The Talkies / Showtime

...A war veteran, his anxiety about meeting his mortgage payments after losing his job at Lockheed in the Los Angeles of 1948 leads him into a world of careless wealth and moral and political corruption—among whites and blacks alike—in which his sturdy petty bourgeois virtues (together with the firepower of his friend Mouse, played by Don Cheadle) see him through...

...Eszterhas certainly does share his creature's self-delusion...

...If they strike you as having the complexity and messiness and fascination of real people, then it's a good movie...

...Perhaps it is only because it's set among blacks in the segregated world of 1948 that the more typical Hollywood view of America gives way here to one that was more common there in, well, 1948...

...The American Spectator November 1995 71...

...As the villains are drilling out the lock on her apartment door, she is reduced to doing a Showgirls-type turn in front of the window to try (unsuccessfully) to attract the attention of someone who might help her...

...That is why they make so many films like this one, or like the bizarrely titled drag queen picture, To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar...

...T he second Movie of the Month is Devil in a Blue Dress by Carl Franklin, based on the novel by Walter Mosely...

...Denzel Washington starsas Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins, who is made to come alive for us through his pride in joining the home-owning middle class after starting with nothing...

...She surely cannot be unaware, as the doltish Nomi is, that her writhing naked in the lap of Kyle MacLachlan has some slight connection to the opportunity that is afforded her to show off her artistry as an actress and a dancer...

...Our heart goes out to Billy, who must convince them—without being able to talk to them—that she saw what she saw before the killers come back to finish her off for seeing it...

...What a hoot...

...Humor is also visual, as when the bad guy subsequently chases her into the bathroom...

...Opening the medicine chest in her search for anything she might fight back with, she finds an economy sized box of "Stress Tabs...

...Not only does he have her, preposterously, giving up dancing just as she becomes a star because—would you believe it?—the people who run the show are only James Bowman is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement and media columnist for the New Criterion...

...The horror...

...She knocks the recently deceased star's purse over in her haste to get away, and is pursued by two men throughout the large building in a tense and harrowing scene that lasts perhaps just a bit too long...

...People who know nothing of Christians or Christianity but what they have learned from the movies will not be surprised to learn that perfervid religious zeal has driven this movie's nut-case, "John Doe," played by Kevin Spacey, to a series of almost unbelievably sadistic murders based around the theme of the Seven Deadly Sins...

...The cinematography, the editing, and the pacing are compelling, as is the acting of the major roles by Mekhi Phifer, Isaiah Washington, Delray Linda, Harvey Keitel, and John Turturro...

...interested in exploiting her, but he then goes on to publish in Variety an open letter to the women of America, explaining that he made the movie in order to show that dancers in Vegas are often victimized, humiliated, used, verbally and physically raped by the men who are at the power centers of that world...

...if they are flat, or their lives are subordinated to some moral or political abstraction or (as is so often the case, these days) to their resemblance to other movie characters, then it's a bad one...

...The only thing wrong with it is the central incoherence of having the murder, whose investigation is the peg on which hangs the story, committed by someone who has no motivation to do it and every motivation not to...

...Such a movie is Showgirls by Paul Verhoeven and Joe Eszterhas, the team that gave us Basic Instinct...

...Go see it...

...Easy, reluctant in spite of his pecuniary need to "get mixed up in something," finally takes to heart Albright's advice: "When you're mixed up in something, you'd better be mixed up to the top...

...It takes the team of the wise old homicide detective who occasionally dips into Dante of an evening (Morgan Freeman) and the young but street-smart hothead who is only up to Cliff's Notes (Brad Pitt) to catch him, and even then . . . But for the sick-making ending you will have to be 70 The American Spectator November 1995 enough of a masochist to want to watch this lousy movie in the first place...

...Although the plotting and some of the cinematic technique are very clever, the characters are walking clichés whose reason for existing has nothing to do with genuine humanity...

...I might say that this is because she shares her character's self-delusion, but this would be unkind...

...The search by bad guys and police alike for a computer diskette which fell out of the purse of the snuff film star when Billy upset it unnecessarily complicates the plot, I think, but it does provide the excuse for some of the film's most memorable scenes between Billy and a man who tells her that he is a plainclothes policeman called Alexander Larsen (Oleg Jankowskij...

...Like so many serial killers, John Doe is also highly literate and given to quoting Milton at the drop of a head...

...In the case of Eszterhas, at least, it is more charitable to suppose that he is actually stupid enough to believe this, than that he is cynically employing fashionable political language in order (unsuccessfully, I suspect) to placate both feminists and the guardians of public decency...

...Daphne is said to have a predilection for the company of black men, so someone who can mix easily in the black night life of L.A...

