Striptease

 (1996)

Striptease Blu-ray despite great video and audio falls short as a Blu-ray release
After losing custody of her daughter, Erin Grant takes a job stripping to raise money for an appeal. She's soon embroiled in multiple complications, as her ex tries to use her job against her, a corrupt congressman becomes infatuated with her, various parties try to blackmail the congressman, and the elected official's handlers consider drastic means to remove Erin from their boss's life.

For more about Striptease and the Striptease Blu-ray release, see the Striptease Blu-ray Review

Starring: Demi Moore, Burt Reynolds, Armand Assante, Ving Rhames, Robert Patrick, Barbara Alyn Woods
Director: Andrew Bergman

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Striptease Blu-ray Review

Even Worse the Second Time Around

Reviewed by Michael Reuben, March 5, 2012

Striptease ended two careers. The first was Demi Moore's as a box office superstar. When you're paid $12 million for a film, and its opening weekend gross is about the same amount, your stock in Hollywood falls very far, very fast. Even though Striptease ultimately made money overseas, Moore's career hit a wall, and her next film, Ridley Scott's G.I. Jane, had to be a box office smash to wipe away the memory. It didn't even come close.

The second career that fell victim to Striptease's belly flop was that of writer-director Andrew Bergman, whose resume lists such classics as Blazing Saddles, Fletch and The In-Laws (both the good original and the bad remake). Bergman's previous directing credits include one bona fide comedy classic, The Freshman, and two minor gems, Honeymoon in Vegas and It Could Happen to You. But after the stench left by Striptease, he would get only one more shot at the director's chair: 2000's Isn't She Great, about which the less said, the better.

Has time revealed hidden virtues in Bergman's and Moore's collaboration? In a word, no. Striptease is such a disaster that it can't even match the campy "so bad it's good" entertainment value of Showgirls, with which it shares bad taste and bare flesh but not much else. Where Showgirls tried to be shocking (and failed), Striptease tried to be . . . well, that's part of the problem. The film suffers from an ongoing identity crisis. Is it a farce about politics? A satire about divorce? A grotesque tale about a strip club? A dark and dangerous crime story à la Pulp Fiction? A sentimental yarn about the bond between a mother and her daughter? It's all well and good to say, "We offer all those things!", but then you'd better have a director who's a master at balancing and calibrating shifts in tone and performance. Andrew Bergman couldn't do it (though, for reasons discussed below, it may not have been entirely his fault).



Erin Grant (Moore) divorces her boozing, pill-popping petty thief of a husband, Darrell (Robert Patrick), after his arrest cost her a job as an FBI secretary. But the judge (Louis Seeger Crume) gives Darrell custody of their daughter, Angela (Rumer Willis, Moore's real daughter), because the judge was a fan of Darrell's youthful football exploits. What's a desperate mother to do? Why, raise money for an appeal by stripping, of course. Erin makes it clear to her co-workers at the Eager Beaver topless dancing bar that she has to raise the $15,000 needed for an appeal before her next court date, so that she no longer works at the club when she's next before the judge. The fact that Darrell will then be able to smear Erin as an ex-stripper doesn't seem to occur to her.

We never see how Erin gets hired or makes friends at the Eager Beaver. When we catch up with her after the opening titles, she's something of a paradox. She fits right in backstage, where all the ladies are the best of friends and there isn't a hint of rivalry or conflict and not a single catfight. But out front, Erin's the classy one, with fancy moves, stylish outfits and emotionally expressive dancing that distinguish her from the tassled, tawdry moves of her cohorts and inexplicably whip the Eager Beaver's clientele into a frenzy. One of her admirers is the club's stoic bouncer, Shad (Ving Rhames), who is respectful. Another is dissolute Congressman Bob Dilbeck, who is not. Dilbeck is played by Burt Reynolds in a grating, sketch-comedy caricature that was supposed to be a comeback role. It's hard to believe this is the same actor who gave a powerful dramatic performance in Deliverance (1972) and would give an Oscar-nominated one the following year in Boogie Nights (1997).

Drunk and entranced by Erin, Dilbeck gets into an altercation with a bachelor party and is recognized and photographed. With an upcoming reelection campaign, this makes him a target for blackmailers. One of them is sweet, harmless Jerry (William Hill), another of Erin's fans, who just wants the congressman to help her with her custody battle. Another is the lawyer (Stuart Pankin) for the injured groom at the bachelor party, who sees dollar signs dancing, because Dilbeck's biggest backers are sugar magnates Willy and Chris Rojo (Gianni Russo and José Zúñiga), who can't afford to lose their point man on Capitol Hill after spending so much on him. Unfortunately for all the blackmailers, the Rojos are more gangsters than businessmen. They instruct their chief lieutenant, Moldovsky (Paul Guilfoyle), not to pay blackmail, but to to clean up the situation at whatever cost—including Erin, if necessary.

