Review: ‘Showgirls’
When you say [[[Showgirls]]], everyone snickers knowingly, usually making some joke about it being one of the worst movies since the invention of sound recording or how it’s evolved into a midnight cult classic. With the movie’s release on Blu-ray from MGM Home Entertainment today, it seemed appropriate to see how well the 1995 film has aged in 15 years.
OK, it’s still a bad movie. And yes, the transfer to high def makes the nudity all the more entertaining (look for[[[Dancing with the Stars]]]’ Carrie Ann Inaba as a Goddess dancer).
When Joe Eszterhas gained notoriety with his sexually provocative screenplays in the 1990s, he parlayed that into a $2 million payday for this story of Las Vegas showgirls. Coupled with director Paul Verhoeven, who liked to push the sexuality in his films, it was a match seemingly made in heaven for the studios. As a result, it was allowed to run as an NC-17 release complete with full-frontal nudity and many nearly explicit sex scenes that also featured graphic language and rape.
The movie was reviled for its poor structure, gratuitous sexuality, and bad acting but it was seen as so bad as to be good and became the subject of midnight screenings and private parties where mocking it became obligatory. MGM Home Entertainment has fueled this with various box sets, notably The V.I.P. Edition which came complete with two shot glasses, movie cards with drinking games on the back, a deck of playing cards, and a nude poster of Berkley with a pair of suction-cup pasties.
But let’s look at the movie itself. In the course of the 2:11 running time, we’re given a jaundiced view of the showgirl life, the cut-throat world of topless dancers and strippers willing to permanently injure rivals in order to move up the ladder towards fame and fortune. Some have charitably called this a satire but frankly, it smacks of being a setting for Eszter has to lazily find new ways to show naked people. Everyone in the story is a jerk or a detestable example of humanity with the exception of Molly (Gina Rivera) whose innocence is rewarded with a brutal gang rape.
Our friends over at 
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Let’s see if we caught them all– there have been some real gems this year:
in the summer of 1981, it was not well received by an audience who considered his work a thing of the past. Despite its all-star cast, the movie featured a then unknown Harry Hamlin in the lead and the sum of the parts proved disappointing despite it finishing the year 11th at the box office. It would prove to be Harryhausen’s final feature film and a disappointment way to say farewell to his fans.
For one of the most popular book series of the last few years, the movie adaptation of Jeff Kinney’s 
America loved [[[Amelia]]]] Earhart, as much for her pioneering work in the sky, but for being a woman of accomplishment at a time women were still getting used to having the right to vote. She was celebrated in book, story, and song up to her disappearance over the Pacific Ocean in 1937. Since then, her story has been told and retold numerous times and the woman herself has been portrayed by the likes of Rosalind Russell, Diane Keaton, and Jane Lynch. On [[[Star Trek: Voyager]]] she was portrayed by Sharon Lawrence and most recently, Amy Adams displayed her as a plucky, ready-for-action woman in [[[Night at the Museum 2]]].
When people get excited about something, they blossom and their affection can become contagious. Such is the case for screenwriter Shauna Cross, who stumbled across the world of roller derby and decided to get her story into print. She wrote it first as a young adult novel, 
It used to be, actors could stretch by performing “ugly”, burying themselves under layers of makeup or by playing disadvantaged people such as Dustin Hoffman’s [[[Rain Man]]] or Larry Drake’s Benny on LA Law. The current favorite seems to be playing people with Asperger syndrome as popularized with Christian Clemson’s award winning work on [[[Boston Legal]]]. As with anything on a David E. Kelly series, the portrayal tended to be over-the-top or poignant and rarely anything in between.
Ricky Gervais is a terrific writer and comedian but since the success of [[[The Office]]], he has struggled to fully realize his ideas in the limitations of a motion picture. Last year’s 
