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Magic Mike’s Last Dance (2023)

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Ten years ago, my friend Alicia and I walked into the Cinemark at Citiplace in Baton Rouge with a lot of excited middle-aged women to see Magic Mike, the then-new film directed by beloved (by us anyway) BR film icon Steven Soderbergh. Magic Mike had largely been marketed as an upbeat romcom about a hot dude raising money to start his own business by working as a male stripper. In the trailer, which starts out pretending that the film is about Channing Tatum as a cop before revealing his true profession, there’s a very 2012 needle-drop of Rihanna’s “We Found Love” and some romantic tension with romantic lead Cody Horn that would lead you to assume that you’re in for a much different kind of film than the one that hit theaters lo these many years ago. The advertising focused on star power — not so much of Tatum himself but of his taut body and the promise of a tantalizing thrill ride that still featured a traditional “Guy wants more from life, girl wants him but doesn’t know if she can handle his past” plot structure. You know, like a Nicholas Sparks adaptation but with a lot more dry humping.

That wasn’t the movie that we got that day. Instead, Magic Mike was kind of Diet Cola Boogie Nights, which is strange considering that we already had 54. The 2012 movie is one that spends most of its first half focused on Alex Pettyfer’s newcomer character and his introduction to the world of male stripping, and his narratively inevitable fall into the sex/drugs/rock’n’roll dark side of that lifestyle, while Tatum’s Mike is very focused on finding a way to grind—pun intended—-at whatever comes his way until he manages to rise above his current economic class. There are plenty of sexy dances, but they’re shot with a bit of a remove, and so what we’re left with is a tonal mishmash of cheesy rom-com dialogue, writhing torsos, and a storyline about drugs that doesn’t moralize further than “Some people can handle them better than others.” I can’t speak for everyone, but I can say that it wasn’t what I was expecting or what I wanted, and that the deluge of Baton Rouge moms who walked out of that screening also seemed to think that something different was supposed to have happened in that multiplex that day. 

Brandon is a big fan of the first follow-up, Magic Mike XXL, which eschews the first film’s director and direction, subbing in Gregory Jacobs for Soderbergh and, as Brandon wrote, “ditching its predecessor’s despondent character study in favor of an aging-boy-band-goes-on-a-road-trip slapstick comedy.” I understand the appeal, and I don’t think it was a bad idea to make a sequel that followed through on the unfulfilled promise of the first film’s marketing and also give it a lighter, fluffier narrative, and I find Donald Glover to be a welcome addition in anything that I’m watching, but it still didn’t connect with me. The first film purposely contrasted the dour realities of living under a broken economic system and the ways that people learn to cope inside of them with the larger-than-life stagebound fantasies that the boys got to portray. In XXL, the plot gets tiny little conflict injections as infrequently as narrative requirements allow while mostly taking the form of a goofy picaresque that mostly existed to hang strip sequences upon, and while I certainly understand the appeal, I just don’t connect. 

There was a moment in the screening of Magic Mike’s Last Dance when I turned to my friend who had accompanied me and asked: “How is this the best one?” And it’s not just better than the others (in my opinion), it’s actually great. 

This time around, we’ve got a narrator, and for reasons that don’t come into focus until the end of the first act, she’s young and has a British accent, and she’s telling the story of our old friend Mike Lane to catch us up on what’s happened in the intervening years. Mike’s furniture store folded during COVID, and he broke up with the woman he was presumed to have a happy ending with at the conclusion of XXL. Now he’s back to doing gig catering work, and he still hasn’t managed to claw his way out of his economic situation. While bartending at a charity event hosted by Maxandra “Max” Mendoza (Salma Hayek), who is recently separated from her media empire heir husband due to his infidelity, Mike is recognized by one of Max’s lawyers, who also happened to be one of the sorority girls from the party in the first film. To cheer up her boss, she recommends that Max invite Mike to give her a private dance, which he does after very little convincing. When the two wake up together the next morning, Max offers Mike a mysterious job, but he has to fly with her to London immediately. Once there, he meets her daughter—and our narrator—Zadie (Jemelia George) and their butler Victor (Ayub Khan Din), neither of whom approve of what Max is up to or, by extension, Mike’s presence. 

