Showgirls (1995)

WHO: Elizabeth Berkeley stars in this.

WHAT: Showgirls was the first film rated NC-17 by the MPAA to receive a wide release in US theatres. It flopped, and signaled to major studios that they needed to make sure their mainstream theatrical releases went no higher than 'R' (though these days 'PG-13' is more customary), and ever since the NC-17 rating has been essentially relegated to films aimed solely at the art-house or home video markets. 

But in the meantime, Showgirls has become a cult phenomenon in those markets, screening to enthusiastic fans as a midnight offering in the former, and being frequently re-published in increasingly elaborate DVD packages for the latter. Not only has it found a growing fan club, it's also become re-evaluated by critics and academics and even highbrow filmmakers like Jacques Rivette. I hate to name any review as 'definitive' but I have to admit that I pretty much consider Eric Henderson's masterful 2004 write-up for Slant to be just that. Here's a sample:

Gleefully inspiring audiences everywhere to challenge conventional definitions of "good" and "bad" cinema, Showgirls is undoubtedly the think-piece object d'art of its time. It is Paul Verhoeven and Joe Eszterhas's audaciously experimental satire-but-not-satire, an epically mounted "white melodrama" (to borrow Tag Gallagher's description of Sirk's early, less mannered, and more overtly humanistic comedies of error) and also one of the most astringent, least compromised critiques of the Dream Factory ever unleashed on a frustrated, perpetually (and ideologically) pre-cum audience. Many things to many people, and absolutely nothing to a great deal more, Showgirls's proponents and detractors still square off, digging nine-foot trenches in the sand (some planting their heads therein instead of their feet) and lobbing accusations of elitism and anti-pleasure. It is perhaps one of the only films to bridge that critical gap between Film Quarterly (which hosted a beyond extensive critical roundtable on the film last year) and Joe Bob Briggs.

WHERE/WHEN: Tonight only at the Castro Theatre at 8:00.

WHY: I've already related on this blog my story of experiencing Showgirls for the first time. Since writing that piece, I attended two more screenings of the film hosted by Peaches Christ, the last two held at the Bridge Theatre before the annual summer party moved to the Castro Theatre in 2010, with an according ticket-price hike and shift from midnight to prime time. I have to admit that my Peaches Christ devotion dried up around the time of this venue move. I attended dozens of Midnight Mass presentations at the Bridge in part because they were fairly inexpensive and didn't conflict with other potential Saturday evening plans. The Castro shows were said to be better-choreographed and more spectacular (thus deserving of their extra cost) but I found it hard to get motivated to attend one. It may not have helped that the films selected to fill the Castro have to skew more toward mainstream mass-appeal- true oddities like William Castle's Strait-Jacket or Paul Bartel's Death Race 2000 have to be passed up in favor of more well-known films like Mommie Dearest and Purple Rain. (Although a 2013 development of including documentaries like Paris Is Burning and - up next October 12th - Grey Gardens in the program rotation is certainly welcome.)

But tonight's 16th presentation of Showgirls feels like the right time to rejoin the annual tradition. I finally attended my first Peaches Christ presentation at the Castro this summer, helped along by a return to a midnight time slot and lower ticket prices (courtesy Frameline). It didn't matter that the movie screened, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge, didn't become a new favorite, or that the on-stage interview with actor Mark Patton & cinematographer Jacques Haitkin was more awkward than Peaches' interviews I've seen conducted at the Bridge (including Mink Stole, Mary Woronov and Cassandra Peterson). The over-the-top, highly-polished, exquisitely costumed and cast stage show that opened the presentation was worth the ticket price alone. It may be hard to believe that  seeing a Freddie-faced and fedora'd drag queen in a form-fitting orange-and-grey-striped sweater wreak havoc with her claws while lip-synching to Metallica's "Enter Sandman" would be one of the most thrilling live performances I've seen in a long time, but it's the truth. And I'm realizing that, as elaborate and entertaining as the Bridge Theatre Showgirls stage shows got, they'll surely be handily topped by a company that can make full use of a stage built in 1922 for dancing usherettes (such as future Best Actress Academy Award-winner Janet Gaynor). It's got to be the closest thing to being in Vegas next to actually going there!

