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The Japanese tourist has it, "in America everyone's a gynecologist." Las Vegas, a river of slime across a vast desert, in stomps the brusque blonde (Elizabeth Berkley). Spastic moxie is her gift in the scumbag realm, "sooner or later, you're gonna have to sell it." Her idea of fame is the distance between the Cheetah Club and the Stardust Hotel, where her snarl matches the leer of the revue headliner (Gina Gershon), their rivalry is over who gets to rise out of a Styrofoam volcano. A philosophy of hustling, a matter of honesty: "They want tits and ass, you give them tits and ass. Here, they pretend they want something else. And you still show them tits and ass." Joe Eszterhas' script is just the degraded libretto for Paul Verhoeven's kaleidoscopic abandon, only Sin City-as-Hollywood could accommodate the magnified gaudiness of the combined worldviews. The plastic ingénue poses by an ersatz Sphinx, is baptized with champagne, fucks the casino manager (Kyle MacLachlan) surrounded by neon palm trees. The comprehensive curdling of a titillation product, the grinding pleasure mechanism laid bare. "I'm erect. Why aren't you erect?" The kindness of the gal-pal seamstress (Gina Ravera) and the bouncer with artsy aspirations (Glenn Plummer) doesn't go unpunished, the crassness of the strip-joint owner who demands blowjobs (Robert Davi) and the vaudevillian with jack-in-the-box bust (Lin Tucci) emerges with something like affection. Cinemax Nation, writ large and saturated like a fauvist revision of Toulouse-Lautrec, the components of an absolutely lacerating satire. Fellini Satyricon is a mainstay, and surely Rivette recognized Duelle. "Amazing what paint and a surgeon can do." The palace of wisdom at the end of the heroine's road of excess turns out to be the same pickup truck driven by the same pompadoured goon, next stop Los Angeles (and Mulholland Drive). Cinematography by Jost Vacano. With Alan Rachins, Greg Travis, Al Ruscio, Patrick Bristow, William Shockley, and Rena Riffel.
--- Fernando F. Croce |