Every now and then a “people’s movie” comes along…a movie that critics don’t get or even disparage, but which Hollywood Elsewhere surprisingly enjoys along with Joe and Jane…let’s make it Jane Popcorn in this instance. Green Book (mostly shat upon by the woke know-it-alls) was a people’s movie; ditto Bohemian Rhapsody. And now Steven Soderbergh‘s Magic Mike’s Last Dance — partially pissed upon by critics but reportedly really enjoyed by women and gays, hence the current theatrical release rather than straight-to-streaming.

If you assess it as a full package, as a 112-minute movie with a beginning, middle and end, Magic Mike’s last Dance is one-fourth euphoric and three-fourths mezzo-mezzo. The very beginning (totally buffed Channing Tatum, 41, doing a lap dance for Salma Hayek, 55) is genuinely hot, and the ending (a big erotic dance finale at a small London theatre featuring Tatum and 10 or 12 gifted washboard abs slink dancer-grinders) is so good it borders on the transcendent. I mean that.

Don’t worry about the in-and-out middle section in London, which takes up 70 or 75 minutes. Some of it drags, and some of it is okay. All that matters, trust me, is the opening and the ending.

This is going to sound gay but these two sections are so pulse-quickening that I felt stirrings…you know what I mean. Not actual wood due to the overwhelming focus on hot male bods but…well, ’nuff said.

Here’s what I texted to a friend after I emerged from last night’s screening:

“The erotic dancing is Magic Mike’s Last Dance, and I mean especially the shirtless, slinky-bod, dry hump stuff, is magnificent. Part ballet, part breakdance, part Nijinsky and Nureyev, part early ’50s Gene Kelly, part erotic West Side Story, part strip clup, part Babes In Arms…classier and more artified than the last two Magic Mike flicks, but when it gets going it’s really wild!

“The movie itself is somewhere between okay, pretty good and half-decent in an occasionally cliched (I’m not kidding about the Babes in Arms analogy), shuffling along, on-the-nose way. But if I’ve ever seen a turn-on movie for over-40 and even over-50 women, this is the puppy.”

CBC’s Eli Glasner: “If dry-humping was an art form, Channing Tatum would be Pablo Picasso.”

The dance-sex in this film is a much bigger turn-on than the suggested or simulated sex in Emma Thompson‘s Good Luck To You, Leo Grande…I’m telling you.

Soderbergh and screenwriter Reid Carolin are to be commended for investing in a romantic relationship between a 41 year-old guy (Tatum) and a 55 year-old woman (Hayek) — a difference of 14 years. Not as much as the 24 years separating French president Emmanuel Macron (born in ’77) and his wife Brigitte Trogneux (born in ’53), but residing in that general ballpark.

British actor Ayub Khan Din — best known for starring in Hanif Kureishi‘s Sammie and Rosie Get Laid — plays Hayek’s burly, bearded chauffeur. I was kind of shocked when I realized it was the same guy from Sammy and Rosie, which was 35 (going on 36) years ago. Din has put on at least 40 or 50 pounds, and his hair is almost completely silver, not to mention the beard.

Soderbergh shot Magic Mike’s Last Dance under his usual moniker of “Peter Andrews,” but it has to be said that a good portion of it (not the stage-dance scenes or the early lapdance sequence) looks muddy and subdued and generally underlighted. It reminded me of the work of my least-favorite cinematographer, Bradford Young.

Because she wasn’t sanctified or even discussed as a possible threat by the Wokester Award-Season Mafia. So vote for Reezie just to say “fuck you” to those bozo know-it-alls…Joey Berlin, Tom O’Neil, Clayton Davis. You’ve hated them all along, and now here’s your chance to make it count! Up with Reezie, down with Clayton!

Plus it doesn’t matter anyway as the whole Oscar pageant + cavalcade is slowly collapsing within itself…just ask Barry Diller! So vote for Reezie as a nice, friendly, “we’re all in this together” fuck-it gesture…as a message to the disintegrating established AMPAS order that says “we have the power now, not you”…as a “fuck you” to the Academy’s Identity Apology Museum….Cate Blanchett gave 2022’s best female lead performance and Michelle Yeoh is a classy lady who’s been working just as long and hard as Angela Bassett has (and I loved it when she politely told the sore loser Misogynoir crowd to go fuck themselves) but we’re voting Reezie all the same because “why not? and “who cares?”