For those seeking more intellectual stimulation, tonight's screening can launch an in-cinema study of the history of "adults-only" rated movies over the next few months. A good deal of landmark X- and NC-17-rated movies are coming to local theatres in the near future. In just a few weeks, Salo and Arabian Nights screen as part of the Roxie's contribution to this Autumn's Pier Paolo Pasolini celebration; both films will be repeated in October as part of the Pacific Film Archive's full retrospective of the director's work. The PFA is also showing the recent NC-17 sensation Killer Joe in a William Friedkin series (he'll be in attendance at the September 21st screening). 

I've also been tipped off to the titles involved in an all-35mm series of non-pornographic X-rated films  expected to play Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in October through December: Midnight Cowboy (in case you missed it this past week at the Castro), Last Tango In Paris, Fritz the Cat, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Bad Timing, and Henry & June are all expected to screen as part of this series, and provide a pretty good cross-section of films that have become classics despite (or perhaps in some cases because of) an adults-only rating. Hopefully healthy audiences too young to have experienced these when they originally appeared in theatres will turn out to see them in a cinema setting. There's a few on the list I've never seen at all and will definitely be making a priority.

Finally, the Castro's Coming Soon page indicates a few titles that make interesting contrasts to the aforementioned MPAA-"scarlet lettered" titles. Whether re-cutting a movie in order to change an initial NC-17 rating to an R, as Paul Thomas Anderson did with Boogie Nights (screening September 28th), or simply declining to submit a film for a rating at all, as with Paul Schrader's The Canyons (screening with Abel Ferrara's Dangerous Game Sep. 11), there have always been options for filmmakers trying to release films containing adult themes, even if each of them involves its own set of drawbacks.

HOW: Showgirls screens in 35mm, with an extensive live stage show performed beforehand.

Michael Hawley's Two Eyes

Since my own two eyes were not nearly enough to see and evaluate all the repertory/revival film screenings here on Frisco Bay, I'm honored to present local filmgoers' lists of the year's favorites. An index of participants is found here.

The following list comes from cinephile/critic Michael Hawley. He blogs at film-415, where this list has been cross-posted:

The Bay Area continues to be an incredible place to experience repertory cinema. There are few places on the planet where it's possible to see a film every day of the year and not watch a single new release. In 2010 I caught 47 revival screenings at various local venues. Here, in no particular order, are 10 of the most memorable.

Showgirls (Castro Theater)
What better way to celebrate the 15th anniversary of my fave film of the 1990s. Peaches Christ brought an expanded version of her infamous Showgirls Midnight Mass preshow to a sold-out Castro, complete with exploding on-stage volcano and free lapdances with every large popcorn. It inspired me to inaugurate my iphone's movie camera feature and create a YouTube channel to post the results. Apart from Peaches' Castro world premiere of All About Evil, this was the most fun I had at the movies in 2010.

Armored Car Robbery (Castro Theater, Noir City)
I was blown away by this taut and tidy 67-minute slice of obscure 1950 B-Noir about the aftermath of yes, an armored car robbery outside L.A.'s Wrigley Field. It would be brought back to mind months later with the Fenway Park heist of Ben Affleck's The Town. Other 2010 Noir City highlights included the double bill of Suspense (1946) and The Gangster (1948), both starring British ice-skating queen Belita, and 1945's San Francisco-set Escape in the Fog, which begins with a woman dreaming about an attempted murder on the Golden Gate Bridge.


Pornography in Denmark (Oddball Cinema)
There's something weird and wonderful going on each weekend at Oddball Cinema, a funky alternative film venue tucked inside the Mission District warehouse digs Oddball Film + Video. In the spring they screened a 16mm print of this landmark 1970 documentary by local porn-meister Alex de Renzy, which became the first hardcore to show in legit U.S. theaters and be reviewed in the NY Times. Introducing the film was writer/film scholar Jack Stevenson, who was on tour promoting his book, Scandinavian Blue: The Erotic Cinema of Sweden and Denmark in the 1960s and 1970s.

