By Anne Brodie
Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl is a superior character study, with Pamela Anderson as Shelly, a 57-year-old Las Vegas strip dancer whose show is closing after 30 years. Anderson’s sublime, gut wrenching performance firmly reshapes her career and opens important new opportunities. Her flawless work in a show about ageing in a youth obsessed culture is mesmerising. The Razzle Dazzle revue is the last of its kind, considered old fashioned in the era of other moneymaking shows. Shel’s colleague, Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis) is desperate and embittered, appropriately and brilliantly unlikeable, a victim of Las Vegas’ pressures, always ready to lash out after losing her “cocktailing” sidehustle having aged out. Younger dancers will have an easier time getting work while the vets have no savings or pensions. Shel’s humiliating audition for a new show finds her lying about her age – 37, not 42 – but she goes down fighting. Dave Bautista, the stage manager and the father of Shel’s daughter, gives a sensitive performance as heartbreaking as the others; he’s been with them since the beginning – he will work for the circus replacing the revue. As if this weren’t enough, Shel is experiencing memory lapses and trouble finding certain words suggesting future problems. Deeply sad and empathetic, The Last Showgirl takes us down their paths in a changing world that judges by firmness of flesh. Coppola finds telling, quiet moments – Shel dancing alone on a rooftop, sewing her tulle angel’s wing on the final night of the show, and struggling to connect with her daughter (Billie Lourd) who registers disgust after seeing the review for the first time. So much to repair. Anderson’s landed Golden Globe and SAG Best Actress nominations no doubt with more to come. Theatres.
Nickel Boys is a pastoral, sweeping epic around friendship, hardship, courage and love, set in a uniquely embracing natural world that switches to a suffocating prison. The period story of two boys in a racist, cruel reformatory in Florida, far from their families is an adaptation on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer, Kirkus and Orwell Prize winning fast-based novel. Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson) set out to walk to a new life at Tech School but through misfortune wind up in the Nickel Academy sweatshop. Together they endure bullying and punishments by sadistic staff and fellow inmates. Elwood’s adoring grandmother – Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor in a heartbreaking, electrifying performance – risks all to visit him from up north but is refused admittance. The boys witness vicious acts of sexual, physical and verbal abuse and endure their own as good ‘ole white guards, sadists, look for new victims. The story suggests strong parallels between the reformatories of the past and the residential school horrors in Canada. Beauty and hope comes from Elwood and Turner’s bond and mutual support and need to understand the world better. The awful true events contrast vividly with the focus on the healing powers of the natural world. Ross’ cinematic eye is expansive, paying minute attention to the details of life, nature and humanity and somehow reframing them. Co-writer director RaMell Ross and author Whitehead create an extraordinary script and the result will rip your heart out. Theatres.
The HBO MAX Original doc series An Update on Our Family shines an unforgiving light on the saga of YouTube Family Channel vlogger Myka Stauffer. From the heights of fame, popularity and admiration, not to mention a healthy income from YouTube to pariah wiped from socials, hers is a cautionary tale of manipulation and deceit. Rachel Mason’s three-parter raises serious questions about the open book nature of social media influencers and their innocent victims, the children who didn’t ask to be shown to the world multiple times daily. Stauffer and her husband James released multiple videos of their daily life with emphasis on their growing family, her many pregnancies. YouTube became their sole source of income – a good one. But it all came crashing down, forcing her to hide and wipe her socials following death threats and online hate campaign when she decided to adopt a special needs child from China. They found a boy they called Huxley they knew had cognitive and behavioural issues, but he was miserable with them. He loved his Chinese foster mother and the life he’d known since birth. The Stauffers didn’t tolerate it. In one telling sequence she explains she can’t pay $70 a week for his therapy while wearing a $6KCarter bracelet. She becomes pregnant with their fifth child and begins to lose interest in Huxley. Their army of fans began to notice that Huxley disappeared from the vlog. Questions were raised and left unanswered. James Stauffer says they couldn’t go into details in order to “protect his privacy” when they’d put him online multiple times a day. And everything blew up. Streaming now.
