I Want It That Way: Magic Mike XXL

*Analysis of a scene will be a feature on Curtsies and Hand Grenades where I take a look at specific scenes in movies and discuss them. Today I am going to look at 4 moments from Magic Mike XXL and how they tie into the film's central ideas on satisfaction* 

Magic Mike XXL is a film overflowing with life and positive energy. At it's core it is a road trip of friends getting together for one last hurrah, and those pockets of love that spread throughout a group of friends in doing a job. That work is specifically the business of male stripping or as the characters in this movie refer to themselves "male entertainment". Unlike the previous the film there isn't much cynicism to be found here and the camera shifts from the performers to the audience. When I saw Magic Mike with my girlfriends back in 2012 it was a bit of a letdown to everyone in my core group of friends except me, and it was because they were given a movie that didn't satisfy their needs as viewers. They came to watch a stripper movie, but what was delivered was a story about economy. Magic Mike XXL still features some of those same ideas, but they are appropriately slight and only mentioned offhand. The satisfaction of the viewer- specifically the heterosexual women in attendance- is paramount and a few scenes in the movie act as a fulcrum for the type of audience reaction Magic Mike XXL is trying to elicit.

Scene 1: Backstreet at the Gas Station: 

"I bet you can go in there and make her day...That's your goal. Just go in there and make her smile" 

Mike is persistent that the boys change up their routines as they head to Myrtle Beach to the World Summit of Male Stripping Contests, and Big Dick Ritchie is unsure if he should stop doing the fireman routine. He hates fire, the music he dances to, and everything else about the dance, but it works. So, Mike asks Ritchie if he's a fireman to which he replies "I'm a male entertainer" so Mike asks him to go into a gas station and make a girl smile. It's a test, but it also works as a barometer for where the movies heart is at. Magic Mike XXL consistently toes the line between the bro road trip movie and the filmic equivalent of an idea of female satisfaction. Women are first and foremost the #1 priority of the men, and I'll get into that more later, but this is a simple scene where one man dances for a one woman's approval. Approval, being a running theme in XXL.

There isn't a whole lot of room to play around with camera movement or an elaborate dance routine due to the confined nature of the aisles in the gas station, but graceful camerawork, editing, and image selection make the scene pop exactly the way it should. The scene begins with Ritchie being unsure of himself as The Backstreet Boys "I Want it that Way" begins to play over the radio station. Ritchie begins to sway his hips and ass in tune with the song to get her attention, but she's still preoccupied with her phone. The camera sweeps back down the aisle and when the songs first drums kick in Ritchie does a turn and pops open a bag of cheetoes all over the floor. There is a cut to his face and hers. The mess finally got her attention. She seems unamused, but Ritchie's going for it. At the very least he's livening up her mundane day. The scene follows Ritchie to a pepsi machine, and there's a subtle zoom on Mike and the boys cheering him on. This is his moment to really take a chance. He takes a water bottle out of the machine and simulates ejaculation with the bottle right when the song is hitting the biggest part of the chorus. Perfect. Ridiculous. His boys think this is BRILLIANT in all caps and Mike is screaming "yes! yes! yes!" outside as Ritchie dumps water all over himself. The camera follows Ritchie right back up the aisle as he takes his shirt off for the girl (who still appears unimpressed) and now he's as vulnerable as he can be, until he starts humping the floor. She stares down at him, he looks up into her eyes. Ritchie thinks he has things in the bag. This is what girls want right? He finally asks her how much for the cheetoes and water, and then she smiles. Mission Accomplished.

I love a handful of things about this scene, but especially the absurdity of the male idea of female sexuality. The biggest moment in this sequence is the simulated ejaculation. These guys can't stop thinking with their dicks. Mike and the rest of the crew lose their shit when he faux ejaculates in the gas station. She never smiles at this moment. She only smiles at his comment asking about the cheetoes and water, because it's so absurd and played straight. The sheer audacity of this guy to do all of this in her store is eventually what makes her crack, not the dancing. It also just barely opens the door for the sort of lengths they'll go to satisfy women in this movie, which remain pretty ridiculous.

