Category: Kiernan Shipka

THE LAST SHOWGIRL

By Marc S. Sanders

I dunno.  Maybe we grow up twice in our lifetime.  

Growing up is hard to do.  As a kid I loved playing with all my Star Wars, He-Man and GI Joe toys.  Now that I’m in my 50s, I see pictures of those toys online that are long gone, and I tell my wife how I wish I could escape back into that comfortable universe of limitless imagination.  Often, I miss being a child.

Beyond a boring desk job, as an adult I’ve moved on to acting to maintain my sanity, now going on close to 35 years.  Only, I do not memorize lines as well as I used to and there are fewer roles for an over middle-aged guy.  I miss many of my favorite parts that I portrayed on stage in my earlier decades.  I direct more often now, staying off the stage, and I guide actors to a point where I imagine how I would have portrayed the role.

Leaving these periods of my past behind is hard to accept and as I watched Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl, I could deeply relate to the anguish felt by Shelly (Pamela Anderson, in a gut-wrenching performance).  I believe anything we are good at, or that we have complete self confidence in is hardest when we are stripped of our talents.  Arthritis can mar a concert pianist, a unreliable memory can weaken an actor, bad knees can curse an athlete, and for Shelly who has been a Las Vegas showgirl for over thirty years, aging is working against her preservation.  Even worse is knowing that your performance niche carries no interest with audiences any longer.  Shelly’s show is being closed down in two weeks and an updated high-flying circus will occupy the venue.  

Coppola’s present day film appears to be shot on an 80’s camcorder.  The colors and sparkles of Vegas entertainment are glitzy only from the costume wear of Shelly and her fellow performers.  Otherwise, the cinematography is as colorless and burned out as an old home movie.  

Jamie Lee Curtis is unrecognizable at first. She plays Annette who is casino cocktail waitress and out of the showgirl business for a number of years now.  He complexion is craggily and overly tan.  Her hair is damaged, likely from years of hairspray treatments.  Her makeup is overdone in deep blue mascara and rouge.  She’s probably thirty pounds heavier and this has aged her out of her dancing career.  This is hard.  She’s a friend to Shelly, but she’s deeply mad at her newfound reality that will never match what she once was.  Total Eclipse Of The Heart could not be a more appropriate needle drop during a crushing scene among the slot machines of a busy casino.

Pamela Anderson plays Shelly as innocently naive and sweet to the younger performers (Brenda Song, Kiernan Shipka) who still have the youthful looks that will grant them opportunities after their show closes.  Shelly is affectionate and attendant to the younger girls’ insecurities.  She’s a maternal hen the young ladies pay attention to.  On the other hand, Shelly no longer looks like a blond babe who came out of the TV show Baywatch.  That is why casting Pamela Anderson in this role is so smart.  The actor ran the beaches in bathing suits while being an 80s rocker tag along with the drummer from Motley Crue.  Now she’s in her 60s and must adjust her talents and physical assets of wrinkles and crow’s feet to portray a lost soul like Shelly, a girl thrust into an immediate future of no purpose, no need and a lot less hope.  Who can Shelly turn to when her insecurity attacks?

Anderson is definitely up to the task of this role.  Her squeaky voice with a detectable girly lisp fights to uphold an optimistic extrovert.  This girl must have been a Marilyn Monroe of this industry at one point. Inside though, Shelly is in terrifying pain and Coppola’s script allows for several different scenes where her fear explodes organically.  One time it’s on a date with her stage manager Eddie (Dave Bautista, looking like a muscle head that you’d find in Vegas, but not in a showy superhero movie).  Later, Shelly has to pour her regrets out to her estranged college age daughter (Billie Lourd) who resents being placed below a risqué cheesy showgirl act while she was growing up.  

The most heartbreaking moment occurs when Shelly auditions with an unnatural and unsure toothy smile to become club dancer.  The director is unsubtle and apathetic at deteriorating whatever Shelly has left to grasp. Finally, Shelly the former, lovable showgirl must release the pain of her new reality that she’s been stabbed with.  Within a career mostly highlighted with buxom beach running and bathing suit footage, Pamela Anderson delivers her best dramatic scene anyone will ever encounter from her.  This is not just some cheapo dancer draped in stiletto heels, feathers and plastic bling with gigantic headdresses to balance.  This is a real person who has become extinct of her normalcy.  She could’ve performed elsewhere, but she’s three decades older now and on the surface, to the superficial folk of the nightlife scene, she’s not the T & A that people desire anymore.

The Last Showgirl explores the challenges of transition.  Change confronts all of us eventually.  We get older and maybe less healthier.  We are not as flexible and we move slower.  We become less intuitive and analytical too.  We also become displaced and replaced.  

Gia Coppola’s film, written with touching sensitivity by Kate Gersten, opted to follow a career that hinges primarily on aesthetics, but also on a culture that has outlived its shelf life.  Glitz and blingy glamour are not what’s sought after anymore.  Las Vegas has partly become a tourist attraction on a level of amusement park scale with nifty rides, concerts and family fare like circuses.  Shelly and Annette no longer fit in this newer design.  Yet they are not cars or buildings you demolish and replace.  These women have lives that were never prepared to be spit out and discarded.

