Monday, November 26, 2012

Movie Review: "Liz and Dick" The Morning After

A drag queen would have been better...
Remember Robin Williams, that standup comedian who did weird voices and talked frantically in a schizophrenic-roid-rage-kind-of-way on stage? Imagine if, instead of doing his normal dialog, he was reciting the Gettysburg Address (but still frantically). Now imagine him doing it in the movie "Lincoln." I start off this review with this absurd image so you can understand the following: this would be better casting than Lindsay Lohan playing Elizabeth Taylor in the Lifecrime movie "Liz and Dick."

Lindsay Lohan, sounding like Harvey-Fierstein-after-too-many-cigarrettes, evokes the very essence of Lindsay Lohan not doing a good Liz Taylor impression in this awful dreck, which aired Sunday, and will continue to appear in an eternal loop in the personal torture chamber of William Shakespeare in his cell in Hell. She acts less like Liz Taylor and more like Liz Taylor's teenage daughter who went into Mommy's closet and tried on Mommy's too-big wigs and dresses.

The movie, starring Grant Bowler (recently in "Atlas Shrugged"), who is slightly better as Richard Burton, is about the tumultuous relationship between the two movie icons, who met on the set of the early 60s epic (non-nuclear bomb) "Cleopatra" and had an affair, openly and scandalously abandoning two marriages and sets of children, thus becoming the number one target for the paparazzi photographers who follow them everywhere (partly because publicity-seeking Liz calls to tell them where they will be). It follows their up-and-down relationship over the next several decades, as they struggle to overcome Taylor's relatively more successful movie career and Burton's jealousy over that.

The main problem with the movie is that Lohan and Bowler have less chemistry than a grade school science fair vinegar-and-baking-soda volcano, which makes most scenes fairly boring. A side story involving a tragedy with Richard Burton's manager-brother (David Hunt, a minor TV actor) also seems bloodless. The only interesting part of the movie is when Lohan and Bowler are shown in Inside-the-Actors-Studio-type asides, talking directly to the audience about the scenes in the movie.

Now having had its run, the movie is consigned to the realm of the 2-am insomniacs, who, when faced with a choice of this or half hour long infomercials about cleaning products, may find the decision harder than they expect. Unless they are William Shakespeare.

Posted by: GMan



4 comments so far :

Megan F. said...

She mailed the Liz performance in with no postage. I can't even act and could have done better. Since I was pregnant, they should have hired a drag queen instead. Elizabeth loved them.

Jean said...

Er, wait. "Remember" Robin Williams? The man isn't dead, for pete's sake. And the analogy may be a tad off, as Robin Williams has a talent for dramatic acting. I, in fact, can imagine him playing Lincoln quite convincingly. But not, of course, in his comedic persona. That would be absurd...except that I suspect Williams wouldn't make the mistake of doing that, not even when he still was on drugs. Unlike Lohan's inability to see that the script was bad, the idea was bad...and assess that her own performance was bad. A good artist, whether of the dramatic, visual or other varieties, knows to constantly reassess their work and their abilities. They don't phone it in.

This sad attempt (even for Lifetime) deserves all the bad reviews and hilarious Tweets it gets.

Kevin C. said...

Ms. Lohan definitely mailed the performance it in with no postage. I know, I'm expert at that...And I would like to see Robin Williams do a coked up Lincoln.

GMan said...

Jean - I know Robin Williams is still alive and was not maligning him - I agree he's quite a good actor (in some of his movies). The central crime here is, as you say, Lifetime's.

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