Could it be magic?

How much did I love Magic Mike? So much.

When I told a couple of friends that I was taking my boyfriend to see Channing Tatum dance in a strip club in Magic Mike, there was an exultant, “Oh, that looks sooo bad!” They had the so-bad-it’s-good bloodlust; they were hoping for Showgirls crossed with Coyote Ugly crossed with Staying Alive. “It’s a Steven Soderbergh movie,” I said, and I was met with a few blank looks. “As in Traffic and Erin Brockovich and Oceans 11?” Silence. I decided not to mention Sex, Lies and Videotape.

Whoever was behind the marketing for Magic Mike decided that they were not going to even mention Soderbergh, let alone promote him. They were going to focus the ads on a shirtless, occasionally pantsless Tatum and, in various stages of undress, his costars Alex Pettyfer (I am Number Four), Joe Manganiello (True Blood), Matt Bomer (White Collar), and Matthew McConaughey, all looking like Men’s Fitness models. The only clue that the movie might be more than hot guys stripping to Top 40 music for an hour and half came with how stunning some of the visuals were – washes of sunlight, almost iridescent bleeds of color. We also saw a few seconds of what appears to be some snappy acting.

The marketing worked, because when we saw the movie on opening night, the showing was packed, and it was packed with very excited young women, some of whom were very drunk. (There also appeared to be seven or eight gay guys in the audience.) The first sight of Tatum was met with screams from the audience, and the screaming continued throughout the film whenever a man took off his shirt or showed his ass. There was a lot of screaming. I haven’t been to a movie with this much audience participation since I saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show 20 years ago.

As fun as it was to watch all of these gorgeous men show off their perfect abs and how nicely they fit into thongs, the rest of the movie is also deserving of a good scream, too. Soderbergh’s visuals are, as usual, full of unexpected colors and inventive points of view; his edits are quick in places, naturalistic in others, but always propel the story perfectly. And Soderbergh’s direction of Reid Carolin’s very funny and very smart script made it seem as if the entire movie was improvised; everyone seemed totally at ease, their emotions always believable. There’s an actual plot, even if it is cribbed from All About Eve: Mike (Tatum) is the star dancer of Xquisite, a male revue in Tampa run by Dallas (McConaughey), who has the ego the size of the state of Florida and delusions of grandeur to match. Mike is a professional, makes good money, and has dreams of becoming a furniture designer. He meets 19-year-old Adam (Pettyfer), who is stunning and directionless, and helps him get into the show. Adam’s uptight sister Brooke (Horn) disapproves, and she becomes an excellent target for Mike’s endless charm. But as Adam turns into a star, he also turns into a jerk, and the ramifications of Adam’s bad behavior and Dallas’s lack of integrity make Mike question is path.

But the best thing about Magic Mike is Tatum himself. Those of us who saw him in Step Up know he can dance. Watching his long, lean muscular body doing acrobatic hip hop will either will take your breath away or make you scream. He has an odd beauty, the blank face of a dumb jock. This makes him both unthreatening and unspecific enough to serve as a blank screen onto which we can project our fantasies. But his face’s lack of actorly expression allows his audience to underestimate his skill. Because he can act. Magic Mike forces him to articulate almost every emotion, from flirtation to grief, and he is convincing at every turn. Tatum is already a star, but contrary to how Magic Mike was marketed, he may actually turn out to be serious one.

Magic Mike
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Written by Reid Carolin
Starring Channing Tatum, Alex Pettyfer, and Matthew McConaughey
Rated R
At your local multiplex

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Bravely animating a feminist princess

I liked it. But I didn’t really, really like it.

A great deal has been made out of the fact that Brave is the first Pixar movie with a female protagonist. Since Disney has had female protagonists from the beginning – Snow White was released in 1939 – Pixar isn’t exactly breaking new ground. If anything, Brave is the first major American animated film with a feminist female protagonist. Belle in Beauty & The Beast and Mulan were the closest before, and they weren’t very close at all. But Merida, the tomboy teen princess in Brave, is the sort of character many women hoped for after Anne Sexton’s feminist rewriting of Grimm’s fairy tales in 1971 exposed to a large audience the relentless misogyny of Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty. Continue…

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Vampires fought on the side of the South. Of course.

This will run next week.

If you’ve been to the movies over the few months, you may have seen a preview for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and been one of the hundreds of thousands of people to laugh out loud while saying something to the effect of “What the hell?” It’s an apt response to what is probably one of the strangest premises for a big budget summer action film. Based on the popular, and very postmodern novel of the same name, the film follows the life of our 16th president: the murder of his mother by a vampire, his training as a vampire hunter, his courtship of Mary Todd, and, at the film’s climax, the Battle of Gettysburg, which, in this world, was actually fought between the North and a bunch of long-fanged undead in gray uniforms. Directed by one of the masters of slow-motion combat Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted), it stars Ben Walker (Meryl Streep’s son-in-law) as Lincoln and a typecast Rufus Sewell as his slave-devouring arch nemesis Adam. The movie is knowingly ridiculous, from its premise to the balletic fights and the hilarious rewriting of history. But in that ridiculousness is whole hell of a lot of fun.

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It’s the end of the world, and I don’t feel fine

Not my idea of a good time. Here’s the LGBT Weekly link.

When I’m under the weather – when I’m home with a cold or just filled with ennui – I like to watch romantic comedies. However, there are a few things I can’t take in a romantic comedy. Don’t bring me down. I don’t want disease, death or injustice. I can take the lovers not ending up together, but I can’t take killing them. Not in acomedy.

So, for Pete’s sake, don’t end the world in a romantic comedy.

But this is the entire premise of Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, Lorene Scafaria’s new movie starring Steve Carell and Keira Knightly. I’m not sure what would give her the idea to set her movie in the last three weeks before an asteroid arrives and destroys all of humanity; and I’m not sure why she’d set a romantic comedy then; and I’m really not sure why a studio would produce such a movie. Continue…

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A whole bunch of movies every queer boy should see

Last weekend, I was hanging out with a sweet young faglet, and it became clear that many of my boyfriend and my film references were flying over his head. I take my queer culture and queer acculturation seriously, so while we were all watching Victor Victoria, I set out to write a list of a movies that every queer boy should see. It got long.

Almost 20 years ago, an older gay man made a similarly themed, though much shorter, list when I said that I had never seen All About Eve. This was after he had recited the entire opening monologue from memory. He had just used it in a promo he’d written for WGBH, where he wrote, among other things, Vincent Price’s banter for Mystery. He was what was called a “non-resident tutor” at my college residence house, and he came to dinner a couple times a month and sat with the gay resident tutor and told stories. Oh, the stories!

I’ve always found exceptional value in the words, wisdom, wit, and stories of older gay men. Queers are rarely raised by other queers, so when we come out, we have no culture. We have to learn it. And gay culture is rich, weird, and intensely important. It’s also, contrary to Andrew Sullivan and Daniel Harris, not remotely dead. Continue…

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