Dammit, I have got to get a hold of that movie.
Charles Taylor has also written articles for Salon about how much he enjoys porn, and how it should be considered art. And about Gigli he wrote that “it deserves credit for its refreshingly frank sexuality” (http://archive.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2003/07/30/gigli/index_np.html). So it’s no surprise to see him praising Showgirls.
NARRATOR: This man is about to die. In a few moments, now, he will be killed, for lissener is a convicted criminal who has been allowed to choose the manner of his own execution.
NAKED ELIZABETH BERKELEY: There.
NAKED GINA GERSHON: There he is!
lissener sprints for a cliff, desperate to escape.
GOVERNOR: Charles Herbert Runcie MacAdam Jarrett Taylor lissener, you have been convicted by twelve good persons and true . . . of the crime of first degree enjoying of a motion picture that the hive mind decreed unworthy of consideration. Also of first degree insisting that your opinion of said motion picture is not just valid but the only correct one once all the evidence is considered.
Exit lissener, pursued by a bare.
Spoken like someone who has never seen the episode of Saved by the Bell where Jessie (Berkley) battles her addiction to caffeine pills. 
Lemur had the right idea. I am so damned tired of people saying “Oh Showgirls/Starship Troopers isn’t a bad film, it’s a parody! You have to see the subtext!” We SEE the subtext, we NOTICE the parody…it’s just POORLY DONE. Just because a movie is layered like an onion doesn’t mean it’s a good movie.
FWIW, they’re not parodies, but satires.
sorry, hit send too early: meant to include definitions, as to my understanding of the difference. From dictionary.com
**parody: ** A literary or artistic work that imitates the characteristic style of an author or a work for comic effect or ridicule.
**satire: ** A literary work in which human vice or folly is attacked through irony, derision, or wit.
The difference being, to my understanding, that a parody is reference to a particular work; a caricature; a pastiche. Weird Al Yankovic does parodies OF songs.
A satire is not in exact reference to a single specific work, but uses irony or sarcasm to make a particular point. The most famous example is Jonathan Swift’s “A modest proposal,” wherein he suggests that a solution to the overpopulation problem would be to eat the poor.
While there are certainly scenes within Starship Troopers parody scenes from WWII propaganda films (both German and American), the film overall is a satire ABOUT fascism, not a parody OF a particular film.
Awright, what I wanted brought up! 
So who do the masses claim is most to blame for it [(choose one) sucking like the intakes on a 777 / whooshing the entire public / being unsubtle as satire / pissing off the critics / not delivering the box-office success of the creators’ other contemporary pieces]? (that it annihilated Berkley’s post-Bell career was probably her own damn fault) Eszterhas or Verhoeven?
Now children, there’s blame enough for everyone!
And it may not matter, really. After Googling a bit, it seems that the careers of the Dastardly Duo are in firmly in eclipse. Eszterhas has been banished to Cleveland, where he writes massive and unread books about Bill Clinton’s sex life. Verhoeven has scampered back to the Netherlands to make a couple of movies. I think we can safely lower the national threat level to Yellow.
I think the blame can be spread around pretty liberally.
Marketing
[ul]It was sold as nothing more than a titfest, but it was so twisted and violent that the audience was taken by surprise.
[li]It was marketed to make it look like it DIDN’T contain any layers at all, but the layers of course are where its strengths lie.[/li][li]It was given an NC17 rating, which many theaters refused to book. Not sure what the solution there is; Ebert supports a new rating, A, since NC17 has been irredeemably tainted.[/ul][/li]The Critics[ul]As a result of the dishonest marketing, I think, critics were thrown for as much of a loop as the average audience goer; I know I certainly didn’t get it the first time I saw it.
The Audience[list]Most American moviegoers don’t go to the movie to work out the layers; they go for entertainment. That’s fine, but this movie, having been marketed so dishonestly, led the audience to believe it was in for one movie then it switched bait and smacked them in the face with an entirely different movie.
[/ul]
Verhoeven
[ul]This one’s harder for me, because now that I get it, I think it’s a masterpiece and I don’t think he did anything wrong at all. He also didn’t really do anything right: he didn’t defend the film or explain its subtext; he just let it stand on its own. Whic of course I respect him for. I wonder how it’d’ve been marketed if he’d had some control over that? Not sure.[/ul]
Esterhas
[ul]
Also difficult, but for different reasons. Esterhas is a pig and a hack, but just like Verhoeven found a totally different movie buried within Heinlein’s novel Starship Troopers, Verhoeven was able to spin Esterhas’s poop into gold. *Showgirls * and *Basic Instinct * are satires that start from a trashy place and then dig a little deeper. Esterhas supplied the trash; Verhoeven supplied the digging.[/ul]
So overall, I think the bad marketing started a snowball that has only now begin to slow its rolling, to torture a metaphor. It became so famous for being bad, like Ishtar, that this was all anyone was prepared to hear about it. But keep in mind that the same thing happened to *Bringing Up Baby, * OK?
By the way, if you haven’t read Taylor’s review, it’s interesting to note that while he and lissener agree about Showgirls, they don’t similarly value Verhoeven’s career:
Which gives me hope, actually. I agree that Verhoeven is not just a hack (at least, not all the time), and that comparisons to Sirk are not unwarranted. But while I get that Troopers is a parody, it doesn’t make me like the film much more. But Taylor’s ability to credit Verhoeven with skill and complex opinions without always agreeing that they result in a good movie makes me think I should give Showgirls a chance. (Well, I’ve always had it on my “to be rented” list, but haven’t gotten around to it.)
