Strike a Pose

The first 30 minutes are okay, perhaps even enjoyable, the story is set up and quite interesting. But after that.. It's just pure TLC style. The story is nice, but it just did not add any new information after a while.

I have never walked out of a movie in a theatre before, but I did on this one.

I like what this group did, together with Madonna, for the acceptance of homosexuals in the world, only this movie does not do the tour, these men, or any of the people involved any good.

I think that even if you are very interested in Madonna, you would not enjoy this movie.

Lots of crying. Documentary-makers love it. Almost everybody in the movie gets to cry. Coming out of the closet and AIDS, AIDS, AIDS. No, it is not "powerful." It is stagey and manipulative. The individual stories are familiar. The only difference is Madonna.

Like the gay Waiting for Godot. Everybody talks about Madonna, but she's not there.

"We were like a family" is the motif. I doubt that the dancers were really that naive. They were Madonna's employees. Did they really think that they were going to be pals with her once the tour was over?

There is a shot of a mother watching a video of her dead son. There is a discussion of Bell's palsy.

There is an awkward reunion dinner apparently staged for this film. It's as if the dancers know what is expected. Lots of hugging and more crying. Declarations of undying love and friendship. A cringe-inducing replay of truth or dare. Everyone aware of the cameras. It seems self- conscious.

What do you do with your life if it peaks when you're 22? To be cast out of MDNA paradise. There are vague images of the dancers in what may be their present careers. One of them is a waiter, but it is implied that they are still in dance. No specifics are given. The idea is to leave on an upbeat note.

This documentary is truly moving and teaches many lessons. As not having witnessed the HIV epidemic (born 1993), this docu gave me a harsh but eye opening impression what it would have been. But most of all the Irony of the tour and the emotion that it gets out of them, when they talk about it years later. This is pain, this life. Amazing.

Strike a Pose (2016) is a Dutch documentary that was directed by Ester Gould and Reijer Zwaan. It tells the story of the six surviving members of the seven-man dance group that accompanied Madonna on her Truth or Dare tour.

It's a truly sad film. These young, talented men reached great heights during the tour. They became famous in their own right. They were like a family, and Madonna, who was in her 30's at the time, was like their mother hen.

When the tour ended, they learned that they weren't really a family. Some of the dancers complained that Madonna had outed them in the movie Truth or Dare (1991). The conflict ended in a lawsuit.

One died of AIDS, and the others have struggled with HIV, alcohol, and drugs. None of them maintained the heights they had achieved during the tour. All of them are struggling. (Some more than others, but still struggling.)

In retrospect, these talented men would have probably done better if they hadn't been chosen for the tour. No one would have believed it then, but we can see it now.

I didn't enjoy this film. The men may have been great dancers, and they may have felt like a family, but they each went their own way, and that way was down. I had hoped the movie would have had more dancing, but there wasn't very much of that either.

Not my kind of movie, but the film carries an high IMDb rating of 7.7, so obviously I'm in the minority. I think dancing works better on the large screen than it does on the small screen. However, this movie will work well on either, because there wasn't much dancing.

We saw the film at Rochester's excellent Little Theatre, as part of ImageOut, the wonderful Rochester LGBT Film Festival.l

It was really interesting to follow up on their lives. They have had so many struggles through the years trying to find their way in life. Although the guys don't hold resentment, I must say that this makes me dislike Madonna even more than I already did. In my opinion, she took hold of "kids" who thought they were family and when she was done with them, she was done...She's a very cold person.