As my blog is fairly new, with this entry I am risking the stigmata of being a simple girl. But, if that is the case, if your mind has placed on me a label like that, I am okay with it. I cannot help it that I find Magic Mike XXL a very nice movie to watch. I even went to see it in the cinema twice! I know it is so different from the first one, which was a more layered, better movie made by the excellent director Steven Soderbergh, who you might know from Ocean’s Eleven and Erin Brockovich. This second one, however, is more Step Up on steroids, which sounds bad but actually is not. Sometimes a woman just wants to look at a man dancing the night away.

Especially me, because I absolutely love to dance, specifically to hip hop music. It is too bad I find myself too tall (and too big these days..) to really have done a lot with the passion I have for hip hop dancing, but I still love to play Dance Central in the comfort of my own home, and therefor I absolutely loved Magic Mike XXL too; there is a lot of cool hip hop tracks in it. But, back to the flick: Magic Mike XXL is all about hip hop. There are three scenes in particular that I love most about Magic Mike XXL and I would like to sum them up in my blog today:

Pony
When I watched this movie for the first time, it was like there was magic happening when the key character of this flick, Mike, started dancing to Pony. Amaaazing. The story is that he has his own furniture company and the stripper (or: male entertainer) friends ask him for one last road trip. He is not sure yet, but when he is left alone in his garage to fix some furniture, Pony comes up on the Spotify playlist The Golden Age of R&B and as that was his song when he still danced for money, he starts dancing to it pretty wildly. Little did we know that the whole movie is practically a competition on which dance is the most sexual without being actual lovemaking, but I just really love how he uses the whole room and dances so freely. And what makes me LOVE this moment, is how much he is having fun just by dancing on his own.

Cookieman

Later in the movie, there is scene in which Mike meets Zoe once more, and they have a very cute conversation in the kitchen, while Zoe is eating red velvet cake. I love this part so much, because it feels very real to me. The way they speak to each other, the weird topic that it is about; it just speaks to me. It would be a conversation that I could easily have in the exact same way (at least, that is how it feels, cause obviously, if Magic Mike was standing in front of me I would just hug him and make him dance by himself smiling, remember ‘Pony’? 😉 ) I especially love the way in which he says cookieman and it is very funny how they brought this conversation back in the music at the end of the movie.

Groceries

This is a very obvious scene, it was all over the trailers and it is a bit too easy, but after a long debate I have decided to go for the grocery-scene as the third and last moment I love about Magic Mike XXL. I like it so much because every time it makes you laugh one way or the other. The way he looks when the lady is not impressed with the first thing he does, the way his colleagues run to the window, and the way the lady just keeps staring at him so stupidly are all things that eventually make me laugh. The thing is, this movie has always been so open to what you can expect, it never takes itself seriously and it is just a bunch of people having a great time and you get to enjoy that fun with them. I like that simplicity and this scene is the perfect example of that.

Some other thoughts on Magic Mike XXL are:

-What is with that horribly ugly dress on gorgeous Elizabeth Banks at the end?
-Was that last dancing scene with Zoe and Mike communicated to Amber Heard at all? She looks as if she knew nothing about this scene, which is perfect because it makes her reaction look very natural. I wonder…
-What an amazing job Jada Pinkett Smith did. She was amazing as Rome, sexy but strong, and over the top, just perfect.