The movie got some Oscar buzz for Pamela Anderson’s performance, but that didn’t really go anywhere, which is weird since both she and Jamie Lee Curtis did get SAG nominations and those nominations are usually very close to the Oscar nominations.

Anderson is Shelly, an aging dancer in a show that has been around for a very long time, but is now closing down. Shelly, who has been with the show for 37 years, is now left with no real prospects.

The story, such as it is, is not only about here. We have basically four generations of dancers. Annette, played by Curtis, has moved on to waitressing, but is finding that hard as well, Mary-Anne is established, but sees this as just another job, and Jodie is a runaway, who joined the show recently and is only 19, wanting the people at the show to be her surrogate family even going so far as to call Shelly the mother and Eddie, their producer, the father.

Pamela Anderson, of course, is iconic, but not necessarily for the best reasons. This has always limited her opportunities and clearly she can do the work. She’s good, but everyone’s good here. Jodie, played by Kiernan Shipka, is kind of naive, Mary-Anne, Brenda Song, is a realist, Annette is self-deprecating, but still sees her situation as kind of romantic, which is probably why she and Shelly are such good friends as Shelly also romanticizes the show even though it’s essentially an outdated form of porn.

So, I called this a character study in the title. There’s a difference in how movies where traditionally structured in Europe and in the US. In the US, you needed characters to make the plot more interesting, in Europe, you needed a plot to study a character. This is clearly of the latter kind. The plot is very simple. The show is going to close down. We just see how Shelly reacts to that and how she is trying to cope with the situation. That is it. She does try to reconnect with her daughter and we learn about the complexities of that relationship.

Information is given to us in a way that I’m not completely happy with. It doesn’t really matter, but I was at times left to guess on certain things that were spelled out later.

The thing about the movie that has stayed with me the best thusfar is that the movie is funny, but in a way where you know that it’s just defensive. They are hurting and finding life incredible hard, so their only option is to try to find the funny side of it. What else are you going to do?

It is a good movie and also very topical. There is no hopeful ending for anyone here, but that is true to life. Our options are often very limited and the best we can hope for is to survive. Shelly has been doing the same work for 37 years, but has nothing to show for it. She is still living paycheck to paycheck and her earnings have just been dwindling as her role in the production has become smaller and there’s fewer and fewer shows. She even talks about rising prices on multiple occasions indicating that it’s something that’s heavy on her mind.