Definition: In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
Input: Stephen Vaughan / Screen Gems Inc. A scene from Burlesque 
  
 Ali (Christina Aguilera), a lonely innocent from Iowa newly arrived in Los Angeles, has lucky timing. The heroine of the musical Burlesque walks into a Sunset Boulevard nightclub where scantily clad women are gyrating onstage and Alan Cumming is manning the cash register. "Is this a strip club?" Ali asks. Cumming looks appalled. "I should wash your mouth out with Jägermeister," he says, fluttering his eyelashes. Then Tess (Cher), the club's owner and resident diva, struts out onto the stage, as imposing and stiff as a stilt walker, and belts out a number called "Welcome to the Burlesque." Musically, it's not quite Cabaret's "Willkommen," but for an orphaned aspiring showgirl in need of a mothermentor figure, it's a dream introduction. 
  
 By this film's standards, the main criteria for burlesque seems to be looking good in undies and knowing where your breasts are, so you can grab them every 30 seconds or so. Tess is the only performer who actually sings (Cher has two numbers). The rest, including the mean mini-diva Nikki (Kristen Bell), lip-sync to the classics. Ali doesn't get a role onstage, but she does manage to wrangle a waitressing job out of Tess  which allows her to watch the show and learn all the numbers. This means that often, as she's moving about the club, she's simultaneously making spastic little flourishes with her hand, practicing dance moves, waiting for a chance to wow everyone. Ordering anything in a martini glass from this girl would be risky. (See the top 10 movies that shouldn't have made it to Broadway.) 
  
 The movie is frivolous fun, but not, as I had sort of hoped, as sinfully awful as Showgirls, Mariah Carey's Glitter or Britney Spears' Crossroads. Lacking the snap of Chicago or the insane creativity of Moulin Rouge, it's a middle-of-the-road musical. While it took my eyes an hour to recover from the chronic soft focus required to make the naturally vampy Aguilera look like an angelic Breck girl, Burlesque doesn't have the kind of stunning bad taste that calls for the immediate invention of a drinking game built around it. Aguilera, making her dramatic debut, is far from a great actress, but compared to Elizabeth Berkley or Spears, she is a veritable Nicole Kidman. 
  
 And in Burlesque, she is propped up by three of the most fun people in show business: Cumming, Cher and Stanley Tucci, who plays the club's gay (of course) costume designer Sean. None of them are going home with an Oscar, but writer-director Steve Antin has written to their comic strengths and personas  Cher's sarcasm, Cumming's naughtiness and Tucci's gift for being snarky and good-natured. The results, while occasionally forced, are consistently amusing. ("What happened to all the great dancers?" Tess grumbles to Sean during an audition. "They're all dancing with the stars," he says.) (See TIME's Summer Entertainment Preview 2010.) 
  
 What the movie does have in common with Glitter et al is the problem of trying to convince an audience that the adult heroine  Aguilera is about to turn 30  famous to all of us, really could be an undiscovered novice, or for that matter, an innocent. Actually, Burlesque faces a bigger challenge. Aguilera might not be to your taste, or mine (the musical numbers are lively but produced no urge to sing in the shower), but in terms of sheer power, she's impressive  a far bigger vocal talent than a Spears, for example. If Ali were real, she'd have already been discovered on American Idol. 
  
 Antin's solution is to run a bulldozer right over that obstacle and others (Bell can't dance? Shoot her from the waist up). During the opening credits, Ali, alone in a dive bar in Iowa, launches into Etta James' "Something's Got a Hold on Me." Fully amplified and laughable in its professionalism, the number instantly establishes that we have no need to fret about Ali's future. It's lulling, the narrative equivalent of Muzak. The rest of the movie follows suit, unfolding predictably but pleasantly. At Burlesque, Ali meets her primary love interest right off the bat, Jack the bartender (Cam Gigandet, a young Brad Pitt type), and is soon sleeping on his couch in tantalizing proximity. Jack is engaged, but his fiancée is conveniently out of town. (Watch TIME's video "The 2008 New York Burlesque Festival.") 
  
