The Show Won't Go On

The Last Showgirl opens with Pamela Anderson's Shelly Gardner standing awkward and alone on stage, lying about her age as she attempts a dance audition for the first time in decades. We then cut to the hustle and bustle of the dressing room of "The Razzle Dazzle", the Vegas show Shelly has been a part of for thirty years. Full of warmth and camaraderie, the life she is used to presents a stark contrast to the future she is facing. Outdated and playing to empty seats, the Razzle Dazzle is set to close in two weeks, prompting Shelly to contemplate life without the thing she has based her entire existence around.

This is an understated and sombre character study, presenting a far less glamorous view of Sin City than we are used to seeing. The glory days of the Vegas showgirl have long passed and despite her being one of the scenes biggest stars, have left Shelly with precious little to show for her life beyond glorious memories. Here home is modest to say the least and estranged daughter, played by Billie Lourd, is aghast when she finally sees how unremarkable the show her mother prioritised now is. Still, she is in a better place than friend and mentor Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis), a cocktail waitress with a gambling problem who is destined to work til she drops. All things may come to an end but director Gia Coppola is keen to impress the fact it is always the women who end up being deemed the most disposable. Shelly rages that despite being the face of the show for decades she is to be thrown on the scrapheap while stage manager Eddie (a soulful Dave Bautista) simply moves on to the show that is taking their place. Aside from a blunt casting director, Eddie is the only male presence in the film. A decent and respectful guy, he still feels the need to weigh in on Shelly's parenting mistakes.

Given her situation it would be easy for Shelly to simply be a vessel for pity, but while you can't help sympathise, she is three dimensional and deeply flawed. She seeks to build bridges with her daughter but seems incapable of giving a sincere apology for being an absentee mother. She is condescending and dismissive towards newer versions of exotic dancing, demanding respect for her art form while giving precious little to others. She callously rejects a plea for help from a young dancer who idoliser her. This texture is what makes the film work, drawing the viewer in to character that could have been a saccharine passenger. Anderson gives a fantastic central performance. Like a captive tiger she is dignified and lost in equal measure and imbues every minute facial movement with energy and meaning. A lot has been made of the role somehow mirroring her real life story but that feels reductive. Sure, few actresses have been dismissed and misunderstood as much as Anderson has but Shelly is the product of a studied and measured performance, not stunt casting.

The Last Showgirl heads straight for melancholy and remains parked there for the duration. In that sense, it is pretty one note but there is enough nuance in the lead performance and compassion in the film making to make it a show worth getting a ticket for.

7 unbroken wings out of 10.

Comments

Won't Somebody Think of the Children

Weapons is the sophomore effort from writer/director Zach Craggier and while his first film, "Barbarian", was well received, this feels like a clear step up. The film's fantastically eerie marketing campaign revolved around the movies central mystery, at 2.17 AM an entire classrooms worth of sixth graders get up out of bed and disappear into the night. It's a great hook but the story proper actually picks up a couple of months after the event and unfolds over a couple of days as the townspeople continue to deal with the fallout. The point of view shifts between a bunch of characters and time and space is given to fleshing out the small town details. This approach, combined with the sombre and eventually horrific goings on, gives the story a very Stephen King feel. It also works as a tension release, wiping the slate somewhat clean every time we switch perspective. The slight downside to the condensed mini series approach is that it lengthens the film with some segm...

Toxic Shock

The Toxic Avenger ambles his way into theatres some two years after the film was first shown at festivals. Strange that the movie had so much trouble finding a distributor given the presence of major names, relatively mainstream sensibilities (compared to the 80s original anyway) and the fact it's actually quite a bit of fun. Events take place in a fictional city inside a cartoonish, ultra-capitalist, crime-ridden caricature of 80s America, with locations called things like "Depressing Outskirts" and "Ye Olde Shithead District". Peter Dinklage is down on his luck janitor Winston Gooze, a widower with a step son who attempts to break into the headquarters of the mega-pharmaceutical company he works for when he discovers his gold level insurance doesn't cover treatment for his brain condition. Things go south and he is transformed into The Toxic Avenger, a mutated super human who sets about righting some wrongs in his crime ridden city. The film attempts t...

Love is a Battlefield

The Roses is technically a remake of 1989 black comedy, "The War of the Roses", but sticks far less closely to the source novel than its predecessor, with director Jay Roach and writer Tony McNamara bringing a drier, more understated tone to the humour. Add in pitch-perfect performances from Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman in the central roles and you have a fantastically fun hundred-odd minutes. After briefly seeing disillusioned architect Theo (Cumberbatch) and ambitious chef Ivy (Colman) first meet, the film skips us forward a decade to the now-married pair having abandoned their native UK to live their dream life in America. Theo is on the verge of revealing his architectural masterpiece while Ivy is cooking outrageously elaborate cakes in her role as stay-at-home mum to their two children. A freak storm ends up flipping their lives around and Ivy's chef career hits the big time while Theo holds down the fort at home and resentments slowly accumulate over th...

We are Living in a Material World

Materialists is, on the surface, a romantic drama-comedy about a New York matchmaker who faces a choice in her own love life. It has something more on its mind though, presenting a forensic examination of modern adult relationships and the incompatibility of expectation and genuine feeling. Dakota Johnson is Lucy, a specialist in matching together "elite" couples. For elite, read some of the worst people on Earth. Men who demand their partners have knockout bodies, adhere to strict weight limits and the younger the better. Women who will only consider the tall, rich and in one case, white. In Lucy's world marriage is a business deal and the ultimate match is the one who checks the most boxes. As a "voluntary celibate", she carries this philosophy into here every day life and has no interest in dating until she can find the rich man who will make husband material. The love cynic is a classic trope for the lead in a movie with this set up but there is much more...