Max tasks Mike with a challenge: she owns a theater that was in her husband’s family for generations, and she’ll give him $60,000 for one month’s work of “redeveloping” the play that is currently being performed there. It’s a dreary-looking love triangle Victorian-era period piece called Isabel Ascendant that is considered old-fashioned and misogynistic even in-universe, and Max wants Mike to use his supposed knowledge of how to give women what they want to turn the play into an erotic, hip-thrusting masterpiece. This means firing the play’s director and, as a quirk of actors’ union labor laws, keeping on the actress playing the titular Isabel, Hannah (Juliette Motamed), who turns out to be as free of spirit as Isabel was repressed. With only three weeks until the curtain rises, Max and Mike have to recruit sexy dancers from all over Europe to fill out the ensemble while also dodging the various obstacles thrown in their way by Max’s soon-to-be-ex-husband. 

When I texted Brandon about doing coverage for this movie after I walked out of the theater, I was shocked to learn from him that it has such mixed reviews, but I think I have to chalk that up to … let’s politely call it “demographics.” Magic Mike wasn’t what it purported to be, sure, but it also wasn’t much of a fantasy either. Cody Horn is a gorgeous woman, but she’s not one with whom the presumed target audience of this kind of movie can readily identify. She’s hot, she looks great in her bikini, and she’s effortlessly cool. The same could be said of Amber Heard in XXL, and in neither movie is there ever any doubt about how the film will end and thus there are no stakes in those relationships, rendering them flat. Salma Hayek is also a gorgeous woman, and although she doesn’t look it, she’s 56, a full 14 years older than Tatum, and here she’s playing a woman with an ungodly amount of capital. I’m sure it’s not very common for someone’s wildest dreams to be about their partner cheating with their assistant, but there’s a lot to be said for the power fantasy of being a powerful older woman who can hire a maturing stud to create the ultimate sexy stage experience. Last Dance understands that better than the other two, and even though we know that the show will eventually have to go on, even if Max is rolling around in her overstuffed down comforters in a state of depression because it seems like her ex-husband has “won.” It’s called “Magic Mike’s Last Dance.” We know there’s going to be a big sexy revue at the end (and boy howdy is there). 

There’s a lot to really enjoy here. No one is more surprised than I am at how much I was won over by the ongoing subplot of Zadie and Victor. It would be so easy that it would almost be cheating to have Victor secretly be in love with his employer like something out of a Merchant-Ivory production, but there’s none of that nonsense here. I normally find precocious children to be grating and cloying in these movies, but it’s actually rather fun to watch Zadie have to occasionally step up and parent her mother as she goes through hard times, and for Victor to act in an unofficial grandfatherly capacity to get her back up to snuff. It’s not the stuff of Man Booker prizes—Zadie gets her mother out of the house and to the theatre for the finale of the film by finally addressing her as “Mum” instead of using her first name, which is a device that’s older than the hills—but it’s engaging in a way that I wasn’t really expecting for the third trip to this particular well. Hannah’s emceeing of the event is a hell of a lot of fun, and Motamed is a magnetic presence who leaves an impression on the viewer, standing out in a parade of male flesh that could easily wash her out of the mind completely, but she remains firmly rooted. 

In another way of fulfilling the fantasy, we the audience get to sit in on and attend the auditions for the revamped Isabel Ascendant and see all of the dancers get selected for their various individual talents: breakdancing, contortion, modern dance, ballet, and, of course, good ol’ fashioned stripping. It’s a fun montage, but also because it’s a montage, we never have to learn any names or have to try and keep track of them and their individual narratives as we were expected to in the previous films. As Peter, Bjorn, and John sang so long ago, “Flesh is flesh,” and that’s all that there is to it. All we need to worry about is having a good time, and although I’m sure that theatre reeked just as much of creatine farts as the back of the van in XXL, there’s something very classy and fun about it. As promised, the film does end with Magic Mike’s last dance, and it’s truly stunning, a demonstration that as much as mainstream critics like to tease Tatum, he is an amazing dancer who’s lithe and fluid in a way that belies his athletic build and his himbo public persona. The stakes are never too high or too low in the narrative, and the film rides that sweet spot for all that it’s worth, ensuring that this series goes out on a high note. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017)

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I approached this sequel with a fair amount of trepidation. The first Kingsman was an anomaly in that it seemed to fly under most people’s radar (it was in its third week when I saw it, on a Thursday afternoon, and there was not another soul in the entire theater) but was successful enough via word of mouth (after all, there is a sequel now) that it became a bit of a cult film almost instantaneously. The press for the film has been overwhelmingly negative, and I had reservations about seeing how far a follow-up to one of my favorite films of 2015 could possibly stray into territory that garnered such negative feelings.