The Last Showgirl shows a harsh reality.  The performances from its cast of current younger generations to the older material carried by Bautista, Curtis and especially Pamela Anderson are grounded in a range of reactionary authenticity.  Change arrives for each of these people.  Yet, the effects run a spectrum of differing perspectives, and the most hopeless and complex circumstance is delivered affectionately by a surprising Pamela Anderson in a heartbreaking performance.  Her work is so well done in this film. 

RED ONE

By Marc S. Sanders

Santa Claus has been kidnapped.  It’s up to Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans to rescue him before Lucy Liu has to explain to all the Presidents and Prime Ministers across the world that there might not be a Christmas.  It’s one thing to read this as pertinent information.  It’s another to say it out loud with a straight face.  I’m now convinced that Lucy Liu is the most amazing actress of all time.  Not a curve, not a wrinkle, not a twitch in her stoic expression. Still, I believe Christmas is going to happen.

Yes, ol’ St. Nick (J.K. Simmons) has been captured.  His bodyguard is Cal (Dwayne Johnson), also head of security at the North Pole.  He is determined to get the bearded man in red back before Christmas Eve, and he partners up with a petty computer hacker mastermind, lacking any Christmas spirit, named Jack (Chris Evans).  The guys will argue with each other before they connect as buddies. You know how this works.  They’ll follow the leads to find out who and why “Red One” was taken. 

Red One works as a fun action picture with pretty cool and imaginative visuals like I’d count on from director/writer Jake Kasdan, son of Lawrence.  As a Christmas movie though? It needs a lot more tinsel.  

J.K. Simmons is not a conventional fat man Santa with a jolly “Ho Ho Ho.”  This dude is a weightlifter and, well, he talks like the guy from Whiplash and those Spider-Man movies.  Pair him up with the bruising Dwayne Johnson and this Santa is the morose police captain who would sit behind a desk, handing out the next Lethal Weapon assignment.  

The director of security is played by Lucy Liu, dressed in a black starched pantsuit, stressing the urgency of the problem.  Like the rest of the cast, save Evans, she takes Christmas way serious and that’s where the problem lies with Red One.  It’s not gleeful or celebratory of the holiday.  When she warns us that Christmas may not come, how am I supposed to respond to such a dire consequence?  Should I be scared? Am I supposed to laugh or cry?  When Doc Brown told Marty McFly he may be erased from existence, well you know that was pretty heavy (and not as trivial as something wrong with the gravitational pull of the earth).  When Lucy Liu and The Rock talk about NO CHRISTMAS of all things, I gotta wonder if I’ll get my annual Chinese dinner with my Jewish family.  Red One feels like a cliffhanger episode of NCIS.  Even Die Hard was more in line with the Christmas spirit than this flick.  John McClane declared his “Ho Ho Ho!” when he got a machine gun.  No one in this movie seems to have a sense of humor.  Chris Evans cracks some one-liners as if he’s shying away from the hokey script that everyone else embraces like a Tom Clancy novel.  

What works in Red One is the visual imagery of a wicked Christmas witch and assorted trolls and monster mayhem, particularly from Krampus (Santa’s gholish beast of a brother played by Kristofer Hivju) who gives a hilarious beatdown on The Rock.  There’s also a cute way to disarm some beastly polar bears who can encase our heroes in ice. The designs of the North Pole look cool as an industrial military base specializing in toy manufacturing.  However, we could have seen some cool gadgetry with this factory.  Instead, there’s a lot of underground mazes to circumvent that we barely get a look at amid the fast pace of the action scenes.

Cal is gifted with a power wristlet that packs a punch, shrinks him down for fighting advantages and has the ability to turn Hot Wheels cars into life size Chevrolet products for quick travel.  Naturally, Cal also knows that storage closets found in any toy store will transport you to another part of the world.  Nifty!  Not holiday spirited though.

The chases and fights work.  Johnson and Evans make for an okay buddy cop kind of pair.  The designs of the movie hold.  Yet, what’s missing is a spirit of Christmas magic.  Again, the holiday of Santa with his magical reindeer and cookies and stockings all feel hollow here.  Something is definitely missing because it’s hard for me to pinpoint who this film is catered for.  Families?  Red One comes off too nihilistic for that crowd ready to enjoy everyone’s comfort during winter break.  It’s too hokey just for the adults or the action movie lover.  A threat of Santa Claus missing with Christmas at risk also seems too overwhelming for the under 8 crowd.  

I got a kick at everything I saw on screen but there’s no one to connect with or empathize, and even for this Jewish guy, there’s an absence of Christmas tidings to behold from music to decor to the common recognizable tropes. Even when Santa poses as a shopping mall iteration, Simmons’ tough guy exterior doesn’t lend to any sort of joy or whimsy that comes with the holiday.

The sad irony is that Cal wants to retire because he sees more pessimism and materialistic selfishness in the adults these days.  Santa tries to convince Cal to reconsider as the spirit of the holiday will return.  If that’s true, then St Nick with a J. Jonah Jameson disposition does not offer much promise.  

These guys are rescuing Santa Claus like they are rescuing the President Of The United States, and frankly who the hell has liked any of the Presidents Of The United States of late?