Showgirls, 2/10
This ended up being a very fascinating watch. I'd previously considered it as a candidate for bad movie night, but heard such conflicting things about it that I ultimately decided against it. Thing is, I'm still rather conflicted even after seeing it as to whether it could sustain itself as a good bad movie. I certainly was laughing very consistently for about the first 45 minutes, and then was bored to death until the last 15.
I came up with two single-sentence summations of this movie: 1. It's like the 13-year old boy from that lost SNL Game of Thrones skit wrote an entire movie. 2. Good ideas on paper, but execution botched so badly right at the starting line.
This is one of the most relentlessly lurid, grossly gratuitously sleazy movies I've ever seen. And I know you could say "duh, it's Vegas", but even in such a movie you gotta space things out. The incessant barrage of T&A is just
relentless. It's constantly in your face, every minute there's a stripper on screen, or someone showing tits, or someone stripping for some other reason, and it becomes annoying at first, then just white noise in the end. Never have I wanted to shout "Move *****, get out the way, I'm trying to watch a movie here" so much at the screen. I could just hear the low grunting in the audience while watching this, and I watched it on my desktop alone at home. The endless parade of titillation was so overpowering that those sounds of people in the audience rubbing themselves through their trouser pockets transcended time and space.
This is one of those rare movies where just about every possible thing that could go wrong does go wrong. And even more bafflingly it's mostly not due to incompetence: the whole thing is just that misguided. Elizabeth Berkeley's over the top acting and physicality were apparently intended to show her having a history with drug abuse, but it comes across more like she's
on drugs the whole time. Or from another more contemporary angle, she often comes across as possibly even neurodivergent, which made me feel a little guilty about laughing at her throwing food around. There are a ton of interesting angles and subject matter this film could tackle, but it butchers every single one of them with frankly astonishing efficiency:
- the massive amount of gay subtext could be a very interesting exploration of showbusiness in Vegas, and how such an already extravagant place would end up attracting people who go against the grain. In a place where everybody's a coked-out sleazebag social conventions around sexuality would understandably be more lenient. But all it ends up amounting to is "Phwoaarr, it's hot when chicks make out"
- The attempt to express character development, shifting power dynamics and relationships through the numerous dance sequences is admirable, but they're shot in a way that never conveys anything other than "Phwooaarrr, tits"
- Speaking of, there's clearly a ton of effort and coordination put into the dance numbers. They're just edited in a way where you can't focus on anything, and all that effort goes to complete waste. It just ends up as more T&A on the pile
- Apparently some people say this film is supposed to be a satire, but that just feels like a stillborn idea: how do you make a movie about Vegas, the most over the top, dumbest and least subtle place on earth, in a genre that specifically calls for being smart, subtle and/or over the top? Apparently Verhoeven interviewed real life strippers and showgirls and used their actual words as dialogue in this movie. But that just completely caps the satire angle in the head, because you're not satirizing Vegas; you're merely recreating it
- Even the cautionary tale angle is botched superbly: are we seriously supposed to think that Molly, the moral backbone of the story who's worked for years as a seamstress behind the scenes and has to have seen the sleazy side of Vegas, still thinks the rockstar she's hot for is some knight in shining armor? How is Nomi, who we find out already had a history of drug use and prostitution prior to the movie's events, still supposed to think Vegas is some sort of dream come true for her? It honestly goes beyond stupidity into outright denial of reality
I could go on, but I need to go to sleep. The one decent thing about this movie is Kyle MacLachlan, who plays a sleazily charming scumbag really entertainingly. All the rest are things I can appreciate, but not really enjoy. For example, Berkeley's athleticism and commitment to the role is undeniable, she gives it her all in every scene. It's just that we didn't
need her all in
every scene. There's a shitton of production value on display, but it's all shiny surface built on a foundation of wet cardboard and spoiled fish. It's not so much an endless barrage of shit like, say, Suicide Squad. But the fact that I can see so much potential in it makes it infinitely more frustrating. Awful
![[IMG]](https://i.ibb.co/ZBD2jD4/Drive-1997-Steve-Wang-MVD-Visual-BD-mkv-snapshot-01-13-43-083.jpg)
