September 7, 2025
BABYGIRL (Halina Reijn / 2024)
September 14, 2025
THE LAST SHOWGIRL (Gia Coppola / 2024)
I have to say that my last two visits to the local theater have been pretty rewarding. I really enjoyed these films a great deal. Granted, I don't really have much to say about them, because frankly I've become rather fatigued at the prospect of trotting out yet more redundant synopses or offering up an all-out unpacking of every single movie I see at the local theater on this particular site. (Nothing personal, you understand.) But I will just say that I liked both films a lot, and I thought that Nicole Kidman and Pamela Anderson were both very impressive in the leads. (Kidman is never a surprise in this regard, but I found Anderson's performance very powerful and affecting.)
The thing that struck me the most about
Babygirl was how weirdly sympathetic the character of Samuel was, as well as the subtlety of Harris Dickinson's performance. He's one of those "X-ray mind" characters that in a more conventional film could quite easily tilt into out-and-out villainy. (Other examples of this type would include Hannibal Lecter and the outlaw Ben Wade in the
3:10 to Yuma movies.) Samuel is obviously quite immature, and of course part of the tension surrounding the character's affair with Kidman is whether or not he'll spill the beans on that relationship. He could do so at any time, of course, but there is a strong ambiguity about his motivations. First of all,
would he actually go that far? Is he exercising this power over Kidman because he's an immature brat, or is it that in his unfiltered perceptions he senses that on some level Kidman
wants him to hold this power over her and merely obliges her out of an instinctual empathy? There's a lot of food for thought here, and any two people going to see this film could walk away with two completely different takes on the story, characters and subject matter. And frankly, that's how more movies
should be.
I just turned 51 last year, and believe me, the older I get, the more strongly I identify with a character like Shelly Gardner, the aging Vegas showgirl played by Pamela Anderson. Because the older you get, the more it seems like the rest of the world completely passes you by, and everything you've come to know and believe (or tell yourself) about life, politics, art, entertainment or even simple aesthetic sense seems to become less and less valid. When we're young, we think we know where it's at, what's hip or what's cool, what's beautiful, and then as time marches on and younger people come along with far different ideas, it all seems to become less relevant. And that's just the non-physical side of the aging process! Gia Coppola's film - and Kate Gersten's script - perfectly capture this sense. As with
Babygirl, the filmmakers have taken a much less traveled route, because this could just as easily have turned into some kind of post-
Sunset Boulevard "aging diva" melodrama and over-egged the pathos. But this movie manages to keep things real, and it never seems like the movie is ridiculing or even pitying its main character. (Once again, kudos to Anderson!) Even Jamie Lee Curtis as Shelly's older waitress friend and former colleague Annette, as gaudy and blowzy a relic as she is, still feels very real and relatable when she could just as easily have been made into a grotesque.
Weirdly enough, while watching
The Last Showgirl, I was
sort of reminded of Darren Aronofsky's
The Wrestler (2008), another slice-of-life approach to the tale of an aging, over-the-hill entertainer. One
might say that Aronofsky's own female counterpart to that movie was 2011's
Black Swan, but that one was a bit more fantastical and hallucinatory and dealt with creative demons in the world of ballet, which was a much more "high art" realm. Granted,
The Last Showgirl is much less high-stakes, life-or-death than either of those Aronofsky films, but I was strongly reminded of
The Wrestler and felt like it explored very similar territory.
Well... That certainly went on a lot longer than I thought it would!

(It always does. Once I get rolling it's hard to stop, no matter how often I tell myself I'm going to keep things brief.)
P.S. The movies I'm most looking forward to seeing in the future:
Presence /
Black Bag
Back-to-back collaborations between director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp! (And anyway, how could I possibly resist a movie that shares its title with the most underrated Led Zeppelin album?)