He came up with “Robocop” and “Total Recall”, both were great fun and well-directed with loads of gallows humour. Would you say Coppola was a bad director because he was responsible for “Jack”?
G.I. Jane was a bust, too.
I agree that Verhoevan deliberately made an unsexy sexploitation movie. Why would he do such a thing? Because he hates you. Showgirls is unambiguously deliberately bad. That doesn’t make it good, or worth watching, unless you enjoy that sort of thing. If you’re a guy who just wants to see hot women strutting around naked then Showgirls is not the movie for you. He tricked you into thinking Showgirls would be the kind of movie you’d like. Again, why? Again, because he hates you.
It’s funny, looking over his career he really only made 6 Hollywood movies (7 if you count Flesh and Blood). It seems like more. He made a boatload of money with Robocop, Total Recall, and Basic Instinct, and after that he didn’t need anymore money.
Showgirls, the movie, just drips with contempt. It is contemptuous of the audience, the genre, show business, and especially the lead actress. Again, just because this was all deliberate doesn’t mean it’s a movie most people would enjoy seeing. It’s just that you don’t often see a man take millions of dollars worth of studio money and set it on fire.
I mean, lots of people make bad movies, but even if they didn’t exactly intend to make a good movie at least usually they intended to make a movie that they imagined would satisfy the intended audience on some level. Even if they have contempt for the intended audience, they at least were trying to cynically make a pile of crap that would appeal to the audience. That’s what Basic Instinct was. Showgirls is deliberately making a pile of crap that would annoy and confuse the kind of people who would buy a ticket to see a movie like Showgirls.
It’s not exactly a clever joke though. “Oh, you wanted to see a movie about tits and ass and get a boner? Well here’s a movie about tits and ass that WON’T give you a boner! Haw haw haw!”
Interesting take. Sounds like Showgirls is to sex what Funny Games is to violence. Like it’s the work of a director who loathes the Americans he thinks might be coming to see his movie (though, in reality, nobody in America was interested in seeing either movie), and imagines he’s putting one over on them.
I think we can all agree that Coppola was a great director, once. He isn’t any more.
My point is that even great directors make shitty films, and in this case, Verhoeven will never be considered a great director but he was not without some skill. One film can’t define them, however in the case of Showgirls, it was a combination of bad everything:
Bad acting, bad script, bad direction, bad press, bad casting, etc. They hit the grand-slam home run of failures with this film. The screenwriter was already catching shit for “Jade” which makes “Showgirls” look like “Citizen Kane”.
Michael Ironside couldn’t act if his life depended on it.
True. Clancy Brown, though…
Look upon his works and despair…
OBVIOUSLY, VERY NOT SAFE FOR WORK
Spoiler: Because it was a bad movie.
In that case, it would be more correct (but still wrong) to say that G.I. Jane ruined her career, not Striptease.
Two years after Striptease, Demi Moore headlined a major studio production with an A-list director. Clearly, Striptease didn’t ruin her career.
Turning 40 ruined her career.
Robocop still works. Peter Weller, Kirkwood Smith, Miguel Ferrer, Ronny Cox, all good actors who did very well in their roles. The action is still fun. The satire still works. The directing is nothing great but doesn’t get in the way. Total Recall was fun and enjoyable at the time but has not aged well. Basically he did one movie that is decent. Would you say anyone is a good director if they did one decent movie during a career?
I think that’s the key there - Verhoeven is a lot like George Lucas in that he’s just not good at working with actors, and has a tin ear for dialog (in his case, at least he has the excuse of not being a native English speaker). That isn’t a problem when working with pros like Hauer, Weller, Arnie* or Douglas, because they have enough experience to pretty much direct themselves, but younger or less talented actors are pretty much cast adrift.
- Schwartzenegger may not be a *good *actor, but he is a *professional *actor.
Yep. I only saw this film once, near when it was released, and I never read the book, and based on everything I’ve read I think the book has to be basically forgotten about. But what I did understand without trouble was that nothing in this film was supposed to be taken straight. The movie plays it straight, but the audience isn’t supposed to.
If I had any doubts, the clincher was a near-final scene in which the “good guys” celebrated once it was established the alien queen felt fear. Cut to scenes of the queen having horrific experiments being done on her. The movie plays this straight as a triumph of heroic humans against evil aliens. But of course (of course? of course!) the audience shouldn’t take this as given at all.
And given that irony in those final scenes, if there was any doubt about the intended irony in the rest of the movie, that doubt should have been put to rest.
Mind you I’m talking about a movie I haven’t seen in over 15 years so my memory and my thoughts about what I think I remember may be all off. If so apologies all around!
One deluxe DVD, isn’t there a commentator who says that when a scene calls for drama, Verhoeven inserts comedy and when a scene calls for comedy, he inserts drama? Also according to Verhoeven, women spend all their free time eating chips and talking about their breasts and nails. When you have one decent person you care about, she gets brutally beaten and raped by a famous singer. And we’re supposed to believe a press agent saying we could get a big star like Janet Jackson to show her breasts in a Vegas act (dude, Miss Jackson is saving those the Super Bowl).
But wait, such great writing- the woman from “Saved by the Bell” has character Nomi Malone! How absolutely brilliant! Sure to invite literary analysis to rival Moby Dick.
Yeah, you won’t get far praising “Starship Troopers” here, unfortunately. I’m with you, I thought it was a brilliant film and a pretty much unreadable mess of a book. I’ve said it here before countless times, but apparently my wrongness can be proved by science. Or something.
I think, regarding Showgirls, is that even talented people get it wrong sometimes. And with Showgirls Verhoeven got it wrong. Additionally, Berkeley wasn’t the cast member of Saved by the Bell that everyone wanted to see naked. Hell, she probably wasn’t the number two.
Those of you that insist that that Verhoeven has no talent as a director really should check out some of his Dutch stuff. “Black Book” didn’t come out that long ago and was phenomenal.
It was released as an NC-17. I was working in a theater at the time and I remember having to enforce that bit of nonsense.
That was one factor.
I don’t think people saw Elizabeth Berkley as a ‘movie’ star. She isn’t a box office draw. That was a risk the film took in taking a TV star, known for ‘Saved by the Bell’ and saying, “look she’s all grown up and in a movie naked!” Audiences were not interested.
We get that it’s satire. We just don’t think it’s good satire.
Two thoughts about Elizabeth Berkley:
One, we can add her to the list of celebrities who look nothing like themselves anymore: Link.
Two, she has no ass whatsoever (somewhat NSFW). Seriously, how does she not hurt herself every time she sits down on a wooden chair?
Showgirls came out when I was 15, and and maybe 6 months later it was on pay-per-view. At that time, there were just four PPV channels, each one showing a designated movie on an endless loop. Also at that time, my father had purchased a cable descrambler, which meant that I could watch Showgirls whenever I wanted, provided everyone else was asleep. Keep in mind, this was before internet porn.
I got to know the movie very well.
Here’s what I said about this nearly a decade ago. I stand by it. The movie did badly because it was a bad movie, and it deserved to do badly. The only person whose career seemed to take a significant hit as a result was probably the one least responsible for the craptacular Showgirls.