Freddie Mercury, the Untold Story (VIZ Cinema, 3rd i's Queer Eye Mini-Film Festival)
3rd i is best known for the SF International South Asian Film Festival it puts on each November. Back in June they packed SF's snazzy subterranean VIZ Cinema with this revival of Rudi Dolezal and Hannes Rossacher's 2000 documentary – seen in a new director's cut with 43 extra minutes. The audience went nutso at the climax of "Barcelona," Mercury's soaring duet with Montserrat Caballé from the 1986 summer Olympics. Further repertory kudos to 3rd i for bringing an exquisite 35mm print of 1958 Bollywood classic, Madhumati, to the Castro.

Mädchen in Uniform (Castro Theater, Frameline)
A whole lot of LGBT folk must've played hooky from work to catch this mid-day, mid-week revival from 1958 – itself a remake of a 1931 queer cinema classic. Romy Schneider and Lili Palmer are respectively radiant as a student obsessively in love with her boarding school teacher – to the extreme consternation of battleaxe headmistress Therese Giehse. Shown in a gorgeous and rare 35mm print, with the inimitable Jenni Olson delivering a dishy intro. Frameline34's other revelatory revival was Warhol's 1965 Vinyl, in which Factory beauties Gerard Malanga and Edie Sedgwick dance a furious frug to Martha and the Vandellas "Nowhere to Hide." Twice.


The Aztec Mummy vs. The Human Robot (Pacific Film Archive, El Futuro Está Aquí: Sci-Fi Classics from Mexico)
If anything's capable of luring me out of the city on a Saturday night during Frameline, it's bunch of Mexican monster movies from the 50's and 60's. This was double-billed with Santo vs. The Martian Invasion, which had a little too much rasslin' for my tastes. But it boasted a hilarious opening scene in which the Martians explain why they happen to be speaking Spanish. It killed me to miss Planet of the Female Invaders and The Ship of Monsters, also part of this series.

Metropolis (Castro Theater, SF Silent Film Festival)
"When you've waited 83 years, what's another 40 minutes?" Eddie Muller quipped to the antsy, capacity crowd awaiting the Bay Area premiere of Fritz Lang's finally-complete expressionist dystopian masterpiece. In spite of the late start time and disappointing digital format, this was still the repertory event of the year. The Alloy Orchestra performed its celebrated score live and Muller conducted an on-stage conversation with Paula Félix-Didier and Fernando Peña, the Argentine film archivists who discovered the 16mm print of Metropolis with 25 additional minutes. The Alloy Orchestra would return to the fest two days later to perform their heart-stopping score to Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera.

The Cook/Pass the Gravy/Big Business (Castro Theater, SF Silent Film Festival)
Each year this festival invites a filmmaker to program a Director's Pick – and past pickers have included the likes of Guy Maddin and Terry Zwigoff. This year Pete Docter (Monsters, Inc., Up) assembled a program of three comic shorts titled The Big Business of Short Funny Films, each of them screamingly funny. First, Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton had a go at each other in The Cook, followed by some hysterical nonsense involving feuding families and a prized rooster in Pass the Gravy. Finally in Big Business, door-to-door Christmas tree salesmen Laurel and Hardy declared war on a disgruntled customer, taking tit-for-tat to absurd heights.

The Boston Strangler (Pacific Film Archive, Criminal Minds)
This ranks as my personal discovery of the year. Director Richard Fleischer employs a wry tone and magnificent use of wide and split screen to tell the story of 60's serial killer Albert DeSalvo. A restrained Tony Curtis, whose title character doesn't appear until the midway point, gives what must surely be the best dramatic performance of his career. Oscar ® didn't care. With Henry Fonda, George Kennedy and an early appearance by Sally Kellerman as the one girl who got away. Double-billed with 1944's The Lodger, a compelling Jack the Ripper yarn starring Merle Oberon, George Sanders and Laird Cregar.

