Movies: Burlesque

I'm not ashamed to admit it: I am a girl, and I am thus the target audience for this film. Even if I consider myself an aloof intellectual, too critical for television and bubble-gum pop, there is something about dance flicks that I just cannot resist. Burlesque takes its best cues from Marilyn Monroe in Gentleman Prefer Blondes, and at its worst moments is like a Lifetime movie designed for an MTV audience, but I loved it all. Sure, small-town Christina Aguilera standing on top of tables at her dead-end diner job in Nowhere, USA, singing with the jukebox after closing as she scrubs tabletops is an embarrassing fantasy, but it is an embarrassing fantasy in which I myself have partaken (aside from the fact that I've never waitressed). Do I wish that I could go to LA and be a burlesque performer? Um, yeah!—well, maybe not LA. I don't like LA. But who doesn't want to lounge onstage in a bustier made out of pearls, sitting in a giant martini glass? Maybe I did watch too many Marilyn movies as a girl.