Tag Archives: Dave Bautista

Movie Review: The Last Showgirl

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The new movie “The Last Showgirl” is a very small and depressing film about an aging Las Vegas showgirl, Shelly, played by Pamela Anderson, who is 57 and a member of a long-running Las Vegas show that is going out of business. As the expression goes, “Father time is undefeated”, even more for a woman whose entire professional identity depends on her looks.

The obvious problem with this movie is that the story is not big enough to hold your attention for the entire 88 minutes There are way too many slow and boring parts in this flawed overly depressing screenplay. The side stories contain some brief appearances of new characters, including Shelly’s daughter Hanna played by Billie Lourd, who suddenly comes into Shelly’s life after many years. We later find out that Hanna’s father is the manager of the Las Vegas venue, Eddie played by Dave Bautista, who has a small part in this movie.

The other main character is Annette, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, who is a waitress at a local Casino. Along with her extremely dark facial tan, and many wrinkles, Curtis looks way older than 66, her age in real life. Annette is a character that seems to be a method to provide more filler to a relatively short movie and is mostly irrelevant to the progress of this story.

There is a scene at the end where Shelly as an aging showgirl standing on a stage lying about her age, desperate to get a new dancing job in Las Vegas, begging a cruel show director for a chance but is repeatedly rejected. After the producer tells Shelly that “her time as an attractive woman has passed”, Shelly’s response to the director is at first lewd and later a sad rant in a dressing room some minutes later, collapsing in grief, knowing that the only life she has ever known is over. If Pamela Anderson receives an Oscar nomination for this small movie, this scene will be the reason.

Pamela Anderson winning an Oscar for this role would be an amazing moment in Oscar history, however, this is very unlikely because this movie is not significant enough to include a win for Best Actress.

For some of the acting, despite the depressing small story, my rating for this movie is a passable 70% and a moderate recommendation.

Movie Review: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

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With the 3rd installment of the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise, “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” it is impossible for anyone to not be highly impressed with the science fiction imagination of this film. The new ideas, the space travel, the amazing movie sets, costumes, special effects, unique alien creatures, computer-generated special effects, and stunts are all first-rate throughout. The production budget for this film is 250 million dollars, and it is easy to be very impressed with the work, money, and planning that went into this latest Marvel film. The only issue with this movie, which is extremely common for all action films like this one, is that the script, while not bad, could have been much better.

This story starts with a severe injury to Rocket (the squirrel alien of the group, whose voice is performed by the actor Bradley Cooper). Rocket needs some kind of software injection from some remote planet to save him. After this, the entire story is all about all of his friends trying to get this code from an evil leader who is the captain of a huge spaceship. Much of the story is convoluted throughout different parts of this screenplay and at times can be hard to follow. The humor is pretty much like all of the two previous movies, but I thought the previous films had more frequent and funnier scenes. All of the main characters return for this 3rd film: Chris Pratt, Karen Gillan, Dave Bautista, Zoe Saldana, and Vin Diesel who is the voice of Groot – the tree-like alien – whose only line through all 3 installments is “I am Groot”.

There are several short cameos in this film, from Sylvester Stallone, Nathan Fillion, and Linda Cardellini. I thought Fillion had some of the best scenes among the 3 of them.

The Rotten Tomatoes rating for this 3rd and possibly last installment of the Guardians of the Galaxy series is a solid 80% and I agree with this rating, but only for the incredible special effects, not the story/screenplay.

Movie Review: Knock at the Cabin

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If any aspiring screenwriter, no matter how desperate to break into the movie industry (even if they were connected to some agency) were to submit the script for “Knock at the Cabin”, the reason for the rejections would be the same. “This idea is just too off the wall, too crazy, and does not make sense”.

There is a family of two gay men and one very cute Chinese girl, named Wen, played by Kristen Cui who is about 6 years old. Four people break into their cabin and insist that there is a series of events that are going to end all life on planet earth – unless one of the 3 people in this family agrees to sacrifice themselves to save the world. As this idea drags on, each one of the 4 people who invade the cabin agrees to have themselves killed with an ax after they put a white hood over their heads. What? Why is this necessary that these people who break into the house also must kill themselves? How does having one of the 3 people in the cabin agree to die going to prevent the apocalypse? Can this story give more detail, be more specific? Make some sense?

Apparently, the 4 people who break into the cabin have seen visions of earthquakes, tsunamis, and even airplanes falling out of the sky and now all of this is happening in real-time. But no explanation is given as to how or why human sacrifice is going to prevent the end of the world. How can a glaring hole this big exist in an M. Night Shyamalan movie? There are a series of televised news stories that are shown to the 3 people in the cabin, to prove to them that the end of the world is coming. But why not also explain to them, how exactly might their human sacrifice save the world? What did their premonitions tell them about this most important part of the story?

This movie stars mostly unknown actors with the main character, former pro wrestler Dave Bautista, playing the leader of the group that break into the cabin. I thought the acting was mostly very good by everyone, but the story is so absurd they all must have had a hard time not laughing during their scenes.

Once again M. Night Shyamalan is trying to break new ground, create something different, and achieve that high note he did with “The Sixth Sense”, released in 1999. The Sixth Sense is not only one of the greatest movies of all time but also one of the all-time most perfect endings of any movie ever released. Like the previous Shyamalan film “Old”, released in 2021 – this will be considered another not-so-good film, with Rotten Tomatoes ratings at a below-average 67%, that this time around, I do agree with.