I’m renting Showgirls on the way home. Time to pop my Nomi cherry. I’ll post some opinions when I’ve decided what they are – could be a couple of days.
It also sounds like Hollywood picked exactly the wrong director on exactly the wrong project to try and establish NC-17 as a commercially viable rating. Even Brian de Palma, who famously shares audience affection for sex and violence while being unable to actually attract an audience with his sexy, violent films, might have been a better choice.
Hot damn, now this is a thread I can get into.
I’m of two minds about Verhoeven. On the one hand, I’ve always been fascinated by the levels of satire and subversion he works into his films, which generally, at least on the surface, follow the conventions of Hollywood genres such as action, policier, space opera, two-hander melodrama, etc. On the other, I share with some other posters a certain revulsion for the themes he tends to pursue, as well as a feeling that he tends to bury his clever bits under what often seems like ham-handedly obvious direction. Also, just as an aside, several of his films, particularly Robocop, Total Recall and Hollow Man have some of the ugliest production design and most garish palette of colors I’ve ever seen.
Nevertheless, I’ll go against the majority and state that I think that both Troopers and Showgirls are minor masterpieces.
Re: the film under discussion, I feel that Showgirls reworks, reasonably successfully, many of the same themes as Brian de Palma’s version of Scarface, which seems to be mostly revered as a latter-day classic. OK, so nobody gets hacked up by a chainsaw in Showgirls, but both movies, to me at least, have a lot to say about what, for much of American society, constitutes personal success and how little it has to do with anything resembling morality or worth.
Both films present unsympathetic main characters who start from nothing, have no education or sense of taste, set aside any sense of morality as a hindrance to their efforts to claw their way up in a world that is decidedly set against them, and eventually, IIRC, betray their most trustworthy friends for fairly pointless reasons. While their endings diverge wildly, (Tony Montana gets his comeuppance in spades while Nomi gets, or so she thinks, pretty much everything she ever wished for), I find a lot more similarities than differences, and I believe that Verhoeven’s take on this theme is interesting enough to stand up alongside de Palma’s film.
One more point, which I’ll admit is probably too much of a personal thing to justify an objective rating. Again just an aside, but for one reason or another I’ve known a number of women who have worked as strippers at some point in their lives, and the early scenes in Showgirls, and particularly Berkeley’s admittedly vacuous character, make this the only film I’ve ever seen that managed to catch aspects of lap-dancing culture (the ambitions and concerns of the dancers, as well as the deeply weird nature of the typical customer-dancer interaction) with anything like reasonable accuracy (OK, laugh if you will, but what I’ve seen of Stripperella is pretty astute about that as well). Anyway, I know I’ll probably get get thumped for this, but I have no problem placing Showgirls alongside other classics of Grand Guignol such as the aforementioned Scarface and hell, Johnny Guitar.
Thanks, as always, for the chance to gas on at such length about a light entertainment.
Is De Palma’s Scarface really revered as a modern day classic, though? My impression its latter-day support comes from mainly from gangster rappers and a certain type of Internet film fan, the kind who considers Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back to be one of their peak experiences. De Palma’s overall reputation with critics is only a couple of notches above Verhoeven’s.
Showgirls and De Palma’s Scarface do make a good double bill, though. You can have a contest – which performance is campier, Elizabeth Berkeley’s or Al Pacino’s?
I don’t know if I would call it a classic, or even a particularly good movie. However I must admit I like it because of the over the top acting and sex scenes.
I like the fact that the main character is so unlikeable and doesn’t really change (as far as you can tell) in the end. It’s nice seeing something that doesn’t have a traditional Hollywood type happy ending.
I am looking forward to the special edition DVD thats coming out later this year.
So let me see if I have this right. If a movie is good, then it’s good. And if it’s bad but it was intentionally bad, it’s a parody, so it’s good. And if it’s bad but it was unintentionally bad, it’s camp, so it’s good. Which I guess means all movies are good.
If you want a stripper movie with layers, I’d recommend Atom Egoyan’s Exotica or Michael Radford’s Dancing at the Blue Iguana - two movies that don’t require an explanation of how they’re good, because they actually are good.
When I saw it there wasn’t a dry lap in the house.
No, or at least that’s not what I was saying. What I think is if a movie is ‘bad’ by some criteria or other, yet has interesting elements, it is worth seeing.
Saw the former, didn’t see the latter; but while I quite like Egoyan’s films and I thought Exotica was interesting, the club and the characters in it, whether dancers or customers, simply had no ring of authenticity to me.
I don’t know… maybe Showgirls was a great movie. I guess it’s possible.
I only know that I hated it.
Are you satisfied?
Does the date I see on the article indicate that it is an April Fools Day joke or does it change according to when you view it?
You can’t play the opinion card without it being tossed back in your face. It’s a stupid argument.
“It’s just my opinion that the movie sucks!”
“Well it is just my opinion that you’re wrong.”
“But opinions can’t be wrong!”
“That’s, like, your opinion, man.”
Very nice.
I love Starship Troopers. Haven’t seen Showgirls yet. I’ll rent it this weekend. I’ve loved all the V’s movies I have seen.