March 1, 2019

I know...you are probably saying to yourselves....”Tebo...why on god’s green earth do you own a copy of Striptease??” Remember a few months back when I told y’all that I worked a fancy pants estate sale at a mansion on the New Hampshire coastline? And that they had a shelf full of smutty VHS tapes in pristine condition? Striptease was one of ‘em...and I grabbed it...‘cuz I felt like it’s a movie that gets referenced quite a bit but that no one has actually seen. So much like Christ died for our sins...I went ahead and sat through all 117 minutes of Striptease so, hopefully, none of you will ever have to. The look on Demi Moore’s face on the film’s poster really says everything you need to know. It’s like..”yes...as you see...I am naked....but RUN AWAY!” It’s the same expression she wears in every scene in the entire movie (think of the look on Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s face after being asked a question. Just like that). How a bunch of super talented people and Demi Moore could’ve come up with something so actively unpleasant to watch is kind of tough to comprehend. The writer/director, Andy Bergman, wrote Fletch and Blazing Saddles just to name a few....and then there’s Burt Reynolds...who reportedly enjoyed working on this movie so much that he was shocked, the following year, to learn that he’d been nominated for an Oscar...for Boogie Nights...which he called a piece of shit trash. What happens is this: the flick opens with a courtroom scene where Demi Moore is fighting to win custody of her 7 year-old daughter from her pill popping ex-husband, who is totally the T-1000 from Terminator 2. The judge presiding over the case, Judge Fingerhut, patriarch of the junk mail catalogue of the same name, awards custody to the dad, even though he’s shitfaced in court at 8AM. Apparently he’s an informant for the Miami Vice Squad...and Moore is unemployed. So score one for the T-1000. Cut to: Moore has taken a job at the Eager Beaver (Note: barf) so she can raise some dough and hopefully get her kid back. Let me point out here that there is zero character development whatsoever. Just the courtroom scene. Why does Moore have to go straight to the pole? Can’t she sling some Mai Tai’s at Senor Frog’s? These questions will remain unanswered. So it’s off to the Eager Beaver...where every cliche about strip clubs is alive and kickin’...right down to the gold chain and leisure suit-wearing sleazy strip club manager. You know...I had to go to a strip club up in Vermont once for my buddy’s bachelor party...and it was totally in a bowling alley. Like...there were tons of kids there with their family’s...bowling and eating pizzas and drinking pitchers of Shirley Temple’s. And then...in the same building...just past the lockers....there was a strip club. Have they no zoning laws in the state of Vermont!?? Anyway...so Moore is working at the Beave with gals named Glitter and Monique #2 and Urbana Sprawl. Her stripper name: Erin Grant...which also happens to be her character’s name. Easy peasy. Her attitude is pretty lousy from day one. She’s like ‘y’all are strippers....I’m just doing this for my kid”. She also refuses to dance to anything not sung by Annie Lennox...much to the chagrin of all of the Buckcherry fans in the crowd (ok...they didn’t yet exist when this movie came out....but there was surely a FLA-equivalent band in ’96). The stripping scenes have all of the eroticism of an episode of Antiques Roadshow. Like...couldn’t they at least have thrown a some red gels over the lens or something? Moore immediately catches the eye of a wayward republican (natch) congressman played by Burt Reynolds. When some bachelor party yahoo gets a little too handsy Reynolds jumps on stage and assaults the dude with a champagne bottle. One of the strip club regulars named Jerry recognizes the Congressman and offers to blackmail him so he’ll help Demi Moore get custody of her daughter....for totally altruistic, non-pervy reasons I’m sure. She’s like “knock yourself out, bro.” Unfortunately Jerry’s body soon washes up in front of a beach cottage owned by rich man’s Chazz Palminteri Armand Assante..who just happens to be a Miami detective...because of course he is. So now there’s stripping and a murder mystery and some other subplot I haven’t even mentioned yet where a strip club bouncer played by Ving Rhames tries to defraud a yogurt company by injecting the yogurt with cockroach guts and WHAT KIND OF MOVIE IS THIS ANYWAY!?? Seriously...did they pitch it as Sally Field’s “Not Without My Daughter” meets “Get Shorty”...as directed by David Lynch? Striptease