In recent weeks, “Cutthroat Island” has been shown quite often on cable. Well, I like this movie. It seems that people either made such a big deal out of 1) how much this movie cost or 2) how much this movie lost that it never has received a fair chance of being judged objectively.
Sometimes, movies are doomed even before they are released. How about “Glitter” with Mariah Carey? I saw this movie when it made it to cable and it is nowhere near as bad as all the harsh reviews make it out to be.
I have no idea what the movie “Gigli” is like but don’t you think this movie was pre-ordained to self-destruct LONG before it hit the theaters? I think in the case of “Glitter” and “Gigli”, these featured very popular stars and doesn’t there come a point in time when people love to turn on certain celebrities? As Don Henley sang “People love it when you lose, they love dirty laundry”.
Getting back to “Cutthroat Island”, I liked the fact that it was action-packed without resorting to special effects. Sure, movies like Terminator 2 are great to watch but instead of seeing a “liquid chrome” bad terminator morph into a scimitar, it is nice to see actual people doing actual things.
Okay folks, what do you think?
I actually liked Cutthroat Island. But I have a soft spot for tall masted ships, pirates and especially female pirates that look that good in the outfit.
Well Ranger, admittedly Geena Davis’ role did make me have a rather positive outlook on this film.
ARRR, she was a comely little wench befittin’ such a movie.
I liked Cutthroat Island, though I recognize it as the cheap, shallow, oh-so-deliciously-fun entertainment that it is.
Huh. For a second there I could have sworn that you were saying Cutthroat Island isn’t all that bad.
Seriously: You are correct that many movies don’t get a fair shake, due to buzz accumulated through production problems (budgetary, fighting cast members, etc.) or for other reasons. Lots of movies come into cinemas dead on arrival, with the critics having sharpened their knives and pre-written at least an outline of what their review will be, complete with ostensibly clever insults (“Kevin Costner’s The Postman should be returned to sender,” haw haw haw).
Cutthroat Island isn’t a great movie; it’s got too many problems to be considered entirely successful. (To name one, Matt Modine is horribly miscast.) But it certainly doesn’t deserve the rancor with which it was greeted.
This sort of thing happens regularly. A few years ago, for example, everybody was waiting for Charlie’s Angels to come out and be a disaster. They had like four hundred writers on the thing, the director was a novice, and the gossip-mongers on the set couldn’t shut up about Bill Murray fighting with Lucy Liu and the girls arguing about closeups and costumes and the director just trying to get the movie done. Conventional wisdom said it was going to be a big-ticket catastrophe, so when the movie actually came out and… well, it wasn’t good, exactly, but it was bad in exactly the right way, and turned out to be fairly entertaining, everybody was surprised. You can tell from the wishy-washy writeups that met the film how many of the reviewers didn’t get to use all the clever slams they’d thought up over the previous few weeks. Some reviewers ran their original material anyway, more or less.
Further examples: Ishtar is not a bomb; it’s actually pretty good until the last twenty minutes or so. Likewise, Hudson Hawk has a loopy charm, if you go into it with the knowledge that it takes place in an alternate universe. Waterworld is a passable if dopey action movie. All of them cost way, way too much money for what they were, and were attacked mercilessly on arrival.
And don’t get me started on Return to Oz or Showgirls.
I’m going to lose all respect for you if you try to use that “Showgirls isn’t actually a bad movie, it’s a work of subtle genius” line that people try. And the same goes for Starship Troopers.
I hate when I post before I’m done.
I’d just like to say that some of the selections in the Brendan Frasier catalogue aren’t bad, they’re works of subtle genius. Alright, not subtle genius, but they don’t deserve the trashings they get. Some of them, anyway. The ones without Pauly Shore.
Monkeybone, for example, is funny as hell. Dudley Do-right breaks the plane of sheer badness and reaches comic goodness. I have to love any movie where the villian and the good guy argue about who is really the bad guy because of the color of their clothes (“I’m wearing black, you’re wearing navy!” “Why am I wearing navy?!”).Bedazzled has Elizabeth Hurley in a schoolgirl skirt. “What does that have to do with Brendan Fraser?” you’re asking and, to you I say, “Shut up!” The Mummy is a rocking good time movie. Airheads…well, it’s not THAT bad.
