Pop Culture Happy Hour: "Showgirls" at Twenty-Five

Gina Gershon and Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls. Gershon’s career survived. (MGM)

I was surprised when I heard from erstwhile Pop Culture Happy Hour producer Jess Reedy that the show had opted to cover Showgirls, Paul Verhoeven’s notorious 1995 riff on A Star Is Born set in the world of Las Vegas dancers. The movie got a lot of attention at the time, because Verhoeven and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas were both coming off of Basic Instinct — controversial, but also a huge hit — and because Verhoeven had promised their new $40-million plus movie would carry an NC-17 rating due to its realistic treatment of the sex trade.

But realism isn’t Verhoeven’s Versace (pronounced Vehrr-SAYce) bag. Showgirls tanked, all but ending the career of former Saved by the Bell star Elizabeth Berkley, whose bizarre performance is one of the features that got the movie pilloried by critics 25 years ago, and is also one of the elements that has driven the movie’s latter-day reclamation as a Rocky Horror Picture Show-style campfest. (That reclamation is the subject of a good documentary called You Don’t Nomi, which in part inspired PCHH’s Showgirls episode. I recommend the doc.)

I was very happy to join in the Showgirls discourse with the brilliant panel of Linda Holmes, Aisha Harris, and Barrie Hardymon a couple of months back. That episode has now posted, just when we need it most. One thing I wish I’d found a place to point out is how Showgirls’ failure (though the movie by most accounts become profitable on home video) sent Verhoeven back to the R-rated sci-fi satire genre for 1997’s Starship Troopers — another movie that underperformed and got lousy reviews at the time (though not from me!) but has, over time, been rightfully recognized as a sort of masterpiece.

FURTHER READING: Seven long years ago I made 1987’s RoboCop — the movie that made Dutch auteur Verhoeven into a bankable Hollywood filmmaker for about a decade — the subject of the first and ,sadly, only installment in a proposed series of posts for what was then called NPR’s Monkey See blog on the subject of remakes. The column didn’t happen, but I certainly didn’t abandon the approach, as my review of 2016’s instantly forgotten Ben-Hur remake shall demonstrate. Maybe I’ll get to revive it if the long-threatened remake of Starship Troopers sever happens.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: Three Towering Sean Connery Performances

Connery kicks off what will become a Bond-flick tradition — the pre-title sequence — in Goldfinger, 1964.

Sean Connery, not the first screen James Bond but the first one that stuck, died at the age of 90 on Friday. His time in da moviesh spanned some 45 years, but to take stock of it in manageable fashion Pop Culture Happy Hour producer Jessica Reedy asked me to choose three of his performances to discuss. I did that with my pal Glen Weldon today. I tried to pick a trio that reflected the distinct phases of Connery’s career. Which means you’ll have to wait a little longer to hear Glen and I give 1974’s Zardoz the careful dissection it deserves.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "American Utopia"

David Byrne and Spike Lee collaborated on a superb concert film of Byrne’s Broadway show American Utopia. (David Lee)

Unless I’m forgetting something the only band Pal-For-Life Glen Weldon and I have ever gone to see together was The Magnetic Fields a decade ago. Glen has declined invitations from me to performances by many other bands. Had we known one another in 2008, and had I known of his yen for Talking Heads, I certainly would’ve asked him to accompany me to Baltimore that September for the second night of ex-Heads frontman David Byrne’s tour promoting Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, his then-new album with longtime collaborator Brian Eno.

I wrote a brief review of that show for the Washington Post and then saw that tour two more times over the next year or so, at Wolf Trap and I at, I think, the Warner Theater. I loved the tour, devoted to Everything That Happens and the several other Byrne/Talking Heads albums on which Eno was a producer and/or a co-writer and performer. But I was frustrated, as I assume Byrne must have been, at the disparity in the audience’s reception of the superb new songs and the Heads classics: polite deference and ecstatic exuberance, respectively.

That’s a dynamic that repeats itself in American Utopia, Spike Lee’s superb concert film of Byrne’s latest show, which toured for a while before setting into a Broadway engagement at the Hudson Theater where Spike captured it last February, just before the Covid crisis struck NYC. Again Byrne has a strong album of recent material to work from, though only a quarter of American Utopia-the-show’s 20 songs come from Byrne’s 2018 album American Utopia. The rest are, with one unforgettable exception, mined from his 40-year catalog. I’m sure his fellow ex-Heads Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth, and Jerry Harrison must think that by securing an audience for his new work by continuing to perform the most beloved material by a band that hasn’t toured since 1984, Byrne is having his cake and eating it, too. (Frantz says Byrne didn’t even invite him to see American Utopia during its Broadway run.)

