'The Last Showgirl' A Review

The Last Showgirl is a drama about Shelly(Pamela Anderson) the titular showgirl who's show is closing after many years leaving her searching for what's next.

It's great to see Anderson in this role and one can imagine it was cathartic and vindicating for her in some ways, the end result however is inconsistent. Some scenes she is locked in(pretty much any time she shares the screen with Jamie Lee Curtis who plays her friend Annette) but other times she really struggles with the clunky, exposition heavy, tell-don't-show dialogue and the overly contrived conflict heavy plotting. Not her fault but she doesn't have the kind of experience to translate the wonky script and inexpert direction into the kind of powerful performance this has the potential to be. This is highlighted, unfortunately, by how good Curtis is. Who absolutely has the kind of chops to turn the mediocre script into something with some meaning. There's clearly ambition behind the film but the only time it's really actualized is in one incredible scene with Curtis where she is dancing to 'Total Eclipse of the Heart'. Dave Baptista, the other pro, as Eddie is the only other cast member who seems locked in, the other supporting cast- Brenda Song, Kiernan Shipka, and Billie Lourd- are just uneven.

The cinematography and sound design are overly aggressive. The shaky close-up hand-held camera work and soft focus don't really work, it distracts and it's pretty consistently incongruous with what is happening. It's a vibe that's more appropriate with a Terrence Malick tone poem not a drama that is attempting to be coherent. The same is true of the sound design, it frequently(and bizarrely) drowns out dialogue. The costuming and make up are great but all together the production design seems to be separate ideas and approaches that don't weave together but make each other even more discordant.

What the movie is actually trying to say is also kind of baffling. This doesn't empower Shelly, it doesn't really provide any insight on her experience, doesn't convey to us or explore her interiority. It's just one kind of hit after another, bleakness to no purpose, and quite frankly lacking much if any authenticity. There is absolutely a great movie in here, there are scenes here and there that are really brilliant, but writer Kate Gersten fails to offer any real emotional insight or truth and director Gia Coppola fails to adjust to what so clearly does and doesn't work.

An odd, uneven, frustrating piece of cinema with one absolutely ecstatic, transcendent scene from Curtis.

Currently in theaters.

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Fragility

even the snow

is tenuous
fluffy fractals
quickly crushed

by commuting feet

pristineness

inevitably scuffed

be it ice or innocence

beauty need not be

persistent

to be prized

'Den of Thieves 2: Pantera' A Review

Den of Thieves 2: Pantera is a heist movie, a sequel to 2018's Den Of Thieves. After the nebulous conclusion of the first movie LASD sheriff Big Nick(Gerard Butler) continues his pursuit of Donnie(O'Shea Jackson Jr.) eventually tracking him to Nice, France where Donnie is putting together a diamond district job. Nick blackmails Donnie into putting him on the team for the heist and the two develop a cautious friendship as they prepare.

Butler continues to slug it out with Jason Statham for the title of King of January Dad Cinema and he continues to deliver. He's older and is clearly slowing down but he's as charismatic and watchable as ever. Jackson continues his solid, slow-and-steady career, and he is equally compelling here, deploying his lowkey charm and inherent onscreen likability to great effect. The two have great chemistry and equal time is spent on their burgeoning friendship as the main event heist and it mostly works. The supporting cast has some talent, particularly Evin Ahmad who has a sharp and magnetic screen presence, but mostly they are all unknown European actors that don't really distinguish themselves. There's something lost in the sequel without having the deeper bench of known character actors.

Visually the movie is beautiful, shot not on location but close, in the Canary Islands. The action sequences are thrilling, tightly choregraphed, and shot with a focus on authenticity and suspense. The problem is there's only two of them, one at the beginning and one at the end. In the middle there's a pretty great scene at a party where the heist crew all do drugs but in between the story drags. At almost two and a half hours the movie is simply too long. The time spent developing Big Nick's character and then his and Donnie's connection is well intended and effective up to a point but this is a heist movie, awards season counter programing, and it is just way too languorous in its pace to completely deliver.

Fun, entertaining, overstays its welcome by half an hour.

Currently in theaters, coming soon to VOD.

Rent It.

Severance

(Wrote this for a show over the summer, season 1 is now streaming free on the Roku Channel, season 2 premiers on Apple TV+ next Friday 1/17)

Severance on AppleTV+ is about this procedure which separates the psyche of a person creating one that lives, in totality, at work, and leaving the original person with no memories of what they do at work. This new person has no memories of their life, no context, and the show is mostly about a four person team, Macrodata Refinement, within this corporation Lumon.