Well, I didn’t think that Starship Troopers was subtle genius, I thought it was smack you in the face with its message genius, which was fitting considering it was a parody of propaganda flicks and the material it was based on. In all fairness to fans of the book (including myself), it was kind of shitty to crap all over the source material like SST did, but then again if they made the movie completely true to the book it would’ve been pretty fascist in the end result, which, when you think about it, would’ve been pretty shitty as well (I really don’t get why that book is so hyped up, it’s very good, but disturbing).
I guess I lose your respect, then, twice over. Sorry.
I like him a lot. I see him as a modern day Cary Grant, good looking, athletic, with talent for goof ball comedy (George of the Jungle was brilliant, as was Blast from the Past), drama (The Quiet American, where the menace is just under the surface, barely seen) and action (The Mummy).
I also think that sometimes a movie project comes around, when the time simply is wrong. I can think of a number of studios who’d greenlight Cutthroat Island today, after the success of Pirates of the C. It’d probably get a better cast and director too. The time simply wasn’t right, back then, to resurrect the old adventure movie of the 30’s - 50’s.
Tron was another movie like that. Good movie, wrong timing. Dark City is yet another example.
owever, when it comes to movies like Glitter or Crossroads, I will simply not pay money to go see them. I’ll wait till they arrive on regular tv or - even better - MST3K.
Return to Oz has moments of magic; but it also has moments of cringe-inducing messiness. Overall, though, it’s waaay better than its reputation, which largely due to Ebert’s reviewing his expectations rather than the actual movie.
Showgirls will someday be recognized as the great film it is. It’s Verhoeven’s masterpiece (so far), but it will probably take the French critics to reframe it for the American critics to reconsider it. (Remember, Hitchock was thought a hack until the French came along, and Verhoeven is like the bastard son of Hictchock and Sirk, another director who wasn’t recognized until reconsidered many years after his death.)
I think he just picks some really shitty roles.
As to Dark City, I can’t figure out why it wasn’t extremely popular. I know it was weird, but I figured there’d at least be a cult following. And it had Riff Raff! Riff Raff, ferchrissakes!
Those of you arguing about Verhoven are on my list, by the way. However, ST as a propoganda flick, you’re right, I think it shoots itself all the way through parody into seriousness. And it has Doogie Howser as a frickin’ Nazi! But Showgirls? C’mon.
Verhoeven is the bastard son of Steven Spielberg and Brian DePalma. This is not a compliment. (I did like Robocop, though.)
Cuttthroat Island is a perfectly entertaining piece of fluff, if you go in without expectations.
I saw a sneak preview of Cutthroat Island back before it opened and the audience I saw with seemed to like it a lot. Got applause and everyone I heard on the way out predicted it would be a hit.
This was an audience made up of studio employees (not from the studio that made the film), and they usually have a good nose for picking hits, or predicting disasters.
I think a lot of the negative press was personality driven. Granted, it was not worth of a Best Film Oscar, but I thought, and still think, for an action-adventure film, it was better than most.
I did, however, rent Legally Blonde II over the weekend…now that was a turkey too big to fit in my oven this Thanksgiving…truly horrible film.
I know how bad Gigli is… and it is baaaaaaaaaaaaaaad.
Cervaise and lissener, you’re telling me that Showgirls is not only watchable, but actually good? A work of genius, even? Am I being wooshed here? I’m asking this in all sincerity because I haven’t seen the film myself and if it’s really a good movie after all, I want to put it in my Netflix queue.
The thing about Verhoeven (his American movies, at least; I’m not including the films he made in Europe in this generalization) is that he makes what you might call “parallel universe” movies.
