Thugs do Pretty

Rating: Null/10 (26 September 2007)

There are dirty, moneygrubbing thugs in this movie, not ashamed to make money from sex. They operate a strip club, from which one of the characters is "rescued." This movie is made by the same sort of moneygrubbing thugs (Gruber, Peters, Bruckheimer) , and there's no doubt that sex is at the top of its values. It has essentially no story, only a series of setups. Its clearly designed to sell music, which then was LPs.
And yet it works for me. The reason is that its cinematic, a and finely so. I'm usually pretty tough on films that feature dance, unless the camera itself dances. This one doesn't. But what it does have is crisp editing and superb, absolutely superb lighting.
I think dePalma started this and did the stuff that works, the storyboards, the lighting design. I imagine he supervised the scouting of the dirty sets where we see smoke, glow and sparks. I imagine he worked out the tricks where the face is occluded so that we can swap our actress with real dancers, several of them.
So you can find three things to like here: the fold where the smarmy guys are in the movie, the fantastic lighting, beginning with the very fist shots, and the dancing. It almost seems as if the dancing came after the major cinematic decisions. It was unusual for the time: more energetically sensual. Tight in energy but lose in inspiration. All of the dances have an on screen audience, but one: the "manic" dance. That lack of on screen audience after the deliberate inclusion of one invites us in.
And this dance is photographed differently. We don't see the whole body: we see parts, and while the camera doesn't spatially move, it does temporally. The editors dance. The visual rhythm invokes voyeurism, identification and syncopation all at the same time. This is significant movie-making, hidden in a rather trivial-seeming wrapper.
Gruber at the time advertised this as "Rocky with a woman," but there's no resemblance story-wise. There is with the energy though.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.