Scene 2: Serenading a Queen 

"Queens, ain't she beautiful?" 

Magic Mike XXL is inspired in part by fourth wave feminism. Women are often referred to as "Queens" and each man in this movie seems like he reads the Critique My Dick Pick blog set up by @moscaddie. There is a softening of masculinity in each of the male characters here that shows masculinity not as something toxic, but vulnerable, nurturing and sensitive while still being hard enough to not make men lose what makes them so appealing. Andre (Childish Gambino-Donald Glover) raps about this.  The very first thing Andre does is ask Caroline her name and after hearing that she is named after her grandmother he asks "what she do". He remarks that Caroline's grandmother was a strong woman. He respects women.

And then he freestyles. He sets Caroline down and stares right into her eyes and delivers a message about how she's worthy of being loved, and then the chorus happens. Caroline, this could be something special, this love of mine it will never let go, ooh if I could make you mine I would treat you so special, be mine Caroline. She smiles. Once again, the endgame of the men in Magic Mike is to bring a smile on a woman's face. Caroline was just out with her friends trying to have a good time and she did. Andre put her feelings out there in the open for everyone to see, but instead of being the ridiculous almost laughing response from the woman in the gas station this one is of genuine affection.

Much has been said of how Soderbergh's digital cinematography equalizes skin tone in Magic Mike XXL and makes everyone stunning, and that isn't just something happening in the colour. What's so radical about this is that the images are also backing up how everyone is lit to look. There is one scene earlier on in this section of the movie where former pro football star Michael Strahan dances around a woman who is black, and fat, but that woman's enjoyment isn't treated any differently than any of her white or skinny counterparts. Her arousal, her happiness is put on equal footing with everyone else. That's beautiful. That's not just lip service for calling women in the film "queens", because when you're calling women who usually aren't represented in movies and treated as beautiful "queens" that's something remarkably feminist, and rare.

Scene 3: Heaven

"We're healers."

Andre and Ken (Matt Bomer) talk about the joys of making women happy in a scene preceding the one in the above screencap. Andre says "We can be healers. We can give these women what they want just by listening to them. Their boyfriends and husbands don't but we do.". All of that is put into effect directly in the next scene. Mike and the Boys meet back up with a group of girls they befriended at the beginning of the movie, because they needed a place to crash. What they find upon arriving at the lavish mansion is that the Zoe's (Amber Heard) mom (Andie MacDowell) and her girlfriends are having a girls night out. They're all drunk. They're all impressed with the men that have just walked in their door, but what could have been an awkward situation quickly turns into communion.

 Everyone in room begins to have a conversation about sex- more accurately, the women talk and the men listen. When Ken finds out that Mae (Jane McNeil) is upset that her husband never wants to have sex with the lights on he begins to ask her why and about her fantasies. Ken, being the "healer" that he is does his best to re-enact what this woman said she wanted. Like Andre, Ken has a budding music career so he sings her a song. He looks into her eyes and holds her. The distance that she had been feeling with her husband is still there, but this encounter gives her the confidence to know what she wants. It's some facsimile of pure joy.

A fascinating thing about Magic Mike XXL is that the episodic nature of the road trip is given weight by a cyclical narrative. Everything eventually comes back around to mean something greater later on. The healer conversation is one example, but the final act is even more resonant. Mike invites Zoe to Myrtle Beach, because she's depressed. He tells her he's going to win back her smile after they have a long conversation about cake versus cookies and her personal life. The line about cookies comes back around in his song selection for that final dance, and even Ritchie's fireman routine is dropped in favour of an earlier mentioned marriage proposal dance. Every little thing in Magic Mike XXL gets a payoff, but the greatest of all these moments are when happiness is given back to women, and by effect to the audience.

