Some weeks after her professor husband is fatally struck by a car, his young widow (Perkins) faces up to cleaning out his office. His desk is littered with the everyday effluvia of academia: papers, notepads and books. "Just give it all to the library," she tells the department head. Then, opening a drawer, she finds a pack of Chiclets and tenderly fingers the sunny yellow box. "I'll keep these," she whispers.
It's a heartbreaking moment, conveying with delicacy that our memories of those we have loved are as often tied to the trivial and mundane as to life's big events, and Perkins plays it perfectly. An actress of gawky grace, she glows brightly in this bittersweet comedy about a woman muddling through her first year of widowhood with the help of her flaky best pal (Goldberg), her controlling ex-step-mother (Turner) and her fragile younger sister (Paltrow, in an adroit performance). Moonlight is directed with a fittingly soft touch by David Anspaugh (Rudy) and is ably written by Ellen Simon (playwright Neil Simon's daughter, who based the story on her own life, see page 83). Although the movie meanders some, particularly in its second half—and the final scene in a graveyard is a major groaner—the film effectively demonstrates the necessity for laughter even in the worst of times. And Perkins is tops. (R)
Elizabeth Berkley, Gina Gershon, Kyle MacLachlan
You want to see bare breasts? Well, then, Showgirls is the movie for you because women's mammaries are onscreen here as often as Cal Ripken Jr. shows up for work, which is to say all the time. These breasts are attached to Las Vegas strippers and showgirls, whose jobs require much vigorous movement. These jouncing chests, along with bare derrieres and some bikini-waxed nether regions, are Showgirls' major—and only—selling point. To say this movie is smarmy is to understate the case. To say it stinks is more like it.
Showgirls is the latest from writer Joe Eszterhas and director Paul Verhoeven, the team responsible for the equally prurient Basic Instinct. Here these gentlemen are after a morality play. Berkley (see page 110), playing their heroine, comes to Vegas to dance. She gets a job as a stripper and lap dancer, then starts clawing her way up the Vegas food chain, into a big casino's topless revue and ultimately, she hopes, the show's starring role. The higher she climbs, the more of her soul she loses, sleeping with her boss (MacLachlan), snorting cocaine, sabotaging a rival (Gershon), etc.
Berkley (Saved by the Bell) alternates between shrieking her lines and pouting, neither being dramatically effective choices. Best is Gershon, a scrawnier Raquel Welch lookalike, who can drawl a line so that, even when it's on the level of "We're all whores," and mostly it is, it has humor and bite.
My advice: Save the bucks. This movie is simply too bad—and plain old boring—to be dirty. (NC-17)
- Contributors:
- Leah Rozen.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
