Ali Rose (Christina Aguilera) leaves her small Iowa town waitress job for the lights of L.A. Tess (Cher) is the owner of the Burlesque Lounge. She struggles to keep the aging venue going. Ali hires herself as the new waitress. Alexis (Alan Cumming),Sean (Stanley Tucci) and bartender Jack Miller (Cam Gigandet) work there. Ali gets kicked out and stays with Jack thinking he's gay. It turns out that he's engaged to Natalie (Dianna Agron) who is away in a NY play. Vince Scali (Peter Gallagher) is Tess' ex-husband who owns half of the club. Nikki (Kristen Bell) is the club's diva star. Georgia (Julianne Hough) is looking to replace her as the star. Real estate guy Marcus Gerber (Eric Dane) is dating Nikki and trying to buy the club from Tess.

Aguilera is too old to play the young innocent thing who comes into town. The story is older than Cher. It has no originality at all. The song and dance is fun for a little while. Aguilera knows how to sing and even Kristen Bell does a good job. However all the performance are too similar and they wear thin really quickly. They get repetitive and boring. I don't mind Aguilera's acting although she's not winning any awards any time soon. She has charisma and that's a good start.

"Burlesque" is a 2010 musical movie featuring some nice numbers. Cher really shines not only with her performance, but also brings it all to the table with "Welcome to Burlesque" and "You Haven't Seen the Last of Me". There's more musical numbers which work well such as the use of Madonna's "Ray of Light" or "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend". The latter, however, gets much worse when lead star Christina Aguilera (Ali) takes over. I totally wish they would have cast somebody else for that movie's central character. Her acting was mediocre at best and I am not a fan of her voice at all. It's all too much screaming for my taste. The only thing I can see going for her is that her looks are fine, better than most of the time during her pop music career. I remember always being more Team Britney when these two were the most influential new music stars. Still Aguilera looks good here. I found it a bit unrealistic though how such a girl has nobody how she tells us and her new boyfriend at one point. Apart from that, I did not find her really likable which she surely was intended to be. The way she tells Cher's character what to do comes off as pretty cocky and arrogant.

Cher plays Tess, the mother figure to all the girls in her club and I loved her scenes especially with Stanley Tucci, who is great as always and manages with ease to make this character his own. The film takes place in Los Angeles, near Hollywood, where dreams are made. A dream of mine would have been that the sometimes very cheesy script could have been done slightly better. When she tells Gigandet's character they are not brother and sister is one such scene. The whole relationship triangle with his fiancée felt a bit weak and half-baked. Also Ali's reaction at the end when the fiancée suddenly shows up is way over the top. If he did do anything wrong it was that he ended the relationship via phone, but Ali knew that and the way she lost it and ran away was simply ridiculous. The way she ran to the rich guy afterward had something slutty to it, even if it was only to find something out allegedly as we found out not much later. This one was played by Eric Dane, who you may know from "Charmed". For some reason I found myself cheering more for him than for Gigandet's character and that is quite a miss from the filmmakers. The negative highlight was maybe at the very end when Ali sang the song Gigandet's character wrote for her and neither the performance nor the lyrics did anything for me. At all. A very unworthy ending.

I believe "Burlesque" with some fine-tuning on the script and another lead actress could have turned out as one of the best musical movies in recent years. You can't even blame Aguilera as she has not acted before, but she is really lost in her scenes with all these professional actors next to her. I am usually not too big on Kristen Bell, but she was a revelation compared to Aguilera. What I liked about the film were the information on "bought air". I never thought about that, but it makes lots of sense, even if the final "Ali to the rescue"-twist is a bit cheesy. The film is written and directed by Steve Antin and it is his first really big project as a director. He wrote a Sharon Stone movie in the past and acted in "The Goonies", but you can occasionally feel that he lacks experience as a director while watching this. If there is anything the movie is really worth watching for, it is Cher. She has not acted in seven years before this came out and she has not forgotten anything. Pretty good turn from her. Her song "You Haven't Seen the Last of Me" won Diane Warren her first Golden Globe (for her 5th nomination, almost 10 years after the last),but missed out on an Oscar nomination. Same goes for the costumes and art direction where the Academy usually likes to nominate or even award musicals. All in all, it is a decent movie where the strengths slightly outweigh the weaknesses.

Will we be strong enough and be able to turn back time to remember a time without the ageless diva who made it big, not only in music, but on television, on Broadway (in a play, not a musical) and in movies? Yes, Cher is not as active in movies as she was when she shot to the legend of cinema goddesses winning an Oscar for "Moonstruck", but her legendary status has not diminished with age. When I talk with people from age 15-85, they all say one person embellishes it all in the world of entertainment, and that is Cher. You can praise Barbra, Liza, Ms. Ross, the Divine Ms. M, Madonna, etc., and I adore (most) of these ladies. But there is only one who touches each generation, every race and nationality without reluctance.

Now that I've gushed, I must confess that I went into this movie with mixed feelings, and I came out of it a bit surprised. No, this is no classic, and I can honestly say that in my 25 years of living in Los Angeles, there is no club on the Sunset Strip that represents the club that Cher owns here. The club is more Crenshaw Blvd. than Sunset Blvd., the strip loaded with its expensive restaurants, comedy clubs, rock clubs and strip joints (mostly towards downtown). This is more valley than city, but like "Connie and Carla", another favorite of mine, I look beyond its misrepresentation of what it shows L.A. to be.

Christine Aguilera really surprised me by what a natural actress she is- likable, not at all annoying, and someone you root for. She is Ruby Keeler of "42nd Street" in leather and lace, with Cher the Warner Baxter putting on the show and Kristen Bell a younger version of Bebe Daniels, the star who is always late (and usually drunk). Cher tells her to go ahead and "Spend the rest of your life pouring vodka on your Cherrios". She is also the den mother to the girls, reminding Bell of how many nights she held her head over the toilet so the poor girl wouldn't drowned in her own vomit.

When Cher breaks into "Welcome to Burlesque", I cringe at the thought that this multi-talented woman has never stepped foot onto the Broadway stage into a musical, and it took this standard story (beefed up for modern times) to allow her to sing in a movie. Any flagging Broadway show would be lucky to rush her into the cast so she could strut herself. Cher in "Mamma Mia" as Donna, anyone? I found Aguilera's persistence at getting a job at the bar so amusing, her gall both perplexing and pleasing to the deep-down gold-hearted Cher who is so afraid of loosing her club that her distraction by the younger girl ultimately wins her over.

Eric Dane, as the bartender who befriends Aguilera and takes her in may seem to some to be like a Chelsea boy than the sweet heterosexual man he plays, but I think that had more to do with his bartender costuming and the overabundance of showing off his body than anything else. Peter Gallagher, Stanley Tucci and Cam Gigandet give fine supporting performances, but I wanted to see much more of Alan Cumming as the door man with more than just a passing resemblance to his "Cabaret" emcee. The Golden Globe Winning "You Haven't Seen the Last of Me" is Cher's big 11:00 number, and may not have the greatest lyrics, but in the way Cher performs it, the result is unforgettable.

I've heard people call this the L.A. "Show Girls" and an updated "Valley of the Dolls", but it actually offers some intelligence, especially with its denouncement that does what a musical is supposed to do-be triumphant.