I didn't feel any magic.

I just got home from girls night out, where a church friend and I went with some of her work friends out to dinner and then a movie. The hibachi was awesome, thanks for asking. Magic Mike... eh, not so much.
I was expecting maybe a story with the mindless fluff of cheesy dancing & some lovely muscles, but life-altering revelations changing Mike fundamentally and seeing him become a better man and fall in love and make a plan to change his life, and for it to all be awesome and fun and maybe even uplifting. Yeah. Uplifting, with male strippers. Yeah. I was being naive.

Like Michelangelo's David (or pretty much anything he painted - that dude was into naked guys), the human body is a beautiful work of art. We are God's masterpiece. Chicks are different than guys in that we can sit there and ogle a set of ripped abs and say, "Wow, that is beautiful." Much like a sunset. Or a mountain lake. Well, not exactly like that, but in the same ballpark.  Whereas guys will fantasize about doing very naughty things to the woman they're checking out (even days later, when they're not even intentionally thinking about it), we just don't. It's not how we're designed.

(Did that paragraph make me sound less hypocritical? I hope so. Because I'd totally flip if my husband went to see a stripper movie. And I know Jesus totally does not like this movie. I'm sorry, God. I disappointed you tonight. But I really am sorry. I'm disappointed in myself. I really didn't think it would be that bad!)

*spoiler alerts for the movie, but you should read it anyway*

So Matthew McConaughey in assless chaps and Channing Tatum in nothing and Matt Bomer in a cowboy get up was a sight to behold.

I guess that made it worth the $10 ticket... I guess.

I heard the plot sucked, but I was like Plot? What plot? Who is going to see a story with a plot? They don't even have to talk. I have seen Matt Bomer's torso and arms on White Collar, and I want to see them again. A piece of friggin' art, that man is.

But they devoted a LOT of the screen time to the plot. And lemme tell ya... bring a book. Or wait for the DVD to come out so you can skip half the movie. It was that bad. I mean it made me uncomfortable to the point of not even enjoying the guys' final act, because by that point, I was ready to leave. If I had driven my own car, I probably would have.

So much time was spent on showing how pathetic and shallow the guys' real lives were with all the drugs and sport sex, that Channing Tatum's character (Mike) hated it by the end as much as the audience did. And he'd brought a 19 year old boy into the life, who immediately got royally screwed up with drugs, while Mike was wishing he was respectable enough to date the kid's sister. The kid gets sucked in further, thinks he's having the time of his life, and Mike leaves. The end.

What?! Um, redemption story or something, please? No, they leave it with Mike telling the kid's sister he wasn't going to keep stripping & she's all take me to bed even though he just ruined her brother's life. As if.

EVERYBODY was like, "What? That's the end?!"

There's kind of the theme of drugs-are-bad, but they show lots of drugged-out sex and pathetic, stoned, barely legal girls with weird fetishes... and I just kept thinking, This is so so sick. And there are people really like this. What a horrible excuse for a life. What happened to these people to lead them to make such terrible decisions?

It was gross. And graphic. Porn-level graphic in my opinion. I don't know how this got an R rating, but it should have been NC-17.

And maybe that was their goal? Maybe their point was that drugs and wild sex F up your life. Period. You might think it's fun while you're doing it, but look! It's terrible!

Then, you look at them doing their act on stage, after seeing their life, and you're just like, Hmm, well, they've got nice bodies, but I can't enjoy it because they're so damn depressing.

Plus there was the ick factor of them making sure you knew that the kid was 19, and EW! He's a fricking kid! I don't care if he's all muscley and can serve in the military! He can't even legally have a margarita; why would I want to see him take off his clothes! He should be playing video games and bagging groceries, not dry-humping a fifty year old! Ew, ew, ew ew ew!

Channing T, Matthew M, and Matt B, on the other hand, all perfectly legal, all my age or older, all perfectly doable. I mean watchable. Like looking at sculptures that dance. (Matt B even wears a Neal Caffrey hat at one point - nice.)

Seriously, though. Bring a book for when they're not stripping. Or don't bother wasting your money. I honestly feel more guilty about watching the non-stripping parts of the movie than the stripping. It was that raunchy. Just, ick.