Film Review: Steve Antin's Burlesque

What you might expect from a film about show business starring two musical icons as the leads: a dippy romp with a spectacular soundtrack. A cross between Moulin Rouge -- which featured a song by Burlesque star Christina Aguilera -- and Chicago with hints of The Devil Wears Prada, director Steve Antin's film offers up plenty of beauty shots of stars Cher and Aguilera and somehow manages to skip over most of the cohesive drama of those instant classics without totally losing the film's momentum.

The film concerns a naïve girl from Iowa named Ali (Aguilera), who travels to Hollywood with grandiose dreams but quickly finds herself in a seedy motel with no job prospects. After a long day of job searching, she stumbles upon a burlesque club owned by Tess (Cher) and is mesmerized. Ali gets a job as a waitress at the club, which is in danger of slipping through Tess' cash-strapped hands, and after auditioning and imploring the hardened Tess, eventually gets a job in the kick line. When an angered fellow performer cuts the music during one of Ali's first shows, Ali belts out a song that blows everyone away. Suddenly, Tess is congratulating her and planning a whole new show that will revolve around her. The music in the film will certainly inspire fans of Aguilera. Cher, whose lip synching is pretty obvious, also gets to belt out a couple of numbers to somewhat lesser effect. Despite the presence of the pros, the most convincing lip-synch belongs to the petite Kristin Bell, who dons a black wig to play the role of Ali's arch enemy Nikki.

Surely, some viewers will be thrown off by the cheesy resolution of the plot's various conflicts – love, debt, the realization of dreams – but everything else about the film is absolutely stunning. The film is visually ravishing in every way, from set design to costumes to lighting, which, in this critic's mind, more than makes up for its lack of narrative originality. You're not going to this movie for subtle shadings of suggestion or nuance of character, you're going for the sass, soundtrack and supreme swagger of its leads. As long as you're good with that, you should have a fine time.

This film review was originally published on two.one.five magazine's website here.

Film Review: Ondi Timoner's Cool It

 
With this doc, based on the book of the same name by Danish environmentalist Bjørn Lomborg, director Ondi Timoner provides a refreshing sequel of sorts for Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth. While avoiding the scare tactics used in the famed 2006 documentary which served to bring global warming and the Earth’s welfare to the forefront of our collective consciousness, Cool It delves into long-term solutions and some temporary stop-gap measures that would cost much less and do much more good than proposed short-term measures to cut carbon dioxide emissions on this planet.

Problematically, Timoner’s film is a bit disjointed. The first 20 minutes are spent on Lomborg’s personal and professional history before moving on to interviews with professors around the world about global warming and possible solutions. Naturally, it also hits on Lomborg’s proposal for spending $250 million on decreasing global warming and addressing the world’s other problems (like lack of health care, lack of education systems and poverty). Perhaps the 20 minutes spent telling Lomborg’s story is meant to mirror the interspersion of Gore’s personal story in Truth, but here, it's more of a distraction, as if interjecting this man's personal story somehow adds a necessarily element of basic individual humanity.

Ultimately, the bulk of the film addresses the world’s future and the solutions that scientists have been studying for years and are ready to implement. In that, it is fascinating stuff to watch, leaving the viewer hopeful rather than glumly preparing for an imminent apocalypse. One can only hope that policy makers are sitting up and taking notes.

This film review was originally published on two.one.five magazine's website.