Showgirls

 

RED DOG (B) - This is a highly entertaining cinematic memoir of life among strippers, but it too often feels like a cheat and a bit of inbred revisionist history. Luke Dick, a country songwriter, draws memories out of his mom, Kim, and her fellow partiers at the rowdy Red Dog in Oklahoma City, where he was hell-raised in the late '70s and '80s.

Kim is a pistol, not shy about finally letting loose with all the tawdry details of the sex-and-drugs-soaked life she turned to at the tender age of 14. Fat and chain-smoking now, she still has a glint in her eye and a quick wit, leavened by a resignation -- perhaps even a detente -- about the course of her life. A few of the other surviving dancers, enjoying a more sober middle-aged existence, share their stories, and we also hear from good ol' boys who enabled this entire existence, including a tough-talking former bouncer and a regular who was married to Kim and previously to one of her friends.

There should be a social contract which holds that whatever happened in the '70s stays in the '70s, whether it was Vegas or Oklahoma City. All of these folks behaved very badly (it's almost impossible to keep track of all of Kim's husbands and Luke's stepfathers), and you get the sense that time and slick filmmaking techniques (including the occasional cutesy animated re-enactment) are helping gloss over some serious sins. We learn of only one true victim of lifelong drug abuse who did not make it past 50 -- the legendary Nasty Cathy -- but there had to be others whose lives were trashed by the degradation of the day. Cathy's soft-spoken son, now about 40, shows up here -- his puppy-dog eyes barely shielding the emotional pain he must still be processing -- to reveal the harrowing details of his upbringing and estrangement from his mother. He insists that he turned out pretty OK, but you have to wonder if he's just putting on a brave face for the camera.

Luke Dick gives writer-director duties to first-timer Casey Pinkston, but he is the interviewer and narrator, and he fills the soundtrack with his own compositions. Either man could have whittled this project down closer to 90 minutes (it runs an hour 45), and the result would have been sharper and better focused. There is no denying that this is a raunchy reminiscence of a long-gone era, when adults behaved particularly poorly; you just have to wonder if this playful piece of performance art is giving us anything near the real story.

YOU DON'T NOMI (B) - Much has been written in the past quarter century about the 1995 spectacle "Showgirls," the notorious NC-17 spectacle from the exploitation factory of pulp writer Joe Eszterhas and Euro-trash director Paul Verhoeven in their follow-up to "Basic Instinct." More does not need to be written here. In watching this documentary purporting to deconstruct the pop culture sensation that resulted from the big-screen saga of one Nomi Malone (the ill-fated Elizabeth Berkley, having grown up from "Saved by the Bell"), I wondered more than once: Are we overthinking this movie?

Like "Red Dog," "You Don't Nomi" is an entertaining romp through some bygone bare-breasted sleaze, this time up on the big screen. But first-time director Jeffrey McHale is not interested in a simple I (Heart) the Nineties VH1 tribute to a trashy film; rather, he wants to do a philosophical deep dive into whether the widely panned release was truly crap or whether it was somehow brilliant -- or, get this, whether it was some sophisticated needle-threading auteurist attempt to produce brilliant crap of a lineage from Cecil B. DeMille and Busby Berkeley (no relation). Principal among the over-thinkers is Adam Nayman, who actually wrote a book about "Showgirls" with the egg-headed thesis of "It Doesn't Suck." 

Nayman and others expend millions of more brain cells than actually went into the movie about a small-town gal who navigates the dog-eat-dog world of Vegas to become the top showgirl. The film starts out reminding us that the easily mockable story and direction -- leading to a career-killing hysterical performance by Berkley -- is, indeed, as laughable and horrific as we remember it. That intro undercuts later attempts to convince us that it is us who are too shallow or mean to understand or appreciate this inadvertent masterpiece.

Berkley remains convinced that she was participating in a feminist howl (by orgasmically flopping in a swimming pool like a wounded dolphin?), but Verhoeven, shown in recent footage, does everything but wink at the camera to let us know he was merely indulging his male perversions, as we are constantly reminded throughout "Nomi" with clips from Verhoeven's previous and subsequent films, which drive home his simple-minded view of the battle of the sexes. (To his credit, Verhoeven is shown in archival footage appearing in person to accept his Razzie awards, the first director to ever have done so.)

Director McHale explores the metamorphosis of "Showgirls'" place in pop culture, with various stage productions that put it on a plane with "The Brady Bunch" and "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." He chooses not to show the faces of his talking heads, leaving them to perform their analysis in voice-over, which makes it harder to keep track of who is who -- though it allows for the showing of that many more clips from the film, thus upping the tits-per-frame ratio throughout. 

In sum, this is an interesting trinket to drop during the Me-Too era, and I'm hardly qualified to weigh in with much depth. I've already joined in overthinking this blip in cinematic history. I remember going to see it. I recall how appallingly awful it was (though props to the mesmerizing Gina Gershon for thriving and surviving), and I've tossed out glib comments about it over the years. And I'll admit that, for an hour and a half, it was kind of fun to recall, like the cast of "Red Dog," a different era, when we didn't always have to pay for our sins.