![]() ![]() …But I think I see a lotta lawwwwbreakers in the house tonight.” He asks the crowd, “Can you ever touch this? Well, the law says that you cannot touch. The first shot of his face is him grabbing his crotch (in leather pants). McConaughey, a one-time fresh-faced leading man ( A Time To Kill) turned rom-com punchline ( Failure To Launch?) turned dude known for playing the bongo drums shirtless, opens the film in front of a screaming crowd of women. (Maybe the Academy voters just got confused when they gave him the Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club instead of for playing a club buyer named Dallas). Casting is probably half of acting, and Matthew McConaughey as Dallas is one of the most cosmically perfect mergers of acting performance and public persona in cinema history. As both movie characters and public personae, McConaughey represented Tatum’s potential, realized. It’s hard to imagine a starker example of that actually coming to pass than Channing Tatum in 2012, who went from a mumbly himbo we loved making fun of (C-Tates, as we called him on FilmDrunk) to two legitimately brilliant performances in Magic Mike and 21 Jump Street (on which he was also a producer).Ĭhanning Tatum feels like everyone’s “local boy makes good.” Yet there’s a reason Magic Mike opens on McConaughey’s character. Every heartthrob and sexpot, or maybe just every heartthrob and sexpot’s agent, dreams that they’ll be able to hone their craft - through all the extra opportunities show business naturally affords beautiful people - and one day become real actors. Not only was it a smart business move, it was good art. Producing his own semi-autobiographical starring vehicle that spawned a franchise. Tatum plays the whole thing beautifully and I could write a whole separate essay here about how Magic Mike was the moment when Channing Tatum achieved the actor’s version of his character’s dream in the film - not just starring in it, but owning a piece of it. His money is no good here he can’t escape his circumstances. ![]() It doesn’t matter how much cash Magic Mike puts on the table, he still can’t trade it for trust or assets. Because what was the foreclosure crisis if not the event when so many Americans realized that the houses they “owned” were actually just rented from a bank? There’s a reason that one of the climactic scenes in Magic Mike is Mike trying (and failing) to charm a bank representative into giving him a small business loan. “I want to hear you say the word ,” Mike says to Dallas in their first scene together, “ Equity.”īasically, Mike wants to own something. Partly for the money, but also partly because Dallas (McConaughey) has promised him equity in a future club Dallas he’s opening in Miami. Tatum’s character in Magic Mike is an aspiring furniture designer who works in construction and owns a car detailing business, who moonlights as a male stripper. Magic Mike was set in Tampa, Florida, which is partly a semi-autobiographical reflection of the fact that ex-male stripper Channing Tatum grew up there, but also partly a reflection of the financial crisis, which hit Tampa particularly hard (to paraphrase Billy Corben, Florida has always been, first and foremost, a real estate scam). Steven Soderbergh (who directed the original and returns for Last Dance) was so unsubtle in making Magic Mike a financial crisis movie, in fact, that it’s only a testament to how good the stripping was that anyone could’ve been so dumbstruck as to miss that this was a financial crisis movie. I don’t begrudge anyone for just wanting to see the dicks shake (for those people, there’s Magic Mike XXL), but I also think that bait-and-switch is an acceptable strategy if you’re tricking people into appreciating art. Male stripping and professional wrestling are both heavily kitsch, but both movies are about exploring and examining that kitsch for what it says and what it means rather than simply reselling it. People showed up expecting a fun romp about male strippers with lots of dance numbers, and what they got was more like The Wrestler with pleather speedos. I can understand audiences maybe not being able to fully appreciate Magic Mike for what it was in its own time. I’m speaking, of course, of McConaughey’s turn as “Dallas” in 2012’s Magic Mike, whose second sequel, Magic Mike’s Last Dance, opens this weekend. It’s always bugged me that Matthew McConaughey had to play a rodeo cowboy dying of AIDS in Dallas Buyers Club to win an Oscar, when he’d already given one of the defining performances of an entire decade two years earlier.
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