Scene 4: All I Do is Win

"I'm a cookie monster"

The most lavish sequence in the entire movie is the final set piece where 2 dancers mirror each others moves in a sequence that's like if Cocteau and Minnelli decided to craft a scene around stripping together. It is gorgeous, perfectly choreographed and resonant. Despite all of the attention paid to dancing one thing becomes clear, Zoe's face is the true focal point of the action. She's always lit just a little bit brighter than everything around her and the framing and choreography work around her reaction. There is one moment where Mike picks her up and places her head between his legs and there's a zoom in on his face, but then goes right back to her own reaction. The camera pulls out from the action to showcase the symmetry and dancing, but always comes back looking for her approval by focusing on her face. She goes from embarrassed to flattered to enraptured by the time things close up and Mike asks her if she got her smile back. She did.

The stark difference between the first movie and XXL is the intended audience of the dance. In Magic Mike XXL the women are always key instead of the act of stripping itself. Soderbergh's movie was never about getting a warm reaction out of the audience members, but Gregory Jacobs picture is obsessed with earning a smile. DJ Khaled's "All I Do is Win" plays over the films closing moments, and winning in this instance was about approval from the woman in the gas station to Zoe and in the audience. This was about making women happy. It made me happy.

Everlasting Maternity: Angel's Egg (Mamoru Oshii, 1985)

An apocalyptic pall hangs over an unnamed land and one girl lurches forward in the shadows. Her spaghetti hair is knotted and overtakes her frail body, tattered oversized clothing covers her alabaster flesh, and she's hiding something. An oval of adoration. A piece of life in a land that has none. A future in a world devoid of such things. She continuously walks, seemingly reaching towards some sort of peace, cradling a singular egg that could be the only thing worth fighting for left in this world of overbearing darkness.

Mamoru Oshii's Angel's Egg is coloured by tragedy, and exists as a post World War II picture in the lens of Japan. The setting is never explicitly named, but something has been taken from wherever this ragged fairy tale is set. Elaborately painted backgrounds convey a world on the edge of total destruction. All that is left are fragments of nature and ghosts of buildings that once stood tall. Cracked ceramics and broken childhood toys are furniture. This sense of loss is so exquisitely manufactured through landscape imagery that as purely a reaction to the devastation caused by the atomic bombs this would be an undeniable example of anti-war cinema, but there is more present here than that. A maternal cinema that captures a primal need within some to give birth, in this case metaphorically, to a new world.

The Christian imagery is everywhere in this movie, and perhaps the strongest of these images is the idea of the virgin mother. Our lead character represents this idea, but a stronger idea is present in the simplicity of carrying a child and the potential for what this child could bring by existing. The unbound questions of possibilities of pregnancy or in this case bringing this egg to hatch. She adores this egg with everything in her, and it's her only hope in a world that has torn itself apart with war and hatred. She is the only light that shines in this visual painting. Occasionally the reflection of her hair creates a halo effect. She is a mother, She is love, and she is god overseeing the last of humanity.

Is every mother a god in the sense that she gives life? Oshii's film positions the girl as that figure. A bringer of life in a world that only sees a void. The machines and creations of men have killed the world so the purity of a girl as a representative figure of hope is evocative. A forward moving, abstract narrative calls upon a journey as she tries to keep this egg safe. She oversees the wreckage of the world, and she only grows closer to what it is that she's carrying. The tragedy of Angel's Egg is that everything passes, and men, even in worlds that don't fully represent our own, will shatter everything that is beautiful.

She screams at the grave of the earth, and the tragedy that has been wrought. A mothers child is lost. A god weeps over her planet.

There is a devastating moment of clarity within my own personal cinema when she cradles her now flat stomach. That image is of pure grief, and perfectly illustrates in direct blunt imagery the hollowness of losing a potential child. In my own case, it is theoretical. Grieving over something never afforded to my body, with the lingering empty feeling of knowing this is for you, but not for you. I'll never give birth. I am infertile. Viewing cinema within the personal creates an ache in my body when that image is presented in front of me. It is a mirror of my own need and desire for pregnancy, and ultimately grasping at nothing but loose cloth and things that will only exist in dream.

