When Pamela Anderson hosted the Junos in Halifax in 2006, I had a chance to see her up close while I worked as a production assistant on the show. She clearly didn’t know anything about Canadian music beyond Bryan Adams, not a requirement of hosting the country’s biggest music awards show, I guess. She is a survivor, which makes it not a surprise she’s engineered a new chapter of her showbiz career in The Last Showgirl.
She’s Shelley, who after working for 30 years on a Las Vegas nudie revue Razzle Dazzle is about to be out of work when the show shuts down. The movie does a decent job exploring the vagaries of age, obsolescence, and how to sustain self-respect in the face of those two things, though director Gia Coppola is too interested in the woozy montage to offer much real depth in the material. We also never actually see the show, which is distracting for its absence. But Anderson brings some complexity as Shelley, and gets solid support from Dave Bautista, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kiernan Shipka, and especially Billie Lourd. (▲▲1/2) | Crave
Ingrid (Julianne Moore) is a successful author who discovers her old friend, Martha (Tilda Swinton), is in a Manhattan hospital with cervical cancer. They renew their acquaintance as Martha plans to end her life before the cancer takes it. Martha rents a modernist house outside the city and asks Ingrid to keep her company as she executes her plan. These actors are masters, and it’s a gift to have them share the screen with each other. It’s a real shame, then, that The Room Next Door is so painfully stilted. Filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar has made a career of Spanish melodramas, films full of life, laughter, colour, and incident, but something here has been lost in translation. This picture has some of the worst, most obvious ADR I’ve ever seen outside a spaghetti western. Swinton appears in a dual role, as she often does, but playing her own daughter here is laughable and/or perverse. Almodóvar’s first film in English is hollow and detached from the very themes it’s trying to explore — staring down your mortality. (▲▲)