And frankly, I just don’t get it. This movie is awesome.

Around my office I’m known as the guy who likes the weird artsy shit (and, if you’re reading this site, you probably are that guy or gal or person of a nonbinary nature in your office too), but I also genuinely love a surprise, over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek roller coaster of an action film when one somehow stumbles out of the studio system to slouch toward either notoriety or be forgotten. I wasn’t at all interested in the first Kingsman after seeing an overlong preview for it on FX during American Horror Story until a friend promised me that there was more to it than met the eye. And there was! It’s an unapologetic spy film that cribs from My Fair Lady (explicitly), blows the heads off of hundreds of people in a colorful fireworks display, and twists the familiar elements of the gentleman spy and action genres so far around that they essentially break off. It’s not the greatest film ever made, but it was an exceedingly well-choreographed exercise in bubblegum brutality and Blofeldian pomp.

The new film, Kingsman: The Golden Circle is all of those things as well. It’s a little more bloated than its predecessor in length and that nudge-nudge-wink-wink factor (it’s a fine line that’s difficult to manage/navigate), while running a little leaner on some subtlety. Sure, there are no lines that lean so heavily on the fourth wall as the original’s clunky “This ain’t that kind of movie, bruv,” but there is a salon robot that files down and a fifties themed villainous lair buried in “technically undiscovered” ruins in a jungle, not to mention the best use of Sir Elton John in a movie since Almost Famous.

We pick up where we left off last time, with Eggsy (Taron Egerton), codename Galahad, still mourning the loss of his mentor Harry (Colin Firth), the previous Galahad. We learn that he’s still dating Princess Tilde (Hanna Alström), whom he rescued from Valentine’s base at the end of the previous film and that the apparently-killed Charlie (Edward Holcroft), a Kingsman recruit who failed to make the cut, was mangled at the end of the last film but is still alive. In fact, he’s working for Poppy (Julianne Moore), a drug empress who wipes out all of Kingsman but Eggsy and Merlin (Mark Strong), the agency’s surrogate for Bond’s Q. The Kingsman doomsday vault points them in the direction of a kind of sister organization known as Statesman, which uses a distillery as the front for their off-book missions. After some of that good old-fashioned Let’s You and Him Fight nonsense, the remnants of Kingsman team with the Statesman cowboy stereotypes to thwart Poppy’s plan to strongarm the U.S. government into decriminalizing all drugs by withholding the antidote to a virus of her own design. “Champ” Champagne (Jeff Bridges) is the leader of his group: wild card party animal Tequila (Channing Tatum), archetypal honorable gunslinger Whiskey (Pedro Pascal), and shrinking violet Merlin equivalent Ginger Ale (Halle Berry). Before they reach the finish line, there’s much discussion of John Denver, a tussle or two with a couple of killer robotic dogs, a man being forced to eat a hamburger made of his friend, and a painful looking identity-erasing makeover. Also, there’s a subplot about the evil unnamed PoTUS (Bruce Greenwood) cackling and lying. And a wedding.

A lot of people have taken issue with some of the more subversive elements of the film and the way that they turn our hero into a bit of an idiot, but I like that. It’s another way of subverting the Roger Moore Bond’s tropes, because Eggsy isn’t the perfect wish fulfillment hero that Bond is. His friends are uncouth, he’s careless with his lethal gadgetry, and he doesn’t see an obvious traitor in his midst until it’s almost too late.When Whiskey and the Galahads (band name!) visit a facility hidden within some kind of ski resort, you expect that it’s going to be a play on the fact that Roger Moore’s Bond skied all the time, in A View to a Kill, For Your Eyes Only, and The Spy Who Loved Me. But nope, there’s no overlong ski chase, just a giant skyway plummeting from the sky.

