Hacker Cinema
Showgirls
1995 · Film · 131 min
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
Fresh to Las Vegas with no connections, Nomi Malone takes a job as an exotic dancer. Her talents are quickly noticed by Cristal, a headlining dancer who senses an opportunity to bolster her own act. But Nomi won’t play second fiddle and soon begins her venomous path to the top, ruthlessly backstabbing anyone who gets in her way.
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6 comments on Hacker News
Most of verehovens films have the same mechanism where the viewer has a question about if something or someone is legit or not.
Total recall classic example where the viewer never really knows if Quaid is having a mental break or not. Even showgirls has the signature ambiguity.
Similarly:
>Showgirls was a critical failure upon release, panned for its acting (particularly Berkley's), characters, dance numbers, directing, plot, screenplay and sex scenes and is consistently ranked as one of the worst films ever made. Despite this, Showgirls has become regarded as a cult film and has been subject to critical re-evaluation, with some notable directors and critics considering it a serious satire worthy of praise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Showgirls
You're conflating a ton of different cultural issues (3rd wave feminism, UK's censorship fetish, etc) and removing them from their temporal context. Showgirls only came out 22 years ago; it was regarded as a bad movie, but it didn't generate much outrage.
Isn't it Showgirls, or is this a regional title variation? Anyway, it's clearly an attempt at parodying the exploitation movie genre by delivering all the required elements but not actually being enjoyable.
I love Verhoeven and the long running joke he played at the expense of Hollywood (mostly with Starship Troopers, Robocop, Basic Instinct and Showgirls - Flesh + Blood is great but not as sarcastic as his later american movies).
Starship Trooper, the novel, is hilarious on its own, with its hawkishness and interesting political views (it's less creepy than Ender's Game in that aspect though). But Heinlein is a much better writer than Card and Stranger in a Strange land makes up for the juvenile tripe he wrote earlier. I guess Vietnam had to happen for some people to reflect on the Rah-rah-rah kind of military Sci-Fi.
(I know there's a cult of Heinlein on HN - I've always wondered if there was an intersection with the Cult of Rand and the Cult of Card)
Edit: as a thought experiment, it would be interesting (as in "depressing") to imagine the exact opposite: an adaptation of Old Man's War by the current Hollywood industry.
That is false from a global perspective.
Sex and nudity as "offensive content" is mostly an US-centric concept. Maybe they learned it from the UK, or UK from the US, but many European countries during the 1950-2000 did not share it. Sweden as an example, showed many movies on national paid TV that was deemed too sexual for movie theaters in the US. They had a teen age show called "bullen", broadcasting during family prime time, which included everything from nudity to instructions around masturbation. The movie Showgirls was shown not once but twice and both times the uncensored version. Nudity and sex was not discussed in censorship discussions as it was just not an issue in peoples mind.
However, in contrast to US culture, Sweden had a heavy ban on violence. The cartoon show Darkwing Duck was deemed as "video nasty", and banned mid season. The move theaters had a state censure policy which got only as recent as 2001 got abolished.