Burlesque: The bastard child of Showgirls

Thanksgiving couldn't be a more timely opening day for Burlesque. I can't think of anything I'll want to give thanks for more than a completely redundant and instantly dated musical heir to the Showgirls throne. 

For those of you who haven't had the pleasure (and seriously, y'all need to get on that - it is MAGIC), Showgirls is the classic story of Nomi Malone, a crazy-eyed small town girl who moves to Las Vegas to become a dancer. As you'd expect, she meets with various trials and tribulations, including: jealous rivals, having "nice tits," everyone wanting to sleep with her, throwing someone down a flight of steps, being the best dancer of all time (citation needed), spray-on jeans, brown rice and vegetables, and a Mysterious Secret From Her Past (That Could Only Be Hooking). Burlesque, meanwhile, seems to be the classic story of Ali, a crazy-haired small town girl who moves to Los Angeles to become a dancer. This movie clearly has more respectable aspirations than Showgirls - its eyes are on that Golden Globe prize, and it has made the following adjustments to pull it out of the gutter and into the mainstream.


The Star. 
Showgirls - Elizabeth Berkeley
Burlesque - Christina Aguilera


Berkeley got her start on the dubious hit Saved by the Bell as Jessie Spano, the class president (after Zack gave up the title) and valedictorian (after Screech gave up the title). Starring in Showgirls was an obvious attempt to shed her good girl teen image, which she did with reckless abandon. The last thing I remember seeing her in since Showgirls was The First Wives Club, as the underage bimbo Goldie Hawn's husband leaves her for.


Aguilera became famous as the more talented and somehow more sexualized counterpart to Britney Spears. She has never acted before, but technically neither had Berkeley. Taking the more relatable route, Burlesque has Aguilera playing a serious innocent who has probably never had sex, rather than Berkeley's barely reformed prostitute. 

It's game time, and Nomi came to play.

The Mentor/LGBT Icon.
SG - Gina Gershon
B - Cher


It's at this point that the goal to prettify Showgirls becomes extremely obvious. Gina Gershon's crude, off-kilter appeal only works for weird cult "classics" with a heaping spoonful of implied girl-on-girl action. Which is to say, it's severely limited. Cher, on the other hand, is a woman beloved by all, especially the highly lucrative gay male demographic. Hers has become a decidedly milquetoast eccentricity. The masses will squawk with glee at lines like "instead of a canvas, you're painting your face" and other such self-referential warbles. Never mind that her plastic surgeries make her sound like she just got injected with 2500cc's worth of Novocaine. The woman is solid gold(en globe).

Still, she seems puzzled by her involvement.
Puzzled or petrified.

The Rival.
SG - Gina Gershon
B - Kristen Bell


Ms. Gershon acted as mentor AND rival (AND love interest question mark), which is far too complex a relationship for a Golden Globe-nominated musical, so for Burlesque the characters have been split in twain. I won't repeat anything about Gina, but I will point out that I've been calling poor Kristen Bell Kristen Stewart for the past entirety of their careers, which doesn't bode well. I also don't understand Kristen StewBell as a burlesque dancer at all. She's very attractive (to some people) and everything, but she has precisely zero curves. Which is fine, but it doesn't work for burlesque. You have to have attributes that rhyme with burlesque, like "Rubenesque" and "statuesque." "Cute" doesn't cut it.


The Boy Toy. 
SG - Kyle Maclachlan
B - Cam Gigandet 

In casting the guy who would seduce Nomi away from her already shaky morals, SG played it pretty risky and cast a creepy plank of wood named Kyle Maclachlan. You may remember him as the creepy plank of wood from Sex and the City, or as the creepy plank of petrified wood from The Flintstones movie (or maybe not. I don't know your life). Burlesque decided to tap into the teenage girl market rather than the lumberphile market, and picked Cam Gigandet, melter of teen panties and scourge of spell checkers everywhere. 

I don't get the appeal of the bowler hat, but what do I know.

