Striptease

Demi Moore reinvented herself from a hot cutsie girl in the 80's to a powerful sexy woman in the 90's. She used that power to create some pretty dynamic roles at the time, G.I Jane being her best effort.

Striptease is not the greatest movie but it does have enough highlights to make it an ok watch. Rhames is enjoyable as is Reynolds.

Moore however owns the screen on this one. She had power at this time and she knew it and was happy to wield it. Good for her.

The novel "Striptease" was everything you could ask for in a novel. The movie is the complete opposite and a major disappointment for me. I thought Demi was a decent choice and also applauded the casting of Robert Patrick as her good-for-nothing ex, and Ving Rhames as a bodyguard at the club.

However the entire thing ended up being a mess, and I can only hope I can erase the image of Burt Reynolds in his boxers, smothered with petroleum jelly from head to toe, from my mind.

Read the book!!

Striptease

Dire, but strangely fascinating, Demi Moore vehicle about a single mother who turns to a life of stripping in order to gain custody of her daughter. (Robert Patrick is the drug-stealing ex-husband who gains custody of the child.) Ving Rhames is a bodyguard and Burt Reynolds has a nice co-star role as a sleazy political candidate. This movie was extremely bashed when it came out, but it's better than "Showgirls," and sort of watchable. If you don't expect much of a story, then this is for you...be warned, however, that there is a lot of stripteasing in this film.

** / *****

Striptease (1996) is a movie that I recently watched for the first time in a long time on Tubi. The storyline follows a mother going through a divorce who loses visitation of her daughter due to a lack of steady income. She becomes a stripper to build the security she needs to get her daughter back and establish herself. The stripper life will throw her a series of twists and turns.

This movie is directed by Andrew Bergman (It Could Happen to You) and stars Demi Moore (Ghost), Burt Reynolds (Deliverance), Ving Rhames (Pulp Fiction), Robert Patrick (Terminator 2), Paul Guilfoyle (Airforce One) and Armand Assante (Gotti).

This has an absolutely awesome cast that was well selected and fit the storyline perfectly. The strippers were gorgeous. Burt Reynolds was hilarious, and the Vaseline scene is legendary. There's some good humor throughout the movie as Ving Rhames was fantastic and the anaconda scene always makes me crack up. The soundtrack was solid also. The storyline was fairly straightforward but did a great job of depicting strippers as ordinary people with ordinary problems.

Overall, this gets way more criticism than it should. This is entertaining and worth a watch. I would score this a 7/10 and recommend seeing it once.

...the flop that deserves six of its Razzies and the nomination for Worst Picture of the Decade?

I think, "Striptease" (1996) directed by Andrew Bergman based on the book by Carl Hiaasen, is all of the above - a curious mixture of laughs, satire, absurdism, darkness, silliness, and over-seriousness. The latter comes from Demi Moore who plays Erin Grant, the FBI secretary - losing her job and the custody over her daughter to no good small time crook wheelchairs stealing husband (Robert Patrick looking and acting like a stoned, redneck version of Gary Oldman) and who takes a job as an exotic dancer in the local club "Eager Beaver" to earn money for her court appeal. In the club she becomes the hottest attraction and meets many...interesting characters, the most colorful being, of course Congressman David Dilbeck (Burt Reynolds) who "just loves naked women. It's a character flaw" and who is absolutely smitten by Erin. Erin also makes friends with a club bouncer, Shad (Ving Rhames) who is perhaps the best thing in the movie - clever, sharp, sarcastic, with the great sense of humor. One scene where Shad tells to Dilbeck's bodyguards that Meryl Streep used to work in "Eager Beaver" as an exotic dancer and they seem to believe him is brilliant. If only everything had been as good as he was we would've had a really great movie. What do we have now? Well, Demi Moore looks really good with the minimum clothes on. I mean, the woman was a 33 year old mother of three at the time and her body was marvel to behold. I just think that she was too serious, intense, and solemn doing the striptease numbers – after all it is not only strip it is tease, too. It goes to her acting in the movie in general. Reynolds seemed to have a lot of fun with his sleazy drunk Congressman David Dilbeck, election-day choice of Christian groups and a lot of laughs comes from his mannerism and quotes. There are plenty of laughs, actually, in "Striptease" but quite often they seem like the wrong and unintentional type for the movie material.

Who had the best laugh? I'd guess, Demi Moore did after been paid $12.5 million – one of the highest paychecks for an actress back then.