Customer Reviews

LIVE NUDE GIRLS UNITE - Format: [DVD Movie]

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
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Despite the tawdry cover, this is a great flick done with inteligence and humour. It's sexy and has flesh but only to show the working conditions of the stripper-activists. The mother-daughter story is compelling and hilarious!
It won Best Documentary at the San Francisco Film Festival. The lines went around the block. It's the kind of film you want your friends to see.

This is a must-see for anyone interested in sex workers' rights. Dancers at the Lusty Lady were being exploited by management - being paid poor wages, having no changing area, and being racially discriminated against. Query tells the story of how the women not only confronted management, but also picketed in front of the peep show. She shows you the inside of the peep booths, where customers stand, and the layout of the whole place. As she tells this story, she also tells her own coming out story - how she tells her mother she's not quite straight... A truly queer film, and one of the few that is able to celebrate sex work while still highlighting the abuses in the industry.

The film contains interviews with other sex workers, partial nudity, and some frank language.

This documentary is about a group of strippers in San Francisco who fight to start a union. Now they have the only union of exotic dancers in the U.S. The women decided unite when they realized they were being illegally filmed by customers in special one-way mirrors. Using a consumer grade Hi8 camera, first time director Query filmed the actions of the workers. She is also a performance artist and stand-up comic, who started dancing as a way to pay the bills.

While what consenting adults do is their own business, one would think a woman would strip for a living only because the money's good. But as the documentary LIVE NUDE GIRLS UNITE tells it, the pay isn't as fair as one might think and the working conditions don't make up for it. Maybe the paycheck still beats office work's but at a San Francisco club called the Lusty Lady, knowing they are worth better salary and benefits, the strippers unionize.

Even though LIVE NUDE GIRLS UNITE came out in 2000 and won an award at the time, I see I am only the sixth person to review it on this web site. Perhaps its subject matter denied this documentary the shelf life others get in video rental stores and on cable television, but the film's story of nude dancers demanding their rights proves as compelling as, to name a better-known labor film, NORMA RAE. In fact, LIVE NUDE GIRLS UNITE started a little slow for me, as watching guys watch naked girls does not interest me. But as the film moves along and we realize these women feel more vulnerable facing unjust management than they do standing undressed before strangers - and see them start to fight back - LIVE NUDE GIRLS UNITE holds your attention.

LIVE NUDE GIRLS UNITE addresses the split among feminists on girlie shows, as some see it as consenting adult behavior, others as objectification of women. The argument moves from theory to reality as famed woman's advocate Dr. Joyce Wallace learns her daughter is a Lusty Lady dancer and former dominatrix, putting Dr. Wallace's feminist mettle to the test.

One thing I don't understand is the Lusty Lady performers referring to themselves as "sex workers," which I thought was another term for prostitute. The strippers don't have any contact with the men, let alone sexual. LIVE NUDE GIRLS UNITE alludes to Lusty Lady customers masturbating while they watch but if that makes the stripper a sex worker, then an actress doing a nude scene in an R-rated movie is, too.

Anyway, see LIVE NUDE GIRLS UNITE.

Julia Query is an intelligent, college educated woman who has begun working as a peep show stripper in order to pay the bills while she pursues a career as a stand up comic. She and her fellow workers find themselves being exploited by management and decide to take action. They form a union and much of the film is focused on their efforts to reach a fair contract settlement.

One of the film's more interesting angles is the dynamics of the relationship between the director and her mother. Mom is Judy Wallace, a nationally known doctor who advocates and provides health care for street prostitutes. Julia came out to her mother as a lesbian long ago. But is too scared to tell her about being a stripper. When the two find themselves speaking at the same conference for sex workers, Julia is forced to tell her mom the truth. Mom takes the news none too well, though by the film's end there does seem to be some grudging acceptance.

This doc includes enough nudity and sexy content to make it fun. But it is really about how the political activism of these workers demonstrates there is power in a union. Check it out!

I saw this film at an film art festival and only regretted that ALL of my friends couldn't be there to see it; gay or straight, this film will keep you thinking and laughing all the way through. I'm buying one copy for a dancer I know, for Xmas. If you know a dancer -- buy this and give it to her (but watch it first). It's 2 hours that feels like the funniest 20 minutes.