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The Guardian
02-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Last Showgirl review – Pamela Anderson gives performance of a lifetime in rhinestone-studded tale
A life spent in the service of dreams and fantasy collides with unforgiving reality: Pamela Anderson's veteran Vegas showgirl Shelly is forced to face a future that no longer has need of her 1,000-watt smile and glitter-smeared decolletage. The third feature from Palo Alto-director Gia Coppola (granddaughter of Francis, niece of Sofia), The Last Showgirl is a wisp of a thing, clocking in at under 90 minutes and shot in just 18 days. The film's structure, more a series of vignettes than a linear narrative, feels like the fleeting reflections of a life captured in the facets of a mirror ball. It's initially tempting to dismiss the picture, like its central character with her breathy, little-girl voice, as superficial. But there's a bruising cumulative power to this melancholy little paean to an ending era. And Anderson, whose character is left questioning not just what the future holds, but also the costly choices that shaped her past, is excellent, delivering a performance that has single-handedly rewritten the way she is viewed as an actor. Shelly has only ever been a showgirl; with well over 30 years of service under her garter belt, she is, by no small margin, the longest-serving cast member of Le Razzle Dazzle, an old school Vegas spectacle full of rhinestones, forced smiles and barely there costumes. The show is the last of its kind. It is, says Shelly firmly, a descendent of Parisian Lido culture. But Vegas punters, it seems, no longer have the appetite for showbiz cultural relics, even if they come dolled up in ostrich feathers and nipple tassels. Le Razzle Dazzle has already lost half of its weekly shows to an X-rated adult circus. And now comes the news, delivered by the socially maladroit stage manager Eddie (a lovely, low-key, sad-sack turn from Dave Bautista) that the casino's management has decided to close the show for good. For most of the girls, who view the gig as just another job that pays the rent, it's an annoyance. But for Shelly, whose whole identity is wrapped up in her status as a Razzle Dazzle showgirl, it's an existential emergency. With just two weeks to go before the show closes and uncertainty looming, Shelly weighs her options. Her age – she tries for 36, admits to 42 ('Distance helps,' she twitters) but in fact, she's 57 years old – counts against her. But she hauls herself on to the audition circuit anyway. Before we even see her at the film's opening, we hear her – heels clip-clopping purposefully as she strides on to a stage to try out for a jaded producer (Jason Schwartzman). The alternative is the route taken by her friend, former showgirl Annette (a terrific Jamie Lee Curtis, brassy, brusque and baked to a crisp by the desert sun), who now serves cocktails on the casino floor in an ill-fitting tailcoat and tights so shiny they make her legs look like clingfilm-wrapped ham. To complicate matters, Shelly is also struggling to rebuild a relationship with her semi-estranged adult daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd), whose childhood she largely missed in order to pursue her dream of a stage career. It's tempting to draw parallels between Anderson's performance and that of Demi Moore in The Substance – both, after all, are characters whose worth to the entertainment industry has been linked to their youth and beauty, played by actors who had to deal with the same entrenched attitudes. But while Moore's prosthetics-wrestling, Grand Guignol gurning is a lot of fun, Anderson's is the more satisfying turn, a performance that speaks volumes in small details. There is an elegant pair of companion scenes – one early, one towards the end of the film – in which Shelly leaves voicemails for Hannah. The first is all fluttery panic, like a butterfly caught under glass; the second is sober, considered, each word weighted. There's a whole character arc just in these two messages. While as a piece of storytelling, it can feel flimsy, many of Coppola's directing choices are perceptive enough to add real depth to the picture. The score, by Andrew Wyatt, is lush, romantic and steeped in the kind of old Hollywood, Busby Berkeley nostalgia that shapes Shelly's self-image. And the rough-around-the-edges Super 16mm cinematography works particularly well: the shimmering, gauzy lens flare softens the strip malls and wasteland parking lots of daytime Vegas in the same way that the layers of sequin-dusted tulle bring a synthetic magic to the tired and tacky reality of Le Razzle Dazzle. Sign up to Observed Analysis and opinion on the week's news and culture brought to you by the best Observer writers after newsletter promotion In UK and Irish cinemas
