And she is the same as in ‘Saved by the bell’ except with added ‘fucks’.
I’m also reading both W Goldman books about screenwriting and have to ask, who said ‘yes’ to this movie?
MiM
And the naked part. Don’t forget the naked part.
I sorta kinda like any movie with Gina Gershon nekkid. Just sayin’.
Uh oh.
The lid’s off Verhoeven’s box.
Quick! Call that guy who was insanely passionate about this movie and got banned over it! (durned if I can remember who it was tho’)
Have you gotten around to the "dying mackrel in the pool"scene? 'Cause that was where I had to get upand leave the room.
I see you didn’t get the satire of the OP.
and the lipwork.
She’s really pissed off and unsympathetic. Why does the black girl take her in after beating her car and vomiting?
The black guy who says he can teach her to dance - he just fucks dancers right? he’s no undiscovered Fosse or anything?
Sorry about the ‘black girl’ ‘she’ stuff - I’ve only heard one name so far and that was the Starlight producer and Im damned if I can remember that.
It’s great.
MiM
No mackerel yet - but it stinks anyway.
MiM
What are you talking about? That part is AWESOME! Not in the erotic way that I am sure the movie was going for, but awesome all the same.
“I have a thing about pussy, always have, always will.”
“You and me ain’t got no ties”
“Must be weird not having anyone come on you”
OMG - she just took COCAINE!! And slept with the boss. No good will come to this floozy now, you mark my words!
MiM
Ive just seen the same fucking ‘volcano’ show for the 5th time!
Ok Mr Selznick/Warner/Cohen/Geffen, it’s ‘A Star is Born’ in Vegas - with tits! Waddya think?
MiM
That was lissener, a personal favourite of mine. This was the Verhoeven (among other directors) thread that marked his demise.
[quote=lissener, in the before-time]
The POINT of Verhoeven’s satire is made largely by these specific devices:
[ul][li]completely unrealistic[/li][li]with characters we don’t identify with[/li][li]dialogue that could well have been written by five-year-olds[/li][li]huge amounts of gore[/ul][/li][/quote]
Clearly, we just couldn’t get it!
I’m another defender of the movie (recently bought the DVD, in fact), but I’ve gone on about it at length in other threads, so I’ll spare you.
Rest assured, though, I’m perfectly happy to sit down with anyone at any time to talk through the movie, scene by scene, line by line, and sometimes shot by shot, to explain why I have the positive view I do.
Nuff said. Please continue enjoying your bashing.
Bashing??
Gina Gershon has some fine… parts in the film!
Yes, she is a major babe. But even so, I never finished this movie. Still, there were a lot of nice breasts in it.
I’d be the first to admit that the movie was indeed a crapfest. I don’t think that Elizabeth Berkley deserves all the invective she has received for this.
Look at it from her point of view, the director was Paul Verhoeven, whose last three movies were Robocop, Total Recall, and Basic Instinct, all of which made money, and, with a combined budget of 127,000,000 USD grossed 290,000,000 USD in US box office receipts alone, not including foreign box office or sales of recordings, which exceeded the US totals by a comfortable margin. The writer, Joe Eszterhas is the highest paid screenwriter in history, according to Roger Ebert. For her, coming off a syndicated TV series, it must have seemed like a slam dunk.
The movie Showgirls turned out to be a fetid piece of slime. It doesn’t kill her career, but it puts it on the critical list for a good long time. Paul Verhoeven’s next film is Starship Troopers, shot on a 95 million dollar budget.
So why does Verhoeven, who was much more responsible for the failing of Showgirls get a big budget spectacular for his next film and Berkley gets a one way ticket to small parts in movies of the week? Is it that TV stars are not permitted to fail? Everyone remembers what happened to David Caruso and Shelley Long. Are they being punished for hubris?
David Caruso and Shelley Long were never in a movie as bad as “Showgirls.”
I haven’t seen the movie, and this is one reason why. I’ll buy that Verhoeven intended it as some kind of satire, and since I haven’t seen it I’ll grant that it may have been a successful satire. But was Elizabeth Berkley in on the joke? If she knew what kind of movie she’d been hired to make then no problem, you may all disregard the rest of this post. But even the movie’s defenders seem to think that she didn’t know, that she must have thought this was supposed to be a serious adult drama about exotic dancers, and that Verhoeven chose her for the role because it was easier than hiring a good actress to pretend to be dumb and talentless.
I hated Saved By the Bell and have no special feelings for Berkley, but she is a human being. She must have hoped this would be a popular, provocative film that would help her shed her squeaky-clean TV image and put her on the path to fame and success. If not as a serious actress, then at least as a sexy starlet. Maybe Verhoeven’s point was to mock such dreams and the movies that glamorize them, but I don’t need to watch him intentionally humiliate an unwitting young actress in the process.
My guess is that Berkley took the offer because it was on the table. Showgirls wasn’t expected to be a huge bomb - most predictions were that it would be a huge success based on the recent box office appeal of Verhoeven and Eszterhas combined with record amounts of female nudity. And all the evidence is that both men were serious about this - the same ideas which led to this failure are clearly visible in their past works. Basically what happened was that the two of them were in a position to throw off any sense of restraint and didn’t have any self-awareness of how ridiculous their inner visions were. Neither man said anything about satire until everyone else started laughing. That said, while Verhoeven and Eszterhas were the two main culprits and deserve the most blame, Berkley really did do a horrible job as an actress. Gershon was the lucky one; she has some genuine talent and her career survived this.