Starship Troopers is the most obvious example. Everybody went to that expecting either (a) the typical summer shoot-em-up or (b) a faithful adaptation of the Heinlein novel. The film is neither, which is why so many people reacted negatively to it. The key to watching that movie is not to think of it as a satire of propaganda movies, necessarily; you should think of it as a propaganda movie. That is, don’t think of it as having been made by a liberal Dutch director in Hollywood; pretend that the film has fallen back to our universe from an alternate future in which the Soviets or the Nazis won and took over the world. To aid you in making this creative leap, imagine that the movie has been dubbed into English from the original Russian or German. Through this lens, the movie makes perfect sense, with its vacuous and ridiculously pretty actors, its dopey aw-shucks dialogue, the shallow rah-rah spirit, and everything else. In other words, Verhoeven isn’t commenting on the war mentality by standing outside of it and describing its horrors like a clinician, as in All Quiet on the Western Front or Stalingrad; he’s made a movie that explores the idea from the inside out, saying to the audience, “If we really went this way, this is what it would be like.” Now, you can argue that the film is a failure for a couple of reasons: First, no major critic “got” this when the movie was first released, which suggests that the message is muddled (though I’d disagree); and second, reversing and deliberately sabotaging Heinlein’s novel strikes a lot of people as being profoundly disrespectful (with which I cannot disagree).
I describe that at length to establish a baseline for looking at Showgirls, which operates on a similar level. However, it works much more subtly, because the setting seems to be recognizable as our own world. That’s a deliberate deception; basically, the movie sucks in its audience before shitting all over them. Or, well, to be more precise, not them as people, but rather their expectations as audience members.
The structure of Showgirls is based on the age-old “star is born” model; it’s a tossed salad of elements from Stage Door, All About Eve, and, of course, A Star is Born, among others. The general plot about a newcomer to entertainment rising to stardom has been a cliche since the 1930s, but we still see it today, stretching through Funny Girl and the remake of The Jazz Singer up to Glitter and 8 Mile (which at least did something interesting with it) and Chicago. There’s even a project in development at one of the studios in which A Star is Born will be explicitly remade for the umpteenth time, transplanted into hiphop.
It’s a popular, recurring story form because it’s so potent: We in the audience look up at the flickering silver screen and project our dreams of wealth and power and stardom into the beautiful actor or actress pretending to be a doe-eyed naïf; it’s an escapist fantasy that allows us to imagine that our own half-developed talent (childhood tap classes or piano lessons, or singing in the shower for grownups, or whatever) might be the ticket to fame and fortune if we only met the right mentor (and maybe fall in love in the process) or managed to be in the right place at the right time. (Eddie Izzard has a bit in his show Dress to Kill wherein he tells of sneaking onto studio lots as a kid and creeping around hoping some producer will notice him and cast him as the lead in a hypothetical project called The Creeping Kid.)
Showgirls takes this story form, and transplants it into the most foul and sleazy environment it can find that still has some of the trappings of showbiz glitz and glamour. Thus — and this is the subversive bit — it brings our associated fantasies along with it. We cannot help but identify with the rising newcomer, even though from almost the first frame the movie is telling us what an awful person she is; we feel bad when bad things happen to her, and we feel triumph when she gets her big break, but at the same time we feel deeply icky about it. If we don’t understand what the movie is doing and how it works, we may be repulsed by this conflict and reject the movie as a failure, which is how most people responded to it. I am arguing that the film does this on purpose; just like Starship Troopers, it says to the audience, “You find this fantasy appealing? Okay, but let’s look at it another way.” Most people don’t want their fantasies exploded, and the fact that Showgirls comes off as creepy-to-the-bone caused most folks to push it away, assuming (incorrectly, I assert) that this underlying moral contradiction is due to incompetence rather than by design.
