Dancing Ain't F__King

Showgirls
1995, Paul Verhoeven, 131 minutes.
Starring Elizabeth Berkley, Kyle MacLachlan, Gina Gershon, Glenn Plumber

As a disclaimer, I should say that I carry more respect for filmmakers who try really hard and take risks in the hopes of making a good film, but fail, than I do for directors and producers who make merely make by-the-numbers films that always ok. When I played baseball, I always swung as a hard as I could. Most of the time, I struck out. Occasionally, I hit home runs. Some people hit the ball everytime, but never got more than a single.

Showgirls is for me in the upper pantheon of cinematic swings for the fences, up there with Heaven's Gate, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and Spike Lee's 2004 film She Hate Me. Don't get me wrong, Showgirls is an awful film, but underneath its dreck, I feel that there are massive piles of potential.

Starring Saved By the Bell sweetheart Elizabeth Berkley, Showgirls is about a girl who hitches in to Las Vegas with only a suitcase to her name, and within an hour has even less than that. Her dream is to become a dancer in one the extravagant Casino dance shows, but of course ends up at a sleazy strip club. A series of chance encounters eventually gets her a shot at the big show, where she eventually realizes how much the classy dance performance, the strip club, and even prostitution are all really the same thing.

Don't kid yourself, the film is truly awful, and is known as much for being the highest grossing NC-17 film of all time as for anything else. Berkley can't act, that's for sure, but I can't help think that beyond Berkley's piss poor lead performance, and the occasionally painful dialogue, the film does get across exactly what it is trying to say about Las Vegas, and by extension, the entertainment industry as a whole. It's probably not inconceivable that the Hollywood system is not different, and I think that that may have hit too close to home for many people, which probably lead to some overly harsh reviews. MacLachlan, Gershon, and Plumber do credible jobs in their roles, and the set design and choreography is appropriately cheesy. The films does drag on longer than it needs to, and the ...

SPOILER ALERT





... rape scene near the end is more graphic than it needs to be ...






SPOILERS OVER

... but overall it's not a bad film, and one wonders what a more credible actress might have brought to the role. Widely available on DVD, Steph and I saw this on Saturday night at the Mayfair, where they may not have had any more heat, but at least they had some popcorn.

2 1/2 stars out of 5.