Before women’s lib. Before Maude. Before Harriet Miers — there was Endora.
FACT FILE: Endora is a 1,000-year-old witch — though if you saw her pop up suddenly on top of a lampshade — a favorite perch — you’d swear she couldn’t be a day over 999. With her radioactive-blue eye shadow, Lucy red hair, and brilliant lips, Endora tends to be as much Auntie Mame as Wicked Witch of the West. She has eschewed witchy weeds for flowing diva robes in clashing purple-green combos. (more…)
Beware the Eyes that Hypnotize!
In Part I of our Faye extravaganza, we were reminded that like the psychic photographer she played in Eyes of Laura Mars (above), we gay men have always seen fantastic things in the Faye face: (more…)
Faye Dunaway is one of the great movie stars who act with their eyes — or perhaps that should be one of the stars who act greatly with their eyes — in a class with the ocular fireworks of a Bette Davis, as well as the glistening searchlights of the ever-vivid Joan Crawford.
Faye, of course, played Joan Crawford — quite notoriously — in Mommie Dearest, bringing to the proceedings a whole glary-starey madness that had nothing to do with the Joan feeling , that was all Dunaway, and yet captured the truth of the Crawford persona anyway — in the way that art can often say more with one bold stroke of color than with multiple daubs of nuanced photo-realism. (more…)
The father of fifteen minute famewhoring, Andy Warhol, couldn’t have devised a better set up: A sitcom about a desperate reality show star that’s set amidst a doomed Three’s Company-flavored-for-the-00s sitcom (idiotically titled Room and Bored) — that stars — in real life — a star from Friends, one of television history’s most successful sitcoms.
My mind reeled.
Here’s what I’ll miss most about Lisa Kudrow and her series The Comeback:
1. The Entertaining Mind Fuck. I loved watching a thirty-minute show that miraculously managed to generate equal portions laughter, compassion, horror and disdain — all in one short swoop.
Ibsen couldn’t have done it better. Big chunks of time would pass while watching the show before I snapped to and realized that I hadn’t been laughing — and shouldn’t I have been? And that sort of head scratching made me think about, and appreciate the show even more. There was a lot to, ultimately, cherish. The show just needed time to reveal its skewed direction. (more…)
Last Sunday Six Feet Under made TV history, bowing out with the sort of bold, imaginative stroke that made it the hippest show on TV. Poetic justice was served to all concerned, in a manner that will make this finale rank with such justice-dealing endings as the burning sled in Citizen Kane and the legendary Seinfeld finale — a show famous for "being about nothing" — where the entire cast is jailed (and quite deservedly) for "doing nothing" (during a robbery.) (more…)
Mayhem, delirium, destruction. It’s War of the Worlds children — strap yourself in! Warning: spoilers ahead.
To address Edwin Starr’s burning question, from his 1972 Motown mega-hit, War (”What is it good for?”) I must answer: Watching Tom Cruise being sucked up into a giant alien spaceship’s anus. That’s what it’s good for.
Of course, moments later, while still rectally lodged, Tommy pulls a couple of hand grenade’s pins out with his teeth and soon the entire metal booty is rocking and groaning and exploding — freeing Mr. Cruise, his comatose daughter and the other poor captives from their heinous fate of becoming bloody Miracle Grow for planet Red Alert!
O! Hollywood, thank you for that! L. Ron Hubbard couldn’t have written it better (more…)
In the great Gay Book of Beloved Monster Women, the name of one little girl is inscribed right up there with Mommie Dearest, Neely O’Hara and the Wicked Witch of the West. (more…)
Though over 30 years have passed, certain movies from the free-for-all Sixties remain fresh and full of surprises. Fellini Satyricon is one of them, a truly homo-drenched version of Nero’s Rome. (more…)