So what’s all the buzz about A Real Pain? The buddy movie set in Poland as two American cousins David and Benji (Jesse Eisenberg and Kerian Culkin) search for the childhood home of their recently deceased, beloved grandmother. Written and directed by Eisenberg, it’s has amassed 43 awards so far its that good. The lads are on a guided of the grim tourist spots the country offers – a concentration camp, the Warsaw Ghetto, site of the Uprising and various things and places marking the murder by Nazis of six million Polish citizens during the Holocaust. The tour group like the pair even as over time, Benji’s odd behaviour rattles them. He’s brilliant, charming, “lights up a room” and offers constant reality checks to others, wanted or not. David is embarrassed by him but sticks close as Benji has endured a lot; they grant him space and his voice. He has the ability to create moments for those around him, to embrace and entertain them and then shatter it with a cruel word. True he’s a real pain, but he’s loved and loving, with a big heart. The classical piano score brings a mournful, beautiful edge that echoes Benji’s moods and Eisenberg’s terrific lifelike script make it utterly real. An authentic, human experience that lingers. Streaming on Disney+.
The National Film Board of Canada’s documentary feature Sons is a hard hitting and surprising look at men today and how they father their children. Documentarian Justin Simms and a handful of friends in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador open up. Simms began eight years ago with footage of son Jude, hours after his birth, through Jude’s toddler obsession with the superior male roles models in Superheroes and beyond in a sobering portrait of Justin’s struggles to be a “better man”. Hoping to begin again, each subject confronts the generational paths of behaviour and fatherhood set before them, and wonder if they can change the trajectory. Prevent their sons from “the dark side of masculinity”. Each had absentee fathers who did men’s work – making a wage – while the women had no choice but home work. The men missed raising their boys, like their fathers and grandfathers, with the tired misogynistic ideals of what makes a man. Being forceful. Taking no guff. But they wanted to change their paths, to give their sons better than they had and build good men – buts it’s hard to achieve, frustrating and fraught. They’re emotionally raw as they find limited but incremental success. Simm’s wife Willow says “Masculinity can be beautiful, but it needs a new story now.” The confusion of these fathers as they attempt to stem the tide of traditional male behaviours, toxicity and failure is profound but what they are trying to achieve is essential. Vancouver Jan 17 and 18, at The Cinematheque, and in Toronto Jan 23 at CSI Spadina, followed by Q & A with Simms and Next Gen Men’s Jonathon Reed before premiering on www.nfb.ca Jan 20.
Bookworm opens with a caution that New Zealand doesn’t have any land-based animals capable of killing a human … or its pretty sure. The delightfully offbeat modern fairy tale with surreal comedy elements stars Elijah Wood as Strawn, with Nell Fisher as Strawn as 11-year-old Mildred. He shows up out as a total stranger and announces he is her biological father. Her mother’s in a coma and unable to take her on the promised camping trip so he offers to take her. He’s a magician/illusionist and she’s a huge reader, a bookworm. Their aim is to obtain proof of the existence of the killer mythological Canterbury Panther in the New Zealand wilds; they would win a nice money prize anher mother could stop working three jobs, once she is out of the coma, and all would be well. Their adventures are dramatic, funny, dangerous, and bizarre; they’re having the time of their lives and so are we. He can levitate. She offers witticisms, wordplay, and wisdom beyond the ken of an eleven-year-old as they traverse the outback. Bookworm is a surprise and dOn AppleTV+
Canada’s beloved detective series Murdoch Mysteries set in 1920s Toronto takes us away to an English country home for its 300th episode. Detective Murdoch and wife Coroner Julia Ogden are on vacation at a country estate where important English movers and shakers belonging to the Ghent Group have gathered. Another famed detective at the gathering, American Ronald Perle ( Donal Logue) strikes up a friendship. Wendell Stewart ( Eric Osborne ) a young man whose father’s death forces him to join the Group secretly tells Murdoch that something is amiss, “things aren’t what they seem”. A young woman arrives and makes her mark husband hunting husbands among the wealthy guests; she’s found dead in the pond, poisoned and dumped. William and Julia discover the Ghent Group’s strange identity and its off to the races, murder, conspiracy, on what was to be the Murdochs’ vacation. The eppy’s portentous title The Men Who Sold the World isn’t kidding. What fun! Congratulations to the show on its long-running global popularity and always interesting stories. Monday Jan 20 on CBC and CBC Gem.