The show was, for the most part, beloved, by both critics and audiences, so my question is, why is it great? What makes it a great show? It looks great, no question, really cool moody cinematography and interesting odd locations and sets. An eerie, effecting soundtrack, yes. An eclectic and deeply talented cast, yes(including Britt Lower a Chicago improv grad). The twists and turns and surprises and reveals of the story. Yes. No question. However that is not really why people love it. Why they are so effected by it. Severance is a great show and it captured hearts and minds because it is, in essence, The Allegory of the Cave which itself speaks to the most powerful and enduring quality of humanity: curiosity.

Plato's allegory is about a group of people chained in a cave, believing their shadows cast on the cave wall are reality as that is all they know. But upon being released some turn around. Some see the fire behind them and the cave mouth behind that and some depart for the unknown world seeking to understand the truth of reality. Overly simplified but for the sake of argument stay with me. This is 375 BCE Plato says this. And yet the idea endures.

In Severance the four macrodata refiners are quite literally imprisoned, constrained by the very definition of their existence. Consciousnesses wholly and completely confined within this workplace. And they are released to act only when they discover knowledge, when they are in this instance unchained. This comes in two forms, a map left by their old boss Petey and more importantly a self-help memoir written by Mark's(one of the refiners) brother-in-law Ricken they discover by accident. With these are they challenged to consider things outside their perception. And having gotten this glimpse, having peaked behind the curtain, in pursuit of fuller lives, but at a more basic level, reaching for simple understanding, do they act. And it is this fundamental decision which makes the show great. This impulse the macrodata refiners have which we all have to some degree, in some way, in some particular avenue. This desire to know. To see. To understand. To find truth. This quality of the human spirit is what we are responding to when we say to our friend "Have you seen Severance? You gotta watch it." The recognition of our own potential greatness which the show reflects.

And yes, of course, right here, right now, this has been perverted in us. Our most fundamental and wonderous spark has been weaponized, vampiric. Social Media, politics, mega-corporations we have in our hands a machine which can tell us everything we want to know. But that is not reality, that is just more shadows on the wall. Not to say we shouldn't be informed, not to undermine any national or global tragedy or its importance, nor the threats we most assuredly face as a species. But. It is important to question and understand what system we are in, where our information comes from, and by who and why it is provided to us.

Nonetheless this pursuit forges connections, people meet and get to know one another, they form relationships and community, and it is this bond which defines us. Even thousands of years before Plato. We came together. It is this pursuit which causes innovation, which brought us out of the caves and ceased our nomadic migrations. This pursuit which inspires art, reflecting back on us our condition that we may understand and evolve. And it is this aspect that is one of Severance's greatest inspirations. Ricken, the self-obsessed obtuse brother-in-law's vanity project, his book "The You You Are", is the seed of the macrodata refiners awakening. Even something objectively terrible, uninsightful, and navel-gazing can, in fact, be a titanic, earth-shattering, catalyst. And in the context of the show we understand this to be fundamentally true and without irony. That the creative work, regardless of who we have seen Ricken to be, has a power independent of him. That his writing, however saccharine, in its pure sincerity has penetrated the illusion of isolation and revealed the truth. That we are not alone. 

Back in 2016 I directed a play called Blockbuster and it was about a group of women who worked there, using movies and the work environment to engage with various themes. Towards the end of the show there's a scene where one of the characters talks about sexual assault based on her own experience. After one of the shows a friend came up to me in tears and berated me for its inclusion without a trigger warning. My first reaction was defensive, working on that scene had been incredibly difficult and I was proud of the work the cast had done, but I realized I was in uncharted waters. I did not know that experience and both working on the scene as well as being open to my friends hurt brought about a broadening of my perspective, a further understanding of those realities. I was well-meaning but ignorant and only the courage and compassion of my cast and my friend provided me an opportunity for growth, only through working on this project did it arise. I put up a trigger warning for the rest of the run.

Watching Severance we understand that all the macrodata refiners needed to launch on their quest of self actualization was information. Only in ignorance are we complacent, only in darkness do we like pigs at the trough eat the slop given to us without question. But given only a glance, a band of light beneath a locked door, a hint, a glimmer, with just this is inspiration born. We are, by our most fundamental constitution, forced to ask- who am I? where am I? why am I? And it is in the dogged pursuit of these questions are we most ourselves, most human. Severance is a great show because, taking away all the trappings of prestige TV, it is about freedom, it is about becoming.

