Chris Knipp
11-28-2010, 06:46 PM
Steve Antin: Burlesque (2010)
Review by Chris Knipp
http://img508.imageshack.us/img508/1939/burlesquef.jpg
CHER AND CHRISTINA AGUILERA IN BURLESQUE
Iowa girl makes good
Remember that famous 1920's advertising tag line for mail-order music lessons? "They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano. But When I Started to Play!"
That's more or less the premise of this slick, entertaining, but generic little movie musical starring Cher, Christina Aguilera, Cam Gigandet and Stanley Tucci. Small-town girl Ali (Aguilera), an orphan since the age of seven, runs away from Iowa to Hollywood bent on becoming a singer and dancer. She winds up immediately at the Burlesque Club, a show bar run by Tess (Cher) threatened with bank repossession. The super-eager Ali wangles a job as cocktail waitress by getting friendly with bartender Jack (Gigandet). Tess laughs at Ali when she offers to try out as a dancer -- but oh, when she starts to dance! Tess and her stage manager Sean (Tucci) are instantly mesmerized. Later when another jealous performer pulls the plug on the music -- usually the dancers lip-sync to famous records -- Ali belts out a song, without even needing a mike. Oh boy! She's so good, Tess immediately decides to build a whole new show around her.
And that's about it. There are the other girls who don't like Ali at first, especially the drunken Nikki (Kristen Bell). And there's the on-and-off relationship with Jack, whom Ali moves in with when her room is burglarized, assuming (mistakenly, it seems) that Jack is gay. The minimal plot is mainly an excuse to string together a series of glitzy, artificial song-and-dance numbers, most of them featuring Aguilera, whose dancing is fast and slick, and whose singing features a forced, husky soulfulness.
In stories as simplistic as this the line between good and evil tends to be clearly drawn. You'd expect the bad folks to be the jealous girls who resent Ali's talent, and Marcus, the real estate magnate who wants to take over the club and build a high-rise in its place. But the girls never seem that jealous, and Marcus is played by Eric Dane, an actor much too young and pleasant to be either a real estate magnate or a bad guy. He's always nice to Ali even though Tess doesn't "like" him. The affable charm of Burlesque, if you can take it that way, is that it has no teeth. You quickly pick up that nothing bad is ever going to happen -- to anybody in the movie. Ali may have had a rough life in Iowa, but things sure go easily for her in Hollywood. Tess puts on a show of being unimpressed by her at first, but there's never any doubt she'll become a star -- and fast.
The movie/musical comes to an end when the club's debt problems are happily resolved and Ali finds the right man, who turns out to have been Jack all along. She was wooed by Marcus, and it's hard to resist a man who has everything when you're a girl with nothing, but Ali realizes Marcus may not be a bad guy, but he's the wrong guy (That's exactly how she puts it, emphasizing the movie's insistence that nobody is really bad.) Unfortunately Jack doesn't really seem quite the right guy, either. Even at the end it's hard to believe he's not gay, or at least bi. Steve Antin, the writer as well as the director, who's openly gay, has made the movie so gay-friendly full-on heterosexuality seems to be out of place in it. The sexuality, despite all the tits and hip-wiggling, is vague -- except that Sean is definitely gay. Tucci is reduced to playing a cruder, less interesting version of the boy-Friday role he played opposite Meryl Streep in The Devil Plays Prada. When Jack's fiancee finally shows up from New York she looks like a girl hired from the club to play the part as a cover for a boyfriend. Maybe Ali should just forget about finding a guy and focus on her career. Maybe Ali herself is gay. The way she eyes her former enemy Nikki in the dressing room at the end, it looks like an affair may be brewing.
As for Cher, whose beauty blends drag queen mannerism with vampire pallor, her immobility contrasts with the manic Bob Fosse-knockoff dancing of her troupe of girls -- and a pointlessly jittery lens that swings back and forth as if the cinematographer were fanning himself with the camera. She utters a few languid lines and delivers a couple of songs in a rich, soulful, husky voice, not moving much. She reveals no wrinkles, of course; maybe she has to remain still to keep them from showing. As Tess, Cher projects a mixture of world-weariness, dedication and good nature that is all Antin requires of her. It's only a minor weakness he has cast as Ali's virtual older sister a lady who specializes in looking ageless. Cher epitomizes the total artificiality of this movie that is its weird charm. If you don't accept that, you will not have a good time.