came out less than a year after Showgirls so maybe folks were expecting a little repeat business from the stroke fiends? But whereas Showgirls was campy and kind of amazing in its awfulness Striptease just feels like a full on jihad on the moviegoer. While we’re talking about Showgirls...do y’all remember the scene were Special Agent Dale Cooper and Jesse Spano ball in the swimming pool? Imagine if that’s how you learned about sex?? “You see kids...when a man loves a woman very much he takes her into his swimming pool and holds onto her for dear life while she screams at the top of her lungs and thrashes around like an epileptic dolphin.” So...whatever...Moore keeps stripping and saving her bux to hopefully buy back her kid or some shit. Ving Rhames goes to a video store and asks if “Free Willy” has been returned. When he’s told that it is still checked out he slams his fist on the counter and says “People are pigs! Sitting on movies like they own them!” This scene has absolutely nothing to do with anything....but it is the only time I chuckled a bit...so there’s that. Back at Demi Moore’s condo she’s doing a solo sexy dance to another Annie Lenox song while singing into her blow dryer. It’s so awkward I have to temporarily leave the room. I return to find that Armand Assante has come to see Moore to tell her he has mediocre news. Is the mediocre news that there’s another hour left in the movie? I bet it is. Seriously though...I guess Judge Fingerhut went to junk mail heaven so Moore’s custody hearing has been delayed another 6 months....which means 6 more months on the pole. Meanwhile Burt Reynolds is still going on about how he’s in love with Moore...even though he only saw her that one time at the beginning of the movie...700 years ago. He instructs one of his aides to steal a pair of her panties. He then smears vaseline all over his entire body...dresses in a leather vest and cowboy boots...and dances around a hotel room with said panties on his head...minutes before he’s supposed to give a speech to a group of young Christians. I bet this type of shit happens all the time in real life. Moore is tired of waiting for the wheels of justice to turn so she just up and kidnaps her daughter. No one questions this move at all...not even the cop. So Moore makes her kid hang out backstage at the Beaver...which is totally decorated in posters of Fabio (is THAT how the ladies get jazzed up before their routines? I had no idea!)...while momma goes onstage and does her thing. Problem is the little girl sneaks a peek and now Moore feels guilty and doesn’t want to strip anymore...even though the little girls says she looked “pretty”. It’s only at this point that I realize that the kid is friggin’ Rumer Willis...Demi Moore’s actual daughter!! I guess she DID get paid $12.5 million clams to act in this cinematic atrocity. She told the producers “shit, for that kind of coin I’ll take my shirt off AND you can have my kid! ” So weep not for Demi Moore. She’s supposedly a garbage person anyway. I still remember the quote from that copy of Vanity Fair where she’s naked and preggo on the cover: “it’s not like (she) and Bruce Willis wake up every morning and actively decide to be assholes. That’s just...you know...what they are.” So she doesn’t want to dance at the club anymore...but Burt Reynolds offers her $2k to strip for him on his yacht...which is $998,000 less than what Robert Redford offered her to ball him in Indecent Proposal. This time she dances to Prince’s “If I was your Girlfriend”...which kicks the movie up from a 1 to about 1.2. Reynolds’ henchmen kill a few more people and plan to kill Moore after she dances for him a second time. Luckily the T-1000 shows up and his hands turn into liquid metal blades and he murders everyone in the movie. I mean...that doesn’t really happen...but would you really be THAT shocked if I told you it did? He does show up with a broken arm up from crashing his car after chowing down vicodin like skittles..causing someone to quip “how’d you break your arm? Playing polo with Donald Trump?” People watching this in 1996 could laugh because Donald Trump was just a clown businessman and not the leader of the FREE FUCKING WORLD!!!! There’s a shootout and a chase scene and the suspense-o-meter stays pinned at zero. The bad guys get caught or killed or something...I was honestly just dicking around on my phone and not paying attention at this point. Moore gets custody of Rumer...who develops a cocaine habit as a result of having acted in Striptease when she was 7. But someone told me she won Dancing With the Stars so everything is OK now. The end.