Queerness and Corn: Tom at the Farm (Xavier Dolan, 2014)

The two images above offer a snapshot of the stylistic differences one can come to expect from Xavier Dolan's attempt at stripping down his aesthetics to suit the text surrounding his queer thriller, Tom at the Farm. In Laurence Anyways and Mommy, Dolan's style could be more easily associated with fashionable romanticism and blunt metaphorical imagery (especially in the case of Laurence). Tom operates on a different level; replacing the vibrancy of colours with muted browns, and grandiosity substituted for something more altogether minimal.

What is most fascinating about the sudden shift for Dolan is how it plays into how queerness operates on a metropolitan and regional level. In some ways, arriving in this small town, and in making this movie Dolan has closeted what has distinctly made him a remarkable filmmaker to date, and that is perhaps the greatest metaphor he could have offered in visualizing the differences between small town and metropolitan queerness in Canada. It doesn't completely work, but it's a fascinating idea. When push comes to shove Dolan can't help, but overemphasize things. Aspect ratios shift, Tom's (played by Dolan) hair matching the cornfield exactly as he sprints in a breath-taking sequence, and the karaoke flashback seems more appropriate in his previous films. The closet then, cannot hold Dolan, just like it cannot hold Tom.

From a form perspective Tom is perhaps Dolan's greatest achievement, because it doesn't falter nearly as frequently as his previous movies when matched up against the themes he wants to present. Tom is about sheltering queerness, and the danger of the closet. The violence present throughout the movie and threat of more violence is most present when Tom is confronted with his dead lovers (Tom is attending his lovers funeral) brother (Francis) who is doing the best he can to keep his brother's bisexuality a secret from the other citizens of this small farming town. In a scene later on Tom is talking to a bartender who tells him about a time that Francis ripped another man's mouth open for even bringing his brothers sexuality up. This is made even more interesting by the sense that Francis is also queer. There's a real attraction between Tom and Francis that ponders the idea of this picture becoming closer to a persona/swap narrative than a thriller based around the reveal of queerness.

There are moments of softness between the two, like this moment where Francis helps Tom wash the blood off of his hands after helping deliver a baby calf. They share a dance together later on, and Tom even admits to wanting to stay at the farm house and help Francis run the place. Is this some attempt at delivering themes on stockholm syndrome or has he fallen in love with Francis because he reminds him of his dead lover? There, however lies the problem of Tom at the Farm, it's too overstuffed, despite being an exercise in Dolan's minimized style, to deliver on many of the ideas that are presented in the script.

The ultimate undoing is vagueness. Dolan has previously laid things on incredibly thick to get a point across. He does that in an incredibly beautiful way in Laurence Anyways, but when that is inverted into a chorus of maybes and almosts as it is here it feels like a betrayal. Perhaps, that is the ultimate point of Tom at the Farm and why the eventual ending feels closer to relief  rather than catharsis, but it feels unsatisfying to leave so many of these ideas about internalized homophobia, small town bigotry, and the parallel love/hate between Tom and Francis barely explored. Instead when Tom finally gets away he buries everything behind him. He'll never fully understand this week, and we won't either.

Madness and Women: Queen of Earth (Alex Ross Perry, 2015)

 I'm excited. A final still frame of Elisabeth Moss trapped in laughter gives way to credits and I feel disheveled, invigorated, surprised and unsure. I want to say what I experienced was something close to amazement, but everything is hard to grasp, because Queen of Earth is the type of movie that one cannot place their fingers upon fully at the close. It's a little too vague in every way imaginable to simply be about one thing, and Perry is a genius at structuring his pictures so that narrative feels resolutely important to the proceedings. In Queen of Earth's case the one-day-for-a-full-week horror movie as anti-vacation at a Lake House recalls the first act of Je, Tu, Il, Elle refashioned through Roman Polanski's Apartment Trilogy, which makes things feel familiar, but altogether different from the disciples it so obviously takes from.

