Coming to VOD tomorrow, Tuesday, August 19: LA BARE
Joe Manganiello’s look at the world of male strippers had its debut at Slamdance this year. It went on to screen at Maui and at Dallas’ USA Film Festival before its theatrical bow this past June. FilmBuff now releases the doc on a wide range of VOD platforms.
Manganiello’s foray into onscreen stripping in MAGIC MIKE inspired his directorial debut – a largely workmanlike look at the eponymous strip club in Dallas which claims to be the most popular of its ilk. Profiling several of the beefy dancers, while briefly checking in with some of their family members, fans, and other club employees, the film maintains a generally breezy tone as it both dispels and reinforces some of the myths associated with the profession. While the new-ish Russian owner Alex too briefly notes how he reinvigorated the lagging establishment, losing the drug addicts for more serious-minded professionals, several dancers pepper their backstage banter or interviews with braggadocio, commenting on sexual conquests or getting customers to give them extravagant amounts of money. This lends an overall feeling of watching a bunch of overgrown fraternity brothers, which can grow tiresome at times, capped off by an overlong sequence featuring the dancers mocking the club’s mostly inept Amateur Night contestants. Thankfully, a couple of the dancer profiles move away from this to more honest terrain, such as Cesar, a personable former Army Ranger who relates his old-fashioned background – much more effective than the extended hagiography presented for a recently killed fellow dancer – and mentor Randy, the “Master Blaster,” who, his crude bragging aside, offers a sense of history through his three decade career at La Bare, and who shows the lengths he goes to keep his career, taking strange cryo treatments and skin injections to combat aging.
what (not) to doc 