Now let’s consider that design. First look at the characters; every single one is a stock type, right off the shelf of A Star is Born and All About Eve and Gold Diggers of Broadway and so on, plugged right into their expected place; a handful are two-dimensional, and most are fewer. The only difference between those “nice” pieces of froth from the 1930s and 1940s and Showgirls is that the characters get naked and say “fuck” a lot. The correlation is obvious in the performances, too. Look specifically at Kyle MacLachlan. He knows exactly what movie he’s in. Listen to the way his character speaks: a little fast, a little clipped, in a deliberate nod to the genre they’re exploring, sort of a low-key version of the same thing Jennifer Jason Leigh did in Hudsucker Proxy. (Sadly, MacLachlan can’t take credit for an interesting, intelligent performance; whenever people bring up Showgirls and say, “What were you thinking?” he has no choice but to laugh it off as a mistake and change the subject.) And he’s not the only one, and that’s not the only giveaway: There are shots, lines, and occasionally whole scenes that hearken directly back to the fantasy genre being dissected.
The real key performance, though, in my opinion, is that of Elizabeth Berkeley. It’s not a good performance, really, but I think that’s deliberate; unlike MacLachlan, I don’t think Berkeley has a clue what movie she’s in. Based on how fiercely she grabs hold of the role (despite her obvious dramatic limitations), and how seriously she obviously takes it, I think Verhoeven cruelly and consciously misled her. He has a habit of casting beautiful but vapid people, and using them as polished mannequins to undermine audience expectations; this is true in Starship Troopers, of course, and then he did much the same thing later in Hollow Man with Elisabeth Shue and Josh Brolin, two more thespians of questionable depth. The way he uses Berkeley in Showgirls, in my view, as viciously deceptive and unfair to the actress as it seems to be, is part and parcel with the film’s overall intent.
If you decide to get Showgirls and look at it again, I’m going to suggest a point of view that I think will help, along the lines of watching Starship Troopers as a dubbed bit of ineptitude from a semi-parallel future. Instead of watching Showgirls as an ordinary movie, step outside. Imagine yourself in the cinema projection booth, with the audience below you and the movie in front. Rather than just watching the movie, watch the relationship between the movie and the audience. As the movie plays out, look at how it introduces a familiar plot element that seems to tell the audience where it’s going, and then observe as the film quickly twists or undercuts that familiarity. Imagine how the average filmgoer, who is used to passively absorbing the average movie, with its graceless but unambiguous exposition and carefully telegraphed story points designed to lead the inattentive viewer by the hand through the plot, will perceive a given moment in the film and, without even really consciously realizing it, make certain assumptions about what the story is doing and where it’s going; and then watch as the film turns these unconscious assumptions back on the audience with a nearly accusatory tone.
Yes, it’s a fairly hostile film, with a very dark sense of twisted humor not just about the characters in the story but about the comfortable audience illusions it’s attacking. For that reason, even if you “get” it, you may not find it a particularly pleasant experience, because the whole thing, in many ways, is such a cruel joke. And in order to get the joke, you have to work pretty hard and make a big imaginative leap, and keep yourself from being sucked into the movie’s tricks and deceptions, and most people, understandably, don’t want to have to work that hard at what most people would call “merely” entertainment. From that perspective, then, Showgirls cannot be called a “good movie,” because you don’t just sit back and look at it. But it is, in my view, a great work of Art.
(This is a pretty massive hijack of the original post, so anybody who wants to continue this discussion and let this thread return to the topic of how Cutthroat Island was unfairly maligned, we should probably start a new thread.)
What Cervaise said. I’d be happy to add my take too, if this becomes a separate thread. Heck, I’ll go start one.
Just dropping by to say to Cervaise that I read his last post: that’s great movie criticism! Don’t know whether I entirely agree, though, and probably would have to see those movies again. But your post is what distinguishes criticism from reviewing: it makes one think about what the movie really is about.
And that concludes the hijack.
With respect to the subject at hand, I found Cutthroat Island a fun little movie. The escape scene with the carriage at the beginning of the movie is brilliantly done, for example. I’m with Arden Ranger in finding the presence of Geena Davis a positive factor. I’m with **Cervaise ** (and the rest of the world) in considering Matthew Modine miscast.
In some respects the movie seems a little like The Princess Bride, which I only recently saw for the first time. Maybe that’s why they chose Modine as the male lead: he physically resembles Wesley, and in this way the producers could invert the roles of the earlier movie?