I Know You Are, But What Am I? PEE-WEE'S BIG HOLIDAY

Paul Reubens’ Pee-wee Herman surely belongs on the short list of iconic comedy creations, right up there with Buster Keaton and Chaplin’s Tramp, the Marx Brothers and Three Stooges, W.C. Fields and Abbott and Costello. You know exactly what you’re getting the instant any one of those people step on screen, which exact brand of anarchy, slapstick, and wordplay they have at their command. So it is with Pee-wee, whose close-fitting gray suit, dopey bowtie, slicked-back hair, honking laugh, and flailing limbs indicate a creepy innocence and ageless out-of-time contentment. He lives a Rube Goldberg machine life, one elaborate contraption and lucky happenstance at a time. His closest fictional relative would have to be SpongeBob, a similarly cartoonish childlike optimist eager to help his pals and have a good time while able to shake off bizarre setbacks with minimal fuss. We haven’t seen Pee-wee in quite some time. With the exception of a recent Broadway stint he’s been gone since 1988. The novelty of his reappearance goes a long way in Pee-wee’s Big Holiday. It’s nice to see him.

At the movie’s start Pee-wee, appearing eerily unchanged, is in a rut. He moves through an idealized town, which looks like a Pleasantville frozen in the 50s, greeting the same stereotypical townspeople in the same ways every day. He’s can’t even bring himself to dream about leaving town. I’m not sure why the movie forgets about Pee-wee's Big Adventure in the 1985 Tim Burton film of the same name, but maybe it’s so we’re not reminded about that much better effort as this new one proceeds to lift the episodic road trip structure from it. So Pee-wee’s caught in a safe, comfortable, repetitive structure that’s broken when a cool guy (Joe Manganiello, playing a version of himself) rides into town on a motorcycle and quickly becomes his new best friend. Alas, Joe has to be going, but not before inviting Pee-wee to meet him in New York City for his upcoming birthday party. Hooray! It’s a road trip for Pee-wee, who abruptly quits his job in a diner (a la SpongeBob) and ambles east in his quirkiest, most whimsical way.

The journey goes all kinds of wrong, the screenplay by Reubens and Paul Rust leaving Pee-wee stranded repeatedly as he bounces from one eccentric stop to the next. He has run-ins with all manner of goofy characters, alternately vaguely menacing and gently off, including a gang of robber gals dressed like they’ve come from one of Russ Meyer’s tamer picture, a woodsman, Amish villagers, and a farmer desperate to marry off one of his nine overeager grown daughters. Some of these interludes are funnier than others, an uneven collection of sketches Pee-wee wanders into for a time before moving on, hoping he can make it to the birthday party on time. Overseeing the proceedings is John Lee, making his feature debut. He’s been a director on all sorts of TV comedy, from Wonder Showzen to Inside Amy Schumer and Broad City, so he knows his way around building scenarios to best show off a comedian’s personality, skills, interests, and sense of timing. You can’t look at Pee-wee’s Big Holiday without admitting you’re seeing pure unadulterated ideas from Herman’s head.

Brightly lit and flatly staged, the whole thing is deeply frivolous, more enjoyable the more it sticks closely to a breezy effortless silliness. But it’s also clear Pee-wee works better when he has a collaborator instead of an enabler. Its format of loosely connected vignettes never quite builds or escalates like Burton’s film does; Lee is simply letting the gently surreal moments happen. Where Big Adventure knocks about with a vibrant imagination, Big Holiday simply ambles along from one mildly off-kilter peculiar scenario to the next. Still, it’s enough of a pleasant diversion to simply be back in the company of this oddball that by the time the deflation of the pokey and uneven qualities start to sink in it’s already well on its way to a conclusion. Sometimes very funny, it may not add up to much of a movie, but as a patchy excuse to see Reubens in action as his most notable character again, it’s not so bad.

Party On: MAGIC MIKE XXL

The main question left unresolved at the end of Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike, a breezy downbeat male stripper drama with the economy on its mind, was a simple one. Will these entertainers find happiness? We watched them enjoy dancing on stage, commodifying their bodies to barely scrape by. But it wasn’t always fun. They had personal problems, and bigger dreams. In the end Magic Mike (Channing Tatum) gave it all up to start his custom furniture business. Now, three years later, we have a sequel, Magic Mike XXL, to answer the question of the characters’ happiness by ditching the heavier dramatic stakes. A romantic subplot, business angst, and drug-related problems go almost entirely by the wayside. Instead, we get a let’s-put-on-a-show road movie, inessential but hugely enjoyable, unfolding as a series of casual comic hangouts and winning theatrical dance sequences. It’s one long party.

