You tell yourself that being a critic comes with certain responsibilities. My credo is not being above anything. I don’t consciously pick genres or play favorites. If it is convenient for the watching, I’ll watch it. If it got watched, it gets reviewed. Period. And they all get the same weight to start: The Artist or That’s My Boy; Schindler’s List or Big Momma’s House III. You can’t just cherry pick your targets. What kind of integrity is that? Now that being said, some films are tougher to enter the theater by yourself – they can make you feel creepy or isolated or intensely aware of your own demographic. Straight fortysomething white men don’t go by themselves to a film in which chiseled hunks get naked and simulate sex on stage; instead, we are expected to attend films in which chiseled hunks wear skin tight clothing and simulate sex through violence. Oh, I’m sorry; did I just give away the subtext to every superhero movie? Clumsy me.
So I present for you my personal top 10 most uncomfortable I-don’t-belong-here films:
10. Atlas Shrugged: Part I
9. Pariah
8. Letters to God
7. Love! Valour! Compassion!
6. Winnie the Pooh
5. (tie) Justin Bieber: Never Say Never/Jonas Brothers in Concert
4. Any of the Twilight series
3. Anything directed by Tyler Perry
2. Magic Mike
1. High School Musical 3
El Gran Milagro would have made the top 3, but I saw it with friends. Bless you, Tim and Dan.
I have long railed against the imbalance between violence (perceived acceptable) and sexuality (perceived unacceptable) in this country. It frightens me that movies with beheadings and bloodletting and guns galore can merit PG-13 while a decent exposed rack automatically merits an R. Personally, I don’t fear sexuality; I fear gun violence. However, I am ecstatic that Magic Mike is a restricted film. I don’t want Magic Mike trading cards or Magic Mike paraphernalia and I would certainly rather a child played with a Darth Vader action figure than a Big Dick Richie action figure. Say, is that a light saber in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?
Magic Mike (Channing Tatum) is a stripper. Sorry, entrepreneur. Geez, five words into the review and I already screwed it up. He gets the title ‘entrepreneur’ because although stripping pays the bills, he has hobbies like making furniture. Yeah, try selling that line when you’re a female stripper. Channing Tatum, of course, is so good looking that you’ll believe anything he says. He could tell you he’s a doctor and you’d say, “ahhhhh.” People laugh at his jokes when he’s not telling any. I’ve seen it. I was there. Channing Tatum is charming and has a decent sense of humor, but he isn’t funny. Not funny at all and yet, given the right crowd, he’ll get more laughs than Stephen Colbert.
Doncha get it? Mike is awesome, but he’s broken. He has the body of an Olympian and he’s good and sensitive and strong, but he also needs guidance to find the right path … YOU can fix him; he’s the perfect project. He’s like Brad Pitt in Legends of the Fall … but with more nudity.
Mike befriends a drifter, Adam (Alex Pettyfer), and convinces him to come to the Tampa strip club and meet the fellas 
under the guise of “working.” The plot here has every bit the depth of Matthew McConaughey’s acting. Luckily, Adam is a studly drifter, like we all dream, and soon becomes another ranch hand on the sex farm. And he has no talent for it, but hey, he likes the attention. Awwwww. I kinda get this stripping thing. If I entered a room, started taking off my shirt and suddenly women screamed in delight and started stuffing money in my jock, well, I’d probably take my shirt off more often. Alas, life doesn’t work that way. The thing I will never get is the present-day fascination with pre-pubescent boy smoothness. Your dream man can have tattoos but can’t have body hair of any kind? That’s as silly to me as saying all dream girls are blonde.
While I’m there, why is it that a male strip show is a celebration of joy while a female strip show is like an outer circle of Hell? Men baring all on stage is a party; women baring all on stage is a sin. What is up with that?
The hootin’ and hollerin’ and not-so-plotterin’ continues for a looooong time. If you’re too shy to go to a strip club, miss, I certainly recommend the first hour here. Cody Horn shows up occasionally to provide us with much needed shrew time between hunk-offs. Unfortunately, the party has to end; the defining scene in Magic Mike is a downer from several angles. Mike and Adam visit a sorority house dressed as stripper cops. What bothered me about this scene was not actually the fact that Adam force fed ecstasy to a sorority girl or the fact that our “heroes” got into a bitchin’ brawl 
and fled the scene without their clothes or drugs. No, what bothered me was that when they arrived, frat guys were there. And somehow, the gals had managed to corral them all in a separate room (because, well, you know how shy beer-swilling college guys are) and they got to spectate their future wives drooling over hunkier men. Congratulations, every man within ten miles of this screen has been emasculated. Fellas, when you go to a strip club, this is precisely how your woman feels. You kind of have to agree on the sexual boundaries before you invite strippers to co-ed engagements. That’s just common sense, everybody.
Magic Mike hit the 75 minute mark before anything one would consider a plot point. Honestly, this is where the film fails. Had it just been about the fun and the stripping and the loss of innocence for Adam, you could have eked out a victory. But when the drugs and violence started to permeate, you lost every single giddy woman in the crowd. I don’t want to tell you your job, Steven Soderbergh, but … the women came for the sex. This was the fantasy they’re not getting at home. The fantasy doesn’t include drug dealing or percentage-of-the-gross battles. Then again, I don’t profess to know women well, maybe it does.
Perv corner: Channing Tatum gets full dorsal 30 seconds after we meet him. That was an impressive opening. Definitely a “know your audience” moment. The cheering that followed made me wonder if I’d accidentally stumbled upon a bullfight; I was sure it was time to leave despite the naked boobs on screen as well. Tonight is just gonna be full of this, ain’t it? But the longer the film progressed, the more clothing Channing seemed to be wearing; he’s comparitively in full armor for his last non-strip of the night.
Magic Mike has a lot of butts and a lot of shirt removal, but no glory shots. There is a silhouette of a penis so long (and the lone viewer so overselling the moment) that it’s almost certainly a prosthetic and there’s a fuzzy extended close-up of penis pumping (I didn’t know what was going on without audience titter). Abs and asses. If that’s your bag, go bag it.
Sensitive Channing/doing yo’ thang
Pleasin’ th’ ladies/It’s all about wang
Whoa! A plot erupts/That’s hardly gripping
Want to please again?/Just stick to stripping
Rated R, 110 Minutes
D: Steven Soderbergh
W: Reid Carolin
Genre: Chippendale’s
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: I have this friend in Canada who really, really, really digs Channing Tatum.
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Insecure men