A vote for Reezie, finally, is a vote for every divorced or separated, hard-working, under-paid and under-promoted actor in this industry who’s rarely been invited to the cool parties and has often felt obliged to shop at Trader Joes and Pep Boys and pay for a regular car wash ($16 and change) rather than a detailing.

I’ve been attending the Santa Barbara Film Festival since ‘03 or thereabouts, and I really wish I could’ve been there last night. All hail Cate Blanchett!!

A while back I tried to sell my Paramount homies on a special Top Gun: Maverick HE advertorial. The idea had already been written and posted on 1.13.23 — I just wanted to repeat it with a little Paramount dough behind me. The piece was titled “A Film That Saved Hollywood Could Also Save The Oscars.”

It seemed like the right pitch, and if you ask me this was underlined by the fact that Paramount recently launched a billboard ad campaign that echoed what my piece said.

At a time when the old energy current between Hollywood and mainstream audiences seemed to be dropping left and right, Top Gun: Maverick had pumped new life into the spirit of things, and should be roundly celebrated for reaching out and connecting…for making something actually happen in theatres at a time when too many films seemed to be limping along.

A Best Picture Oscar for a movie that had not only restored faith in exhibition but in Hollywood itself.

The current Paramount slogan says it all: BELIEVE IN MOVIES AGAIN. Which translates to BELIEVE IN HOW MOVES WERE DURING THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION AND BEFORE. Which also translates into BELIEVE IN THE FUTURE and the distinct possibility that more films like Top Gun: Maverick could pop the champagne as long as Hollywood takes heed and acts upon the obvious.

Which is this: Joe and Jane Popcorn are sick of instructional woke content (identity politics, progressive guilt-tripping, historical presentism, torture-rack flicks like Last Night in Soho, a general aversion to anything rooted in straight-white-male perspectives, movies that constantly hammer the Millennial-Zoomer BIPOC gay trans #MeToo boogaloo…films that insist that entitled white assholes need to be scolded blah blah).

Joe and Jane Popcorn to Elite Hollywood Wankers: Whatever happened to movies like The Wedding Crashers, Tropic Thunder, Manchester By The Sea, Her, A Separation, Sicario, Leviathan, Hell or High Water, Call Me By Your Name, The Social Network, Superbad, Whiplash, The Witch, etc.? How about unwoke-ing your sorry asses and keeping it that way for the foreeeable future? And making more upcoming films like Ben Affleck and Matt Damon‘s Air? And while you’re at it, fire the Woke Award-Season Mafia goons and all the kiss-asses who keep pushing movies that make people miserable.

Alternate headline: “Make Joe & Jane Popcorn Happy, And They’ll Return The Favor In Spades.”

2nd Alternate headline: “Listen to Barry Diller!”

“We’re supposed to hate Jaws now?” He was responding to “Did These Chinatown Viewers Understand?” And I replied by summarizing Peter Biskind’s “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” as follows:

The huge primal successes of Jaws (6.20.75) and Star Wars (5.20.77) slowly bland-ified the moody, anti-establishment ‘70s thing that had permeated Hollywood…the New Experimental Anti-Conventional Hollywood Party Era that began with Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate and The President’s Analyst (all released in ‘67).

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, the directing maestros behind Jaws and Star Wars, pretty much killed the cool kidz party by injecting (a) a win-really-big greed jackpot virus into the Hollywood bloodstream and (b) a strain of thematic infantilization into movies in general.

These guys didn’t didn’t suck the creative oxygen out of the room deliberately or maliciously, but the massive success of their historic blockbusters gradually introduced the idea of “high concept” and suppressed the commercial intrigue factor among industry folk and audiences alike for adult movies like Night Moves, The Conversation, The Outfit, The French Connection, Z, Easy Rider, Mean Streets, Rosemary’s Baby, Raging Bull, Scarecrow, Get Carter, The Day of the Jackal, Dog Day Afternoon, Godfather I & II, That’ll Be The Day, Stardust, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Chinatown, The Hospital, Network, Prince of the City, The Ruling Class, Quadrophenia, The Last American Hero, Performance, Don’t Look Now, etc.