The Sassy Diva. 
SG - Nobody?!?
B - Stanley Tucci AND Alan Cumming


Stanley Tucci is breaking my heart. I'm praying that his desire to play fruit to the celebrated fly (last seen in The Devil Wears Prada with Meryl Streep) will end here when he realizes his terrific talent is being wasted on smirking through lines like "Alice, huh? Well, welcome to Wonderland." Alan Cumming is basically doing what he's always doing, which has no effect on my heart whatsoever. 




We'll see how the movie fares at the box office, though I suspect it won't be the mid-range blockbuster it so definitely wants to be. I also suspect that, even with this Chicago-like sheen and high street star power, it won't be able to transcend its sleazy roots. 

A better choice for For Colored Girls

Tyler Perry is an awfully divisive figure. On the one hand, he's the most successful black director of all time, his 9 movies having netted over $450 million at the box office. (To compare, Spike Lee has made twice as many movies, and they've made less than $400 million.) He became a household name, practically overnight. But critics, for the most part, hate the hell out of him. His work has been called mawkish, amateurish, offensive, and minstrelly. His box office clout and Oprah blessing made him the most logical choice to direct an adaptation of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Wasn't Enuf; still, his inability to portray a single realistic human emotion made him a horrible fit. 

This man speaks for black women everywhere.

I'm sure I have no idea what the conversations about who should direct the film adaptation looked like, but I imagine it involved Perry bludgeoning film execs with bags of money while screaming in a "hilarious" voice. If I could have taken part in any of the conversations, though, these are some of the suggestions I would have made: 


John Singleton
Pros: Boyz in the Hood is a classic, full stop. It does an excellent job at portraying lower-class black life, something that is rarely done in a non-exploitative or even hopeful way. Singleton cares about his characters and their various plights, and treats them, their plot arcs, and their environment with respect. He also directed Poetic Justice, a lesser and lesser-known movie starring Janet Jackson as a poet who embarks on a road trip to escape the violence that claimed her boyfriend. Unfortunately, Janet's limited acting abilities squandered a well-written role, but it didn't make the role any less well-written.
Cons: 2 Fast 2 Furious. What in the hell WAS that? I can only assume that the promise of lots of cash prompted him to eschew any positive female characters with opinions and personalities in favour of Eva Mendes slithering about in a bikini. 

I mean, to be fair...

Spike Lee
Pros: Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X are powerful movies, focused by Lee's desire to say something coherent. And in Jungle Fever, a movie that investigates and ultimately rejects the potential for happy interracial relationships, he dedicates a 5-minute uninterrupted scene to a group of black women coming together to commiserate, air their grievances, and support each other. Fortunately for these women, Lee lets them speak without a script, freeing them from his very unnatural and stilted language to really open up about how they feel about men, and how men make them feel about themselves.
Cons: Lee is no longer in the habit of trying to say something coherent, other than WHITE RACISM IS BAD, BLACK RACISM IS JUSTIFIED. He also has very little respect for women (white women especially, but all women in general), which is difficult to overlook. After all, that scene in Jungle Fever was just a scene, and most of the women come across as bitter or stingy. The less he deals with women, the better he is, but that pretty much disqualifies him from directing a movie all about women. 


Malcolm D. Lee
Pros: Of all these gentlemen, Malcolm D. is definitely my favourite. He's adept at ensemble pieces like The Best Man, creating (for the most part) three-dimensional characters with unique personalities, outlooks, and problems. I also just love Undercover Brother, for all its warts. He has a real love for black culture and black history that I really don't feel from Tyler Perry, without any of the narrow-mindedness and hatred of his cousin Spike. 
Cons: Brother Malcolm has a problem with professionally successful black women. The women who "put career first" are punished by getting no love or sex, or by becoming castrating caricatures ripe for humiliation. This problem is pretty pervasive, and pretty bothersome. I hate the idea that women - and especially black women - are made to be villains for being successful. 

Don't worry, she's just a non-threatening caterer.