...Most remarkably, one of them establishes herself as a person in whom we are prepared to take a very strong interest without uttering a single syllable...

...When Andy and Karen arrive they are too ready to believe the bad guys' story that the death was only simulated...

...has nothing to do with titillating pictures of naked women in erotic poses...

...Ordinary cinema goers, I think (I hope), will be a harder sell...

...You canget left-wing politicians or intellectuals to believe that (you can hardly get them not to believe it), because they have an interest in excusing the bad behavior of ghetto-dwellers...

...B ut though the bad movies would probably far outnumber the good even if it were not for Hollywood's spiritual sickness, we can for now rejoice in the rare treat of having not one but two Movies of the Month...

...Soon people start to be murdered, and racist policemen playing the game (as he says) of "cops and niggers" find it easy to blame Easy...

...In the end, as moral and legal and racial categories have all been shaken up and mixed about with the messiness of real life, Easy returns to the comfortable company of "my friend on my porch of my house" and the modest self-possession of the solid American middle class...

...Society will never change if we stick our heads in the sand and pretend that abuses to women, blacks, Jews and gay people aren't happening every day...

...It is a world away not only from blackmail and murder among the demimonde but also from the fascist or psychopathic middle America of Seven and the frightful ghetto of Clockers...

...Billy accidentally gets locked in on the set one evening and is unable to alert anyone to her plight...

...Lee covers over this gaping hole in his plot with an implicit appeal to the sentimental liberal's belief that life in the ghetto is so horrible that it explains, if not excuses, even the most improbable of wicked deeds...

...The horror...

...Showgirls is a deeply moral tale designed to right all the wrongs of the world and really (really...

...To them the heartland of America, with its quaint folk customs and religious beliefs, is the Heart of Darkness, full of bestial lust and violence, racism, homophobia, and wife-beating...

...Instead they are all—serial killer and cops alike—spokesmen for the kind of existential gloom which has long been popular among intellectual types but I suspect is less frequently to be met with than they suppose among law-enforcement personnel...

...The same cannot be said of David Fincher's Seven, which aspires to artiness in a kind of punky way—like its jumpy and unhinged opening credits, meant to suggest the craziness of the serial killer, and its chopped-up closing credits...

...It is the story of a Las Vegas showgirl named Nomi Malone, played by Elizabeth Berkley, who does all manner of whorish things in order to get to the top of her, um, profession, all the while insisting she is not a whore but a dancer and an artiste...

...Although he is suspicious himself, she has to make a split-second decision to trust him with her life...

...It is appropriate to the medium that the film is also an examination of nonverbal forms of communication...

...As so often with Lee, at least when he is able to avoid self-indulgence, everything else in the film besides the political message is top notch...

...He swiftly realizes that nothing is what it seems, in spite of the simple certainties of a world sharply divided into black and white...

...But it is a very special kind of bad movie that takes the trouble to create a living character, and then throw it away for the sake of politics...

...Give me a break...

...But Mr...

...is required...

...CI (James Bowman welcomes e-mail comments and queries on his reviews and can be reached at 72056.3226@compuserve.com...

...The comic and satirical possibilities are considerable, and the hitherto obscure Miss Berkley does a splendid job...

...It doesn't work—not because of any overt political message but because of the character-destroying implausibility built into its political assumptions...

...Clockers, based on the novel by Richard Price, is wonderfully watchable and full of harrowing imagery of life—and death—in the world of ghetto drug dealers and their victims...

...The film ends with Morgan Freeman's portentous voiceover: "Ernest Hemingway once said, 'The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.' I agree with the second part...

...The first is Mute Witness by Anthony Waller, which combines an almost Hitchcockian level of suspense with a clutch of engaging and genuine characters...

...Soon she comes upon some of the Russian crew, including one handsome fellow who Karen has told her was sweet on her, making what appears to be a pornographic film...

...F ashionable politics also vitiates what might otherwise have been Spike Lee's best movie since Do the Right Thing...

...These will be familiar to anyone who has seen virtually any Hollywood movie of the last quarter century in which religion plays a part...

...Marina Sudina plays Billy, a mute makeup girl on the set of a crummy American independent film being shot in Moscow...

...Easy is approached by a fellow named Albright (Tom Sizemore) and asked to find one Daphne Monet (Jennifer Beals), the fiancée of a mayoral candidate for whom Albright is ostensibly working...

...It is also a terrifically exciting, funny, and well-made movie with real people in it...

...The director is the clownish Andy (Evan Richards), who is always talking about his influential daddy in America, has no taste or talent, and nearly gets himself, as well as Billy and her sister Karen (Fay Ripley), killed...

...Among Hollywood artistes, however, it is pretty much taken for granted...

...Withmounting horror she realizes that it is a snuff film...