Catherine (Elisabeth Moss) and Virginia (Katherine Waterston) are best friends, but they seem to hate each other. They share every last detail of their lives in long conversations that link them as spiritual sisters. When Catherine's father dies after killing himself Catherine shuts herself off from the world to rehabilitate herself and her career as an artist at Virginia's vacation house that belongs to her parents (they both benefit from nepotism in some regards). While spending the week in this cabin things begin to unravel for Catherine as the vacation from herself becomes a series of avoiding contact with other people, bodily breakdown and an evolving sense of inwardness that leaves her in a panicked state of depression. The same thing that eventually killed her father.

The narrative of how close these women are slightly indulges in the persona/swap trope made famous by Mulholland Dr., 3 Women and godmother picture Persona. Moss and Waterstone at first seem to only exist in front of one another, and a long take sequence of a conversation physically links them. "This makes us the same", Virginia says at one point. Catherine enters in one frame and Virginia reappears in another. This is all perhaps just a smokescreen though, as a means of perpetuating the idea of female friendship as both endearing and toxic that Perry seems to buy into. The yin-yang quality of good and evil and love and hate seems to exist in every moment between the two. It's ludicrous, but quickly twists into a singular experience, and the picture that had once presented itself as a sister to those others becomes Catherine's film entirely.

That movie would not work if Elisabeth Moss were not on fucking point throughout. Her ascension as one of the best actors working today began with Mad Men, and has brought us other fine performances such as Top of the Lake and another Alex Ross Perry picture, Listen Up Philip, but it is here in Queen of Earth where her skills as an actor have been brought to the forefront and should, hopefully, guarantee her the chance to play any role she desires in the future. There's one scene in this movie where Catherine has been sabotaged, and her reclusion has been disrupted by a party that Virginia is throwing. Something seems off though, and her anxiety in being around others forces her to have a panic attack and she envisions them touching her body. She's been discussing with Virginia the pain her bones are causing her previously so this is at the apex of her uncomfortability around people. She cannot handle this in the slightest, so the following morning when another woman innocently touches Catherine's face, it is a moment of utmost horror, and Moss' reaction to this is devastating. I could barely breathe in this moment, and it was then that I knew the insular nature of her character was something I was completely enveloped in due to Moss' performance.

Queen of the Earth is also a testament to the power tone can have over a horror movie. Perry has cited Roman Polanski's The Apartment Trilogy in interviews when discussing his work here, and it shows, and as he considers these movies to be comedies in one way or another his movie isn't without moments of bleak laughter. This however, is an unsettling movie, and with each passing day of Catherine waking up in the same outfit with the garbage of barely eaten food piling up around her the claustrophobia of the setting overtakes any sense of black comedy and Queen lurches towards pure horror. There's a disorienting effect surrounding Perry's camerawork and Sean Price Williams incredible super 16 cinematography. Perry astounds with his ability with a camera, creating split screens out of real space and framing bodies in opposite ends of functionality in one moment and dissolving imagery of the nature that surrounds them the next. I'm most impressed by his ability to shift gears when the film calls for it, because when Queen of Earth moves into the depression fueled failings of Catherine after a male neighbour (Patrick Fugit in a role that undoes his Almost Famous popularity) is interjected into the plot he deftly captures her inability to function by altering his lens from Catherine and Virginia's shared mental state to just Catherine's. His repetitious framing on her ever-dirty nightgown and unkempt hair, the dirtyness of her body, the bed she lays in, and the cave she is building around herself creates a sense of isolation within the character and the viewer and with the power of Moss' note for note perfect performance Perry can achieve everything he set out for.

This is a great movie, maybe an amazing one, but that's unknown after a single viewing. At current times the feeling of being overwhelmed takes over me. The thought of chasing this movie and trying to pin down what it means or how it gets there is an ecstasy. Unlocking a picture can bring with it its own merits, but unraveling the mystery of why a film is so effecting towards you personally is something else entirely. Queen of Earth feels like the sort of luggage I'll be carrying with me for the rest of my life.

Queen of Earth will be in limited release August 26, 2015.