Word: leers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Hoffman is superb, underplaying even the punchiest lines for maximum effect. A spotlight line such as, "You're the best show in town, Sam," might have amounted to little more than a melodramatic leer in the hands of a less talented actor; Hoffman delivers it quietly, almost swallowing the words, and the effect is chilling. To its own detriment, the script fails to learn from his example. Writers Tom Matthews and Eric Williams, journalists themselves, cannot resist hammering home their message. "I don't want to cross the line," Brackett tells his boss; Lou, at the beginning of the movie...
Adding insult to injury, many "survivors," as they call themselves, report that doctors and other medical personnel routinely leer at or ridicule the inert bodies before them. Jeanette Tracy, a television producer from Dallas, suffered this when she was anesthetized for a hernia operation in 1991. Enduring pain she describes as "a blow torch in my stomach...every tissue tearing like a piece of paper," she heard the anesthesiologist say she had "the right size breasts" and was in "great shape" for a mother of two. "You can't cover yourself," she says furiously. "You're screaming as loud...
...giving you a devilish leer...
Would that it were. Hollywood films often wallow in bloodlust and sexual smirking--it's the Kingdom of Leer--but genuine eroticism is hard to find. Maybe Verhoeven is right when he says, "Americans have a problem accepting sexuality. American society is more impregnated with Christian beliefs." And to those who find the very idea of sex unholy, it may be as pointless to prefer the erotic to the lurid as to choose a call girl over a hooker. But Showgirls is cold, antierotic. It just ain't sexy; it's only...
There is only one person who Grady does not fail, and that is James Leer, who as a fledgling writer excites his protective instincts. Grady and James share what Grady calls the "midnight disease" of the writer, a sense of their own strangeness that isolates them from the world. This dark side of writing is introduced in the person of Albert Vetch, a hack horror writer whose suicide Grady witnessed as a child. Vetch floats over the book as a symbol of the true artist, the estate to which Grade aspires: "He was the first real writer I knew, because...