Yahoo
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Pamela Anderson is a dramatic revelation in the raw, honest The Last Showgirl
The first moments of The Last Showgirl hit like a static shock. We know the face that occupies its frames – shot tight, unnervingly tight – all too well. It belongs to Pamela Anderson, the pop culture behemoth and unfairly maligned bombshell who, in recent years, has wrested back the narrative through a stint in Chicago on Broadway, a paired autobiography and documentary, and a decision to go makeup free at public events. She's come into full ownership, now, of the power that was always hers, generated by that megawatt smile, in those hazy blue eyes and peroxide blonde curls. In Gia Coppola's portrait of an artist in the midst of identity collapse, though, Anderson's Shelly Gardner, a showgirl we first meet mid-audition, seems shockingly vulnerable. Her smile is a nervous twitch. Her eyes dart left and right. When an offscreen voice (Jason Schwartzman, cousin to Coppola, who's the granddaughter of Francis Ford) asks Shelly her age, it's as if she's just been struck by the interrogator's spotlight. '36?' she whimpers. 'Sorry, I lied, I'm 42.' She's 57. 'Distance helps!' she jokes. It doesn't feel quite right to say The Last Showgirl is Anderson's comeback role. But it does feel significant – a way to memorialise, on film, the kind of career she's wanted to shape for herself, by playing a character who's less an echo of herself than an echo of what she's had to fight against. There is something raw and honest in all of Shelly's self-effacing giggles. Coppola's film doesn't just tackle the cruel dismissal of women who dare to age, but of every modern artist's deepest fear: that the day will come when the bottom falls out of their industry, leaving them with nothing to show for it but a lifetime of sacrifice. Shelly has been with the Vegas revue show Le Razzle Dazzle for three decades. Her younger colleagues, Jodie (Kiernan Shipka) and Mary-Anne (Brenda Song), don't value their work beyond the paycheque. But Shelly feels immense pride in it and can barely sustain a conversation without alluding to its prestige origins as 'the last descendant of Parisian Lido culture'. So when the show's producer Eddie (Dave Bautista, proving he's at his best in quiet, soulful roles) announces its closure, it's accompanied by the drone sound of Shelly's entire universe imploding. Is she valiant or delusional? Coppola doesn't let us see much of Le Razzle Dazzle itself, and not until the very end, and Shelly's elegant descriptions are always combated by other people's dismissal of it as a 'stupid nudie show'. But all artists are delusional, to a degree, and Autumn Durald Arkapaw's grainy 16mm cinematography invites us to scrutinise faces and emotions while the borders around them – the stuff that makes up concrete reality – are largely a blur. At the heart of Kate Gersten's script lives a small found family living under less-than-ideal circumstances. Shelly's best friend Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis) insists she'll die in her cocktail waitress uniform; Jodie and Mary-Anne cling to Shelly and Eddie as unwilling parental figures, while Shelly's actual daughter, Hannah (Billie Lourd), remains detached and bitter under the belief her mother chose her career over her child. Coppola's previous films, Palo Alto (2013), about disaffected teenagers, and Mainstream (2020), about the lure of viral popularity, were similarly centred around people trapped in their own minor delusions. But the director shows great empathy for the pull of self-romanticisation, even when it wounds the dreamer. Shelly lingers around car parks and grimy rooftops, adorned in all her rhinestones and feathers. We're watching her write her own poetry. Dir: Gia Coppola. Starring: Pamela Anderson, Kiernan Shipka, Brenda Song, Billie Lourd, Dave Bautista and Jamie Lee Curtis. 15, 89 minutes. 'The Last Showgirl' is in cinemas from 28 February
