Welcome to Michael and us. I'm Will Sloan. My regular co-host Luke Savage is on break this week. He'll be back soon. But sitting in, we have a distinguished critic, whose work appears regularly in cinemascope in the ringer.

As well as the author of Handsome and informed books on Paul Thomas Anderson, the Coen Brothers and David Fincher, as well as the man who helped lead the reclamation of Paul Verhoeven's showgirls. It's Adam Neiman, thank you for being here.

I think Handsome and informed is the nicest podcast intro ever. Very efficient, I appreciate it.

We wrote your book about showgirls, which is titled It Doesn't Suck and is still available. I believe it was published in 2014, maybe 2013. And it's funny, the general critical consensus at that time was that it was still a bad movie.

And I saw today that it's on the criterion channel. I feel like one almost has to explain to the younger generation that there was a time when showgirls was almost universally reviled.

Well, each time I've shown the movie, I've been lucky enough to speak at screening to this movie, at least at this point, six or seven times, with different events around the book.

There is always one person, usually I guess, in their 20s-ish, who comes up and is like, so why didn't people like this?

Like not in a deeply polemical way or trying to score some kind of points, but sort of just being like, I don't see the problem.

I don't see the malfunction here. I guess I had to be there, why people didn't like it. Yeah, the arc of the universe spends towards justice, right?

This is maybe a bit of a digression, but last night I had the opportunity to watch a very acclaimed movie of 15 years ago called The Dark Knight, maybe you've heard of it.

I have to say, I did not particularly care for it. When I was 19 years old, I thought it was very strong, and last night's viewing was quite a disappointment.

I'm not sure to what extent the movie has changed, to what extent I've changed, but these things are always refracting and reflecting.

They're not static works, whatever they are. I guess I'm saying this because showgirls, maybe for a multitude of different reasons, just looks much more interesting than it did in 1995.

Yeah, I mean, without going down the Dark Knight rabbit hole or the Christopher Nolan wormhole, I know you haven't seen Oppenheimer yet.

The one thing I would say, there's not a huge age gap between us, so you'll probably remember this, but as someone who was semi-reporting from the front at that point in 2008,

Dark Knight is definitely an inflection point in the whole, like, let people enjoy things or we will kill you.

Well, I remember every review on Rotten Tomatoes in 2008 had a comment section, no matter if it was the New Yorker or dorkshelf.com or whatever.

And, you know, the 4% of critics who didn't like the Dark Knight were getting death threats.

So there was that, there was the fact that Marvel was not a harmful entity as yet.

And it kind of looked like Nolan and the Nolan verse of the Batman movies that kind of taken this stuff as far as it could go in terms of this kind of grand unified, you know, theory of comic-quick movies and comic-quick movie reception.

Now it almost looks kind of quaint, how self-contained those three movies are and how relatively, I don't want to say serious, but like the relative integrity of those Dark Knight movies compared to the huge,

interlocking product, you know, stuff that we've gotten.

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