thoughts on Magic Mike

So I went to see Magic Mike today. I saw it with a group of several women for a bachelorette party, which was definitely the way to see it, I think. The theater was packed, primarily also with large groups of women; I'm guessing there were less than ten men in the whole theater, if not less than five. "Last summer there was Bridesmaids, this summer there's Magic Mike!" I exclaimed before we left for the movie. "It's so cool how there's a bachelorette movie, like, every summer!"

The verdict: it was pretty darn good, and in fact, better than it had any right to be or really needed to be. Like, I'm sure no one would have complained if the strip club scenes had been the only good parts in the movie, but it actually had a pretty decent storyline about Channing Tatum's character, Mike, bringing a nineteen-year-old into the stripping business while making moves to get out of it himself. Also, I liked Channing Tatum and Matthew McConaughey quite a bit. I really didn't know who Channing Tatum even was until a few months ago, when a group of us talked about seeing The Vow but never did, then actually did see 21 Jump Street, in which he was surprisingly funny and unsurprisingly good-looking ("Science and magic are the SAME THING!"). Then I read an article about how he really was a male stripper back in the day and proceeded to begin looking forward to seeing Magic Mike. He's a great dancer, and again, that's all he would have really needed to be for this movie, but he's also, as I previously observed, quite funny and charming.

As for McConaughey, he is, as he has always been, very good-looking but also kind of skeevy, which works better here than it has ever worked before. He does the "Alright alright alright!" thing he always does. He plays the bongos shirtless, as he has been known to do. He often is onstage wearing very little besides leather pants and a cowboy hat, though at one point he instead wears an Uncle Sam hat. When we see his house, it turns out he has a portrait of himself wearing the leather pants and cowboy hat with a snake around his neck, as well as a bust of himself. This is good stuff, people.

And, if the movie is true to life, it seems that male stripping is pretty weird business. Like, watching it is humorous in a way that I don't think female stripping probably would be, yet I would imagine it's similar in that it's difficult to get out of it and start doing something legitimate and that (for many people, at least) there's a lot of drinking and drugs involved. There's probably more that could be said there, but I'll leave it at that and just say that I had a good time.