Honey Doesn't

Honey Don't is the second film from the director/writer team-up of Ethan (one half of the brothers) Coen and his wife Tricia Cook. Like their previous effort, "Drive Away Dolls", it is wonderfully queer but lacks any of the sharpness and precise pacing that typifies a classic Coen brothers movie. Margaret Qualley is Honey O'Donahue (a name you will hear spoken a LOT over the course of the film), a private investigator in Bakersfield. She is essentially a classic noir gumshoe detective transported to sun-bleached, modern-day California. After a would-be-client dies, Honey begins an investigation that has her cross paths with Chris Evans's skeezy preacher and the mysterious French woman who represents his business partners. She is also attempting to provide support to her sister, who has a small army of children, including an eldest daughter who she is constantly at loggerheads with. All while working her way through the lesbian population of town, including embarki...

Dressed for Fun

The Naked Gun is a legacy sequel to the mad cap comedy franchise of the late 80's/ early 90's, with Liam Neeson playing Frank Drebin Jr, son of the legendary Leslie Neilson's detective from the original movies. Is big Liam quite as good at deadpan hilarity as Neilson was? Possibly not. Does this film ever completely match the highs of its predecessors? Probably not. Is it still very funny? Absolutely. The film arrives amid a cinematic landscape devoid of out of and out comedies, with laughs mostly relegated to one liners in action films or the silly sidekick in a romcom. Fortunately, from the moment a Girl Scout peels off her face to reveal a gurning Neilson, right through to a joke filled credits roll, The Naked Gun is interested solely in making you chuckle. Sure, there is a plot, involving a mcguffin literally named PLOT device and an evil tech mogul, played with deliciously deadpan malice by Danny Huston, but it's all about the gags. The comedy runs the gamut from ...

I Got Bombs But I'm Not a Bomber

Oppenheimer posed a tricky question for perennial hit maker Christopher Nolan. How do you make a three hour biopic of a scientist compelling enough to bring in big money? Turns out the answer is to not make a biopic at all. While J. Robert Oppenheimer is indeed the focus of the film it eschews any traditional biopic format, instead serving up what is essentially a heist or even sports movie wrapped up in a courtroom drama. This allows the director to indulge his favourite hobby of playing with time, as the story jumps between two different panel hearings while also covering Oppenheimer's early career and of course the work of the Manhattan Project. This approach works incredibly well with the three hour runtime flying by. In fact, if you go to see this in the cinema you might want to skip the large cola as there really isn't any time when little enough is happening to sneak in a toilet brake. Technically the film is outstanding. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, follo...

Money and Masks

The challenge for Dumb Money is how to make a story about stocks interesting, especially when anyone interested either already knows what happened or can easily look up the events. The answer given here is to focus on some great characters played by grade A actors. The story is a simple one, albeit one seasoned with odd bit of financial jargon. Way back in pandemic times (2021) a low rung financial investor called Keith Gill led a Reddit driven movement to buy up stock in video game retail chain Gamestop, massively driving up its share price and giving investors a huge return. This sparks a backlash from the big finance institutions betting on the companies demise. Paul Dano plays Gill with Seth Rogan, Vincent D'Onofrio and Nick Offerman appearing as real life Wall Street investors alongside some made up "average Joe" characters portrayed by America Ferrera, Anthony Ramos and others. When every character is introduced we see their net worth, from the multiple billions ...

2024 at the Cinema

Bye bye 2024, time to put your ducks in a row. If ducks are films I saw in the cinema. As ever, ranking is purely my opinion (although my opinion is obviously correct), a movie needs to have been released in the UK during calendar year 2024 and I have to have seen it on the big screen for it to be eligible. 60. The Strangers: Chapter 1 Unrelentingly tedious reboot of an already mediocre home invasion thriller that ramps up nothing but the banality. If your idea of entertainment is watching an insufferable couple hide while a man and a woman in stupid masks walk about slowly then this is the film for you. Otherwise the only scary thing here is the fact they have already filmed chapters two and three. 59. In a Violent Nature You don't need to make people drink curdled milk to know it would taste awful. Similarly, you shouldn't need to make people watch a slasher film that follows the killer for the whole runtime to know it's a terrible idea. Dialogue is replaced by endless...

Best Foot 4Ward

The Fantastic Four : First Steps marks the third cinematic imagining of the first family of superheroes (not counting the unreleased Roger Corman movie of the 90's) and their introduction to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Well, sort of. It's sort of because the story takes place in a separate dimension from the rest of the films. This is Earth-828, where the Fantastic Four are seemingly the only super heroes. More than heroes, in fact, they are the de facto most important people on the planet and via science and diplomacy they have ushered in an era of worldwide peace and unity. The world itself is a fantastically realised retro-futuristic version of the 1960's, something like Fallout crossed with the Jetsons or, closer to home, a live action Incredibles. The Four consists of; Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), brilliant scientist with stretchy powers, his wife Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), who can go invisible and create force fields with her mind, her brother Johnny (Joseph Qui...

Dan Says its Alright

Search This Blog