The Independent
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Pamela Anderson is a dramatic revelation in the raw, honest The Last Showgirl
The first moments of The Last Showgirl hit like a static shock. We know the face that occupies its frames – shot tight, unnervingly tight – all too well. It belongs to Pamela Anderson, the pop culture behemoth and unfairly maligned bombshell who, in recent years, has wrested back the narrative through a stint in Chicago on Broadway, a paired autobiography and documentary, and a decision to go makeup free at public events. She's come into full ownership, now, of the power that was always hers, generated by that megawatt smile, in those hazy blue eyes and peroxide blonde curls. In Gia Coppola's portrait of an artist in the midst of identity collapse, though, Anderson's Shelly Gardner, a showgirl we first meet mid-audition, seems shockingly vulnerable. Her smile is a nervous twitch. Her eyes dart left and right. When an offscreen voice (Jason Schwartzman, cousin to Coppola, who's the granddaughter of Francis Ford) asks Shelly her age, it's as if she's just been struck by the interrogator's spotlight. '36?' she whimpers. 'Sorry, I lied, I'm 42.' She's 57. 'Distance helps!' she jokes. It doesn't feel quite right to say The Last Showgirl is Anderson's comeback role. But it does feel significant – a way to memorialise, on film, the kind of career she's wanted to shape for herself, by playing a character who's less an echo of herself than an echo of what she's had to fight against. There is something raw and honest in all of Shelly's self-effacing giggles. Coppola's film doesn't just tackle the cruel dismissal of women who dare to age, but of every modern artist's deepest fear: that the day will come when the bottom falls out of their industry, leaving them with nothing to show for it but a lifetime of sacrifice. Shelly has been with the Vegas revue show Le Razzle Dazzle for three decades. Her younger colleagues, Jodie (Kiernan Shipka) and Mary-Anne (Brenda Song), don't value their work beyond the paycheque. But Shelly feels immense pride in it and can barely sustain a conversation without alluding to its prestige origins as 'the last descendant of Parisian Lido culture'. So when the show's producer Eddie (Dave Bautista, proving he's at his best in quiet, soulful roles) announces its closure, it's accompanied by the drone sound of Shelly's entire universe imploding. Is she valiant or delusional? Coppola doesn't let us see much of Le Razzle Dazzle itself, and not until the very end, and Shelly's elegant descriptions are always combated by other people's dismissal of it as a 'stupid nudie show'. But all artists are delusional, to a degree, and Autumn Durald Arkapaw's grainy 16mm cinematography invites us to scrutinise faces and emotions while the borders around them – the stuff that makes up concrete reality – are largely a blur. At the heart of Kate Gersten's script lives a small found family living under less-than-ideal circumstances. Shelly's best friend Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis) insists she'll die in her cocktail waitress uniform; Jodie and Mary-Anne cling to Shelly and Eddie as unwilling parental figures, while Shelly's actual daughter, Hannah (Billie Lourd), remains detached and bitter under the belief her mother chose her career over her child. Coppola's previous films, Palo Alto (2013), about disaffected teenagers, and Mainstream (2020), about the lure of viral popularity, were similarly centred around people trapped in their own minor delusions. But the director shows great empathy for the pull of self-romanticisation, even when it wounds the dreamer. Shelly lingers around car parks and grimy rooftops, adorned in all her rhinestones and feathers. We're watching her write her own poetry. Dir: Gia Coppola. Starring: Pamela Anderson, Kiernan Shipka, Brenda Song, Billie Lourd, Dave Bautista and Jamie Lee Curtis. 15, 89 minutes.