Johanna (Roxie Theater)
I was woefully resigned to never seeing Kornél Mundruczó's 2005 filmic opera about a junkie performing sex miracles in a subterranean Budapest hospital, which had never screened in the Bay Area or been released on Region 1 DVD. Then the Roxie answered my prayers by showing a gorgeous 35mm print for two nights in November, double-billed with the director's follow-up, 2008's Delta. Earlier in the month, the Roxie revived 36 Quai des Orfèvres, a gritty and stylish 2004 policier that had also inexplicably gone unseen the Bay Area, despite starring Gérard Depardieu and Daniel Auteuil.

Honorable Mentions
Traffic (1971, dir. Jacques Tati, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts)
Insiang (1976, dir. Lino Brocka, Sundance Kabuki, SF International Asian American Film Festival)
Black Narcissus (1947, dir. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, Pacific Film Archive, "Life, Death and Technicolor: A Tribute to Jack Cardiff")
Hausu (1977, dir. Nobuhiko Ôbayashi, Castro Theater)
A Night to Dismember (1983, dir. Doris Wishman, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, "Go to Hell for the Holidays: Horror in December")

Now Museum

Frisco's gone gaga over the reopened Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. I took a peek at an early preview a couple weeks ago. While the exhibits I saw were informative and interesting, I place a lot of stock in atmosphere. And I admit it was hard to appreciate the modern building when I'd gotten so used to the old architecture. Let's just say I don't expect anyone to use the new moray eel tank as backdrop to a film noir anytime soon, even if they are able to miraculously find actors to fill Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth's shoes. But I will withhold my final judgment until I get to see more of the exhibits that weren't ready to show yet at that point. Most notably the rainforest exhibit, and the planetarium. I can't deny I'm extremely nervous about the latter, as I feel I practically grew up in the original Morrison Planetarium, becoming a city slicker stargazer that could actually keep up with any of the country kids in the identification of astral bodies, even when I found myself transplanted to a place where light pollution didn't obscure all but the brightest objects. But they say the new presentation equipment is spectacular, more than making up for the uniqueness of the 1952 projector that's been decommissioned.

As a cinephile, my interest in museums tends toward the film and video programs shown there. I haven't heard that the Academy is going to be initiating this kind of programming; as a science and not an art museum it may seem counterintuitive, though I'm not certain why. The rest of this post will focus on upcoming screenings at Frisco art museums.

October at SFMOMA continues September's focus on China, now spotlighting 1980s works little-known in the West at that time. They're made by so-called "Fourth Generation" filmmakers, who preceded in Mainland Chinese film schools the "Fifth Generation" filmmakers like Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige whose works began filling European and American arthouses in the late-1980s. The success of the latter groups' films like Raise the Red Lantern and Farewell My Concubine helped pave the way for a few films by their elders who were still working, to come into Western cinemas. Wu Tianming's 1996 King of Masks is probably the best-known, and a personal favorite of mine; his 1983 River Without Buoys plays SFMOMA on October 4th, 9th and 18th. Xie Fei, whose Song of Tibet surfaced several years ago at the 4-Star Theatre, has a 1989 film Black Snow that will play October 11th, 23rd & 25th. And two Fourth Gen filmmakers I'm completely unfamiliar with, Wu Yigong & Huang Shuqin, fill out the slate. Huang's 1987 Woman Demon Human sounds particularly interesting; it's apparently a supernatural tale that invites feminist readings. It plays on the 11th, 25th and 30th of October.

November and December bring to the venue a touring series I've been crossing my fingers to see all year: a Derek Jarman retrospective. Before 2008, Jarman's work was all but completely unknown to me. That started to change in January when I saw a beautiful 35mm print of the tremendous Edward II at the Sundance Film Festival, as well as a new documentary on the director simply entitled Derek. As I mentioned on this podcast, I found the film extremely inspiring on many levels, particularly in the direction of wanting to see more of his films. I'll admit I was mildly disappointed that the Frameline film festival declined to program any Jarman films when it locally premiered Derek. But all is forgiven now that eleven of his features, from Sebastiane to Blue, will be presented on the big screen. I'm having a hard time believing it myself, but my memory banks tell me it's the largest, closest-to-complete retrospective for a major director on this shore of Frisco Bay since the Balboa brought that Louis Malle series way back in 2005. Speaking of other venues for a moment, this Friday's Castro Theatre screening of Ken Russell's 1971 The Devils might make a good prelude to the series, as it was Jarman's work as a set designer on that film that got his film career started.

