Burlesque

This movie reminds me a little of Frankenstein’s monster. Take an arm from corpse A, a leg from corpse B, a head from … now where did I put that head? Igor, have you seen a spare head around here? So you take a little Showgirls without the full-frontal nudity (small-town girl comes to the Big City to make it), a little 42nd Street (“This is your big chance, girl, you’ve got to go out there and come back a star!”), a little bit of Chicago (our girl fantasizes that she takes over from the star in mid-number), a lot of Cabaret … I’ll bet Bob Fosse is tap-dancing in his grave, shouting “Plagiarism!” There is even a dance number with the girls contorting themselves in chairs, exactly like the “Mein Herr” number in Cabaret. In fact, about all this movie needs to be Cabaret is—aside, of course, from the genius of Fosse—some Nazis sitting in the audience. Here, poor Kristen Bell has to stand in for the Nazis. Well, imitation is flattery, I guess. It’s a good thing that Cher and especially Christina Aguilera can sing pretty damn good, because the story is one of the most clichéd, standard, off-the-shelf wheezers I’ve seen since Love Story. Other pluses: costumes, set design, some of the dancing (though there are too many jump cuts). And did I mention that Christina Aguilera can really belt it out? So don’t take this as a bad review. In a musical all I really need is some good singin’ and dancin’, and this delivers. But if you don’t love musicals as much as I do, avoid this as if it were a black plague rat.