G
Guest
Guest
These are clever but informative briefs on three disparate films. I still cannot bring myself to see Showgirls and won't watch Cher, but the French filum is on my list. - Perdita
DVD REVIEWS from the SF Chron, August 1, 2004
SHOWGIRLS (V.I.P.): A camp classic can only be made accidentally. If you try to make camp, you just end up with something smirky and self-protective. Nine years after its release, "Showgirls" is a camp masterpiece, a movie worth watching over and over again because it features not only one of the worst lead performances in film history, but one of the most astonishingly misguided. Elizabeth Berkley thought she was playing a sexy woman (nope), a good dancer (nope), a sympathetic character (nope), a determined artist (ha!) and an interesting, complex woman (uh, no). At the time, I considered "Showgirls" one of the worst films of 1995, but I don't think I've watched any other 1995 release more than this one. Age cannot wither it, nor custom stale its amazing awfulness. It's 131 minutes of jaw-droppingly tasteless, crazily written, badly acted, mind- bogglingly strange scenes, and as such it is never, ever dull. So that's what's great about "Showgirls." As for this new repackaging, it's a disappointment. The new DVD features a lap-dance tutorial, a video-commentary and a little B-roll -- that's not much -- and it comes in a big box, along with two "Showgirls" shot glasses (very nice), instructions for "Showgirls" games (no thanks), a "Showgirls" blindfold (cheap) and a nude poster of Elizabeth Berkley (right into the garbage). An earlier DVD edition is still out there, and you can get that for $14.95. - Mick LaSalle.
PORT OF SHADOWS: Jean Gabin is one of the great alpha males of cinema, France's answer to Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart and Spencer Tracy. In this 1938 Marcel Carne film, written by Jacques Prevert, he plays a military deserter who hitches a ride to the port of Le Havre, in search of a ship that will take him out of the country. There his life becomes entwined with that of several colorful characters, including a perverse old merchant (Michel Simon) and his ward, played by a very young and Garbo-esque Michele Morgan. The film comes under the category of "poetic realism," a genre that cut across countries and art forms in the 1930s and '40s. The subject matter is earthy, the dialogue is clipped, the people and places border on the sordid. But the treatment is poetic, not journalistic. The grimness is picturesque -- a world of fog, shadow and barely concealed cinematic artifice that's like a philosophical statement. The characters stand for themselves but also as spiritual illustrations, embodying some human struggle against an overpowering fate. This is Hemingway. This is Raymond Chandler. And this is why the French discovered film noir -- they were in that mental space seven or eight years before Americans were. The film is much more adult, though, than American noirs. It contains a bedroom scene that couldn't have made it into an American film until the 1960s. - Mick LaSalle
CHASTITY: "Chastity. She's a bummer, a loser, a cop-out, a dropout." These words from the trailer for "Chastity" are describing the title character, but they could just as easily be describing the movie itself, a monotonous, amateurish saga about a mixed-up hippie in search of herself, notable only for being written by Sonny Bono and starring a very young Cher. With one stony, sullen look on her face throughout the film, Chastity hitches rides with truckers, crashes in cheap hotels, smokes dope and steals cars when she isn't tossing her waist-length mane of pitch-black hair or conveying anguish through eyes so thick with mascara they could put Tammy Faye to shame. Chastity's had it with men (she chose her name from the dictionary when she found it meant "sexual purity") -- until she falls for good guy Eddie (Stephen Whittaker), a valet car parker and law student. Alas, she can't deal with the intimacy because of some creepy dark past indicated only by voices in her head, so she flees to a Mexican whorehouse and develops a mother fixation on a lesbian madam. Of course. This movie is no masterpiece -- and, with the wooden acting, it's no wonder audiences tittered years later when they saw Cher's name in the opening credits for "Silkwood," for which she earned an Oscar nomination. But Cher fans might want to rent it just to look at her youthful beauty and hear her sing on the soundtrack. Directed by Alessio de Paola, who went on to direct - surprise! - nothing. No extras other than the trailer, unless you count subtitled versions. - Sue Adolphson
