Review of Burlesque (2010) by Shiira — 06 Dec 2010

As a reward for straight guys who were broad-minded enough to withstand same-sex kissing and buggery among cowboys, Anne Hathaway took off her top, in what was, and still is, the gayest movie ever, hands down.

Terrified of glimpsing full frontal male nudity, Hathaway's 36C breasts put the heterosexual male at ease, remasculating them for the remainder of Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain", especially the stretch run when Jack Twist(Jake Gylenhaal) tells Enis(Heath Ledger), "I wish I knew how to quit you.

" The same broad-minded straight guys expecting the same sort of compensation for patronizing "Burlesque"(a musical that features not just one, but two gay icons), will be sorely disappointed.

Kristen Bell, never nude, flashes some skin, but her showgirl character, a high-maintenance diva, is not that kind of showgirl, because burlesque(not to be confused with exotic dancing) is striptease with art pretensions, in which dancers tantalize the audience with mystery, so Nikki wears pasties, and Christine Aguilera's breasts are strategically covered with stage props.

To add insult to injury, the only nipples we see are a dude's nipples, Cam Gigadet's nipples, and the only bared ass, Cam Gigadet's ass. Aguilera's well-documented nipple rings are left to the imagination.

Playing a designer hayseed from Iowa named Ally, the clothing optional girl who likes to get "Dirty", as she's done throughout the course of her career, shows off her skin and pipes in equal measures, a balancing act that sells the triple threat(singer, dancer.

..actress?) short, when Aguilera's sex kitten image can often overshadow her aptitude for peerless vocalization,Knowing in her heart that the club patrons will value live singing more than t*ts and a*s, Ally convinces Tess(Cher, in yet another comeback) to ditch the practice of having her girls lip synch over canned music during their routines.

In doing so, the contract between the filmmaker and moviegoer is breached. Normally, the audience is complicitous to the habitude of musicals, in which actors mouth the words to the accompanying song that plays over the soundtrack, but "Burlesque" loses its artistic license, the leeway to misrepresent reality, the very moment Ally broaches Tess over the subject of pre-recorded music.

In Peter Bogdanovich's "At Long Last Love", actors intoned lyrics under a live boom mic while the cameras rolled, as an experiment in adding realism to the musical genre. It didn't work, but that's because the filmmaker had non-singers like Cybil Shepard, Burt Reynolds, and John Hillerman at his disposal, all of whom possessed voices which needed a liberal dose of sweetening in post-production, and then some.

(Ulu Grosbard's "Georgia" used the same methodology to better effect.) "Burlesque", on the other hand, has Aguilera, who possesses a voice big enough to pull off the live thing, and yet, in the crucial moment when Ally reveals her secret weapon(it's not a vagina, that's Elizabeth Berkley's secret weapon) to the burlesque world after Nikki cuts off the music in the middle of a performance, the voice we hear is clothed, not naked as it should be.

Ally's disdain for fakery makes us hyper-aware of the fact that she's doing the same thing, albeit with her own voice. After all, once it becomes obvious that "Burlesque" isn't going to be a softcore porn flick like Paul Verhoeven's "Showgirls", as a consolation prize, people will want to hear Aguilera sing, for real.

Straight or gay, people aren't coming to see her act, that's for sure.