Meanwhile the painfully period-appropriate fashion and aptly harsh makeup evoke a time that wasn’t too far away but is definitively lost. She employs a framing device in which Destiny tells her story to a reporter (Julia Stiles) some years later, but this well-worn trope-like those of the crime-and-punishment story arc, the shopping montage, and the before-the-fall scene of popping Champagne-not only gets the cobwebs blown off it but polished to a gloss. Scafaria, who previously helmed The Meddler and Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, displays a masterful control of tone and narrative structure as she lays out a somewhat complicated series of events without a hitch. A short stint at Old Navy with a callous employer (Jon Glaser) demonstrates that men who like to humiliate less powerful women aren’t limited to the club. The workaday approach to stripping is refreshing, perhaps even empowering, but not even a master technician like Ramona can survive the devastation of the recession on dancing alone. “Drain the clock, not the cock,” learns Destiny. The first half of the film is propelled along by earnest reveals of the mundane occupational hazards of stripping: demanding clients, managers demanding a cut, the wrong kind of six-inch stiletto. Still, sisterhood doesn’t make stripping any less of a job-and an often demeaning one at that. But the film is much more interested in the camaraderie among the dancers, including one played by a flute-playing Lizzo (who could soon have the country’s No. The club isn’t free of female competition-in an early scene, a stripper played by Cardi B hilariously yanks an unwitting Destiny away by the hair when the newcomer approaches one of her own patrons. Sometimes the deepest bonds are products of a time and place, too, and are stubbornly irretrievable thereafter. But what Ramona and Destiny eventually miss most is their friendship. The post-2008 ploy that Ramona (Lopez) and Destiny (Wu) hatch-to spike customers’ drinks with a drug cocktail that would leave them incapacitated and their credit cards available to max out-was, just like that economy, never built to last. Based on a New York magazine story about how the Great Recession inspired a pair of entrepreneurial dancers to concoct a ruthless “Robin Hood” scheme to steal back the money Wall Street plundered from the 99 percent, writer-director Lorene Scafaria’s film looks fondly to the mid-2000s, when stripping, at least for our protagonists, was absurdly lucrative and not-a-little glamorous. Hustlers, the new strippers-turned-scammers tragicomedy starring Jennifer Lopez and Constance Wu, nurses a nostalgia all its own. The Audition So Insulting That It Inspired a Classic Hollywood Satire The Cocaine Bear Scene That Scandalized the Right Wing Has Some Strange Science Behind It The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to Netflix, HBO, Amazon Prime, and Hulu in March
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