Eggsy is still the un-Bond, and while this film fails to have the same (relative) gravity as it managed to maintain via the character arcs of the first, there’s a development there that I think is being overlooked by those who are decrying this as a bombastic failure, either as a follow-up or a standalone film. One of the things that people seem to be most upset about is the fact that Eggsy chooses to call his girlfriend and get permission to sleep with another woman in pursuit of the mission. Yes, it’s dumb in that it’s poorly timed (he couldn’t have called her on the way to the rendezvous?), but it reflects another anti-Bond quality that makes Eggsy more likable and relatable. For all the power fantasies that he fulfills, James Bond is an aggressive womanizer and kind of an asshole. He always gets the job done, but you know that if his marriage to Tracy Bond had lasted more than eight minutes he would have given her the old Betsy Draper special every time he was in the field, whether it was beneficial to his mission or just because he was bored. The film goes out of its way to show you just how unlike Bond Eggsy is in this way, and it’s actually refreshingly original. Also, there’s a laser whip.

I’ve also seen some responses to the political commentary in the film, which is allegedly slanted left. I was surprised to read this interpretation of the film after my screening, as I actually thought the film was rather toothless in its reflection of the current American political climate (not that I expected any deep commentary at all in this one, but by making the PotUS a major character, you invite that criticism). After all, in the last one, it was made pretty explicit that President Obama (along with essentially every political leader save for Tilde and her father and perhaps a few other dissidents) was a willing participant in villainous mastermind’s evil scheme. I’ve seen dismissal of the Oval Office subplot as being “pandering” because the evil president’s moral victor is an older blonde woman, a way of giving liberals the world that they want to live in. I didn’t (and don’t) see it that way, however. All of the reporting that we see within the film comes straight from Fox News, and, in comparison to the complicit Obama of the first film, the evil President herein is given neither a name or an explicit political party, and doesn’t have the mannerisms or characteristics that would truly make him an analog of Trump: no combover, no dayglo skin, no broken or rambling sentences or rogue trains of thought. There’s no actual political commentary here, and that’s fine; this is just another generic evil president in a long line of fictional evil presidents. If you see Trump in this performance, well, that’s up to you.

Overall, this is a sequel that works. It’s a bit paler and a not quite as fun, but it’s stylish, witty, visceral, colorful, and a hell of a lot of fun. It’s a film that’s not to be taken seriously, and it delivers on the promise that the (spoilery!) trailer sets up. On a scale of sequels that copied the template of the first film verbatim from Men in Black II to 10 Cloverfied Lane, it errs on the “scenes from the last one, but with a twist!” side, but there’s still enough new to satisfy you, as long as you’re willing to get lost in a candy kingdom of headshots and people getting cut in half. And Elton John in fabulous feathery shackles.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Logan Lucky (2017)

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I imagine a few outsiders are likely to be offended on The South’s behalf for the way the region is depicted in Steven Soderbergh’s latest heist picture. A self-described Oceans 7-11, Logan Lucky stages an elaborate robbery of a NASCAR racetrack with the same technical intricacy of Soderbergh’s more lavish crime pictures, except now with the Southern-fried flavor of a Masterminds or Talladega Nights. A Louisiana native himself, Soderbergh feels intimately familiar with the Down South culture of his North Carolina & West Virginia settings, even peppering in references to LSU football as a callback to his Baton Rouge roots (which are more immediately perceptible in titles like Schizopolis & Sex, Lies, and Video Tape). Speaking as a lifelong Louisiana resident who’s familiar with the camo sweatpants & Bob Seger t-shirts country where Logan Lucky is staged, I personally found the film to be far more loving than satirical. Characters may awkwardly reference “knowing all the Twitters” or “looking it up on the Google” in their comically thick Southern accents, but the movie is genuinely invested in their emotional & financial hardships even while having a laugh at colloquialisms. Soderbergh may be making fun of his characters to an extent, but it’s in the way of an older brother ragging on their younger sibling. It’s done out of love & an unavoidable compulsion.

