Hollywood Top 5: Worst Movie Strippers
Hollywood does a lot of things well, but movie strippers is not one of them. More often than not, you’ll get an actress who wants all the cache of being able to say, “I played a stripper in a movie”, but without taking the clothes off. By not stripping, they are technically not playing strippers, as the word “strippers” would seem to imply the “stripping” off one of one’s clothes. Another major problem with movie strippers is the “good girl wants to go bad” syndrome, where an actress known for an innocuous career decides to “shock” us by playing a stripper to prove she’s grown up. Sometimes it works, but mostly it doesn’t. Here, then, are our Hollywood Top 5: Worst Movie Strippers.
#5 Demi Moore (in Striptease)
There’s nothing really wrong with Demi Moore’s stripper in “Striptease” per se — after all, her stripper actually does what strippers do — you know, take her clothes off. My only problem with the movie is Demi Moore’s, er, recent trip to the surgeon’s, which resulted in smallish globes that used to be her breasts. I guess Demi didn’t have a whole lot going on by way of a rack back “in the day”, so she needed a little help. The results were not entirely successful, as you can clearly see. They were, in fact, pretty ghastly.
#4 Elizabeth Berkley (in Showgirls)
Is it possible to make a movie where all the girls are naked 90% of the time, including the leading lady, and still make it the dullest piece of shit on all of God’s green Earth? Only if you call the movie “Showgirls”. Easily the most ridiculous stripper movie of all time, starring Elizabeth Berkley as a hitchhiker stripper who doesn’t have a heart of gold, but she would like to carve out yours with her switchblade if you look at her funny. The film’s supposedly sexiest moment has Elizabeth Berkley grinding in Kyle MacLachlan’s lap in a swimming pool. The film, and Berkley’s performance, was so bad that the movie nearly killed Berkley’s career and that of writer Joe Eszterhas.
#3 Lindsay Lohan (in I Know Who Killed Me)
After she stopped boozing long enough to realize that her movie career wasn’t going anywhere fast (and was in fact plummeting faster than Rosie O’Donnell cannonballing into a pool filled with jell-o), Lindsay Lohan finally got off her freckled ass and put it to good work in “I Know Who Killed Me”. The movie posited Lohan as the victim of a serial killer who realized she’s also a stripper on the side. Or something like that. Look, I didn’t actually watch the movie, and frankly, neither did anyone else. The movie was meant to “shock” Lindsay Lohan’s career back into the spotlight, but all it did was prove that despite her notoriety as a tabloid princess, Lindsay Lohan makes for one lousy movie stripper who couldn’t be sexy if she actually took her clothes off in the movie.
#2 Jessica Alba (in Sin City)
With “Sin City”, director Robert Rodriguez wanted to replicate Frank Miller’s graphic novels so faithfully that he did the film almost exclusively using green screen. All that authenticity went out the window when we saw Jessica Alba, playing stripper Nancy Callahan as one of those mysterious Hollywood strippers who doesn’t actually strip. So let me get this straight, Robert: you spent months, years even, making this movie, getting everything exactly right down to the rain pellets as they appeared in Miller’s comics, but when it came time for Nancy Callahan to do her cowboy dance, you said “Yes” to Jessica Alba keeping her bra on? And to make matters worst, the “can’t act her way out of a paper bag” Jessica Alba barely registered in the film as a viable entity, meaning that Rodriguez denied us tantalizing slow-motion tit shots of a gorgeous girl for absolutely no conceivable reason. Dude, you are so on my shit list.
#1 Natalie Portman (in Closer)
Portman spent her entire movie career doing cutesy teen roles and crappy sci-fi movies, so the heavy drama of Mike Nichols’ “Closer” was the perfect vehicle for her to show the world that she was all grown up. Portman “shocked” the world by playing a stripper who never actually showed anything besides a bright pink wig and a little ass crack. It’s all one big cock tease from beginning to end. But what makes Natalie Portman’s lack of skin in “Closer” even more frustrating was that she eventually took it off for a completely gratuitous side nude shot in Wes Anderson’s “The Darjeeling Limited”. Say What??? Oh, what could have been. Portman lands at our #1 spot of Worst Movie Strippers of all time not because she did the stripper gig badly, but because her stripper represents everything that is wrong with Hollywood A-listers wanting to play movie strippers. Take it off or go home, toots.
