BURLESQUE

[Emperor]

This is a truly musical weekend at the movies, with Disney's TANGLED and a weirdly realized version of THE NUTCRACKER coming out almost in secret (more on that later). But only one of the three that is "Fabulous!" is BURLESQUE, an unapologetically camp and unintentionally awful work that doesn't so much qualify as a movie as it does a 105-minute moving photo shoot for star Christina Aguilera. A combination of the worst parts of SHOWGIRLS, COYOTE UGLY, and GLITTER, this movie exists for no other reason than to have people tell Aguilera how talented she is as a singer, dancer, and looker. She plays Ali, a small-town midget from Iowa with a killer voice (there's no getting around how great her vocal skills are) who decides one day for no particular reason that she's moving to Los Angeles to make it as a singer.

 

Instead, she wanders into a club that looks like it's built in half of a duplex and houses the town's premiere burlesque show run by Tess (Cher). Okay, I really do like Cher as an actor, and she in no way embarrasses herself in this movie other than by simply being in it. But her face literally distracted me so much that I almost never heard her speak. Her features are so exaggerated that I felt like I was staring at someone wearing a Cher Halloween mask. Still, her two musical numbers are passable as pop music, although certainly not the kind that would play in a burlesque club.

 

Ali wants to do what the girls on the stage do: dance and lip synch to classic bump-and-grind songs. But what she really wants is a chance to sing like an angel. After befriends a bartender at the club (Cam Gigandet's Jack), she gets a waitressing job, while her eyes stay glued on the stage as she memorizes the routines. Soon, she gets a shot at dancing thanks to an impromptu audition for Tess and her gay sidekick, Sean (the utterly wasted Stanley Tucci, whose job appears to be telling Cher how beautiful and wonderful a person she is). And by sheer coincidence, when jealous fellow dancer Nikki (Kristen Bell) pulls the plug on Ali's music, the old Aguilera pipes kick in to sing the song live, thus changing the course of written history forever.

 

Burlesque is the kind of movie that could only be given life by springing from the engorged loins of the singer at the center of the action. I don't care if Aguilera had anything to do with making this movie happen or not, once she signed on the entire world began to revolve around her beautiful voice. Artificial drama is tossed in having to do with a greedy real estate developer (Eric Dane) attempting to buy the struggling club away from Tess and her nebbishy ex-husband (Peter Gallagher), while making a play for Ali, who is "forced" to move in with the bartender while trying with all her might not to fall in bed with the charmer.

 

The film's greatest crime is the way it virtually ignores one of its greatest assets, Alan Cumming, who plays the guy at the door who sells tickets to the patrons. Does he get to sing? Not really. But wait, didn't Cumming play the emcee on Broadway in "Cabaret"? Why, yes he did, but writer-director Steve Antin (a former actor who appeared in such film as THE GOONIES, THE ACCUSED, and THE LAST AMERICAN VIRGIN) took a big dump on one of the few people in his cast qualified to sing burlesque-style songs. Instead, the gifted Cumming is reduced to popping his head into a couple of scenes and delivering various "Tisk tisk"-type responses to the naughtiness on stage. The film feels like he had a bigger role that was chopped out for more Peter Gallagher or Eric Dane. Cumming is too nice a guy to say it, so allow me to do so on his behalf: Fuck you, Steve Antin.

 

And about that music, while some of it does adhere to my understanding of the kind of accompaniment that goes along with burlesque routines, most of what is here are pop-ified dance numbers that have nothing to with classic burlesque. One of the funniest things in BURLESQUE is that Jack the bartender is a frustrated songwriter, whose big moment comes when he gives Ali a song of his to dance to as the movie's big closer. It is such a god-awful song that Jack (and the real songwriter) should be thrown in music jail. Then there are a couple numbers--one by Cher and one by Aguilera--that are simply thrown in as spotlight numbers and have nothing to do with a routine or real life, for that matter. But Alan Cumming gets nothing, right Antin? I grew up in the '80s, and back then, we would have called this kind of work a video album, because that's all it is--a collection of songs, mostly by one or two artists, strung together by a thin story line. Sure, the women are pretty and scantily clad, and that does count for something. But sitting through this predictable, horribly written, ill-conceived mess is the definition of mental cruelty. If you can do it, more power to you. If you can do it and enjoy the experience, you're dead to me.