I’ve personally never seen an Oceans movie so I can’t directly compare Soderbergh’s sleek money-makers to Logan Lucky in terms of how they function as elaborate heist plots. I will say that there’s a laid-back, distinctly Southern vibe in the way the film builds up to its NASCAR track heist centerpiece that I doubt was integral to when he was filming beautiful movie stars robbing casinos in tuxedos. That slow Southern drawl delivery leaves a lot of room in the first two acts for character-based humor, however. Channing Tatum & Adam Driver star as two blue collar brothers who mastermind the NASCAR heist with a limited set of technical skills, but an intimate knowledge of how the facility’s money is stored & accounted for. Although Logan Lucky is a notable departure from the Oceans movies’ sleekness, it does feel like a direct continuation of Soderbergh’s previous collaboration with Tatum, Magic Mike. Both films can be wickedly fun in spurts, but also dwell on the dismal economic landscape suffered by modern American Southerners. Instead of struggling as a male stripper trying to make it out of the business, Tatum is a construction worker who’s let go for not disclosing a pre-existing medical condition, but desperately needs money to be able to afford his right to visit with his young daughter. Along with his bartender brother (Driver) & his hairdresser sister (Riley Keough), he intends to shatter a local superstition about his “family curse” by stealing a large sum of cash from an insured corporation that can stand to lose the money. As an audience, we never get the detailed plan of the heist until it’s entirely over, but rather take the time to get to know the Logan family in the weeks before they pull the trigger on their NASCAR-robbing ambitions. It’s easy to equate that kind of lead-up to traditional Southern Hospitality, which I believe to be a genuine impulse here.

Although I was often the only lunatic laughing in the theater, I do believe one of Logan Lucky‘s greatest strengths is its muted, character & setting derived sense of humor. A stranger accusing Tatum’s protagonist of being “one of them Unabomber types” because he doesn’t carry a cellphone or a smash cut from cockroaches to frying bacon had me cackling so much in the film’s first act build that I was in no rush to get to the payoff of its NASCAR heist. Admittedly, some of the humor in that build-up was in hearing ludicrously thick Southern accents attempted by big shot movie stars: Tatum, Driver, Keough, Daniel Craig, Katherine Waterson, Katie Holmes, Hilary Swank (the last two of whom were tasked with similar caricatures in Sam Raimi’s The Gift), etc. Those accents are just one facet of Soderbergh’s larger scope portrait of Everywhere, America that rests at Logan Lucky‘s core, however. There are so many distinct touchstones of Americana informing the film’s aesthetic: child beauty pageants, Katie Holmes drinking white wine in the doorway of her McMansion, off-hand references to Dr. Phil and the Fast & Furious franchise, an impassioned inclusion of John Denver music (in a year where every movie from Okja to Free Fire seems bent on honoring the long gone folk musician), and so on. It’s perfectly fitting, then, that the film pauses dead in its tracks for the National Anthem at the top of its centerpiece NASCAR race and makes frequent references to Memorial Day & American veterans. Anyone who’s made uneasy by the idea of a wealthy British actor dressing up in the guise of a poor American Southerner or the image of a pig feet dunking contest at a local fair is missing the larger picture of Soderbergh’s love for these characters and their environment. He’s having fun with them for sure, but not necessarily at their expense. The great joy of the film is watching them get one over on a larger corporation with the limited means of a discounted underdog; the movie is on their side.

-Brandon Ledet

Hail, Caesar! (2016)

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Paying too close of attention to reviews & hype surrounding a film can sometimes lead you to miss out. Besides its release date coinciding a little too closely to Mardi Gras, I had put catching up with the latest Coen Brothers comedy, Hail, Caesar!, on the backburner due to the film’s somewhat tepid response at the box office. Hail, Caesar! is flopping hard right now, failing to find a significantly sized audience despite the prominence of Big Name movie stars in its advertising & the Coens’ loyal (though not gigantic) fanbase. Many major publication critics are also seemingly lukewarm on the film, often citing it an overstuffed mixed bag. That lack of enthusiasm & no basic knowledge of the film’s plot lead me to the theater with essentially no expectations, but Hail, Caesar! floored me anyway. Honestly, if I don’t see a better movie in the cinema all year I’ll still be perfectly happy. It was that much of a delight. I should have gotten to the theater a hell of a lot sooner.

