Change Your Image
carasher
Reviews
Showgirls (1995)
Ingenious and Painful
I took both my mother and grandmother to see this film. I found it to be a painful vision of America: Veerhoeven is revealing an underground world which we do not wish to see. I wish more people were as lucky as I was to have a professor "show me the light" because perhaps then they would understand that this movie does not exploit women but is rather ABOUT exploitation!
If it did exploit women, it would have been far more popular! For example, the nudity as portrayed in the film becomes "a uniform" after the first 10 minutes...It loses its sex appeal. I don't know how Veerhoeven accomplishes this, but he does. If it were "sexy", there would be a horny teenage cult following of this film - which there is NOT which says something about it!The culmination of the representation of exploitation: the rape scene. It was so brutal, so difficult to watch.
Yes, in some ways this film is a satire..The ridiculous sex scenes (which correlate to the dance numbers - if you pay attention) are laughable...but disturbing nonetheless.
It is an uncomfortable laugh that this movie evokes if one truly looks at it.
And if you disagree with everything I am saying, and think this film is not redeemable, AT LEAST look at the stunning cinematography!!!!
After all, you're not reading a book, you're watching a movie. Over half the film is shot with a stedi cam and it's STUNNING.
i don't mean to preach, most of these things were pointed out TO me, i simply hate that a brilliant film has been so widely condemned.
She's All That (1999)
boy did this suck
From someone who enjoys the occasional dumb teen flick (you can't only watch art films; at least i can't) I was very disappointed. I was expecting the usual amusement of watching pretty young actors and actresses flit about and make cute jokes and eventually end up in teen love... Usually in these movies the acting is somewhat laughable but this was beyond anything I have previously experienced: not bad acting, no atrocious acting (that at least would have been amusing), but BORING acting. Freddie Prinze Jr. would flash a little smile here and there and we were supposed to read into that brilliant gesture that he was really a good guy who happened to be friends with a lot of a*******... I think the only part that amused me was the idea that a character given such mindless dialogue was accepted by all of these Ivy League schools...Freddie Prinze's performance is not the only one that sucked, but the one i was most surprised by's sucking. I thought that with all the hype surrounding him that he'd have to be at least halfway decent an actor and not just a pretty fact who's probably a decent guy and therefore makes me feel bad for writing nasty things about online.
One final pet peeve: How clueless was Lainey? Her lines were especially dumb.... Her crusade to save the world cliched beyond belief... And she wears the falafel hat which is not funny, just humiliating and annoying all at the same time (an accomplishment). I'm still shocked that the solution to her life is all in a bag of makeup. I mean, I thought at least the movie would make some compromise and say something about beauty not being skin deep (in some half assed teenybopper way)...but no. Beware: this movie is really bad...it will not provide you with a brainless teen escape that amuses...it's not dumb enough to laugh at, and too dumb to laugh with.