Myopia Movies

Nomi Malone wants to dance. She wants it so bad she'll claw, thrust, and pool-vomit her way from a Vegas diner to the top of the Stardust Casino's marquee show — and we're along for every glitter-caked, oddly joyless step of it. Paul Verhoeven and Joe Eszterhas set out to make the ultimate NC-17 spectacle and instead produced one of the most gloriously, bafflingly bad movies ever released by a major studio. We're talking about the lap dances that look like seizures, the dialogue that sounds like it was translated into and out of three other languages, and a steak dinner scene that has somehow entered the pop-culture canon.
Join us as we dissect Showgirls — a film so committed to its own vision of sleazy excess that it looped back around into something like camp genius. Is it satire? Is it just bad? Is Elizabeth Berkley giving the bravest performance of 1995 or the most unhinged? We riff, we argue, we never quite agree.
How will Showgirls hold up?
Directed by Paul Verhoeven
Starring: Elizabeth Berkley, Kyle MacLachlan, Gina Gershon, Glenn Plummer, Robert Davi, Alan Rachins, Gina Ravera, Lin Tucci

A movie about a songwriter who is too shy to sing, solved by putting her on a bar in wet jeans. Violet Sanford flees New Jersey for Manhattan with a demo tape and roughly nine dollars, gets robbed, gets hired at a saloon whose entire business model is "hydrate the patrons against their will," and discovers that the cure for stage fright is a crowd of drunk men chanting. Meanwhile her father drives down from the Garden State to yell about it, and Adam Garcia keeps showing up like a Australian golden retriever who learned to make omelets.
Bruckheimer looked at Flashdance, said "what if less plot and more hose," and cashed a check. We're here for the fire code violations, the LeAnn Rimes of it all, and the moment John Goodman quietly outacts the entire soundtrack. Also: nobody in this bar is ever served a drink. We counted.
Can you fight the moonlight? Findings inside.
How will Coyote Ugly hold up?
Directed by David McNallyStarring: Piper Perabo, Adam Garcia, John Goodman, Maria Bello, Izabella Miko, Tyra Banks, Bridget Moynahan, Melanie Lynskey

We're digging into the vault for this one. The Plastics are back, Gretchen is still trying to make fetch happen, and so are we. Join us as we revisit our take on the 2004 teen comedy that somehow became both a cultural touchstone and a Broadway musical — because Hollywood ran out of ideas and humility.
Does Mean Girls hold up? Is Regina George actually the hero? Why does a grown adult math teacher have this many emotional breakdowns? We had questions in [original year]. We have more questions now.
Remastered for clarity. The opinions are messier than ever.
How will Mean Girls hold up?
Directed by Mark WatersStarring Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Lacey Chabert, Amanda Seyfried, Lizzy Caplan, Daniel Franzese, Jonathan Bennett, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Rajiv Surendra
 

This week on Myopia Movie, we got a full moon coming up! We watched Ginger Snaps, where a Canadian teenager gets bitten by a werewolf on the same night she gets her first period...turns out puberty was always kind of a horror movie, we just needed the claws to make it official.
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How will Ginger Snaps hold up?
Directed by John FawcettStarring: Emily Perkins, Katharine Isabelle, Kris Lemche, Mimi Rogers, Jesse Moss

Two California teens dig a hole in the backyard looking for a swimming pool and instead unearth a frozen Neanderthal, thaw him out with a hair dryer, and enroll him in high school. It works about as well as you'd expect. Brendan Fraser grunts his way through his big-screen debut as "Link," Pauly Shore is somehow the film's moral center, and Sean Astin plays a guy who just wants everyone to respect the Pleistocene. We dig into the movie's truly deranged internal logic (nobody calls the Smithsonian?), the early-90s obsession with turning "weird outsider" into "coolest kid at school" in under 90 minutes, and whether this counts as anthropology if you squint hard enough. Bring your own hair dryer.
How will Encino Man hold up?
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Here are the film credits for Encino Man (1992):
Director: Les Mayfield
Cast:
Sean Astin as Dave Morgan
Brendan Fraser as Link (Linkovitch Chomofsky)
Pauly Shore as Stanley "Stoney" Brown
Megan Ward as Robyn Sweeney
Robin Tunney as Ella
Michael DeLuise as Matt Wilson
Mariette Hartley as Joan Morgan
Richard Masur as Ed Morgan
Rick Ducommun as Mr. Morris
 
 

This week on Myopia Movie, we got a candy-coated murder cover-up coming up! We watched Jawbreaker, where three impossibly glamorous high school mean girls accidentally kill their best friend with a birthday prank gone wrong and then spend the rest of the movie handling it with all the grace and subtlety you'd expect from teenagers who peaked in the "Flawless" clique... turns out 1999 had a lot of feelings about popularity, and somehow all of them involve Judy Greer stealing every scene she's in.
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How will Jawbreaker hold up?
Directed by Darren SteinStarring: Rose McGowan, Rebecca Gayheart, Julie Benz, Judy Greer, Rose Marie, Pam Grier

This week on Myopia Movies, we got a yearbook coming up! We watched Can't Hardly Wait, where a lovesick teenager spends an entire graduation party trying to work up the nerve to talk to his crush...turns out 1998 had a lot of feelings about the last day of high school and a surprising number of them involve Jerry Springer references.
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How will Can't Hardly Wait hold up?
Directed by Harry Elfont, Deborah KaplanStarring: Ethan Embry, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Charlie Korsmo, Lauren Ambrose, Peter Facinelli, Seth Green, Jerry O'Connell, Melissa Joan Hart

Before he was terminating cyborgs or governing California, Arnold Schwarzenegger was just a well-oiled Austrian oak with a plan and a truly alarming amount of confidence. This week we strap into George Butler and Robert Fiore's landmark bodybuilding documentary, where men in tiny shorts pursue "aesthetics" with the single-minded devotion usually reserved for religious orders. We'll be riffing on the sun-baked psychodrama of the 1975 Mr. Olympia competition, Arnold's genuinely unhinged mind games against poor Lou Ferrigno, and a supporting cast of quads that deserve their own screen credit. Expect commentary on 70s masculinity, the pageantry of competitive posing, and the sneaking suspicion that this whole film is just performance art that forgot to tell anyone. Pump up, tune in, and don't skip leg day — or this episode.
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We are riffers on Cineprov! Check us out!!
How will Pumping Iron hold up?
Directed by George Butler and Robert Fiore,
Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lou Ferrigno, Franco Columbu, Mike Katz, Ken Waller, and Serge Nubret