 In addition to finding fame and true love, there's also, surprisingly, a subplot involving the national real estate crisis. Tess and her ex-husband, Burlesque's co-owner Vince (the completely unnecessary Peter Gallagher), are facing foreclosure, which means we get to hear Cher grumbling about balloon payments. The local sleazy real estate mogul Marcus (Eric Dane) wants to buy Tess out, but she refuses. Ali's talent might bring in the punters and save the day, unless she's seduced by Marcus, who comes bearing glittering Louis Vuitton shoes and an opportunity to meet big-time producers. Should we be worried she'll let the club down? Not in this carefully cushioned star vehicle. "That one there," Sean says, gesturing at Ali, "she's beautiful on the inside as well." 
  
 See TIME's special report "Broadway and Beyond." ||||| Burlesque is a terrible film that will delight nearly everyone who sees it, whether they’re 12-year-old Christina Aguilera fans or bad-movie buffs angling for a guilty pleasure. Burlesque delivers exactly what it promises, and then some: It’s a glittering neon valentine to divadom so exquisitely, unapologetically gay that Alan Cumming’s homage to Joel Grey in Cabaret actually constitutes one of its butcher elements. The screenplay sometimes suggests an overachieving direct-to-DVD sequel to Showgirls, so good in an egregiously awful fashion that someone decided to give it the A-list treatment and rope in big-name talent like Christina Aguilera—who finally has a Crossroads or Glitter to call her own—and Cher, who here completes her evolution from camp diva to Academy Award-winning dramatic actress back into camp diva. 
  
 Aguilera stars as a Small-Town Girl from Nowheresville, Iowa who quits her thankless job as a waitress and heads to The Big City to Make It. We’re in the land of archetypes here, so each new character is a variation on one we’ve seen thousands of time before, most particularly in Showgirls. In L.A., Aguilera scores a job as a waitress at a burlesque club run by saintly Cher, and eventually makes her way onto the stage. There, she becomes the club’s star attraction, but will her rapid rise to glory be enough to keep the club from falling into the clutches of a wealthy playboy (Eric Dane) who just so happens to be wooing Aguilera? Will our plucky heroine ultimately choose Dane or Cam Gigandet, an impossibly hunky bartender/aspiring songwriter with killer abs, big dreams, and a phantom actress girlfriend in New York who might just fall out of the picture whenever that proves narratively convenient? 
  
 Steve Antin’s job as writer and director primarily involves keeping his divas happy. Late in the film, Burlesque stops cold so Cher can deliver, with only the faintest of pretenses, her answer to Jennifer Hudson’s big “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” number from Dreamgirls. Why? Because Cher hasn’t had a huge dramatic moment for about 20 minutes, and Burlesque is committed to doling out an endless series of hysterically over-the-top climaxes borrowed from other show-biz melodramas. Burlesque is the kind of instant camp classic that audiences enjoy shouting along with countless times, à la Rocky Horror Picture Show or The Room. But the film hews so lovingly to genre conventions that anyone with even a passing familiarity of its clichés will be able to shout every line along with the actors the first time around. ||||| Christina Aguilera stars in Burlesque. STEPHEN VAUGHAN/SCREEN GEMS 
  
 Burlesque 
  
 (out of 4) 
  
 Starring Cher, Christina Aguilera, Stanley Tucci and Kristen Bell. Written and directed by Steven Antin. At major theatres. 119 minutes. PG 
  
 Snobs, cynics and hussies will try to tell you that Burlesque is a farrago of atrocious acting and worse singing. 
  
 Point granted on the singing, especially when Christina Aguilera is in full bovine belch as a frustrated Iowa farm girl who moves to Los Angeles to find her inner slut. One blast of her mighty pipes could stun an advancing bull moose at 50 paces. 
  
 But the knock against her acting is a damnable lie, and the same goes for her co-star Cher, likewise no stranger to social misconduct and moose-abusing vocals. Simple logic insists that superhuman thespian abilities were required to maintain a straight face when negotiating such farcical material. 
  
 You try being Cher’s Tess, co-owner of the titular Burlesque Lounge, which promises “the best view on the Sunset Strip,” then fails to deliver. She’s a fleshpot Norma Desmond — and working on Sunset Boulevard! — who has to mouth howlers such as telling an aspiring butt wiggler that, “Maybe you could learn from my mistakes.” 
  
