Female Film Critics 24/375
You know that terrible movie cliche where the quiet librarian finally lets her hair down, takes off her glasses — and va-va-va-voom? You can watch Pamela Anderson do that in reverse in Pamela: A Love Story, the entertaining new Netflix documentary about her life.
Anderson upends whatever “Baywatch Babe” idea you might have about her as she tucks her hair up in a bun, puts on her glasses and reveals her nerdy heart for all to see.
You just know that, when the voice of a protagonist’s male member gets a credit in the cast list, the motion picture has the tell-tale tongue in the cheek. In eight episodes. Pam and Tommy flashes back and shreds threads of history through the Eighties and Nineties. shedding light on sleazy producers and paparazzi, celebrities, and craven criminals. The result is bright, loud, sad, vicious, painful and stupefying and worth considering as a slice of recent history and a slab of eternal misogyny.
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Pam & Tommy is tabloid television given an elegant veneer by its A-list cast and the fig leaf of feminism offered by the women on the production team and women like Lake Bell who direct some of the episodes. But nearly 30 years after all of this first started, this show is really just the latest chapter in the ongoing exploitation of Pamela Anderson, a woman who does not deserve it.
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