Needless to say, Ali's magical ability to perform complicated dance numbers just from watching them at the bar and belt out songs without any particular training or experience are matters best not delved into. This is the magical world of theater, with hardly a nod to the everyday world. Every set looks just like that -- a set, including the places where people live. This whole movie could be transferred directly to the stage with nothing lost -- and nothing gained, except the legitimacy conferred when songs are performed live, so you can tell a real person is singing them.
This lack of realism extends particularly to the thing called "burlesque," which in the real world, whether the old-school kind with g-strings, pasties and vaudeville clowns or a hard-bodied and aggressive neo-burlesque, involves a bracing degree of sleaze totally lacking in this airbrushed, thoroughly rehearsed and over-edited version. A dash of more rank flavor, though strictly of stage pedigree, comes from Alan Cumming as the club's gatekeeper, winking at the camera in a series of quick cameos to evoke the louche Thirties Berlin of Cabaret. But 99% of the time this is the synthetic new world of American movie musicals of the slickest kind, like Rob Marshall's Chicago. Yet Burlesque lacks the clear-cut distinctions between songs and segments you get in Chicago, as well as the so-bad-it's-good campiness of Verhoeven's Showgirls. If Burlesque becomes a Guilty Pleasure, it will be one of a very bland kind.
Steve Antin's Burlesque creates its own Brigadoon, a land of enchantment to which no real harm can ever come, where no one ever ages: they just have endless face-jobs. (Peter Gallagher, who plays Tess' almost forgotten ex-husband and co-owner Vince, seems to have acquired a few wrinkles, but we don't see much of him.) The absence of the slightest worry about the fate of the characters, because it's so obvious no one is even going to stub a toe, makes the song-and-dance numbers all the more enjoyable as pure performance. But a movie that has no credible darkness on its horizon, no sense of the world's obstacles, also arouses too little emotion to leave a strong memory.
Review by Chris Knipp
http://img508.imageshack.us/img508/1939/burlesquef.jpg
CHER AND CHRISTINA AGUILERA IN BURLESQUE
Iowa girl makes good
Remember that famous 1920's advertising tag line for mail-order music lessons? "They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano. But When I Started to Play!"
That's more or less the premise of this slick, entertaining, but generic little movie musical starring Cher, Christina Aguilera, Cam Gigandet and Stanley Tucci. Small-town girl Ali (Aguilera), an orphan since the age of seven, runs away from Iowa to Hollywood bent on becoming a singer and dancer. She winds up immediately at the Burlesque Club, a show bar run by Tess (Cher) threatened with bank repossession. The super-eager Ali wangles a job as cocktail waitress by getting friendly with bartender Jack (Gigandet). Tess laughs at Ali when she offers to try out as a dancer -- but oh, when she starts to dance! Tess and her stage manager Sean (Tucci) are instantly mesmerized. Later when another jealous performer pulls the plug on the music -- usually the dancers lip-sync to famous records -- Ali belts out a song, without even needing a mike. Oh boy! She's so good, Tess immediately decides to build a whole new show around her.
And that's about it. There are the other girls who don't like Ali at first, especially the drunken Nikki (Kristen Bell). And there's the on-and-off relationship with Jack, whom Ali moves in with when her room is burglarized, assuming (mistakenly, it seems) that Jack is gay. The minimal plot is mainly an excuse to string together a series of glitzy, artificial song-and-dance numbers, most of them featuring Aguilera, whose dancing is fast and slick, and whose singing features a forced, husky soulfulness.
In stories as simplistic as this the line between good and evil tends to be clearly drawn. You'd expect the bad folks to be the jealous girls who resent Ali's talent, and Marcus, the real estate magnate who wants to take over the club and build a high-rise in its place. But the girls never seem that jealous, and Marcus is played by Eric Dane, an actor much too young and pleasant to be either a real estate magnate or a bad guy. He's always nice to Ali even though Tess doesn't "like" him. The affable charm of Burlesque, if you can take it that way, is that it has no teeth. You quickly pick up that nothing bad is ever going to happen -- to anybody in the movie. Ali may have had a rough life in Iowa, but things sure go easily for her in Hollywood. Tess puts on a show of being unimpressed by her at first, but there's never any doubt she'll become a star -- and fast.
