(We don’t usually post reviews after the US release, but this one got snarled up in my hard drive earlier this week and I didn’t want to waste it. I’ve noticed a number of readers posting thoughts on the film in yesterday’s Cinejabber post, so look on this as your “Tell us what you thought of Burlesque’” post into the bargain.)
“There’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure,” a music-critic friend once told me. “Just songs that work and songs that don’t. And any song that works is a pleasure.” He may have been talking about pop music (and justifying the expense spent on some rather dubious concert tickets), but the sentiment is just as true of cinema: there are enough wholly joyless bad films out there that one needn’t feel remorse for liking those that sparkle a little.
Or a lot, as in the case of Steven Antin’s sweetly stupid and gleefully tatty backstage musical “Burlesque,” a kind of cinematic party horn that unfurls for nearly two full hours, pausing only occasionally for wheezily abridged plot extension. Heroically spry performances adjoin rancidly inept ones, peppery one-liners encircle bat-brained narrative turns, even the music veers from choice cabaret to hoary album offcuts – and this gurning, flailing whole is held together with the irrepressibly sincere let’s-put-on-a-show enthusiasm of a high-school drama teacher given a dream budget. It’s hard to shake the suspicion that Antin is just out of shot throughout, wielding a glue gun and a spare bag of sequins.