Alright, alright, alright: otherwise known as Matthew McConaughey was ROBBED!

Holy shit, but the McConaughey was amazing in Magic Mike. Easily the best I've seen him since the Wooderson days.

I truly can't believe he didn't get at least nominated for an Oscar last year. Maybe it was just so... McConaughey that it appeared to be deceptively easy to play, but come on! Just for what must've been an intense workout regimen alone, the dude deserved a nod.

As for the rest of the movie, it was... fine. The dancing was pretty laugh-out-loud entertaining, though -- and I realize I'm not the target audience for this -- not in the least bit sexy. I got pretty tired of Soderbergh's decisions for shooting the thing -- all "natural" light that he basically just decided not to white balance his camera before hitting the record button. I got that the only place with "natural" skin tones was the club, but the overly sepia/just-plain-dark of all the other scenes was really distracting. I kept waiting for there to be a point to it, but it never came. Much like in Haywire, it just came off as an art-house/college film experiment gone awry.

And I never really bought the relationship between Mike and the Kid, his protege/"best friend," though that's admittedly due in part to the relative ickyness of Alex Pettyfer. That and having the character say "we should be best friends" more than once in the script doesn't mean it's fucking so. There was just never any build to that relationship, so some of the choices made by Mike later in the film just didn't hold any water.

Once upon a time (circa 2003)*, the Soderbergh was on my short list of directors who could do no wrong. but after the one-two punch of Haywire and the MM -- though at least I made it through Magic Mike -- that no longer holds... though I've still got high hopes for the yet-to-be-seen Side Effects and Behind the Candelabra.

*speaking of that list, now almost exactly a decade old, it's interesting to see what and where it's changed -- some of which is just my old age (I just don't have time to keep up with Todd Haynes and Jim Jarmush these days) and some of which is, like the Soderbergh, due to some relatively "eh" output -- Wes Anderson and Peter Jackson, I'm looking at you)