Saturday, August 16, 2025

The Last Showgirl

I struggle to watch movies at home. It's hard for me to sit still for long enough to watch anything. I get antsy and anxious and weird. It's like my brain refuses to commit to anything for more than 15 minutes or so.

So I try and see as many movies in the theater as possible. There's something about the ritual of going to the movies that allows me to disengage and watch the friggin movie.

All of that is to say that I meant to watch The Last Showgirl in the theater, but it didn't play near me, and so I didn't see it. Once it was gone, I was pretty much resigned to not seeing it.

However, Sandra watched it on streaming and really enjoyed it, and told me to watch it. I said I would, then didn't for months. Well, tonight Sandra asked if I wanted to watch it on the projector in our bedroom that plays on the screen on our ceiling. I said sure, and we watched it.

And it was good! Really good. A character study, certainly, and I like that sort of thing. I especially appreciated that it was the kind of movie Robert Altman might have made in the seventies, where characters are all talking at the same time and not a whole lot happens.

It stars Pamela Anderson as Shelly, a dancer in the last old-school showgirl review show. Billie Lourd plays her estranged daughter, and Jamie Lee Curtis, Dave Bautista, Kiernan Shipka, and Brenda Song round out the cast.

I was honestly a little taken aback by Pamela's performance, if only because I misjudged it at first. She was doing this kind of hoaky old school Hollywood cadence to her voice, which isn't that far removed from how she sounded back in the 90s when she was at the height of her cultural prominence. But then she slips into her dramatic mode, and it made me realize it was all a choice. The character talked in that old Hollywood voice because she was delusional about the glamor of her career. So when Shelly starts to unravel and has her dramatic freakouts, it makes the performance that much more intense.

I'm definitely in the Pro-Pamela Anderson camp, particularly regarding her performance and all the acting in this movie, but especially Anderson. She's just captivating, sometimes syrupy sweet, with this constant undercurrent of absolute chaos beneath the surface. Then, suddenly, she'll flip it, and she's a tornado of embarrassing cringe while still being so sympathetic that your heart breaks for her lifetime of bad decisions.

The decision to cast Billie Lourd as her estranged daughter was a deliberate decision, which I found interesting. There were certainly some parallels to real life being drawn there.

One thing I'm loving about Jamie Lee Curtis right now is that every time I see her play one of these totally bonkers characters she's been playing lately, there's just this air about her that she's getting away with something, and friggin loves and appreciates every minute of what she does. I think she, more than anyone, knows how hard women have had to fight to get the same kind of meaty roles men at their level are getting. So when she plays these chain-smoking, walking disasters like her character in this and on The Bear, it warms my heart, because she's SO GOOD at it, and she's been working her entire life for this kind of legitimacy.

The whole cast is just solid and brings this range of subtle energy that makes this movie so enriching. I love a character study. It reminded me a lot of The Wrestler, both in tone and story, and that wasn't a bad thing. They're both movies about people dedicating their entire lives to their artistic passion, at the expense of everything else. This is the kind of thing I watch movies to see — an exploration of what it means to be a human being in this unforgiving world.

Just some Degu goodness. Olive and Willow are stretching out on their heating pad for a little bit of a degu snooze.

Weapons

YES, YES AGAIN

I went to see Weapons again, mostly because I felt like I was a little harsh on it the first time around. I wasn't overly impressed with some of the storytelling choices this movie made the first time, but I thought I should give it another chance. Now that I've gotten over that part of it, I was able to take this movie on its own merit, and I'm glad I did!

I won't review the movie again, but I would like to add a few more comments on a few things.

First, I feel bad for Josh Brolin. He's good in the movie! He does exactly what the role calls for, and he does it well. Yet people all over the internet are going on and on about how Pedro Pascal dropped out of Weapons due to an unspecified scheduling conflict, and they had to recast the movie. Josh must be like, "Hey, you can talk to me about the movie. I was actually IN it and did the acting and participated in the good movie!"

Anyway, one thing that really struck me this time around is just how well it portrayed the way that adults can intimidate and control kids using the fear of social awkwardness. That feeling of being afraid that you'll screw things up for everyone if you disobey an adult, even when that adult is asking you to do bad things. Without giving anything away, I felt for the characters in this movie, even when many of them were pretty unlikable.

Julia Garner's character, while layered and portrayed well, isn't very sympathetic. She's kind of just pathetic. Drawn well, in a way that makes you sad for her, yet still not particularly on board with her whole vibe.

Also, can we take a minute and appreciate that Toby Huss has been in roughly 500 movies and TV shows in the last ten years? Yet, when I see him, I still always think "It's Artie, the strongest man... IN THE WORLD!"

The Rolling Stones and YungBlud

Like everyone my age, I was captivated by YungBlud's performance of the Black Sabbath song Changes at the Ozzy tribute show. I was vaguely familiar with him, mostly from clips of him being a decent fella on TikTok, but very little of his actual music.

Watching that performance, I started to get what people like about him. He's Mick Jagger without the baggage. He's odd looking, in the same way Mick is. He's got an insane amount of charisma and stage presence, just like Mick. And honestly, if you watch him and think about the Rolling Stones' performance from Rock and Roll Circus it's pretty clear that the mantle of Rock and Roll Singer is still, at least a little, intact with YungBlud.

Alright, that's it for me for today. As usual, my books are all here: joehumphrey.com

OH YEAH

Yeah, my website. It's live now! I buried the lead. Let me know if there's anything broken or wonky looking.