Back to SFMOMA: for the family-together time of the holiday season in late December, what better than a set of films themed around family-friendly Las Vegas? A trio of features will be shown: the Elvis Presley romp Viva Las Vegas and the notoriously NC-17 Showgirls play December 20th (a long-awaited opportunity to see Paul Verhoeven's seriously satirical film in a venue without a Midnight Mass audience screaming at the screen, as endearing as that may be sometimes), and Caveh Zahedi's family vacation film (of sorts) I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore plays with a set of experimental shorts curated by Steve Anker on December 27th. This is all in conjunction with the Double Down video installation currently at the museum through early January, where Olivo Barbieri's eye-popping site specific_LAS VEGAS 05 and Stephen Dean's No More Bets (which I have not yet seen myself) are shown repeatedly throughout the day elsewhere in the museum.

Finally, across the street, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts has also updated its planned film calendar through November. October' programs of note include continuations of the Bay Area Now tribute to innovative and creative local programmers. November brings two days of John Cassavetes' first film Shadows Nov. 1 & 2, two screenings of Wang Bing's 3-hour Fengming: a Chinese Memoir Nov. 6 & 9, and continued co-presentations with local film festivals and SF Cinematheque.

Vision Thing

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Today marks the 10th Anniversary of the release of Showgirls in director Paul Verhoeven's Mother Holland, and it didn't take much prodding for me to be convinced to join the appreciation party happening right now in the blogosphere. Yes, I actually like this perhaps inherently misogynistic film that rates a measly 3.8/10 from imdb voters and a 16/100 score on Metacritic. I count myself among the growing number of cinephiles whose views at the very least fit under the umbrella statement, "It doesn't suck."

I first saw Showgirls in the summer of 2001 when I scored free passes to Peaches Christ's summer series of witching hour cult movies called Midnight Mass. Showgirls was the second film in the series, and unquestionably the most raucous evening of those I attended (I skipped 9 To 5). The audience was packed with drunks, butch dykes, drag queens, and a few of us token "normals" who maybe didn't feel quite so normal anymore. I had the distinct impression that my friend and I were the only ones who'd never seen the film before, especially when most of the audience seemed to be yelling half the lines of dialogue at the screen. It was clear that at least we'd stumbled into a true cult phenomenon, and indeed Peaches has screened the film to sellout crowds at least once every summer since 1998. Well, how can you not enjoy a film on a certain level when surrounded by enthusiasm like that? I even got into the spirit of the evening and at one point around the midway mark yelled out (something I never do in a movie theatre) in my most nasal geek voice, "Excuse me, I'm trying to watch the movie!" It got a laugh, but there was some truth in my mock complaint. It was fun but difficult to untangle my reaction to the film from my response to the audience's shouts and cheers. I remember thinking that the film had utterly failed at being sexy if that was the intention, but I had the impression that the sterile plasticity of the sex and nudity just might have been part of a grander scheme to satirize the American Dream. Though I hadn't yet read Charles Taylor's review of the film, I agreed with his premise that Showgirls is intentional camp. I had been exposed to the idea of Verhoeven as satirist (through Zach Campbell for one) before seeing the film, and I found myself agreeing.

Here come spoilers in case you're still a Showgirls virgin...



I was totally caught off guard by Molly's rape scene, though. It's a truly disgusting and shocking scene, and sharply contrasts the good-natured humiliation, back stabbing, lying, pimping and whoring that make up the bulk of the film. Perhaps I was reacting less to the film than to the way the Midnight Masses became so much more subdued for this scene and its aftermath, but it felt like a real miscalculation to suddenly change the film's tone so radically. It took exposure to insightful analysis by the likes of Eric Henderson for me to start to understand the function of that scene in the film, and to finally see Verhoeven's creation as something more than a fun but flawed film.

