{"id":294202,"date":"2025-11-19T05:53:15","date_gmt":"2025-11-19T05:53:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/294202\/"},"modified":"2025-11-19T05:53:15","modified_gmt":"2025-11-19T05:53:15","slug":"stop-the-insanity-finding-susan-powter-review-an-empathetic-doc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/294202\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Stop the Insanity: Finding Susan Powter’ Review: An Empathetic Doc"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tZeberiah Newman<\/a>\u2018s Stop the Insanity<\/a>: Finding Susan Powter<\/a> is not your typical exercise in rise-and-fall \u201990s celebrity nostalgia.<\/p>\n

\n\tThen again, Susan Powter was never your typical \u201990s celebrity. From a distance of over three decades and coming personally from a demographic that was probably her least lucrative, I find it hard to explain exactly what kind of celebrity she was. There was surely a period of several years in which Powter\u2019s spiky, platinum hair and almost cartoonishly assertive energy were ubiquitous. She was an infomercial juggernaut, a bestselling author, a regular talk show guest and a personality so aggressive she almost couldn\u2019t be parodied, but she was visible enough that she was parodied anyway. Her message involved healthier eating and a physically fit lifestyle, but I couldn\u2019t quite explain it in more depth.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tStop the Insanity: Finding Susan Powter\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n

\tCaptures a complicated life with empathy.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tRelease Date: Wednesday, November 19 (Los Angeles); Friday, November 21 (New York)
Director: Zeberiah Newman
Producers: Zeberiah Newman, Michiel Thomas, Leah Turner
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t1 hour 27 minutes\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tPowter was everywhere and then she was gone, but in contrast to so many of her fin de si\u00e8cle peers who have received documentary treatment in recent years, there was no controversy, no disgrace, no run of late-night punchlines left in her wake. She wasn\u2019t a joke or a pariah; she was simply gone, as if she had agency in her own recusal from a world in which she had appeared to be so comfortable.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat\u2019s fascinating and often successful about Newman\u2019s documentary is how proudly uninformative it is, and I\u2019m really intrigued by the idea of how it might play to viewers who have no clue who Susan Powter was. Newman sketches out the basic details of her emergence as a self-care guru. There are a few talking heads providing context or explanation, and those talking heads \u2014 Ross Matthews, mostly \u2014 are easily the worst part of the documentary, or at least the most superfluous part.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhere Finding Susan Powter works best is as a near-v\u00e9rit\u00e9 glimpse into the life of somebody who seemingly had everything, seemingly lost everything and is now living in a limbo that would be sad except that the doc treats it as matter-of-fact, rather than tragic \u2014 a distinction I certainly appreciated. There\u2019s no condescension, no treatment of Powter as a cautionary tale. We see her exist, and it\u2019s an existence that makes her relatable in a way I definitely never found her in the \u201990s.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhere is Susan Powter in the documentary\u2019s present? Las Vegas, and if you told your average Gen X-er or millennial that Susan Powter was working there now, the response would probably be \u201cSure, that makes sense,\u201d with the assumption that she had a nightly empowerment show at, like, the Excalibur or something. One can imagine Powter prowling a stage, shouting catchphrases into a tiny microphone, bringing up tourists from the audience for tough love and then hugs.<\/p>\n

\n\tExcept that, as the documentary begins (Newman plays very loose with time), Powter is actually delivering for UberEats. Hair grown out, aged naturally, she\u2019s unrecognizable \u2014 except that when she starts to talk and she locks onto Newman and cinematographer Michiel Thomas (a former colleague of mine, in the interest of full disclosure), it\u2019s with the same intensity you might imagine the pre-fame Powter brought to an aerobics class and mid-fame Powter brought to her talk show.<\/p>\n

\n\tShe treats her living situation \u2014 which reached its nadir at a crime-ridden welfare hotel on the edge of The Strip \u2014 with candor, not shying from the ironies of a workout guru whose regular workout became daily multi-mile marches in the Vegas heat or a healthy-eating guru shopping for meals at the 99 Cent Store. She explains the bad business decisions that put her in this position but doesn\u2019t dwell, nor does the documentary dwell, on her absolute low point.<\/p>\n