Telegraph
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The Last Showgirl: Pamela Anderson's comeback exposes her limitations
There can be a connoisseur-ish pleasure in an actor taking a role that feeds on their own public persona: see Michael Keaton in Birdman, or Antonio Banderas in Official Competition, or more recently, Demi Moore in The Substance. But the trouble with all that self-reflexivity is it takes a supple player to pull it off. And, awkward as it might be to admit, Pamela Anderson – whose new film has been touted as something of a comeback – may not be quite on the same level as the talents above. The former Baywatch star draws on her sex-symbol past for the title role in this elegant but slight piece of serio-whimsy from Gia Coppola, 38-year-old granddaughter of the great Francis Ford. (The script is Kate Gersten's adaptation of her unproduced play, Body of Work.) Anderson's Shelly Gardner is an ageing Las Vegas dancer who has been performing in the same glitzy revue, Le Razzle Dazzle, for decades, even as the costumes grow increasingly tatty and the nightly audience thins. She's an artiste – she sees value in, and draws it from, every performance she gives – but the market for her particular brand of artistry has all but dried up, forcing Shelly to confront the fact that her beloved industry now regards her as fit for the scrap heap. If the précis above has you picturing Anderson poignantly pirouetting through projected footage of Old Hollywood dancers in the front room of a chintzy bungalow, congratulations: you already have the measure of the film. Though its title suggests a glimpse of the Vegas you never see, the film contains no surprising scenes or moments at all: from the reunion with her estranged and very unglamorous daughter (Billie Lourd) to the faltering date with her long-time lighting director Eddie (a terrific Dave Bautista, whose personal style here is 'what if The Wizard of Oz's Cowardly Lion was a cocaine dealer'), you can see every plot development coming, boinking calmly and predictably away from the underlying premise like a tennis ball bouncing down stairs. Anderson's performance is certainly decent. But the film keeps butting up against her limits as a performer: the coquettish babydoll voice never cracks; the glossy-mag-enshrined face never quite crumples or fragments. There is no moment to compare with, say, Moore's jaw-dropping mirror scene in The Substance, in which she frantically redoes her makeup to try to look 'young' for a date – for Anderson, at least. The closest thing to it is given to Jamie Lee Curtis, whose brassy, boozy cocktail waitress Annette is essentially Shelly plus 10 years: our heroine's personal Ghost of Vegas Yet To Come. As Total Eclipse of the Heart strikes up on the casino sound system, Curtis sets down her tray, mounts a podium and begins a trance-like dance – surely a nod towards her iconic striptease sequence in 1994's True Lies. Skin spray-tanned a light shade of creosote, bosoms erupting from her tangerine blazer, face framed by a blonde and chestnut mane, she resembles nothing less than a horny Wookiee, and it's glorious. More of this would have given this showbusiness fable some welcome bite; as it is, it's an absorbing but disappointingly tasteful watch.
New York Times
21-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Showgirl Must Go on
If names can influence destinies, Gypsy Wood was always meant to be a showgirl. Just as she was about to be born in a hospital in Sydney, Australia, her parents, who were theater people, came across a program for the musical 'Gypsy.' This inspired them to name the baby after its subject, the burlesque performer Gypsy Rose Lee. 'Being very spiritual '70s artists, they were, like, 'It's a sign!' Ms. Wood recounted. That Natalie Wood (no relation) played Gypsy in the movie only added to the sense of planetary alignment. Ms. Wood grew up to be a dancer and cabaret artist with a wide streak of surrealist humor. She jumped out of dignitaries' birthday cakes, did strip teases and magic shows and appeared on Australian television and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Eventually, she made her way to Las Vegas, where she joined an adult-oriented circus/comedy show hybrid — a 'dirty circus,' if you will — called 'Opium.' She played a nurse aboard a spaceship that transported visitors from Uranus to Las Vegas. Her longtime performing partner, Asher Treleaven, who was also her ex-husband, played the captain. In the fall of 2023, the cosmos knocked again. Ms. Wood was in bed, recovering from a hangover from her 45th birthday party and moping over the end of a relationship, when someone making a Hollywood movie called 'The Last Showgirl' got in touch. Through a network of Las Vegas artists, Robert Schwartzman, a producer of the film and the cousin of its director, Gia Coppola, learned about Ms. Wood's house near the Las Vegas Strip and thought it might work as the home of the title character, Shelly Gardner. As played by Pamela Anderson in a career redefining role, Shelly is a middle-aged dancer