Cinema
Striptease
(15, selected cinemas)
The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love (15, selected cinemas)
Keeping abreast of Demi
Mark Steyn
Demi Moore's breasts hang around Striptease like a brace of silicon albatrosses. I don't know what she keeps in them, but once again they've sunk the movie, notwithstanding that for this airing Demi got more money than any other actress ever: $12.5 million. The problem with Striptease is a simple one: it's supposed to be a comedy; it stars Demi Moore. Now you can make a comedy or you can make a film with Demi Moore, but you can't do both. When Miss Moore had her breasts done, something obviously went wrong and surgeons had to perform an emergency comedy bypass operation. So since then, whatever the role, she's played it the same: a strong woman who determines to have it all in a man's world and thereby 'empow- ers' herself. The empowering usually involves taking her top off. This was her novel approach to Puritan New England in her adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and it's now her equally bizarre take on Carl Hiaasen's comic romp Striptease.
Hiaasen's no Waugh or Wodehouse, but his novels are made for the movies: unusu- ally in comic literature these days, they're full of what are in effect sight gags, so vividly conjured they make you laugh out loud. They're all set in Florida, and they're sadistically satirical: Hiassen is basically pro-swamp, anti-condo, so he takes great delight in creating innocuous tourist char- acters and then feeding them to alligators. Striptease is typical: a big cast of grotesques floating round a handful of relatively nor- mal folks. In this instance, stripper and sin- gle mom Erin Grant (Demi Moore) is locked in a custody battle for her little girl with her ex-husband (Robert Patrick), a man who steals wheelchairs for a living. When the story fell into the hands of pro- ducer Mike Lobell and writer/director Andy Bergman, Hiassen probably thought he'd found his cinematic soulmates: the boys' back catalogue includes Honeymoon in Vegas with its platoon of skydiving Elvis impersonators. But the minute Demi Moore was cast, he must have known it was unlikely that anything even vaguely approx- imating to his novel could be steered through the Scylla and Charybdis of her breasts. I don't like to harp on about her chest, but I do think it's relevant: the Erin of the book is explicitly stated not to have great breasts, but rather to be a good dancer and a winning personality. Demi's Erin is neither; you need something closer to Melanie Griffith's combination of sex and vulnerability.
Miss Moore, though, is what they call a `hardbody' — that's to say, as is the fash- ion, she's toned and muscled and glisten- ing. Fine, but Demi seems to have chosen to take the 'hardbody' look a stage further. For years, men have applied military terms to the upper female torso — bazookas, tor- pedoes — but Miss Moore is the first to turn the guns on them. She wields hers like real, not metaphorical, bazookas: when she stomps out on stage and rips open her front-loading bra, your first instinct is to dive for cover. This may be admirably femi- nist — and Miss Moore's theory seems to be that hardworking strippers are the true repository of feminism — but it doesn't make for likeable company. She has a hard, sour expression throughout the picture; she never smiles; it's difficult to warm to her or care about what happens to her. Her best moment comes when she turns up for a pri- vate show at a sugar baron's yacht. 'Who are you?' asks the security man. 'Barbara Bush,' she says. 'And how about you?' he asks, pointing to her bullet-headed black bodyguard. 'I'm George Bush,' he replies, deadpan. Ving Rhames as the bodyguard and Burt Reynolds as a figuratively and lit- erally oily congressman are two of several in the supporting crew who give the impression they'd really shine if they weren't too busy trying to prop up a mis- cast star vehicle.
The poor film never recovers from its disastrous decision. The poster exemplifies the confusion: a nude Demi is draped in front of the logo like a come-on for some Showgirls-type 'erotica'. It's just about pos- sible to build wild ensemble comedy around a central player who isn't funny. It might conceivably have worked if Demi, like Margaret Dumont with Groucho, had appeared unaware of the comedy. Instead, though, she goes around grouchy, cranky and earnest, as if she actually disapproves of the jokes.
Maria Maggenti's Incredibly True Adven- ture of Two Girls in Love is an incredibly trite adventure about two high school slacker lesbians, complete with every cine- matic cliche and dialogue that's mostly con- fined to 'It's sorta kind like totally y'know ' I like a lesbian movie as much as the next man, but this was too sorta kind like totally ...
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