The movie/musical comes to an end when the club's debt problems are happily resolved and Ali finds the right man, who turns out to have been Jack all along. She was wooed by Marcus, and it's hard to resist a man who has everything when you're a girl with nothing, but Ali realizes Marcus may not be a bad guy, but he's the wrong guy (That's exactly how she puts it, emphasizing the movie's insistence that nobody is really bad.) Unfortunately Jack doesn't really seem quite the right guy, either. Even at the end it's hard to believe he's not gay, or at least bi. Steve Antin, the writer as well as the director, who's openly gay, has made the movie so gay-friendly full-on heterosexuality seems to be out of place in it. The sexuality, despite all the tits and hip-wiggling, is vague -- except that Sean is definitely gay. Tucci is reduced to playing a cruder, less interesting version of the boy-Friday role he played opposite Meryl Streep in The Devil Plays Prada. When Jack's fiancee finally shows up from New York she looks like a girl hired from the club to play the part as a cover for a boyfriend. Maybe Ali should just forget about finding a guy and focus on her career. Maybe Ali herself is gay. The way she eyes her former enemy Nikki in the dressing room at the end, it looks like an affair may be brewing.
As for Cher, whose beauty blends drag queen mannerism with vampire pallor, her immobility contrasts with the manic Bob Fosse-knockoff dancing of her troupe of girls -- and a pointlessly jittery lens that swings back and forth as if the cinematographer were fanning himself with the camera. She utters a few languid lines and delivers a couple of songs in a rich, soulful, husky voice, not moving much. She reveals no wrinkles, of course; maybe she has to remain still to keep them from showing. As Tess, Cher projects a mixture of world-weariness, dedication and good nature that is all Antin requires of her. It's only a minor weakness he has cast as Ali's virtual older sister a lady who specializes in looking ageless. Cher epitomizes the total artificiality of this movie that is its weird charm. If you don't accept that, you will not have a good time.
Needless to say, Ali's magical ability to perform complicated dance numbers just from watching them at the bar and belt out songs without any particular training or experience are matters best not delved into. This is the magical world of theater, with hardly a nod to the everyday world. Every set looks just like that -- a set, including the places where people live. This whole movie could be transferred directly to the stage with nothing lost -- and nothing gained, except the legitimacy conferred when songs are performed live, so you can tell a real person is singing them.
This lack of realism extends particularly to the thing called "burlesque," which in the real world, whether the old-school kind with g-strings, pasties and vaudeville clowns or a hard-bodied and aggressive neo-burlesque, involves a bracing degree of sleaze totally lacking in this airbrushed, thoroughly rehearsed and over-edited version. A dash of more rank flavor, though strictly of stage pedigree, comes from Alan Cumming as the club's gatekeeper, winking at the camera in a series of quick cameos to evoke the louche Thirties Berlin of Cabaret. But 99% of the time this is the synthetic new world of American movie musicals of the slickest kind, like Rob Marshall's Chicago. Yet Burlesque lacks the clear-cut distinctions between songs and segments you get in Chicago, as well as the so-bad-it's-good campiness of Verhoeven's Showgirls. If Burlesque becomes a Guilty Pleasure, it will be one of a very bland kind.
Steve Antin's Burlesque creates its own Brigadoon, a land of enchantment to which no real harm can ever come, where no one ever ages: they just have endless face-jobs. (Peter Gallagher, who plays Tess' almost forgotten ex-husband and co-owner Vince, seems to have acquired a few wrinkles, but we don't see much of him.) The absence of the slightest worry about the fate of the characters, because it's so obvious no one is even going to stub a toe, makes the song-and-dance numbers all the more enjoyable as pure performance. But a movie that has no credible darkness on its horizon, no sense of the world's obstacles, also arouses too little emotion to leave a strong memory.