I first moved to Chicago in 2006 straight from college and worked at the Barns & Noble cafe downtown. I was green and I was oblivious. I locked my bike up with a combination lock and one of those plastic covered mental cords. In the first month I was working, I'd lock it up across the street and could see my bike out the window. One day a guy appeared to be locking his bike up on the same stand and my bike was wiggling. I thought, huh, that's odd, and when I looked back it was gone. I ran out, no trace of my bike, no trace of the guy, I was demoralized. But I began to see and be aware of things I had not been previously. Do I think Chicago is dangerous? No. But it is a city. Teaming with life and passion and energy and duplicity and transcendence. Having been chastised by her, corrected, Chicago gave me an opportunity to learn, to go beyond my limited perspective to experience and understand more deeply, to become apart of something greater.

This is a well used idea, Silo has this, The Matrix, most recently Blink Twice and on and on, all these share this quality. Individuals coming to a jumping off place. A fulcrum where things are revealed and they are changed. Storytellers recycle this idea again and again. Why? Because we will never stop. We will never stop seeking. Never stop searching. Never stop trying to live in truth and beauty. It is our organizing principle.

I'd guess most of the people here tonight are artists in one form or another, to one degree or another. So I want to say two things to you. One, watch the TV show Severance. And two. Thank you and keep going.

By Grace Alone

We need do nothing
to be redeemed

as we are expressions

of the great divinity

despite avarice and pain

joy and generosity

we are, all of us

small but vital pieces

of the celestial mosaic

all cogs in the grand spiritual machine

which makes our glorious existence run

look around!

what beauty!

rejoice in our belonging

take solace in the fact

on the continuum of eternity

our time is but a moment

a fleeting spark 

from the cosmic conflagration

'The Return' A Review

The Return is a historical drama an adaptation of the final part of Homer's Odyssey. Odysseus(Ralph Finnes) washes up on the shores of his homeland to discover it in ruins and his wife Penelope(Juliette Binoche) beset by leering, reprobate suitors and his ineffectual son Telemachus(Charlie Plummer) under threat.

Finnes and Binoche are consummate talents and make something mildly diverting out of this mostly boring, misguided, pedantic script. Plummer is borderline unwatchable and seems wildly uncomfortable, whether a result of the period setting or the clunky script, who's to say, regardless he's bad. The rest of the supporting cast don't make much of an impression and they're given no assistance by the script or direction.

The locations are beautiful and appropriate, the costuming period, but the real issue is the adaptation of the source material. In the first, the end of Odysseus's journey simply doesn't have the same impact having not experienced it, the movie, kind of from conception, is destined to come up short. In the second, the Odyssey is an epic with magic and gods and monsters and adventure and here there is a baffling attempt to make it realistic. Like, director Uberto Pasolini seems to be focused on genuinely investigating Odysseus's PTSD, which I guess fair, but the execution just clearly misses the point entirely. None of the grandness of Odysseus's experience is conveyed, there's no sense of its depth or texture, no sense of its otherworldlyness. Which may be unfair, criticizing it for what its not so taking it on its own merits as a grounded ancient Greek period piece about the cost of war it just never really comes together, never delivers fully on action or emotion.

Two of our greatest actors make something watchable out of something that otherwise wouldn't be.

Currently available to rent on most VOD platforms.

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'Wolfs' A Review

Wolfs is an action comedy about two loner fixers(George Clooney and Brad Pitt) forced to work together for a night to cover up an indiscretion by a politician that is more complicated than it first appears.

Both Clooney and Pitt bring their breezy charm and movie star solidity to their parts and it works, they have good chemistry as they have proven multiple times before, and both have some decent comedic chops. This isn't something we haven't seen them do before nor is the story particularly original but its entertaining and fills a particular genre void in the current release schedule. The talented supporting cast is limited namely Amy Ryan and Poorna Jagannathan, who are each in it for basically one scene, and then Austin Abrams who gives an effective and surprisingly bizarre turn as the object of the leads mission.

The film looks decent, shot on location in NYC, a good soundtrack/score, its effective, workmanlike, without much pretention and that's OK. This is an old school piece of adult entertainment and it is a solid example of such. 

A quality popcorn flick.

Currently streaming on Apple TV+.

Rent It.