Movies can take us places we’ve never been. For most of us, that’ll be a road trip from Miami to Myrtle Beach for a Fourth of July male stripper convention, ending in a performance space filled with screaming and swooning women ready to see perfect physical specimens perform cheeky choreography. Is there such a convention? I don’t know, but it makes for a great low-stakes movie idea. We meet Mike in Tampa, working hard to keep his business afloat when a group of his old stripper buddies (Joe Manganiello, Matt Bomer, Adam Rodriguez, and Kevin Nash) show up. The DJ (Gabriel Iglesias) at the wheel, they’re on their way to the convention, and convince Mike to take a vacation and join them. His girlfriend dumped him. Their manager dumped them, taking the hot young star with him. (What a convenient way to write out the absent Cody Horn, Matthew McConaughey, and Alex Pettyfer, huh?) Why not take a fun holiday weekend trip together?

A loose, shaggy structure moves the guys up the coast, taking pit stops for relaxed sidebars. They find themselves watching a drag show, and then attending a beach party with some likable young women (including Amber Heard). They visit a luxurious private club where a group of performers (Twitch, Donald Glover, Michael Strahan) are presided over by an intensely charismatic host (Jada Pinkett Smith). They stop at a house owned by a wine-guzzling rich lady (Andie McDowell) for some flirtatious conversation. And of course they dance a little at each stop, and elsewhere too, including a hilarious convenience store challenge set to a booming Backstreet Boys song. (Boy bands are an important part of Florida history, we’re told in one of many amusing off-the-cuff conversations.) The movie treats the characters’ lives seriously, but their weekend lightly. It knows they, and we, just want to have a fun time. The result is a charming movie full of good cheer, easy rapport, a comfortable vibe watching a reunion of old friends happy to hang out and dance together again.

Soderbergh hands the director’s chair to his longtime assistant director/producer Gregory Jacobs, but stays on as producer, editor, and director of photography. There’s the same lush naturalism to the dim lighting, the loving consideration of physical presence as conduit of appeal. Reid Carolin returns as screenwriter, finding warm energy in stumbling banter, a funny, supportive, open-minded atmosphere. Without the dramatic tensions or interest in seedier elements of the first film, this one has the characters just enjoying the journey. Along the way, Mike convinces the group to toss out their old routines and just dance from the heart. We hear each man talk about their plans for the future, wishes for secure relationships, steady income. They’re driving towards one last big show. They might never see each other again. Why not do some new choreography, express themselves, go out on a high note?

So it’s three hoary old plots in one: road movie, dance movie, and one last job movie. The structure is similar to an early talkie musical like 1934’s Joan Blondell/Dick Powell picture Dames, which has lots of light comedy before climaxing in a series of elaborate dance sequences. Or look at it as a ribald Step Up movie, not just because it has two of that series’ alumni, but because it’s sprinkled with dance breaks before finishing off at a big contest with an elaborate show-stopping group number giving every character a shining showcase. Their raunchy routines are expertly choreographed collections of uninhibited, abs-baring, hip-thrusting, gyrations and gesticulations, spiced up with prop comedy and a little amateur Astaire and Kelly. Even a bit of the Marx brother’s Duck Soup mirror works its way into the lengthy climax. It’s thick with the electric ogling energy of performance.

That’s why the movie’s such a carousing delight. It finds exuberance of performance with a comfortable ensemble allowed unhurried scenes. Chemistry is what carries it, as well as a refreshing diversity, and low-key non-judgmental kindness, emphasizing the respect and enjoyment all involved on stage and off get out of their sexualized dancing. Other sequels would be tempted to open up new conflicts between the guys, find a villain of some kind, make the stakes higher. Though we learn a lot more about each character’s hopes, dreams, fears, and proclivities, there’s no heavy drama. It’s just a bunch of friends having fun, going with the flow, meeting interesting new people, and pulling together for a final job. It provides just enough plot for forward momentum and settles back into appealing sequences of likable actors thrown into eccentric situations. Light on its feet, there’s a meandering party atmosphere pervading every moment.

