping Arnie’s memory
properly. This can be seen even more clearly just by watching the remakes of
these movies (well not Starship Troopers, the remake of which is thankfully
stuck in development hell), which miss out on all the cleverness, and merely
focus on the visual spectacle instead. So what went wrong with Showgirls?
Well the satire is still there, this
time on the vacuity of celebrity and the dark and seedy world this often
entails, but unlike some of his past films, this critique of the corruption of
the American Dream seems like shooting fish at Billingsgate Market using a
mini-gun, and yet still it manages often to be the film equivalent of a
perfectly healthy cod. That’s not to say there aren’t some subversive moments of
genius that are hard to spot. For example when Nomi is first seen dancing it’s
to the Prince song “319”, then later when she visits Cristal in hospital after
she’s no longer the top dancer in Vegas, Cristal is in room 319, showing how
easy it is to fall back to the bottom whilst you’re riding on top (I admit I
never spotted this myself, it was only through research that I found this out).
Also it’s a
beautifully shot movie. Verhoeven has always made visually brilliant movies and
this is no exception. The cinematography, editing, sets, costumes (what little
of them there are) and choreography are all great. But then again this just
highlights what the intended satire fails to deliver. Then again, perhaps this
is exactly what Verhoeven wants you to see in that Vegas/Hollywood/celebrity
world. Everything is such a spectacle, then peel beneath it and there’s really
not that much there (again the costumes really wouldn’t take that much peeling
back. I said it when I was younger and I’ll say it again now, but this movie
could have seriously just have been called Show-boobs, as on the surface that’s
all this movie really does).
Even the acting isn’t
that bad. Sure it has some of the most laughable sex scenes in movie history,
and Elizabeth Berkley often over dramatises everything, but at least she can
dance, unlike in the last movie we watched which featured stripping, I Know Who
Killed Me (see here). Gina Gershon is suitably divaish as Cristal, and Kyle
MacLachlan is always great. I even liked Lin Tucci as Mama Bazoom (her acting
may not have been the greatest, but her boobs seem to come with a car horn
noise every time they pop from her bustier, which made up for a lot).
What really lets down
Showgirls is the script. The film itself has such dark undertones, that lines
that are supposed to be funny just appear as tragic as everything else in this
movie, whereas what isn’t supposed to be funny is often laughable. It’s a very
chauvinistic movie, where even though the stars of the show are women, the men
behind the scenes treat them as little more than commodities. Not only that,
but the nice people, the ones you would like to see succeed all fail, male or
female. Whereas the nasty ones (including Nomi), those who screw people over to
get what they want all do well until someone turns on them. Whilst this was
clearly the point, the pure cynicism makes it a hard movie to enjoy watching
and for me made the movie a tiresome experience that I was happy when it
finally over.
Honestly Showgirls
isn’t THAT bad a movie. I’m glad it was only in the reserve list as it doesn’t
deserve to be nestled alongside some of the movies we’ve watched, but it’s not
a movie that I’ll be revisiting in a hurry. It doesn’t deserve as much
criticism as it receives, but nor does it deserve the praise that also seems to
be heaped upon it in the past few years (including a book titled It Doesn’t
Suck: Showgirls). It’s merely a below average movie that would have been mostly
forgotten quickly if people didn’t make such a fuss of it at the time, but then
again even the critics in this world make occasional boobs.
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