(Note: When I said on this blog I would sometimes talk about Big Girl Serious Stuff, and sometimes I would talk about butts, I wasn’t kidding about the second part. )
One of my greatest annoyances, besides people who use like, like, unnecessarily, all like, the time like, is movie trailers. Specifically, how movie trailers 15/16’s of the time are lying liars who bathe under a high-pressure Swedish engineered sexy showerhead full of LIES.
A lesson for you readers. Never trust movie trailers.
Magic Mike, the trailer, told me I would see dancing and not a lot of clothes and many butts. Magic Mike, the movie, told me strippers can’t be happy and you can’t be happy watching them strip. Other lessons from Magic Mike are that male strippers
- can have fun for about 3 months before they fall into a swirling teacup ride of drug addiction, narcissism, and self-destruction (the teacup ride and drug montage both coincidentally come with puke).
- can go on with their blissfully ignorant stripper lives in Florida until they are eventually usurped by the Teenage Abs With a Drug/Attitude Problem.
- can get together with your ex-douchey best friend’s sister who has a personality that sparkles like a diamond dropped in a septic tank. Also, make furniture. Because that’s what dreams are made of in Florida.
The thing is, Magic Mike started out promisingly enough. As I sat in the theater with my two comrades in tow, the seats all around me teeming with all the upper class, white, middle-aged women in the immediate 5 mile radius, my friends and I realizing that we dropped the average age of the audience by 20 years, the lights go out. The screen darkens, and Matthew McConaughey enters on-screen in tiny leather pants, with a tiny leather vest, and a not so tiny hat.
Alright, so McConaughey vaguely reminds me too much of that Uncle who’s always trying to get the kids to “wrestle” him at the family reunion for me to be entirely comfortable sexually objectifying him. But, the clothes are miniature. Promising.
When The Tiny Leather Pants Formerly Known as Matthew exeunts, the scene then flashes to Channing Tatum, and then, to Channing Tatum’s ass. A nice, long, lingering shot of Channing Tatum’s ass.
Now this is what I paid $7.50 on a Thursday night to see: Man butt. Shout out also for Olivia Munde’s boobs making an appearance almost immediately following which was subsequently THEN followed by Lady butt. I reclined into my movie theater seat, thinking I had a one way ticket to Carefree Dancing Naked Times.
I forgot to read the disclaimer on the ticket.
“Warning: You are a bad, bad person for wanting to see strippers strip in a movie about strippers, shame on you. STRIPPERS HAVE DRUG PROBLEMS AND LIFE DISSATISFACTION AND ALL THEY WANT TO DO IS MAKE YOUR HUBCAP INTO A NICE COFFEE TABLE.”
In the first half of this movie, Mike does his cool “I am a hot stripper/entrepreneur” act and The Kid, whose nickname I assume comes from the other strippers’ passion for Westerns, is introduced to the world of male stripping wide-eyed and naive, like a country boy arriving in the Big City for the first time. Only this city has a slighter higher thong rate per capita. Matthew McConaughey teaches The Kid how to pelvic thrust, which is funny, and there are some obviously staged-to-be-sexy dark club scenes, which are so awkward and forced it feels physically painful. All in all, the first hour was light-hearted.
Remember the ticket warning? That’s the second hour.
Suddenly people are giving The Kid drugs to sell–$10,000 worth of pills to sell, which seems a touch excessive if you’re a first time dealer–Mike can’t get the loan he needs to be able to craft chairs out of soup cans to his heart’s content, and the Lack of Matt Bomer is astoundingly low and depressing.
From there on, it progressively degenerates into something that, horrifyingly, appears to be a film whose main goal is NOT to provide me with thinly disguised soft-core porn. Then shit really goes down. As in, gets more awkward as a film about male strippers in Florida tries to have substance.
The Kid has a Drug Problem, apparently The Kid’s sister is fascinating and, somehow, THE most important person in the whole wide world to Mike, despite having what appears to be the personality of dry toast, and there’s a pig who is apparently hang around with the wrong crowd.
I won’t spoil the ending for you, in case you still want to see it. Just take these words of wisdom with you if you still want to see Magic Mike.
They are making a sequel, and now I feel compelled to see it when it comes out if only to know if The Kid died in a pool of his own vomit.
Attempted Amusement 