January 14, 2025

REEL | Pamela Anderson Retires 'The Last Showgirl' x WFF 2024

"Las Vegas used to treat us like movie stars."
Brenda Song Gia Coppola | The Last Showgirl | Whistler Film Festival 2024
Whistler Film Festival
Vancouver Island native Pamela Anderson makes her on-screen starring role comeback (after her 2022 Broadway stage debut in Chicago) in third-generation filmmaker Gia Coppola's melodic, working-class Las Vegas indie drama. The Last Showgirl deromanticizes a past collective sense of "old Vegas" and its previously idealized facade of sexy glamour.

Co-starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Kiernan Shipka, Billie Lourd, and a soulful Dave Bautista, Anderson gives an exceptionally earnest, sweetly naïve performance as her Shelly deals with the closing of her Vegas show (called the "Razzle Dazzle") after a less than legendary thirty-eight-year run off the Strip.

Television writer Kate Gersten's straightforward script allows Anderson to express her own thinly veiled characteristics as an alternate, much less successful version of who she could have been had she not been plucked from obscurity for stardom before retreating back her quiet life in Ladysmith, away from public scrutiny.

There's a bygone quality to The Last Showgirl's sad sense of farewell as a last hurrah for the brand of entertainment it's modestly eulogizing. Coppola's naturalistic style lends to the minimalist personal character exploration of street-level entertainers as often menial but professional workers still reliving their past glory days. If nothing less, it's an earnest portrait of women at work devoid of any real vanity despite a long faded sheen of ritzy allure.

The Last Showgirl screened as the opening night film of the 2024 Whistler Film Festival. Anderson will in attendance for a special post-film Q&A at Fifth Avenue Cinemas on January 17th (7pm screening).


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