\n\tMost of the documentary is spent with Powter in a very slightly improved condition. She somehow got enough money to live in a grungy but acceptable apartment and she\u2019s able to afford some fresh vegetables. But she also knows she\u2019s one dental emergency or car repair away from disaster. She is, in this respect, no different from most Americans \u2014 though unlike most Americans, she\u2019s able to start writing a memoir knowing she can get it into the hands of her former Simon & Schuster editor, in the hopes that she\u2019s one or two breaks from something resembling a comeback.<\/p>\n

\n\tYou will have questions. You will want to know which parts of her departure from the spotlight were her own choice and which were related to financial mismanagement. You will want to know about her three children. You will want to know about which parts of her financial struggle have been caused by stubbornness and pride, when presumably there\u2019s a nostalgia circuit that could have supported her over the years and may, in fact, be what helped her rise from her lowest point. You\u2019ll want some discussion of her version of wellness in the \u201990s and how it aligns with a 2025 version of wellness. Is she relevant today or clinging to the past? You will have questions.<\/p>\n

\n\tNewman, though, is more interested in capturing moments in Powter\u2019s life as she\u2019s living it, rather than telling viewers what we probably want to know. It\u2019s intimate and not informative.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe documentary thrives when it captures her going through boxes of her old possessions, rescued from a storage locker in New Mexico; having a panic attack when her Prius is on the verge of breaking down; or, later, when she finds herself in Los Angeles for an exclusive interview with People and an experience with a stylist takes her from elation to depression.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt works best when it conjures a fly-on-the-wall experience of being Susan Powter today, making her an unlikely version of an Everywoman. Even more intriguingly, the documentary turns her into an avatar for all things contemporary Las Vegas, embodying the real-life challenges experienced by real-life Las Vegas residents who exist with a tawdry version of glitz and glamour that\u2019s on the horizon but not quite accessible. When Powter is simply part of the Vegas landscape, with no trappings of her prior fame, it\u2019s captured beautifully.<\/p>\n

\n\tFinding Susan Powter struggles when Newman doesn\u2019t trust the fly-on-the-wall approach: when he lets Matthews, who met Powter once on a cruise ship, have talking-head segments despite a lack of personal connection; when he lets several other people in Powter\u2019s very limited sphere have direct-to-camera conversations that violate Powter\u2019s perspective, which should be the documentary\u2019s exclusive perspective.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe documentary isn\u2019t pure v\u00e9rit\u00e9, because it\u2019s an acknowledged part of the story \u2014 whether it\u2019s the production\u2019s role in helping Powter get her belongings from the storage facility or the appearance by Jamie Lee Curtis, an executive producer and catalyst for the project in ways that aren\u2019t fully explained. Curtis\u2019 interactions with Powter are so pure, and illustrate the two women\u2019s similarities in such revealing ways, that the contrivance of their meeting ceased to bother me.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat I liked most about Stop the Insanity is what\u2019s likely to make it a tough sell to audiences who have devoured films about so many of her former contemporaries. It doesn\u2019t say if Powter, as a guru, was right or wrong. It doesn\u2019t tell you if Powter in her current form is well or unwell, healthy or unhealthy, and it definitely doesn\u2019t offer reassurance that, after the camera stops rolling, she\u2019s going to be OK. It doesn\u2019t exploit her celebrity or sensationalize its demise. As the title suggests, it merely finds Susan Powter and lets her tell her story as she\u2019s living it.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs somebody with little previous investment in Powter\u2019s story, I found that a much more interesting approach than a version of the film that might have satisfied a larger audience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Zeberiah Newman\u2018s Stop the Insanity: Finding Susan Powter is not your typical exercise in rise-and-fall \u201990s celebrity nostalgia.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":294203,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,134,344,169006,117349,117350,117351],"class_list":{"0":"post-294202","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-movies","12":"tag-stop-the-insanity","13":"tag-stop-the-insanity-finding-susan-powter","14":"tag-susan-powter","15":"tag-zeberiah-newman"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294202"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294202\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/294203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}