Burlesque

2010 "It takes a legend... to make a star"
6.4| 1h59m| PG-13| en
Details

Ali leaves behind a troubled life and follows her dreams to Los Angeles, where she lands a job as a cocktail waitress at the Burlesque Lounge, a once-majestic theater that houses an inspired musical revue. Vowing to perform there, she makes the leap from bar to stage, helping restore the club's former glory.

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Bedford Falls Productions

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Reviews

KnotMissPriceless Why so much hype?
Inclubabu Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.
Cheryl A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.
Jenni Devyn Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.
WritingWed4 Burlesque is the best and great musical movie I've ever seen. As you know, this is musical movie, but song and dance and performance are so excellent, so people definitely listen to the voice every day. The story is that main character overcome challenges to fulfill dream, but this film is not predictable. There are many scenes of her for example,happiness and sadness and anger, so people can feel her emotion through this movie. It is good text for senior high school students and adult because this film push their back. Also, its content is brilliant, so girls and women can enjoy the time. And there are many fashionable cloth in the movie, so they may feel that I'm proud of woman. I recommend Burlesque to people who overcome challenges.
Lechuguilla At least it's got Cher, and the iconic "Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend". There isn't much else to see or listen to. Annoyingly unoriginal story about an ambitious, small town Iowa girl named Ali (Christina Aguilera), who leaves the slow lane for the fast lights and glitter of L.A.There, she too easily lands a job at a nightclub overseen by Tess (Cher). The club features small tables and a stage whereupon mini-clad young ladies dance, lip-sync to the music, and pose evocatively for mostly male patrons. Ali gets her chance to replace the lead performer. Along the way, various characters and incidents intersperse the club's stage numbers to keep the contrived plot moving along.You get the feeling that the entire script was written for Aguilera. Yes, she can sing, if by singing you mean yelling out lyrics attached to modern rap beats, nominally called "music", devoid of melody or substantive meaning. Aguilera specializes in loudness. The stage numbers start out fine, before Aguilera horns in, but then deteriorate. The final stage number reeks of cringe inducing, vapid noise.Further, Aguilera is miscast. She looks too little-girl innocent in the first half; in the second, with all that garish makeup and posing, she looks horribly fake. Cher is better cast and I like her backstage presence. Performances are okay. Indoor lighting looks convincing. But the stage seems to change size; in one scene, it looks small, in another, overwhelming.I would have preferred a more unpredictable plot, more emphasis on Cher's character, a different actor for the Ali character, and stage numbers that didn't sound like they came from the portfolio of Justin Bieber. Still, the presence of Cher elevates "Burlesque" to borderline entertaining. It's worth a one-time watch.
captzero I sat down to watch Burlesque yesterday. My first thought: this is a cliché, trying to escape her small town, move to Hollywood, become a star, girl drama. It seemed to be a, middle of the road, union of Coyote Ugly and Show Girls. Both of which, in their own right, are terrible movies. So, no surprise, immediately, this appears to be a worthy candidate for HDTGM dissection.This is a chick flick, through and through. Men simply can't identify with this type of story. Lets face it: a movie, in which a man packs up and moves from his home town to escape small town life and a dead end job, would be a three minute film of him tying his bootlaces together, tossing the footwear over a power line, followed by a shot of him driving away. Fini. Yes, this is a movie for chicks. Based on this realization, alone, this movie should never have been made. However, men are also horn dogs who enjoy looking at scantily clad, attractive, young women, in provocative poses. There's no denying, women aren't the target demographic for burlesque shows. So, in that sense, where the premise of the story and the acting fail, the movie, at least delivers for the men. They went to the theater and paid to see a burlesque show; the movie delivered on that count. This probably explains the 6.4 user rating on IMDb.This movie had significant failings in it's plot. The biggest failing, for me, is the burlesque club itself. Firstly, you must suspend your disbelief that we live in a world where a club like this would even exist. Burlesque establishments are typically sexually deviant, back alley, basement dungeons. But the most flagrant, in your face, aspect of the club that causes you to instantly disconnect from an ability to care, is the fact that the finances and operation of the business are woefully mismanaged by Cher's character, Tess. Compounded, on top of delinquent payments of her property's multiple mortgages, a balloon payment that is due at the end of the month, she also has so many, unnecessary, expenses that are driving her into bankruptcy. A live band, for starters, when the vocals are lip synced?. Bringing the dancers expensive alcoholic beverages between numbers? These are reasons why Tess has no business running a business, and so I really don't give a crap if she loses the club, in fact... I was hoping she would.My 'What the F**k Moment' was the scene where Cher does a solo rehearsal with her DJ. He pops in a compact disc--no need to include the band in a rehearsal--and she belts out a sorrowful ballad, that just so happens, to fit her mood at the moment. This is about as close to being a true musical that, Burlesque, could ever be. The problem is that the scene felt like it was a contractual obligation, between the studio and Cher, that they just wanted to get out of the way. Unfortunately, this isn't even a song that belongs in a burlesque show, and feels completely freaking alien to the rest of the film.In the end, what we have, as far as a movie goes, is a two hour long string of choreographed hip-hop videos--comprising roughly 70% of the screen time--loosely strung together by an absurd plot, culminating as an excuse to see provocatively clad women prancing around a stage. So why did this movie get made? From budget to box office, the movie is about ten million in the red. For that reason alone, the movie should never have been made. I think this is probably a case of a studio that miscalculated the popularity of Cher and Aguilera in their ability to draw in an audience of their fans. The only redeeming value of the film, from a guy's perspective, was that there was plenty of hot women doing hot things to keep us from falling asleep. I'd just watch pornography, however, if that's what I was after. I've certainly seen porn with equally plausible plot lines.
winstonfg And I say that as an old fart who has never particularly liked Christine Aguilera, or her image or brand of pop (am I getting old?).It's not 'Funny Girl' or 'Cabaret', but it's a bit of a mixture of both, with some nice moments for the supporting cast - especially Stanley Tucci, who once again gets to play "the gay" in that interesting, undemonstrative style of his - and not much needed from the leads, who do their jobs as required.And if that sounds like a put-down, it's not meant to be. I enjoyed watching the film - it's just not up there with the ones I mentioned. And the business of it being too "Bob Fosse"-esque? Pah. If you're going to mimic, at least pick the best.My preference would have been for a few more classic lip-synced blues tracks; but at the end of the day, it's a nice story, well told. And it reminded me that, even with all that prodigious female talent on display: It ain't what you got; it's how you use it.