Stripper

Found this while scrolling YouTube. I didn't know if it was a movie or documentary. It was a bit slow till everyone gets to Vegas. I knew the girl who won would win. She did a great job! I wonder what happened to all of them. It's interesting how different strippers look now vs then. Back then it seemed to be more about dancing and talent vs big fake boobs and bottomless.

This is a "documentary" about female strippers who are taking part in a stripping contest. (Do such contests exist?) Most of the women who are featured in the film are reasonably good-looking, and you do get to see them perform. This is definitely one to be watched with one finger on the pause button, if you know what I mean.

I get the feeling the producers had seen "Rocky" recently.

Cinemax put this into their late night, dirty movie lineup a decade or so ago, and it sounded interesting so I watched it. Definately memorable, I've thought a lot about it since, recommended it to people, and no I don't remember much of the naked women (they would strip down to a G-string, I recall.)

Instead it was great to see people in one of the less-well-regarded professions, eagerly competing to be "the best!" for different personal reasons, not the least of which was to just be the best. A lot of planning, and psyching up, and working out, and along the way telling life stories.

One asks her boss, the night club owner, for a few days off to be in the contest. Maybe he didn't realize that she would be a much better draw after being a "world class contestant", because he said no. She had to quit to go, and the viewer wonders how that will work out when the contest is over.

Whether it's titallating is up to you. A memorable sequence is the dancer who hired a personal trainer, got up early every morning, put on a sweat suit, and did a long distance run/job to tone up and slim down. Lot of pounding the pavement, boring exercising, not really too stimulating for the viewer, right?

Or the two that were working a route in Canada, taking the train from one mill town to another. Interesting how they could get off the train, and get to talking to the men in the town quickly, asking really old geezers "you're going to come see my show tonight, right?"

The one who talked about her finances -- strippers don't have that long (maybe to age 40) to make their money. She had been doing okay, but witlessly signed her money over to a scum-boyfriend, now long vanished with the loot, and now she works because she has a little girl. Winning the contest might help her recover financially.

Truthfully, I loved the stories here, maybe you will, too. It plays like a female "Rocky", only "Stripper" was the real thing.

Basically it's about several different strippers that are gearing up to participate in a competition at a stripper convention in Las Vegas. The documentary filmmakers follow the girls, get their back story, and watch how things turn out for them at the big show.

In many ways, it prefigures a lot of the "reality" TV stuff that would come out twenty years later. The hook is to develop rooting interests in each of the contestants and see how it all unfolds.

To that end, "Stripper" has both good points and bad points. The good is that the production values are high and it is moderately entertaining to get invested in the dancers' ambitions. It could have been much more exploitative but tries gamely to be, well, a documentary. To a point, it succeeds. The bad is that, like much reality-based drama, many of the scenes feel manufactured and staged for the cameras. The final competition might just as well have been assembled for the purpose of making this film.

A fair amount is superficial and can't be taken seriously. It's the softest of the soft core porn, so those looking for arousal should look elsewhere. But there's more than a glimmer of entertainment and human insight to be had, especially considering that this was done a generation before every empty-souled schnook looking for attention went on reality shows and both producer and viewer alike knew what to expect.

This film does it well back before people started doing it poorly.

This movie was interesting to me because it showed the behind-the-scenes of strippers' life, which I knew nothing about. I just thought it was a sleazy profession that degrades women, and never thought about the women themselves. I found the story of the single mother especially touching.

This movie revealed to me the sad and human, and sometimes satisfying, side of this profession. There was, of course, some peeping in watching it, but I didn't get aroused by the naked women - it is Not a porno movie, it is a Documentary.

I'm not saying that I'm going to be a stripper myself after I've seen it, but that I view strippers more humanly. All I need now is to watch a movie about the motives of men watching strippers, and maybe that'll change my mind about them too.