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.

Talking Yuletunes on All Things Considered

I didn’t put quite as much muscle behind promoting my yulemix this year as I have in years past, but I was very glad to get an invitation to talk to All Things Considered’s Ailsa Chang about some of the selections featured on my 2020 compilation, Four Seasons Total Greetings. The show suggested I choose three new-for-2020 recordings and one of the surprising deep cuts I uncovered in the prior year, which is how I got to talk about The Shades’ recorded-in-1966-but-eerily-topical “Prancer’s Got Some Red Spots” and also sneak a little bit of Canadian country singer Hank Snow’s “Christmas Wants” in at the outro.

We recorded this conversation in mid-December, and there was enough dire news in the days after that that I assumed this piece would be axed. It was my old boyhood pal Chip Goines who notified me, via Twitter, that the piece was airing on Christmas Eve, just as I was loading up to drive to my parents’ house in Virginia (after two weeks in quarantine) for the holiday. The bar for Christmas miracles has rarely been lower, but I’ll take it. God bless us, everyone!

Hark! "FOUR SEASONS TOTAL GREETINGS," my XVth fabulous #yulemix, hath arrived to delight your senses. One of them, anyway!

It’s the most puzzling tiiiiiiiiiiiiime of the year.

One knee operation, one global pandemic, three No Time to Die release dates, and one harrowing but un-fradulent presidential election later, your favorite foul-weather friend has returned to soundtrack (verb) your regrettably antisocial holidaze with another lovingly curated set of yulejams, yulehyms, and yulbrenners. Golly! HARK your herald angels and DECK whatever halls you’ve got, because this multidenominaltional multitrack is the funkiest yulestew in the multiverse. It’s got more hooks than Jan Hooks and more riffs than Ron Rifkin. Masked singers only, please.

Side B TK, OK?

ctklimek · FOUR SEASONS TOTAL GREETINGS—Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable XV [Side A]

Just in time to save Christmas, it's the long-awaited second side of my 2020 yulemix! It's the perfectly imperfect soundtrack to your somber, shelter-in-place holiday.

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.

Flowers (Postcards) For Harrison

This paen to handwritten correspondence is didactic and repetitive but whaddaya want from me, it's raining. At least it has a certified banger at the end. As of this morning the Cook Political Report had the South Carolina Senate race between three-term incumbent Lindsey Graham and challenger Jaime Harrison in the Toss-Up column.

Please make sure everyone you know votes... unless, you know.

Literature on Screen: "You" with Caroline Kepnes and Penn Badgley

I had roughly six weeks’ notice to prepare for the 90-minute discussion I moderated for the PEN/Faulkner Foundation on Sept. 23 between Caroline Kepnes, author of the bestselling thrillers You and Hidden Bodies, and Penn Badgley, who plays the homicidal narrator of those books on the Netflix series they spawned. Given that I had to read two 500ish-page novels and watch 20 hours of Netflix, that was a reasonable amount of time! But I was pleased with how the discussion turned out, and particularly that I managed to make my office/bedroom look enough like a recording booth to fool Mr. Badgley.

The PEN/Faulker people have now posted a video of the even, which you can watch here if you like.

IN EIGHT HOURS! It’s my first time conducting a live interview with the author of bestselling novels about a predator & the actor who plays that predator on TV so I left my keys in my door all night & did not discover this until a neighbor knocked at 8 AM to alert me. Good omen! https://t.co/iOn4iAvppB

— Chris Klimek (@ctklimek) September 23, 2020

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.

Call Me: The Telephonic Literary Union's "Human Resources," reviewed.

This is a panel from a David Mazzucchelli-drawn issue of Daredevil from the 80s, when phones were rotary and more suspenseful.

My first theater review—and The Telephonic Literary Union’s Human Resources is being presented by Woolly Mammoth Theater Company, its lack of resemblance to anything like a play notwithstanding—since I saw the Folger’s Merry Wives of Windsor back in January, when we all lived in another world and the population of the United States was more than 200,000 people larger than it is now, is in the Washington City Paper this week.

TL;DR: The show (or whatever it is) is an imperfect but worthy experiment in a form with a lot of possibility.