 It helps that Cher’s face is now permanently immobile, frozen in a rictus pose that’s long past second thoughts about cosmetic surgery. 
  
 And imagine Aguilera’s hard labour as the naive but nubile Ali Rose, who must feign seriousness while telling everyone that her life ambition is to lacquer her face, dress like a whore and sing PG-13 facsimiles of raunchy songs to drunks. Good thing Ali’s mom expired when she was 11; they don’t approve of things like this down on the farm. 
  
 It’s all pretty laughable (and please note that I’m kidding about the great acting), but it must be said that Burlesque is no Showgirls, that hilarious attempt at multiplex-friendly porn that killed any chance of a rational adult film rating stateside. 
  
 Burlesque writer/director Steven Antin may be one overpainted eyelash away from straight parody, and his dialogue is certainly risible, but not much of it is really funny in the hah-hah sense. Burlesque is not over the top enough to qualify it for the midnight movie hoot-fests that Showgirls enjoyed, although you can certainly see the top from here. It’s more corny than campy and more silly than sexy, much more’s the pity. 
  
 No one could say that Aguilera doesn’t give it her all, though. This is her first real acting assignment, and by God, she’s going to act. 
  
 She shimmies and shakes that bod within every inch of its cantilevered curvature. When she belts out a dominatrix number, she does so sans microphone, defying the evil bee-yatchery perpetrated by perpetually drunk rival showgirl Nikki (Kristen Bell). It’s like listening to a building demolition crew at work without hearing protection. 
  
 No slouch herself in the over-emoting department, when Cher sings the Diane Warren-penned power ballad “You Haven’t Seen the Last of Me,” it sounds like a threat. At least she seems to realize that she’s acting in trash; sadly, her role is rather compacted. 
  
 What of men, you ask? Not really wanted on the journey, but it’s funny to see Stanley Tucci’s gay dresser character seeming as if he was simply cut-and-pasted out of The Devil Wears Prada. You go, girl! 
  
 Studly bartender Jack (Cam Gigandet) keeps the home fires burning very, very slowly for Ali. Eric Dane gnaws foliage as a randy real estate developer. Peter Gallagher whines as Cher’s ex-hubby. Alan Cumming wishes so badly he could have been Joel Grey, but he’s barely in the film. 
  
 Sex and nudity? Nothing more than you’d see in a TV ad for the Bahamas, unless the sight of someone consuming a banana onstage sounds arousing. 
  
 The singing and dancing are better than in last year’s unfortunate Nine, but that’s not saying much. You’d expect Antin, a videographer by past profession and current inclination, to know a thing or two about movement. 
  
 But it ain’t no Cabaret, or even Chicago. 
  
 Somewhere, the ghost of Bob Fosse is smirking. |||||
Output:
Cher is back, starring in her first film in seven years, but critics aren't too wowed by the campy Burlesque, which also feature Christina Aguilera: "The choicest dialogue in Burlesque provokes the sort of laughter that other, intentionally funny films only dream of generating," writes Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune. "Most backstage musicals are ridiculous, but this is ridiculous." Cher's howlingly-bad lines are made even worse by the fact that her "face is now permanently immobile, frozen in a rictus pose that’s long past second thoughts about cosmetic surgery," writes Peter Howell in the Toronto Star, but he does give semi-sarcastic props to Aguilera: "No one could say that Aguilera doesn’t give it her all, though. This is her first real acting assignment, and by God, she’s going to act." Even Nathan Rabin, who gives the film a rare positive review on the Onion's AV Club, praises it mostly for being "a terrible film that will delight nearly everyone who sees it, whether they’re 12-year-old Christina Aguilera fans or bad-movie buffs angling for a guilty pleasure." "The movie is frivolous fun, but not, as I had sort of hoped, as sinfully awful as Showgirls, Mariah Carey's Glitter, or Britney Spears' Crossroads," writes Mary Pols in Time. "Lacking the snap of Chicago or the insane creativity of Moulin Rouge, it's a middle-of-the-road musical."