BEFORE: OK, I survived the great double-shift fiasco of January. I worked the Nets game on Friday night, then I got home and was really too wound up to get any good sleep, I was afraid that if I went to bed I would most likely oversleep on Saturday morning. So basically I stayed up, even though I had no sugar or caffeine on Friday night. At 5:00 am on Saturday I was getting dressed and I made it to the theater by 6:30 am (OK, 6:40) and worked a 10-hour shift like a zombie. Thank God the event was a cake-walk, it was just a guild of VFX workers watching clips for their annual awards nomination. I didn't have to do much, and also there were donuts left from the day before and pizza handed out for lunch. By 4:30 pm I was headed home again by bus (because the infamous L train is shut down for track work AGAIN) and finally I could get some sleep in a bed. I slept for three hours (OK, 4) woke up, had dinner, had a beer float, watched this movie, then back to sleep for another eight. Finally I was feeling close to normal again, well, as close as I get. This is why I doubled up on movies Friday (and also slept extra late) in case I needed to skip Saturday. It's Sunday now (I think) and the chain moves on - it's fine, as long as I keep an eye on the count and don't fall behind.
Jamie Lee Curtis carries over from "Freakier Friday". Four appearances this year puts her at the top of the leader board, but you know, it's still way early. This Movie Year has just started and a lead like that just won't survive through the Doc Block - the late Johnny Carson won last year with like 12 appearances, all via archive footage.
THE PLOT: A seasoned showgirl must plan for her future when her show abruptly closes after a 30-year run.
AFTER: Guess what just popped up on my shuffle play - "Like a Rolling Stone", only covered by the Rolling Stones. Still, I think maybe Nobel laureate Bob Dylan said it best -
Once upon a time, you dressed so fine, threw the bums a dime, in your prime, didn't you?
Now you don't talk so loud, now you don't seem so proud about having to be scrounging your next meal. How does it feel, how does it feel?
That's exactly what this film delves into - how it feels to be on your own, with no direction home, a complete unknown, so to speak. The central character maybe stayed in one place for too long while the whole world changed around her. I've spent some time lately going through old photos, looking for pics of the good times to post on Instagram (because nobody really posts pics of the bad times, do they? it's all about pumping yourself up and making your life look enviable...) and yeah, things really have changed - I don't remember much about the whole decade of the 2010s, so it's really good that I took pictures and kept good notes. The Sundance Film Festival, the San Diego Comic Con, BBQ crawls across the south, and cruises to the Caribbean. I've been all over, really the trick is remembering it all as my mind slowly turns to mush. Maybe at some point everything I did will feel like stuff that happened to somebody else - I have to pre-reminisce about it all now before I'm disconnected from it all.
I've been to Vegas, twice now, but I never went to a showgirl revue. We were in Sin City in late 2019, a few months before the pandemic, and our goal was to visit as many casinos as possible, gamble just a little in all of them, and take meal breaks at the ones with the best buffets. My wife got sick at some point, I can't say it was COVID because at that time nobody knew what that was - but just maybe it was here before we knew it was here. I had to hit the last buffet without her because she just wanted to sleep in our room at the Luxor. Five buffets in 7 days is a LOT, plus we ate at other places too, like Oscar's and Hell's Kitchen and Hash House a Go Go. We also went to the Mob Museum and the Neon Sign Museum - it's going to be a while before I start posting those photos, I'm still sorting through 2010. The only real show that we went to in Vegas was the Legends in Concert at the Luxor, this is the one with people performing as Freddie Mercury, Tina Turner, Elvis, Lady Gaga and Pat Benatar - hosted by a Joan Rivers drag queen. There were some showgirls in the back, according to my photos.
But I'm more connected to this film because it features someone who had the same job for 30 years, and then found out that the show was closing, because attendance was way down and that time of performance was no longer marketable. The same sort of thing happened to me, I was in independent animation production for 31 years, and during that time the whole market changed, to the point where the company was always struggling, deep in dept, and more to the point, my boss refused to change with the times, would not listen to my advice to get a proper agent and market his body of work properly. So I was always working hard to come up with new revenue sources, like monetizing his YouTube channel or selling art from his past films to museums and collectors. This took a toll on my mental health because I was unable to sleep, always in panic mode over how to keep the company going for another couple of months.
So, long story short, I left. I got fired, got asked back and then quit, if you want to know exactly how it went down. Then, what comes next? An unemployment check, at least for a while. But the NYS Dept. of Labor kept asking me to go IN PERSON to check with them and update them on my job search. This could have been an e-mail. What's worse, they expected me to meet with them at 8:45 am, and their office was all the way across Queens - well, there goes THAT day of job-hunting - I really wanted to tell them I'd have better luck finding a job if I didn't have to go meet with THEM all the time. But they finally believed me that I had a temp job with irregular hours and I was able to collect partial unemployment for a few months - then the second part-time job kicked in, and combined I'm still not making as much as I was before, but I'm getting by.
What also happens after losing your job is the second-guessing. Should I have tried to save my job? Should I have quit earlier, which would have given me more time to set something else up? How can I possibly be too old to start something else and also be too young to retire? Should I have studied something different in film school, like computer animation or advanced writing? And more importantly, what comes next?
For Shelly, a whole bunch of other questions about her own life arise. Should she have developed some other skills, besides dancing topless? Should she have married Eddie, or tried harder to make it work with the other guy that she DID marry? Is it too late to make things right with her daughter? Should she have spent more time working on being a mother when she had the chance? And more importantly, what comes next?
If you had the same job for 30 years straight, probably you stayed there five years too long, maybe ten - because if you're not thinking about your next move, then you're falling behind. But certainly there must be revenue streams available to her now that didn't exist before - she could go on Cameo or OnlyFans, that's just for starters. She could write a book about her career, or become a dance instructor, maybe move out of Vegas because it's probably pretty expensive to keep living there. Annette needs a place to live, maybe she can move in and one day start paying rent, if she can manage to quit gambling. In exchange, maybe Annette can get her a job as a cocktail waitress, it's not the worst thing to work in the service industry. Defiantly, maddeningly, the movie ends before we can get any ideas about what's in Shelly's future, but maybe that's for the best, we're forced to imagine what that could be. Anything and everything is possible, but then in a natural limiting fashion, not everything is going to happen to her. Just like my old boss, she's going to have to rise or fall based on her own ideas and work ethic, nobody can save her but herself.
I'm awarding an extra point tonight for the relevance of this film's story, job loss and uncertainty can befall anyone in any career, it's more universal than it set out to be. But then I have to take away a point because across the board (with one or two exceptions) the acting is just so horrible. I couldn't take that actress when she played Don Draper's daughter on "Mad Men", and I can't stand her now, nothing has improved there.
Directed by Gia Coppola
Also starring Pamela Anderson (last seen in "Scooby-Doo"), Brenda Song (last seen in "The Social Network"), Kiernan Shipka (last seen in "Twisters"), Dave Bautista (last seen in "Dune: Part Two"), Billie Lourd (last seen in "Ticket to Paradise"), Linda Montana, John Clofine, Giovani L. DiCandilo, Gypsy Wood, Jason Schwartzman (last seen in "Mountainhead"), Melina Blitz, Eliseo Duque, Patrick Hilgart
RATING: 5 out of 10 dwindling paychecks
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