Skip to main content

'The safe word is unicorn': can you stomach Magic Mike Live?

Channing Tatum brings his strip show and self-help rally to London, offering consumerist feminism of the purest form

Magic Mike is a 2012 film about male strippers, based on the early life of its star Channing Tatum. It is a tale of loss, directed by Steven Soderbergh, and now, as if to entirely miss the point of itself, it is a live strip show in Las Vegas and London. There is nothing about loss here. I waited for it, but it didn’t come. Perhaps stripping, by itself, is the wrong form to describe loss of soul?

There is opportunity here for women and they know it. Groups of women, some old but mostly young, sit waiting with cocktails the size of cauldrons. Their screams are barely suppressed. Because it’s their turn now – this is a form of revenge. There is opportunity too for men, but of a different kind. Tickets are selling on resale websites for £675, but I don’t know what the dancers are paid. You’re worth what you can prise out of their purses, Tatum is told in the film by Matthew McConaughey.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2TTHZol
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more