So, you may have noticed some trends here. One is that all of these directors are at least a little bit iffy on their characterization of black women. Another is that none of these directors is a lady. And, you know, I couldn't think of a single black female director off the top of my head. That breaks my heart - naming five black directors off the top of my head is difficult by itself, and trying to name one who's also a woman is pretty much impossible. Luckily, I persevered and came up with a woman who would be artistically perfect but financially untouchable. 


Gina Prince-Bythewood directed a movie I will never stop loving, Love & Basketball. This movie is basically awesome. It's a realistic love story about two arrogant and talented athletes. It's a frank portrayal of the toll conventional gender roles can take on married women. It's a commentary on how differently (or indifferently, really) female athletes are treated. It's a movie with Tyra Banks in it for a little. My point is, Prince-Bythewood is a director who cares about her characters, who can deal with serious drama without letting it become maudlin, and who respects and understands women. Unfortunately, she doesn't and will never have the bags of money that Tyler Perry has, and that fact robs us of what would have been a beautiful, sensitive movie. 

James Franco, shut the goddamn hell up

One of the many things that rile me up is when actors get too big for their damn britches. Not in a George "What we do is the most important thing anyone could do" Clooney way, which is fairly annoying but kind of socially validated. What I'm talking about is when they conduct themselves like I don't remember their cinematic origins. And maybe this is unfair, because actors don't (and shouldn't) expect that everyone had 500 TV channels in high school, and so was able to soak up a lot of horrible, horrible movies. Still, acting like you've always been dedicated to some sort of artistic integrity when I saw your punk ass in Bride of Chucky is bullshit. I SAW YOU. 


A laughably egregious example of this is Mr. Lou Gossett, Jr. He appeared in a Tyler Perry trailer (and ostensibly the corresponding film) as Academy Award Winner Louis Gossett, Jr. When I saw this trailer in theatres, I immediately launched into an amused diatribe. Yes, LGJ won an Academy Award for kicking Richard Gere in the nuts and screaming homophobic insults at new recruits. But surely, surely, that Oscar no longer counts in light of his appearance in Jaws 3-D. Jaws 3-D, people, and practically nothing else between that and a Tyler Perry movie. The man didn't even have the decency to get chomped by the shark (which wasn't totally his fault - this iteration of Jaws kills exactly one person by using its teeth. The other person just kind of falls into its throat). 


There are more well-known examples, like Jennifer Aniston in Leprechaun (but she sticks to movies that are on the same quality level, for the most part), but the one currently driving me crazy is James Franco. 


This fucking guy. He's made 20 billion on-screen appearances in the past 3 years. Here's an abbreviated list: 


Spiderman 3
Pineapple Express
Nights in Rodanthe, apparently
Milk
General Hospital
An episode of 30 Rock
Eat Pray Love
Howl
127 Hours


He also published a hopelessly mundane story in Esquire, and attended some grad school classes. He is everyfuckingwhere, usually with a book or a furrowed brow, being introspective and self-satisfied. Interviewers dislodge their heads from his hindquarters just long enough to briefly mention his foray into trivial blockbuster territory with Spiderman, but quickly remind the reader that he was amazing as James Dean. 


But you know something, James Franco? I remember you. Specifically, I remember Whatever It Takes. 

Yes, I am the one person who saw that, and I remember everything. You, covered in grease and handcuffed to a bed; you, playing the stupidest person on the planet and seeming too stupid for the part; you, being called "too stiff and uninteresting." 

Coincidentally, I also remember this.

Do you remember the names of your costars, James? I do, and I know one of them went on to star in A Walk to Remember and A League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I remember that one of the best parts of the movie was Julia Sweeney, for chrissake. I remember all of this when I hear people talking about your depth or incredible work ethic. 


Sigh. 


I get that everyone has to pay their dues in Hollywood, and that nobody except John Cazale has a perfect record. But the fact that James Franco is so eager to have people praise his awesome taste because he played Allen Ginsberg and is literate while pretending he doesn't have this monstrous skeleton in his closet...it just bugs me. So if you're reading this, James - and you better be - just know that I have a long memory, and I hold cinematic grudges. I hope that sticks in your craw.