DVD REVIEWS from the SF Chron, August 1, 2004
SHOWGIRLS (V.I.P.): A camp classic can only be made accidentally. If you try to make camp, you just end up with something smirky and self-protective. Nine years after its release, "Showgirls" is a camp masterpiece, a movie worth watching over and over again because it features not only one of the worst lead performances in film history, but one of the most astonishingly misguided. Elizabeth Berkley thought she was playing a sexy woman (nope), a good dancer (nope), a sympathetic character (nope), a determined artist (ha!) and an interesting, complex woman (uh, no). At the time, I considered "Showgirls" one of the worst films of 1995, but I don't think I've watched any other 1995 release more than this one. Age cannot wither it, nor custom stale its amazing awfulness. It's 131 minutes of jaw-droppingly tasteless, crazily written, badly acted, mind- bogglingly strange scenes, and as such it is never, ever dull. So that's what's great about "Showgirls." As for this new repackaging, it's a disappointment. The new DVD features a lap-dance tutorial, a video-commentary and a little B-roll -- that's not much -- and it comes in a big box, along with two "Showgirls" shot glasses (very nice), instructions for "Showgirls" games (no thanks), a "Showgirls" blindfold (cheap) and a nude poster of Elizabeth Berkley (right into the garbage). An earlier DVD edition is still out there, and you can get that for $14.95. - Mick LaSalle.
PORT OF SHADOWS: Jean Gabin is one of the great alpha males of cinema, France's answer to Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart and Spencer Tracy. In this 1938 Marcel Carne film, written by Jacques Prevert, he plays a military deserter who hitches a ride to the port of Le Havre, in search of a ship that will take him out of the country. There his life becomes entwined with that of several colorful characters, including a perverse old merchant (Michel Simon) and his ward, played by a very young and Garbo-esque Michele Morgan. The film comes under the category of "poetic realism," a genre that cut across countries and art forms in the 1930s and '40s. The subject matter is earthy, the dialogue is clipped, the people and places border on the sordid. But the treatment is poetic, not journalistic. The grimness is picturesque -- a world of fog, shadow and barely concealed cinematic artifice that's like a philosophical statement. The characters stand for themselves but also as spiritual illustrations, embodying some human struggle against an overpowering fate. This is Hemingway. This is Raymond Chandler. And this is why the French discovered film noir -- they were in that mental space seven or eight years before Americans were. The film is much more adult, though, than American noirs. It contains a bedroom scene that couldn't have made it into an American film until the 1960s. - Mick LaSalle
CHASTITY: "Chastity. She's a bummer, a loser, a cop-out, a dropout." These words from the trailer for "Chastity" are describing the title character, but they could just as easily be describing the movie itself, a monotonous, amateurish saga about a mixed-up hippie in search of herself, notable only for being written by Sonny Bono and starring a very young Cher. With one stony, sullen look on her face throughout the film, Chastity hitches rides with truckers, crashes in cheap hotels, smokes dope and steals cars when she isn't tossing her waist-length mane of pitch-black hair or conveying anguish through eyes so thick with mascara they could put Tammy Faye to shame. Chastity's had it with men (she chose her name from the dictionary when she found it meant "sexual purity") -- until she falls for good guy Eddie (Stephen Whittaker), a valet car parker and law student. Alas, she can't deal with the intimacy because of some creepy dark past indicated only by voices in her head, so she flees to a Mexican whorehouse and develops a mother fixation on a lesbian madam. Of course. This movie is no masterpiece -- and, with the wooden acting, it's no wonder audiences tittered years later when they saw Cher's name in the opening credits for "Silkwood," for which she earned an Oscar nomination. But Cher fans might want to rent it just to look at her youthful beauty and hear her sing on the soundtrack. Directed by Alessio de Paola, who went on to direct - surprise! - nothing. No extras other than the trailer, unless you count subtitled versions. - Sue Adolphson
