Review ‘Pamela, a love story’ – The Hollywood Reporter

Not many key takeaways from Ryan White’s Netflix documentary Pamela, a love storyBut perhaps the most important thing is this: Pamela Anderson knows what she’s doing.

Discussing PETA’s decision to pose nude for a series of advertisements, Anderson candidly commented: “You have to be brave and you have to use what you have.”

January is coming to an end with a few Anderson-centric projects — Pamela, a love story and unrelated (but totally related) memoirs Love, Pamela – was released with the popular story that popular culture in general and the media in particular mistreated Pamela Anderson, belittling her body and dating life and ultimately the sex tape stolen from her, in the process denied her true voice. But to draw attention to the projects devoted to restoring that voice and getting her story back, Anderson isn’t opposed to sprinkling a few intriguing details. So everyone is talking about Tim Allen’s revelation from Love, Pamela and claims from the documentary that Sylvester Stallone gave her a Porsche and an apartment to be his mistress.

I haven’t read the memoir so I don’t know if there are long passages dedicated to upgrade house and Tim Allen’s penis, but I know that Stallone’s story in the documentary isn’t even a story. It was a sentence thrown with a chuckle of incredulity, one of several other aspects that I doubt Anderson was fully aware of that would be compiled into the newsletters “The 5 Most Shocking Disclosures From Pamela Anderson’s New Documentary”. And upgrade house and Allen doesn’t even need to be mentioned in the documentary.

Depending on your point of view, the biggest problem with Pamela, a love story how hard it can be to put together that kind of story. Like, if you reach out, can you highlight Anderson’s one-sentence reference to dating Scott Baio and Mario Van Peebles at the same time? Is that shocking? Or is it shocking that she and Tommy Lee have a flash wedding, is she actually dating surfer Kelly Slater?

Maybe it’s not exactly that Pamela, a love story is not disclosed. Just what it reveals is that once you flip through the tabloid-friendly headlines from the ’90s and ’00s, Pamela Anderson is in fact a pretty smart, pretty funny, and pretty boring person – complete Not in a critical way, just in a way that goes against expectations – the woman just wants love. She too – and this is a real problem – has always been the subject of quite frank interviews. Want to know what she thinks about the theft and release of Tommy Lee’s sex tape? For 25 years, she’s been telling anyone who will listen. Want to know about her generally complicated relationship with Lee, the father of her two sons? For 25 years, she’s been telling anyone who will listen. She talked about her gruesome past with sexual violence, about feeling empowered when she first photographed for dissipatedabout her love for being loved.

In Pamela, a love story, one of her sons – I think it’s Brandon, who’s also a producer here – says his mother never had trouble talking about things, even when they got her into trouble. tangled. And it’s true! Long before this recent story moved to approach Pamela Anderson as someone of some nature, I thought of her as a surprisingly good talk show guest, one women are likely to grind their teeth through interviews with disdain for men – always men, too often Jay Leno, whose status is one of the more toxic pop culture figures in 50 It’s become increasingly clear over the years – and the delivery of her message, not everyone has listened.

Unfortunately, this has left White, the talented director Ask Dr. Ruth and Good night, with the mission of trying to create compelling content from a woman whose greatest determination when she started filming was to be normal. White encountered Anderson after moving back to her childhood community in Ladysmith, BC. She’s mostly kept anonymous by avoiding makeup and wearing masks – COVID, not Phantom of the Opera – and even trying to marry a normal guy (don’t get too invested). Around her were crates full of diaries and stacks of VHS tapes and DVDs. One interesting point that White might make is that Anderson has recorded her entire life, but she is involved in a stolen tape. The documentary makes solid use of all of that footage – much of it showing Anderson and Lee’s relationship without any gender – and even erratically enhances existing footage. to resemble the stock of classic movies.

Her retelling of her often-told life is presented with a headache-inducing dullness, for even Anderson has the feeling that she has told these stories too many times and is different from romanticism. whimsical – Pamela Anderson loves love, in case you haven’t been told – her diary excerpt adds a little more. There’s a vertigo to the way White uses Anderson’s dissipated pictures and videos, the nudity is completely uncensored, which feels a bit sleazy, but there’s a difference both she and the film want to make in terms of the difference between allowed exposure and unauthorized exposure, and I get the difference on an intellectual level.

Whether or not she regularly discusses sex tapes, that chapter in her life at least gives her goosebumps, as does her frustration when Hulu comes out. Pam & Tommy. She hasn’t watched the miniseries, which limits her ability to say anything substantive about it, and it’s worth mentioning that all she wants to emphasize about the tape and its aftermath – spooky lawyers who say she has no right to privacy, double standards of how the tape affects her career compared to Tommy’s – are central to her Pam & Tommy. Her message is a program that exploits her image without her consent that was conceived without her consent is just a re-exploitation of her image. And it didn’t matter if the show said the right things. She is right. She can’t talk about it with authority. By the way, she doesn’t have to either.

Maybe in the last 30 minutes, Pamela, a love story (and Anderson himself) received a new source of energy. She went to New York to work for two months Chicago on Broadway, and her process of rehearsing and performing for an appreciative audience creates her own joy and pride. It’s hard to know what this documentary would even be like if the Broadway opportunity didn’t present itself. Her eagerness to begin a terrifying new chapter in her life is contagious, as is the joy her sons Brandon and Dylan have from seeing this side of their mother. It should be added that both sons are far more adorable than you’d expect from anyone who’s ever had Kid Rock as a stepfather for a short while (one of the many things in the doc that makes you giggle. , but almost zero).

But don’t expect that tidbit to compete with Stallone’s accusations for coverage in a documentary that’s perhaps less important than audiences want and exactly as important as its subject matter wants it to be.