Meanwhile, Erin keeps looking for her daughter, who is being dragged around Florida assisting her father's new "business", which involves stealing wheelchairs from hospitals. The first real offer of help comes in the form of a homicide detective, Lt. Garcia (Armand Assante), who shows up asking questions when the Rojos start dropping bodies. He takes enough pity on Erin to make inquiries about her husband. He also gives her some notion of the mess she's gotten herself into.

If you're familiar with Bergman's The Freshman, it's possible to discern the outlines of the film he might have intended with Striptease: a generally comic caper with a (mostly) innocent protagonist at the center surrounded by operators ranging from the merely mischievous to the truly evil. Many of the The Freshman's characters were exaggerated for comic effect (e.g., Bruno Kirby's Victor, who kept you guessing until the very end), and a few were true grotesques (notably, Paul Benedict's detestable film professor, Arthur Fleeber, author of The Fleeber Treatise). But The Freshman had something going for it that Striptease entirely lacks: believable characters. Matthew Broderick's Clark Kellogg was a credible portrait of a kid from Vermont dumped into an alien urban environment and suddenly sucked into plots and adventures he could scarcely comprehend, while Marlon Brando's recreation of his character from The Godfather was a one-of-a-kind high-wire act poised between parody and personification (he was Brando, after all).

Striptease has a hole at its center, and her name is Demi Moore. Not for one second does Moore make Erin Grant believable as a blue-collar working woman who married badly and now has to pick up the pieces of her life as best she can. With her toned figure, perfectly coiffed hair, expensive make-up and classy outfits, Moore looks every inch the Hollywood star plunked down in a trashy environment and destined to remain there no longer than Paris Hilton for a reality show. (Note how quickly Erin relocates from a derelict shack of a home to a fancy apartment, even though she's supposed to be saving every penny for attorney's fees.) Even in what should be the film's most affecting scene, when Erin discovers that her daughter managed to slip behind the curtain and watch her perform and has to confront the shame of seeing herself through her daughter's eyes, Moore gives such a superficial performance that the moment dies on the screen.

With the central performance AWOL, what hope does the rest of the picture have? One desperate attempt at comedy or suspense follows another, and not one of them ignites. Twelve years ago, the film might have drawn viewers on the strength of its bare flesh, but in today's internet world of "anything goes", it's too tame even to cause a ripple.

Striptease Blu-ray, Video Quality

 

Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray is a capable rendering of Striptease's tricky photography by Stephen Goldblatt (The Help). The blacks are strong and solid, which is crucial for this film, because so many scenes occur either at night or in the darkness of the Eager Beaver. The performances by the dancers are full of flashing lights and changing colors, and these are likely areas for motion artifacts, but I didn't see any. (Extracting a good still image of a dancer in motion is a whole different subject.) Colors are appropriately vibrant and saturated in the club, and the Florida pastels stand out in elegant locale's like Dilbeck's hotel suite and the boat where he meets Erin. More prosaic places like the courtroom where Erin loses custody have a more muted palette. Fine detail is evident throughout the frame. The grain patterns appear natural and well-controlled, without evidence of high-frequency filtering, artificial sharpening or other inappropriate digital tampering. Although the film has been issued on a BD-25, no compression artifacts were observed.

Striptease Blu-ray, Audio Quality

 

The most aggressive use of the surround channels on Striptease's 5.1 track, presented in DTS- HD MA, occurs in the Eager Beaver, where the sound mixers have done a superb job of recreating the enveloping, thumping, overpumped club sound for the musical selections that accompany the various dances. Erin prefers songs by Annie Lennox, either from her solo career or with the Eurythmics, and the bass extension in these scenes is more powerful than on the actual albums (but without the boomy effect of a cheap stereo system). Compare the sound mix to the scene where Erin rehearses to a tape in her apartment (and is interrupted by a visit from Lt. Garcia), and the difference in the mix is immediately obvious. Since I happen to like many of these songs ("Little Bird", "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)", "Money Can't Buy It"), these rejiggered mixes were a saving grace that helped get me through a film I would have turned off long before the end, if not for the requirement of writing a review.

The remainder of the mix is solid and serviceable, with clear dialogue, a general sense of ambiance and almost unnoticeable incidental scoring by Howard Shore. If you're at all like me, by the second half of the film, you'll be praying for more scenes at the Eager Beaver, not to see more skin, but because you'd much rather hear songs than the increasingly ludicrous dialogue, especially whenever Burt Reynolds appears.

Striptease Blu-ray, Special Features and Extras

 

• Theatrical Trailer (SD; 1.78, enhanced for 16:9; 1:57): I remember it well. Thanks to both brevity and the magic of editing, it was much funnier than the movie (which, granted, isn't setting the bar very high).

Striptease Blu-ray, Overall Score and Recommendation

 

Striptease could be the most technically stellar Blu-ray known to man, and that wouldn't change the fact that it's an atrocious movie. It won six Razzie awards and was a finalist for worst film of the Nineties, losing to Warner's Wild, Wild West (a close call, in my opinion). If you're one of Ms. Moore's die-hard fans and just can't wait to see a great deal of her topless, then by all means grab this disc. Everyone else should keep a safe distance.