MAGIC MIKE, the male stripper movie starring channing tatum, matthew mcconaughey, dir. Steven Soderbergh

I am going to see this on Saturday -- if it provides even half of the entertainment of Burlesque, I'll be content.

Trades are all into it. Hollywood Reporter: "Arguably the raunchiest, funniest and most enjoyably nonjudgmental American movie about selling sex since Boogie Nights,"

Any reason this won't be this generation's A NIGHT IN HEAVEN (which, before you say "Soderberg" I'll remind you was also directed by an Oscar winning filmmaker)?

yes, the hugely iconic John G Avildsen.

I find the default assumption that this is a junk movie premature. No one would be so ready to dismiss if this was a period piece about a brothel.

(much more interesting about ANiH is that it was by the writer of Nashville)

I don't necessarily think it will be junk, but good or bad it is bound to be entertaining.

I'm thinking of seeing it this weekend.

DO IT.

I must decide b/w watching this and In The Family, inexplicably playing again.

gotta make sure I have enough singles to get a good show

I see a lot of lawbreakers in this thread

Going to be a lot of Slate think pieces about this and 50 Shades when it opens big.

oh joy

this and In The Family covers the spectrum, Sotosyn. Do it!

wiki sez the budget of this was only $5 mil? doesnt really seem possible

Soderbergh innit

he used a styrofoam camera this time.

saved some $$ on wardrobe too I imagine

most enjoyably nonjudgmental

Gonna go ahead and call bullshit on this one, for both Boogie Nights and Magic Mike. It's no doubt possible to make a non-judgy movie about this trade, but neither BN or MM are that movie.

http://popwatch.ew.com/2012/06/27/channing-tatum-today-flash-mob/

Made $19.4 million on Friday. The budget was $7 million.

this was decent if ultimately unsatisfying. great fun at the start but (and you're not gonna believe this) it has a lot of probs turning the corner into being abt "serious" things

Yep, June and July are fine. August is problematic.

this was decent if ultimately unsatisfying. great fun at the start but (and you're not gonna believe this) it has a lot of probs turning the corner into being abt "serious" things

OTM. It reminded me a bit of Saturday Night Fever but it was waaaay less successful at pulling off the serious material.

yeah i'd say this was decent enough, and it held my interest, but i probably won't remember much beyond some of the better strip routines in a few weeks/months.

some of the semi-improvished stuff between tatum and cody horn was good, but a lot of it was pretty bad. horn doesn't have the most expressive face. there were a lot of reaction shots of her where i was wondering what she was supposed to be thinking/feeling.

but i liked it well enough. i feel like soderbergh's lack of a certain kind of ambition (he seems content to take these sort of underdeveloped genre scripts and shoot them in very stylish and offhandedly convincing ways) is both an advantage and a problem, in that his films lack the sort of reach and strangeness that distinguishes a good film from an excellent one. he always seems to be measuring risk. maybe he's just aware of the limits of his talent.

i was thinking about this b/c i rewatched michael mann's heat the other day. i'd rather spend time listening to soderbergh give interviews than mann, that's for sure. and when the balance between michael mann's skill with narrative/visual style and portentousness is off i really have a difficult time w/ his films--honestly i think heat is the only place where he gets it almost exactly right. but heat is kind of ambitious and nuts and idiosyncratic than anything soderbergh has made in a genre mold, and soderbergh has and never will make anything remotely as good, even if his overall batting average is about as strong as mann's. if that makes any sense.

tatum is totally charming though.

re: the low budget - probably also helped that there were basically 3 locations (strip club, mikes house, kid's house)

thought this was pretty ok. tatum is unexpectedly charming for a big meathead-lookin dude.

Good points, am.

Have you guys seen 21 Jump Street? Tatum is pretty good by this point at playing palookas in a smart way.

Zach Baron from his recent Tatum profile: "These days Soderbergh makes movies to solve problems, not tell stories — he wants to see Gina Carano run. The script is just an excuse." He likes this development.

lol we actually watched 21 jump street on friday (as well as pieces of dear john and gi joe on tv for the rarely-seen four-channing weekend).

his charm is actually v. straightforward, just plays dumb guys with hearts of gold but is extremely good at it.

cody horn was kind of a problem in this (nepotism alert she got the part without reading for it)--the character is a little underdeveloped but she is definitely not the actress who could make more of it than what it was.

I also watched 21 jump st on Friday

I liked Cody Horn

He's the thinking man's less thinking Josh Hartmett.

It didn't take much thought to forget Josh Hartnett.

I appreciate this movie more for what it didn't do than what it did; 1) not bothering to reshoot the scenes where Tatum stumbles over his lines, and 2) after he says "I'm not that guy you see on stage", Cody Horn's character does NOT say "then who are you?", followed by Tatum looking sad for a while. It's the little things

my eyes are not going to forget Josh Hartnett easily.

ppl stumble over their lines irl.

is this, like The Girlfriend Experience, really about CAPITALISM?

Is this as deadly boring as TGE?

TGE was not boring, and was onlh 79 min or something

Small favors.

Zach Baron from his recent Tatum profile: "These days Soderbergh makes movies to solve problems, not tell stories — he wants to see Gina Carano run. The script is just an excuse." He likes this development.

― a regina spektor is haunting europe (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, July 1, 2012 7:05 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

1) i think more filmmakers than soderbergh do this, soderbergh just has bracingly smart and direct way of owning up to it.

2) i don't think this aspect of soderbergh's approach is bad, either. i just think it kind of places limits on his films, makes them feel a little hemmed in. which is why i think he's an admirable and extremely interesting filmmaker who probably hasn't and never will make a knocked-it-out-of-the-park masterpiece. which is probably OK with him?

also yeah the stumbling over lines stuff was interesting insofar as it was impossible to tell if it was the actor or the character doing the stumbling. occasionally that threw me out of the film occasionally, but ultimately i found it mildly charming and effective.

the guy playing "the kid" was kind of a blank, no? as were lots of the other actors. mcconauggggghhheeey was pretty great--glad he got his moment to, uh, shine at the end. man, is that guy in good shape for 40 y.o.

he's one of those dudes (like nic cage) who should have just been a character actor in weird roles for his entire career instead of ever being a leading man

nic cage is amazing as a leading man, what are you talking about

yeah nic cage can carry a movie pretty well, he just happens to be in a lot of shit movies.

Picturing Nic Cage in g-string & six shooters all "look like ah see lotta lawbraahk in haaaahr."

Well, that ruined my afternoon.

****spoilers****

i like how they get the are-we-gonna-show-channing-tatum's-bare-ass out of the way pretty much immediately. lots of ladies in the audience squealed but were actually rather sedate throughout the rest of the movie.

They may have been sleeping.

the local paper said this was (iirc) "surprisingly dark" with "betrayal, fistfights, and puking"

Also: Channing Tatum in Marilyn Monroe drag for no discernable reason
McConaughey playing the bongos
a baby pig consuming human vomit

I bet McConaughey had the inclusion of a bongo scene written into his contract