Flash, Dance: MAGIC MIKE

With Magic Mike, director Steven Soderbergh continues to explore the ways in which society’s institutions can both enable and thwart ambition by turning people into products. Here he (from a screenplay by Reid Carolin) tells a story of an ambitious thirty-year-old man, Mike (Channing Tatum), working three jobs, none of them the one he most desires. He wants to make custom furniture, a way to take his passions and creativity and spend his time getting paid for something he loves to do. Instead, he’s working mostly low-paying jobs, getting paid all in cash. He can save up enough for a down payment on a loan for his dream business, but can’t get one with his bad credit. The economy has had him stuck in place for six years now in a vicious cycle of saving to no avail. Still he works. He has a mobile detailing business when he’s not haggling for better pay at his construction job. It’s there that he meets an aimless, mostly unemployed twenty-year-old guy, Adam (Alex Pettyfer), who is on his first and last day on the job. Mike feels sorry for Adam and invites him to come help out at his third job, where he works only weekend nights, where he makes most of his money: a strip club.

There, under the watch of drawling manger Dallas (Matthew McConaughey), Mike and his co-workers, guys with names like Richie (Joe Manganiello), Ken (Matt Bomer), Tito (Adam Rodriguez), and Tarzan (Kevin Nash), perform goofy choreographed routines with silly props. Their performances look like nothing more than racy dance numbers until they slip off just enough clothes to scandalize and titillate the screaming audience of sorority girls and bachelorette parties. For their audience this is not about nudity or dirtiness so much as it’s about the naughtiness of escaping the norms of everyday life. Either way, it looks like easy money to Adam who is currently crashing with his older sister (Cody Horn), and so the movie turns into one of those melodramas wherein the older veteran, frustrated with his life but making it look so easy, takes the naive new guy into the fold of a business rife with temptations. Soderbergh takes it all in with his usual patient, clinically observant cinematography, which steers the film away from easy predictability.

Like Soderbergh’s 2009 film The Girlfriend Experience, this is a film about people living under a cloud of economic uncertainty, trying to get by with the money they can get selling themselves. It’s essentially an R-rated backstage drama that starts as goofy fun of a sort and then grows progressively darker as the full implications of the business sets in. It doesn’t go exactly where you’d expect, tracking not simply the younger man’s descent from naivety into jadedness, but the veteran’s growing disillusionment as well. Here’s a guy who feels like he’s been doing everything right, getting a job or three, working hard, saving up, and still he can’t get ahead, can’t find a good foothold. There’s talk of moving the club to Miami, where, we’re told, the real money is. But would that really change the situations of these men in a significant way? More money for the same objectification may not be the healthiest thing, especially as several are already suffering from mostly well-hidden substance abuse issues. The first performance of the movie, one dancer ends up passed out backstage. Later, a groupie with a pet pig is eager to pass out ecstasy. “I’m not my lifestyle,” Mike protests to Adam’s sister, who is both charmed and repulsed by his flirtatiousness.

What’s best about Magic Mike is the generous way Soderbergh has of drawing terrific performances from the entirety of an ensemble. He finds exactly the right ways to use his performers to best accentuate their skills, to draw out aspects of their personas in interesting ways. The tension between Tatum’s charm and blockheaded athleticism is used to flesh out a portrait of a man who allows himself to be objectified despite larger goals, much like his own early film roles hid his deeper talent. McConaughey’s near self-parody “alright, alright, alright” becomes a sort of incantation of sleaze, his mostly shirtless wardrobe a form of wiry narcissism. The other actors, convincing all, even stand-up comedian Gabriel Iglesias as the club’s DJ, float in and out of the story, creating a vivid portrait of this world filled with details both funny (one dancer throws out his back and shuffles off the stage after a heavyset woman leaps onto the stage and into his arms) and sad (another dancer brings his wife to a party and urges the new guy to feel her up).

The film is, in contrast to its high-energy burlesque on-stage and its funnier moments, so low-key about its off-stage melodrama that by the end it feels uncommitted and, when the film ends with its thematic cards still up in the air, the lack of resolution is at once bracing and frustrating. Still, the film is so well acted and crisply directed that the characters’ (and, by extension, the film’s) uncomfortable tension between enjoyment and depression becomes notable. As the credits roll, some characters have made tentative steps towards self-improvement. Others are left, maybe to thrive, perhaps to wallow, in their disreputable career choices. Why shouldn’t the end be so unresolved? It fits right in with the sense of economic despair that hovers around in this story of easy money and uneasy decisions.