All That Glitters Is Not Always Gold.

Rating: Null/10 (29 December 2010)

Since the advent of sound and the first Best Picture Oscar winner in the sound era (1929 winner "The Broadway Melody"), Hollywood has been fascinated with the musical and namely the 'small-town girl has huge dreams in the big city' genre. The 2010 version of this sometimes-proved formula gives us "Burlesque", a film that wants to continue the trends of "Moulin Rouge!" and "Chicago", but looks more like the genre when it was fleeting through the 1970s and 1980s with that Bob Fosse take on the material. Christina Aguilera is that small-town Iowa girl (!?) who comes up with the idea out of the blue one day to leave the simple Midwest life for Los Angeles. Times are tough though as she has no luck until she wanders aimlessly into a nightclub that has the feel of Fosse's "Cabaret". There she encounters the club's owner and creative force (bravura role for Cher, doing her best work in two decades) and a whole array of fascinating characters (namely love interest/bartender Cam Gigandet and the scene-stealing Stanley Tucci). Inside the club, the typical soap operas play out with Aguilera wanting to be a star, Cher having her doubts, Cher's ex-husband Peter Gallagher worrying about the club's enormous debt, Aguilera having a rivalry with star attraction Kristen Bell, big-money sleaze-ball Eric Dane eyeing the club and many of the female performers for himself, Gigandet's long-distance relationship with fiancé Dianna Agron, and even an unplanned pregnancy via role player Julianne Hough, and so on. In the end there is nothing just earth-shattering here, but there is still something about this film that makes it pop nevertheless. The musical numbers and dance sequences can be looked upon as exciting or downright tiring, but the women do sizzle and keep the audience and intensity up throughout. Relative film-making newcomer Steve Antin (who directed the film and wrote the screenplay) shows kind of an intense MTV-styled 1980s consciousness which likely comes from his hay-day acting career during that decade (being in films such as "The Goonies" and "The Accused"). Is the film successful in its goals? I think in this case it is up to the viewer and ultimately there were enough pluses for "Burlesque" to be one of the more guiltier pleasures of the past few years. 4 stars out of 5.