Hustlers: Have pole will dance

Jennifer Lopez is a pole dancer turned business woman in Hustlers.

The battle of the sexes never looked as raunchy as in this flick about pole dancers who challenge the system.

Here's how it all goes down. It seems the dancers were doing just fine,  thank you very much, until that pesky 2008 recession kept their clients at home. With children to feed (Yes these are  responsible young women) they devise a business plan that rakes in the bucks. Too bad it involves some, er, shady activities.

Based on a story in New York magazine, our polers with hearts of gold... well, you'll have to read the 2015 article or see the movie to find out what happened. Like the gals in this film, The Movie Slut doesn't give it all away. However, she will go out on a limb and say that Lopez could garner an Oscar nomination for her performance.

After the Wedding: Forget the honeymoon

Julianne Moore and Michelle Williams

Q: When is a movie like a favorite old sweater?
A: When it's riddled with holes but still pleases you.

After the Wedding is one of those twisty, turny movies that manages to squirm away from you just as you think you have a hold of it. In the end, it did come together to the Movie Slut's satisfaction. While not entirely believable, it makes sense in an as-it-aught-to-be kind of way.

To the Movie Slut's annoyance, all the little holes that necessitated dispensing with disbelief could have been mended with a few small patches. Alas, it was not to be. Which brings us to a second question.

Q. How is a movie like an arrogant boyfriend?
A. They both think they can get away with anything as long as they show up in the end with a bouquet of flowers. 

Official Secrets: A Whistleblower's Tale

Official Secrets may not be the best film of 2019. But it may be the most important.

At a time when corruption, greed, self-interest, deceit, obfuscation and vulgarity seem to be the rule, we need to remember that honest, decent, moral, ethic people are still among us.

Katharine Gun is one of these individuals. In 2003, she was a British intelligence specialist who received an official memo from the US directing Britain to join in an illegal plot to enlist UN countries to vote for the war in Iraq.

Outraged at the deception and aware of the lives that would be lost, Gun blows the whistle on this scheme. As we know, it didn't stop the war. But it did get Gun arrested for breaking the Official Secrets Act.

The movie is part political thriller, part newspaper story, part courtroom drama. It doesn't use sensationalist or gimmicky measures to intrigue the audience, still the Movie Slut was riveted throughout.

Kudos to Keira Knightley for portraying Gun as the larger-than-life woman she is.

Ad Astra: To the stars

Hamlet isn't the only one with daddy issues. Meet Major Roy Mcbride (Brad Pitt). Like his father, he's a highly respected astronaut. When we meet him, he's about to embark on the mission of his life.

It seems dad disappeared on Neptune (of all places) years ago. Now Major Roy has been enlisted to convince dad (Tommy Lee Jones) to come down to Earth. But wait!! Is Roy actually being used to draw his father out for more nefarious reasons?

Roy's space odyssey is only one half of this story. The other, more Hamletesque part, is his internal struggle. The ferocious battle between love and hate of a parent who abandoned him.

Pitt does a powerful job of almost making this film seem profound. Alas, it's a feat far, far beyond human grasp. As impossible, at least for now, as his voyage to Neptune.

If there's an Oscar category for best performance in a crap movie, Pitt's a shoe-in.

The Goldfinch: Soars on screen

Ansel Elgort as grown up Theo

Last night, the Movie Slut finally reached page 771 of The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Today, she saw the movie based on the book. It's only the second time in her movie-obsessed life that MS has liked a movie more than a book.

Clearly she was not on the Pulitzer committee.

It is almost a surprise that a neat plot and salient messages were buried under page after page of boozing and drugging, needless repetitions, and a throw-everything-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach. The movie seemed to peel away layers of cold-weather padding to reveal a chic little dress.

For those who refused to invest days of their lives to reading the tome, it tells the story of  13-year-old Theo Decker, who loses his mother in a terrorist bombing and how the tragedy informs the rest of his life. It's also the story of a 17th-century work of art that survived a fire that took the life of the painter and is now saved from another disaster four centuries later.

BTW, the other movie the MS liked more than the book is the 2009 film Up In The Air .

Where Did You Go, Bernadette: Not far enough

The Movie Slut has nothing against message movies. What she hates is a movie that hits her over the head with its message. Again. And Again. And again.

The message here is that creative folks who are deprived of creating are pretty obnoxious people.

And who better to play the part of such a deprived individual than Kate Blanchette overacting and overchanneling Katherine Hepburn.

This movie tries and fails to be funny. When her husband considers a bit of R & R at a psychiatric institute, she refers to it as the "loony bin." And we thought that term went out with the rotary phone.

Bernadette was an award-winning architect who became a stay-at-home mom—bored, unfulfilled, unchallenged. Instead of the inane antics we see on screen, Bernadette, who we're to believe is so intelligent, could have read "The Feminine Mystique" and learned she has "the problem with no name," which was given a name in 1963 when Betty Friedan wrote the book.

Blinding by the Light: Awed by the music

Summer 2019 may not be the summer of peace & love. But at the multiplex, it is the summer of music. "Blinded...," now in theaters, which is based on a true story of a Pakistani teen living in England who becomes a Bruce Springsteen uber-fan, is just the latest.

It follows Rocketman (Elton John) reviewed below; Yesterday, a fantasy involving the Beatles and lost memories; Echo in the Canyon, a doc about mid-60s rockers (The Byrds, The Beach Boys, Buffalo Springfield) who lived in Laurel Canyon, California; Rolling Thunder Review, Martin Scorsese's doc of a 1975 Bob Dylan tour: and David Crosby: Remember my name.

The Movie Slut loved them all. But back to "Blinded..." This exuberant flick has the good sense to depart from reality in the service of creativity. It includes musical song & dance numbers right out of an old-time Hollywood movie. Best of all, it shows how and why the Boss and his music, which could be called quintessentially American, appealed to this Pakistani kid living in Luton, England.