whose three-decade job in a Vegas show called 'Le Razzle Dazzle' is about to end. It could be said that Shelly's true home is her backstage dressing room, where she gossips and makes frantic costume changes along with the other showgirls. But much of the film is centered on her domestic life, cooking fish for a date who never shows up, entertaining friends and colleagues, melting down in the bathroom and receiving a rare visit from a resentful daughter. Ms. Wood said she expected months to pass before anyone stopped by to check out her house for use as a set, but the filmmakers soon came, saw and swooned. The 1954 ranch house was a veritable museum of Rat Pack era décor, filled with fluffy, sparkly and fruit colored furnishings. The walls were giddy with patterned paper and hung with vintage portraits of busty women. Tiny Chihuahuas ambled around. Ms. Wood is part of a coterie that haunts estate sales and vintage shops to rescue pieces of Las Vegas that threaten to be buried under the onslaught of themed amusements like the soon-to-be-built Guitar Hotel, and technological wonders like the Sphere arena. To her and many others, these remnants of imperfect times fraught with crime, misogyny and reckless spending now feel as harmless in their gilded excesses as a small, hairless dog. They are even aspirational. 'When I came to Vegas,' Ms. Wood said, 'I saw a picture of Jayne Mansfield shopping in a supermarket in Las Vegas in a sequined gown, and I was, like, 'That's going be my spirit animal.'' Natalie Ziering, who designed the sets for 'The Last Showgirl,' recalled in a phone conversation that the film's screenwriter, Kate Gersten, was initially put off by all the bling in Ms. Wood's house. 'She saw Shelly's place as more sterile, more IKEA, just more kind of dull. I was, like, 'No, I think this is perfect because she brings her work home. Her work is all she has,'' (Ms. Ziering added that her entire production budget was $95,000.) Speaking on the phone from Los Angeles, Ms. Coppola said she felt a sense of Kismet when she saw a poster for 'The Red Shoes' hanging in Ms. Wood's living room. The 1948 Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger movie is about how a commitment to one's art can be a two-headed beast, both euphoric and cruel. This is no more true for the celebrated ballerina whom Moira Shearer plays in that film than it is for Shelly dancing in feathers and pasties. 'I definitely felt that that was a movie Shelly would have loved,' Ms. Coppola said. The production team made few décor changes in the 18-day shoot. A crystal chandelier was hung here, a fluorescent lamp was removed there. A broken pair of porcelain figurines that represented the end of Ms. Wood's marriage was positioned on a bathroom windowsill for a cameo. Paint swatches were left on a kitchen wall where Ms. Wood had been experimenting with colors 'I said, 'Please don't touch that,'' Ms. Coppola recalled about the swatches. 'These are just the kind of little details you couldn't necessarily recreate.' In January, Ms. Wood offered a reporter a tour of her home. It was early on a Monday afternoon, and she was wearing an emerald green chiffon cocktail dress that complemented her auburn hair. The house looked deceptively small from outside. 'It's three bedrooms, but that's more than a showgirl needs,' she said. One of those bedrooms — covered in light-blue flocked wallpaper and hung with vintage pinup girl calendar pages — was reserved for artists who were between jobs and needed a place to stay. A second bedroom was papered in a fuzzy dark-green damask on metallic gold. It had gold-painted furniture and a cherub hanging from a corner of the ceiling. Ms. Wood's own room was filled with a bed she bought from a security guard at the Treasure Island Resort & Casino, which had a hot pink tufted headboard framed in baroque gilded swirls. She was collecting gold-veined mirror tiles to cover the ceiling and figured she was about halfway done. By this time, she had papered her kitchen with something 'very Limoncello, very stardust,' as she put it. She spoke of replacing the blond wood kitchen flooring with linoleum. 'It's not terrible,' she said about the boards underfoot. 'It's just too nice.' She vowed never to paint over the white-and-gold lace-patterned wallpaper in the living room that had been put up by the previous owners. 'It's just a masterpiece of design,' she said. Ms. Wood opened a closet door and gestured at holes tunneled into the floorboards that she believed had once been used to hide contraband. Ms. Coppola later recalled that she was so enchanted with them she made sure Shelly referred to them in the movie. Shortly after the film wrapped, Ms. Wood discovered that she, like Shelly, would soon be out of a job. 'Opium,' which was produced by the entertainment company Spiegelworld, closed in December of 2023. But Ms. Wood soon found a place in 'Absinthe,' a raunchy circus performed in a tent outside Caesars Palace that is another Spiegelworld production. She can also be spotted spinning plates in a scene in 'The Last Showgirl.'