Hail, Caesar! is firmly in the highly respectable medium of art about the nature of art. More specifically, it’s a movie about the movies. Much like with Barton Fink, the Coens have looked back to the Old Hollywood studio system as a gateway into discussing the nature of what they do for living as well as the nature of Nature at large. Packed with theological & political debate/diatribes and a sprawling cast of both Big Name movie stars & That Guy character actors, the film sounds like a lot more effort than it actually is. The plot is, in essence, the day in the life of a “fixer” for a major Hollywood film studio in the 1950s. Imagine if Pulp Fiction was centered on Harvey Keitel’s “The Wolf” character instead of the organized crime ring he was keeping steady & his work was in major film production instead of the murder & drug trade (on top of being oddly sweet instead of quietly terrifying). Josh Brolin’s protagonist, Eddie Mannix, provides such an anchor for Hail, Caesar! as a whirlwind of film production snafus swirl around him. Rampant addiction, a kidnapped star, unwanted pregnancy, secret Communist societies, gossip column vultures, and all kinds of trouble on the studio lot’s various sets turn Mannix’s typical workday into a laughable, Kafkaesque nightmare. It’s a testament to the Coens’ screenwriting talents that the film feels so smooth & effortless while Mannix’s webs become increasingly tangled and the general tone is a mix of subtle humor & broad farce instead of plot fatigue.

A lot of movies are effortlessly funny, though. What’s special about Hail, Caesar! is the way it perfectly captures Old Hollywood’s ghost. It reminded me a lot of the feeling of seeing Georges Méliès’s work recreated so vividly in the theater during Scorcese’s Hugo, except that Hail, Caesar! covered a much wider range of genres & filmmakers from a completely different era. Every classic Old Hollywood genre I can think of makes an appearance here: noir, Westerns, musicals, synchronized swimming pictures, Roman & religious epics, tuxedo’d leading man dramas, etc. Audiences sometimes forget that these types of films weren’t always physically degraded so it’s somewhat shocking to see the beautiful costuming & set design achievements of the era recreated & blown up large in such striking clarity at a modern movie theater. Besides the breathtaking visual achievements, it’s impressive how many other aspects of Old Hollywood cinema the film manages to include, both in its “real” setting & in its fake film shoots: close attention to lighting, a briefcase MacGuffin, sets that look like backdrop paintings, the threat that television will destroy the movie business, reclusive editors who act like chain-smoking psychos, talent that’s owned by the studio in what essentially amounts to indentured servitude, a sea of white faces in a world where everyone else has been locked out, etc. Even the smallest turns of phrase like “motion picture teleplay” & character names like George Clooney’s leading man actor Baird Whitlock feel perfectly in tune with the vibe of the era whether or not they’re poking fun at its inherent quaintness.

Speaking of Clooney’s wonderful turn as Baird Whitlock, Hail, Caesar! is at heart an ensemble cast comedy. It’s difficult to pinpoint any exact MVPs among the film’s long list of cameos & supporting players (Brolin undeniably takes the honor overall). Channing Tatum continues his nonstop winning streak here, dressing like a sailor & leading one of the most wholesomely filthy song & dance numbers you’re ever likely to see. Scarlett Johansson looks peacefully at home as a classic Hollywood starlet in a mermaid costume & hilariously disrupts the illusion with a brassy performance that allows her to refer to her flipper as a “fish ass.” Following up his delicately winning performance in Grand Budapest Hotel, Ralph Fiennes continues to prove himself as a stealthily comic force to be reckoned with. Relative unknown Alden Ehrenreich threatens to steal the show with an “Aw, shucks” cowboy routine & the similarly obscure Emily Beecham is a near dead-ringer for The Red Shoes/Peeping Tom star Moira Shearer (and I mean that as the highest praise). And all that’s just scratching the surface of how attractive everyone looks in this film, how effective the smallest of roles come across, and the sheer number of recognizable faces on display here.

So what’s keeping a smart, star-studded, intricately-plotted, politically & theologically thoughtful, genuinely hilarious, and strikingly gorgeous film like Hail, Caesar! from pulling in ticket sales? Who’s to say? I was a good three or four decades younger than most members of the audience where I watched the film (although it should be noted that most young folks were probably watching Deadpool that weekend), so maybe it’s missing an appeal to key money-making demographics? Maybe the advertising didn’t sell the more gorgeous end of its visuals hard enough, so a lot of folks are calmly waiting for it to reach VOD? I have no answers, really. I will, however, defend the film against the accusation that it’s overstuffed or unfocused. Hail, Caesar! chronicles a day in the life of a world-weary man who operates in an overstuffed, unfocused industry, so the various plotlines could be perceived as overwhelming as you try to make sense of them in retrospect, but on the screen they play with the confident poise of an expert juggler.

