![]() ![]() “You Don’t Nomi” takes “Showgirls” seriously, obsessively, looking at it from every angle, presenting a chorus of critical voices who analyze the film in ways that are highly enlightening and provocative. “Showgirls,” it says, is a bad movie that also is a tasty slice of kitsch that also is a flawed but honestly bracing drama. The fascination of “You Don’t Nomi” is that it doesn’t find some fatal contradiction among the three views. Verhoeven wrote a deadly serious book about the movie but showed up to accept seven trophies for it at the Razzie Awards - the first director ever to do so. It finds room for all three views: “Showgirls” as disaster, “Showgirls” as kitsch landmark, “Showgirls” as weirdly intense and watchable effusion of ’90s commercial Hollywood. ![]() It’s more of a mediation, a feature-length appreciation of the phenomenon of “Showgirls” and all the ways the movie is now appraised and experienced. Jeffrey McHale’s “You Don’t Nomi” is an avid and entertaining critical documentary about “Showgirls.” It’s not about the making of the film. (On the other hand, I’ve seen Criterion films that aren’t nearly as much fun or as memorable.) Yet there are ways that “Showgirls” was damned for being ahead of its time, and much of the smug judgment about how “sexist” the movie was had an element of sexism itself. There, I said it! Is it a film worthy of rediscovery by the Criterion Collection? Maybe not. Namely: that “Showgirls,” if you watch it again with open eyes, is actually kind of a good movie. The second view is based on the resurgence that the film enjoyed, starting in the late ’90s, as a new classic of high camp, a latter-day companion piece to “Mommie Dearest” and “Valley of the Dolls.” In this view, the qualities that the movie had first been damned for - the exhibitionism, the catfight luridness, the wild mood swings of its heroine - now became virtues.Īnd then there’s the third view - one that may, as of now, be a minority view, but it’s one that I’m not ashamed to say I subscribe to. ![]() The first is the original one, which has never gone away - that “Showgirls” was embarrassing junk, an atrocious movie to its rotten NC-17 core. In truth, there are now three competing views of the film. Twenty-five years later, to say that there’s been a critical reassessment of “Showgirls” would be an understatement. ![]()
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