So when the call went out for participation in a Showgirls-a-thon, I was ripe to revisit the film on DVD, which I finally did last night. What follows are a few thoughts and questions, not coherently gelled into any kind of argument whatsoever.

1. I own the soundtrack on audiocassette (it features excellent tracks from likes of Killing Joke, David Bowie, and Siouxsie and the Banshees) but I'd forgotten that in her initial hitch-hiking scene, Nomi changes the music from Dwight Yoakam (who she mislabels as Garth Brooks) to a song not found on my tape for whatever reason. "Vision Thing," by one of my favorite bands of the late eighties and early nineties, the Sisters of Mercy, is a song about America's cocaine-fueled aggression and imperialism. Though we don't hear the beginning of the song (which starts off with the sound of a coke sniff) I'm sure that whoever selected it knew what Verhoeven was up to; it's no coincidence that the Bowie song that plays in the dance club is "I'm Afraid of Americans". Oh, and guess where the Sisters are launching their 2006 American tour on March 22? Sin City itself, where the streets are lined with the tossed-away hamburger wrappers left by Nomis of the world over.

2. Having recently seen Footlight Parade for the first time and being struck by the incredible speed of the first half of that film, propelled of course by the actor who personifies "rapid-fire", James Cagney, I have to say Verhoeven doesn't quite capture that feeling of intense organizational energy though he comes close a couple of times. I'm not saying he's even trying to. The 1933 Lloyd Bacon/Busby Berkeley film Showgirls usually gets compared to is of course 42nd Street which is less fresh in my mind. But I definitely feel that Footlight Parade is worth a comparative look too, if only because the milieu seems somewhat more similar; aren't the depression-era girlie shows Cagney is trying to put together in that film some of the more apt equivalents to big Vegas shows like "Goddess"? And wasn't a big part of the appeal of Busby Berkeley's most lavish production numbers (like the ones in Footlight Parade) the feminine flesh on display, even if they never provided audiences the full frontal nudity required to bat eyebrows in 1995?

3. What kind of fantasyland is this where not only does someone suggest that Janet Jackson or Paula Abdul might star in "Goddess", but that the president of the hotel actually repeats the dismissed suggestion to the media? Or am I remembering 1995 inaccurately, with my post-Super Bowl, post-American Idol perspective clouding my sense of history?

4. What's with Cristal's underdeveloped Elvis fixation? Is there some character backstory or a key line that got trimmed out somehow?

5. Least-sexy sex scene in the film: Elizabeth Berkley flopping like a fish in the pool with her groin attached to Kyle MacLachlan's abdomen.

6. Spoilers again. That means you, mom; I know you haven't seen the film. Here's a wacky and/or trite interpretation of Nomi and Molly's relationship for everyone to point and laugh at. Let me know if this has already been proven or disproven somewhere I haven't seen (like in that Film Quarterly roundtable on the film that I still haven't read). Molly, who reiterates that she hasn't had sex in many a moon at the point Nomi comes into her life, represents Nomi's virginity (or born-again virginity if you will, since we later learn Nomi's a reformed Oaktown crack-whore). Though surrounded by wanton Vegas sexuality, Nomi's roommate remains chaste, ensuring that no matter what our natural-blonde heroine goes through in her escapades at the Cheetah club or with aspiring gynecologists by which I mean choreographers, her hymen remains intact. But when Andrew Carver and his gang force their camels through the eye of the seamstress's needle (sorry about that turn of phrase but I couldn't resist) it's as if Nomi has herself been raped. And though she gets revenge on the rapist, she also feels the blame and shame rape victims (I'm told) often do. Looked at this way, it seems that perhaps her departure on the road to Los Angeles is not so much a return to blind ambition but an escape from a community where she no longer can live in her own skin. Or is that what ambition always is anyway, an escape from our selves?