Like I said, Hail, Caesar! is not performing well financially & the reviews are mixed so it’s obvious that not everyone’s going to be into it. However, it’s loaded with beautiful tributes to every Old Hollywood genre I can think of and it’s pretty damn hilarious in a subtle, quirky way that I think ranks up there with the very best of the Coens’ work, an accolade I wouldn’t use lightly. If you need a litmus test for whether or not you’ll enjoy the film yourself, Barton Fink might be a good place to start. If you hold Barton Fink in high regard, I encourage you to give Hail, Caesar! a chance. You might even end up falling in love with it just as much as I did & it’ll be well worth the effort to see its beautiful visual work projected on the silver screen either way.

-Brandon Ledet

Magic Mike XXL (2015)

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I’ve long considered pro wrestling to be the hyper-masculine equivalent to the way femininity is vamped up in drag performances. Magic Mike XXL poses that male entertainment (read: male stripping) fills that role instead. As represented on the screen here, it’s a solidly convincing argument. Early in the film male strippers & drag queens meet eye to eye in a small dive bar where the male entertainment crew from the first Magic Mike film participate in a voguing contest hosted by a wonderful small-part drag queen MC named Ms Tori Snatch. This scene not only gives the world the wonderful gift of watching former pro wrestler/NWO member Kevin Nash attempt voguing (he at least gets the spirit down more than some of his buddies, even if he can’t move his lumbering body very well), but it also establishes a connection between drag & male entertainment as artforms. Although the strip routines at the big competition at the end of the movie feature a ludicrous amount of faux ejaculations & weightlifting human beings that you’re unlikely to see in a roadside drag show, that brand of cartoonishly gendered performance is not far from what Tori Snatch does for a living. It’s just at the opposite end of the spectrum.

This exploration of stripping as absurd gender performance is limited almost entirely to Magic Mike XXL‘s on-screen stripteases & the brief foray into voguing (although Channing Tatum’s titular protagonist does reveal that his drag queen name would be Clitoria Labia), though, so what of the rest of the film? Besides a couple refreshingly casual nods to a few characters’ bisexuality & some vague philosophising about male entertainment’s role as female worship & sexual healing, the film doesn’t have all too much on its pretty little mind. The first Magic Mike film was an existential, melancholy look at the personal lives of male entertainers that had a lot of devious fun clashing their gloomy off-the-clock behavior with the over-the-top escapism they delivered on stage. Magic Mike XXL, by contrast, is pure escapism. The sequel ditches its predecessor’s despondent character study in favor of an aging-boy-band-goes-on-a-road-trip slapstick comedy. The opening of the film revisits a little of Mike’s downtrodden attempts to escape The Life, but once he rejoins the fold & starts dancing again the film is essentially a long list of road trip gags that all land beautifully (when they aren’t interrupted by the film’s hot & heavy strip teases).

True to the film’s boy band dynamic, its narrative focus mostly distinguishing the individual personalities of Mike’s crew of stripper buddies. There’s the pretty boy mystic, the aging giant with an artist’s heart, the boytoy who’s looking to shed his casual sex life in favor of a longterm relationship, etc., all for you to fawn over while they remove clothing from their shaved & oiled bodies. Magic Mike XXL only loses its spark when it strays from detailing the quirks of its all-growed-up boy band heart throbs & tries to find women for them to love. A lot of the heart of the first film was wrapped up in finding a budding romance for Mike, but the idea of repeating that process for the sequel isn’t exactly an enticing one. The love interest angle of XXL is treated like a necessary evil that the movie attempts to downplay at every turn. Mike’s potential partner is an unlikeable Ke$ha type who fancies herself an important artist too wrapped up in herself to engage with the oustide world in an interesting way. She’s self-absorbed, too young & too naive for Mike, and “not going through a boy phase right now” anyway, so her role as the generic Love Interest #2 is significantly downplayed, but it still feels like a waste of the movie’s time. Brief turns as potential love interests from Jada Pinkett Smith & Andie MacDowell (whose Georgian accent is so bad here that she uses the phrase “you guys” instead of “y’all”) fare a little better than Ke$ha the Self-Important Photographer, but they don’t make much of an impression either. The best XXL has to offer story-wise is as a goofy roadtrip movie about a ludicrous group of male entertainment buddies each finding themselves & bringing their true natures into their acts instead of emptily filling the Village People type of stripper roles like fireman in a thong, policeman in a thong, etc.

