Two pervs at the movies – Burlesque

Christina Aguilera in Burlesque.

Movie review – Burlesque

In what may become a blog tradition: the first movie review column Two Pervs at the Movies. This week’s movie: Burlesque, starring Cher and Christina Aguilera and a cast of minions and Kristen Bell (yeah!). The pervs: myself and my 77-year-old bachelor uncle M.

Kristen Bell in Burlesque (2010).

First, we saw the movie exactly where it should be seen – at a run-down, wannabe-sleazy discount theatre within walking distance of my parents’ North End home in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Other movies at the same theatre included Jackass 3 and Love and Other Drugs (which features a nude Anne Hathaway, so that may be the next movie included in this).

Anne Hathaway in Love and Other Drugs.

We got the start time wrong so we wandered over to the other end of the strip mall to Zellers. At these beat-up discount department stores there’s always pop culture detritus just lying around waiting to be found and, sure enough, I struck gold in the calendar section where, I might add, everything was half off sticker price ($12.99).

I bypassed the 2 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit calendars and the Maxim calendar and went straight to the Madmen calendar (Christina Hendricks playing accordion – for a whole month!) and the piece de resistance, the Lady Gaga Monster Ball Calendar.

The latter may have been called the Lady Gaga Monster Ass Calendar due to all the butt shots of Lady Gaga. It is a wonderful world where you can buy a Lady Gaga calendar fashioned for the perv demographic for under $7.

As for Burlesque, which is directed and written by one Steve Antin (a former actor who was in the movie The Goonies) well, it’s as purely awful as one would expect: terrible dialogue (“You’ll be out on your ass so fast your head will spin!”), terrible acting (Christine Aguilera and Cam Gigandet, a mannequin out of Tacoma, WA who plays her wretched love interest, a bartender named Jack); a completely predictable storyline.

Guess who’s chewing the scenery and who’s acting in this scene from Burlesque.

To make matters worse, Burlesque barely registers on the perv scale. Aguilera and Bell are no Elizabeth Berkley and Gina Gershon (good girl/bad girl in Showgirls) and the only (mild) thrills come during some of the more elaborate dance sequences.

Gina Gershon and Elizabeth Berkeley show how it’s done in Showgirls.

But even then the dancing is tame and there’s shockingly little (as in “none”) T & A for a movie presumably about burlesque. In fact Burlesque resembles the actual burlesque routines I’ve seen the same way movie strip clubs resemble real-life strip clubs, i.e., not at all, although at least in the movie and HBO strip clubs you might actually get to see Eva Amurri naked.

So on a perv scale, Burlesque gets a low 3, and even that’s being generous. However, the Lady Gaga Monster Bum, I mean Ball, 2011 Calendar gets an eight.

Well, if we want to see more of Christina Aguilera (which we don’t, really), we have no choice but to turn to our trusty friend the Internet.

Christina Aguilera in an apparently leaked personal pic.