I was honored to discuss most of this on a Pop Culture Happy Hour episode hosted by Glen and featuring the great Soraya Nadia McDonald, who blushed when I congratulated her on being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize this year. If I ever get that close to a Pulitzer, I won’t be nearly so gracious about it.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "Enola Holmes"

Henry Cavill, Millie Bobbie Brown, and Sam Claflin as Sherlock, Enola, and Mycroft, respectively. (Netflix)

Wherein the alphabetical dream team of Klimek, Daisy Rosario, Glen Weldon, and Margaret H. Willison, LLP, breaks down Enola Holmes, the Millie Bobby Brown-shepherded Netflix movie adapted from Nancy Springer’s YA novels about Sherlock and Mycroft’s younger sister.

The only thing I have to add to what’s in the episode is that I wanted to smuggle in a second What’s Making Me Happy pick, one with resonances both to Sherlock Holmes and the Happy I cited, Stephen Baxter’s novel The Massacre of Mankind. It’s a new track from Elvis Costello called “Phonographic Memory,” a bizarre spoken-word account of an audience in some dark future listening to a speech mashed up from various recordings of the long-dead Orson Welles. “After the peace was negotiated, and the Internet switched off, knowledge returned to its medieval cloister,” Elvis intones over an open-tuned acoustic guitar.

The track, he has said is a digital B-side, so don’t look for it on Hey Clockface, the new album he’s dropping next month. In addition to creating the most famous adaptation of War of the Worlds — his Halloween 1938 Mercury Theatre radio play, ingeniously disguised as a series of news reports — Welles played Professor Moriarty in a 1954 radio adaptation of The Final Problem.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "Star Trek: Lower Decks"

Lower Decks, the latest Star Trek spinoff, is meant to show us the crew members who work the shit jobs on a Federation starship. (CBS All Access)

It’s been nine months since last I joined a PCHH panel, and they’ve been dog months. In that span I’ve bought myself a pricey new microphone, had knee surgery, run zero point zero miles, and watched in impotent rage as a global pandemic has slain hundreds of thousands of Americans who might still be with us had responsible adults been in charge when the plague hit. Police officers murdered George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, millions took to the streets (I was still too weak to do that back in May and June) to protest police violence against persons of color, and my beloved hometown of Washington, DC was invaded by the U.S. military.

Dog months. And all without the outlets of running or boxing, the strategies I have relied upon to exorcize corrosive feelings since I was a kid. I got a bicycle at the end of June, and the increasingly long rides to which I’ve been treating myself have helped.

Anyway, Pop Culture Happy Hour! And a new Star Trek series, which is both animated and fluid-rich (blood, bile… alien vomit.)

Lower Decks is set in the Next Generation era, aboard the U.S.S. Cerritos, a California-class vessel. The first shuttlecraft we see parked in its shuttle bay is the Joshua Tree, a naked play for my affection. The shuttle Yosemite gets more airtime in the early episodes.

I was delighted to dissect the show with Stephen Thompson, Glen Weldon, and Petra Mayer.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood" and What's Making Us Happy

Tom Hanks, America’s Reasonable Dad, pulls double duty as Mr. Rogers & Daniel Striped Tiger. (Lacey Terrell)

I sure hope my friends Linda Holmes, Stephen Thompson, Glen Weldon, Jess Reedy, and Emmanuel Johnson aren’t suffering today from the head cold that audibly ailed me on Monday during the recording of today’s Pop Culture Happy Hour. Our subject is A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, the Tom Hanks-IS-Fred Rogers movie directed by Marielle (Can You Ever Forgive Me?) Heller loosely fashioned after Tom Junod’s 1998 profile of Rogers for Esquire magazine. As I say in the show, this movie’s depiction of the life of a magazine journalist reflects the circa 1998 expectations on which I based career choices that I have, over the last 20 years, had more than one occasion to lament.

Thanks to all of them for allowing me once again to plug my yulemix. You can hear the show right here or via whatever podfeeder brings you your NPR.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "The Goldfinch" and What's Making Us Happy

Oakes Fegley play Theo Decker, the narrator and protagonist of The Goldfinch. (Warner Bros.)

Today’s Pop Culture Happy Hour is a special one for me because Jess Reedy summoned me to huddle with Barry Hardymon, Katie Pressley, and host Stephen Thompson on The Goldfinch — John Crowley’s new film adaptation of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Donna Tartt that remains far afield of my usual bailiwicks of fisticuffs and rocketships. Plus I get to shout out Meow Wolf, perhaps the highlight of my visit to New Mexico last week.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw"

Kirby, Statham, and Johnson are Shaw, Shaw, and Hobbs.

Yesterday's exciting episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour featured Linda Holmes' triumphant return to the host chair after the triumphant publication of her debut novel. Hooray! In a deleted scene, I asked the panel—my forever Fast & Furious viewing-mate Linda, my sister-from-another-mother Daisy Rosario, and new friend Christina Tucker of the Unfriendly Black Hotties podcast—if I was the only one of use suffering from what I am loath to call "Johnson Fatigue."

Yes, came the three ladies' reply. It's just you. So be it! This was an especially fun episode. My review of Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw is right here.