Beyond the road-trip story, which survives on the strength of its individual gags, Magic Mike XXL‘s greatest asset is its intense imagery. It’s totally understandable that a franchise about male strippers often gets overlooked for the quality of its cinematography, but it’s still a shame. Certain images (like a BDSM-themed strip tease set to Nine Inch Nail’s “Closer” & a surreal tour through Jada Pinkett Smith’s dream-logic sex mansion) are just as striking as anything you’d find in a well-crafted art film, but still feel comfortably at home in this over-sexed road-trip buddy comedy. Magic Mike XXL is an impressive melding of the high & low brow, engaging both in its wealth of comedic & over-sexed surface pleasures & in its intense visual palette & light philosophising on the nature of gender performance & sexual healing in male entertainment. It’s difficult to say whether or not it’s a better film than the first, but it’s undeniably more fun.

-Brandon Ledet

Jupiter Ascending (2015)

/ swampflix / 12 Comments

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The worst part about hating Jupiter Ascending is that I was really rooting for it. I’m not a Wachowskis super fan or anything (I barely know of their work outside The Maxtrix & Speed Racer); I just liked the movie’s basic concept & attributes. The idea of a sci-fi action-adventure with a female lead hit a lot of my sweet spots right out of the gate, but every one of those elements in the final product fell embarrassingly flat. The female lead, played by Mila Kunis, is for the most part a passenger & an observer while the action swirls around her (she’s a literal princess in need of saving, even). The action itself alternates from occasionally engaging to just painfully awful, anchored mostly by an against-all-odds unsexy Channing Tatum figure skating through the air (thanks to some kind of goofy laser boots) while terrible CGI obstacles crash & burn in his wake. That leaves the film’s sci-fi concepts to carry the load, which they occasionally do in a Richard Kelly kitchen sink fashion, but even those fade to long stretches of unimpressive action sequences. In short, Jupiter Ascending is a failure, when I really, really didn’t want it to be.

I’m just one dude, though! There’s a lot floating around in the film for people to latch onto. Beautiful, futuristic landscapes & architecture are populated with (unbelievably dumb-looking) alien weirdos like CGI lizard minions & humanoid owl things (that look like Ron Perlmen in Beauty and the Beast). Eddy Redmayne gives a (laughably) memorable performance as an evil alien dictator (who is just a wig & a sashay short of a killer drag routine). The aforementioned Richard Kelly brand of too-plentiful ideas contrast an undocumented immigrant’s life as a servant on Earth with distant & lavish alien aristocrats (who cares). There’s some (mildly amusing) honey bee worship (à la Upside Down) that results in the line “Bees are genetically designed to recognize royalty.” Other lines like “Your Earth is a very small part of a very large industry,” and “Time is the single most precious commodity in the universe,” also have a sort of a staying power (even if it’s as a joke). There’s a whole lot to love in Jupiter Ascending, but if you’re like me and have problems arriving on its wavelength, that excess gets ugly quickly.

If I had to boil what’s wrong with Jupiter Ascending down to a single fault it would be that it’s just so thoroughly uncool. I could be wrong and the movie’s late 90s Hot Topic raver aesthetic could be vintage enough to be cool again (if it was ever cool), but from my POV it just feels painfully outdated, like watching your stepdad desperately try to be hip. Imagine if The Fifth Element arrived 20 years late, dead serious (or at least not funny), and about as exciting as The Ice Pirates. Maybe a list of the character names will give you an idea of what I’m describing here: Jupiter Jones, Titus Abrasax, Phylo Percadium, Gemma Chatterjee, Stinger Apini, etc. If these names belong anywhere (and I’m not sure that they do) it’s on a TV screen, clogging up a low-rent Battlestar Galactica knockoff. Much of the film operates this way, feeling like a television show whose special effects budget was afforded way too much money and not nearly enough time to get the details right. I sincerely hope that there are people who have positive experiences with Jupiter Ascending, as I do find it interesting in concept, but it’s a movie I would love to never see or think about again. This might work out just fine, as even while I was watching I felt like it had been released nearly two decades ago.

-Brandon Ledet