Striptease (1996)

Wonderful Movie

Overrated and overhyped

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

A former FBI secretary now turned stripper gets involved in a dangerous high-level game which involves a soon to be elected congressman. In order to regain the right to take care of her daughter, helped by a determined detective, she becomes an inside man who must uncover crimes of dangerous people.It's an average movie, with a below average story, which is as superficial as it is predictable. The actors, except the main one which is OK, do an average job, consolidating the overall low-budget feel of this movie. As upsides, it is very sensual, the main character being a stripper at a famous club, and funny through the characters' stupidity. It manages to not make you yawn until the end which is a good thing but it's still an average movie in every aspect.

This movie gets a lot of attention for being a mainstream film with an unusually high amount of nudity, yet nudity is the least notable aspect of the movie from a critical standpoint. With but a single exception, this movie's use of nudity is entirely appropriate to the subject matter: a strip club and its employees. Less nudity simply wouldn't make sense.The lone exception is a scene where Ms. Moore's character practices a stage routine at home after a shower. It turns awkward the moment she pulls panties on under cover of the towel she has wrapped around her body. Why the sudden modesty? She's clearly alone, the blinds are closed, and her comportment in the rest of the scene shows that she feels entirely secure in her person. Why not either a) drop the towel and pull on the panties, or just leave the towel on through the rest of the scene and skip the flashes of buns and boobs? There is either too much nudity in this scene or not enough. The movie makers tried to strike a balance between unnecessary titillation and a desire to keep their MPAA R rating, at a toll to believability.Contrast this with the backstage scenes, where the women re-dress shortly after coming off stage. We believe this. It's probably cold back there. They aren't going to hang around in their skin until it's time to go back on stage.The real problem with this movie is that it is nearly incoherent in its presentation. The style jerks madly between scary, slapstick, and serious. I'm all in favor of nuanced movies that don't fit into neat categories, but this movie doesn't blend them, it just butts mismatched scenes up against each other.It's clear that the movie's main character is not happy stripping for a living, but the sense we get from the movie is that this is because of the club's patrons, not from being nude, per se. One of the most telling scenes in the movie is when the main character's prepubescent daughter steals an illicit peek at her mother stripping and dancing on stage. When her mother learns of it, she is clearly upset by it, but why? Given the stage lights, all her daughter could have seen is the nudity, but it's clearly not nudity that's the problem here, only the audience's reaction to it. That leaves a huge hole in the social commentary this movie could be making, that the only problems needing to be fixed are the risks to the dancers.In the end, I find myself completely unchanged in my opinions about nudity, stripping as a profession, or the sleaze accompanying it. As a sermon, this movie entirely fails, where it had the opportunity to break new social ground.Then there are the scenes of violence mixed with comedy. It comes across not as black comedy, but as clowns stumbling drunkenly through a gang fight. It feels contrived, completely unrealistic. Violence and comedy can blend wonderfully: witness Quentin Tarantino's films. This film doesn't manage to pull that blend off at all.In the end, I give this movie 3 out of 10 because this movie failed to either achieve untethered fantasy or grounded reality. The only scenes that felt real are the exotic dancing scenes. It's 2016: if I want to see beautiful women peeling to their skin, I don't need to plow through 2 hours of incoherence to get it.I'm unlikely to watch this movie again.

I never understood why this film received the trashing and disparagement that it did when it was first released. If you look at it for what it is, then there is a lot to enjoy. First is the story. This was taken from a Carl Hiassan novel and if you enjoy his writing then you should like this story.Secondly, it has a great cast of actors and it is peopled with distinct characters. Ving Rhames is especially good in this movie but so are Armand Assante, Robert Patrick and Demi Moore. It IS light entertainment but it is one of those movies where I can watch repeat viewings and will do so if I happen to catch it on TV.For those of you that have not seen this film, I would recommend that you try it and form your own opinion. You might just find that you like it too.

Erin Grant (Demi Moore) loses her secretary job at the FBI due to her criminal former football star ex-husband Darrell (Robert Patrick) and loses custody of her daughter Angela (Rumer Willis) due to losing her job. She ends up stripping at the Eager Beaver trying to earn the money to appeal the decision. Congressman David Dilbeck (Burt Reynolds) becomes a big fan. Shad (Ving Rhames) is the bouncer. Her fan Jerry comes up with a scheme to use the congressman to get to the judge. Jerry is killed and police detective Al Garcia (Armand Assante) investigates.This is deliberately stupid and the characters are deliberately ridiculous. Yet Demi Moore is playing it completely serious which is the way that she's written. The movie is caught between a scary Lifetime movie and a wacky comedy. It is utterly unsustainable and none of it works. There are points where the movie is so bad that it borders on being funny. Mostly, it's cringe-worthy.