Nomi is a loner. She wants to dance for a living and she wants to make a living in Las Vegas; those are two tough things. The city of sin isn’t easily swayed by such dreams and chews up the young, hot Nomi and spits her out into her dancing dream. Getting to be a showgirl is one thing, but maintaining that status is a wholly other. She soon finds that being beautiful and dancing isn’t quite enough to stay employed.
As the late, great Heath Ledger says in The Dark Knight, “Where do I begin?”
The story of Showgirls is written like it was pulled off the pages of a lonely freshman in college. The characters, which aren’t bad from a distance, are written very poorly. The poorly written characters are given poorly written dialogue that connects together like a lincoln log to a lego. For example, when Nomi (played by Elizabeth Berkley) meets Annie for the first time the scene calls for Annie to find Nomi crying on her car (they don’t know each other at this point). When Annie yells at Nomi to get off her car (a clear establishing scene for how tough Vegas is) the pair begin to fight. During the fight Nomi erupts into a vomiting fit, which causes the fight to stall. The vomiting not only stops the fight, but somehow causes the pair to bond. Yeah, vomiting generally isn’t the ‘bonding’ sort of thing when it comes to friendship. Generally vomiting causes friends to hate each other. What’s even more bizarre is that the vomiting isn’t a problem as much as there is no reason given for the random vomit.
This is how the movie pretty much flows. Showgirls is a series of badly written moments that are given a band-aid of nudity to help bridge the inconsistencies. Joe Eszterhas did one of the worst jobs in bringing plot points together and developing characters. The two main characters, Nomi and Cristal (played by Gina Gershon) are a perfect example of how bad the writing gets. The pair has some sort of terrible rivalry going on, but at the same time there’s some secret love affair between them. The rivalry is shallow and the love affair is not believable. Throughout the entire movie you try to connect with either/both and you simply can’t. You like Cristal, as she doesn’t do enough to create animosity towards her. You like Nomi because she’s a noob to the dancing life. They don’t have enough bad blood between them to create the proper amount of protagonist versus antagonist. Yet Eszterhas and Verhoeven do their best efforts want the two to hate each other in the deepest of ways.
The big drive to this movie wasn’t that it had a great story; rather it was that Elizabeth Berkley (a noob to the industry) was coming from Saved by the Bell and into what could be considered soft-core porn. Showgirls was going to be this huge film where Berkley bared it all and finally broke out of that Jessie Spano role and into a real acting gig; regretfully that notion never came to fruition.
As for this Blu-ray for Showgirls 15th Anniversary Sinsational Edition, I’m impressed with how good the film looks. For a movie that has become the laughing stock of the last 15 years it’s nice to see that MGM/Fox has brought some high-quality video to the table in HD. It’s true that it probably won’t up the ante when it comes to enjoyment of the film, but you won’t be able to deny how pretty it all looks. The audio, which is also remastered, comes to you in DTS-HD and is simply superb. So when you hear Kyle MacLachlan’s character and Elizabeth Berkley going at it in the swimming pool while being sprayed by statue dolphins you’ll think of how great the splashing water sounds (kidding! but the audio is good overall).
Finally, here’s what you get for features on this Blu-ray:
● Pole Dancing: Finding Your Inner Stripper
● Lap Dance Tutorial Featuring the World-Famous Girls of Scores
● “The Greatest Movie Ever Made” – A Commentary by David Schmader
● Showgirls Fact-Up Trivia
● A Showgirls Diary
● DVD version of the film
The features are actually not that bad, especially the lap dance tutorial, which is frightfully cool. The commentary from David Schmader is actually not that bad either.