"I'm sorry, I'm losing my mind," Tommy Wiseau said to me seconds after I shook his hand in the lobby of the Four Points Sheraton in SoHo two Sundays ago. That was more believable than most things he would go on to tell me that afternoon.
The Westboro Baptist Church has at last found its medium. The hate group's over-the-top brand of expressing bigotry for basically anyone who isn't them, it turns out, is perfectly suited for the cut-heavy, silliness-fueled, 6-second world of Vining. It's like they've been an avant garde art project this whole time and only now can they fully express it.
Lifetime's House of Versace aired last night, and it was excellent to see Gina Gershon in her old thematic stomping ground of playing a coked-up lady boss set on making everyone's lives miserable. Though critically savaged, I'd wager that Gershon's alternately groggy and raving portrayal of Donatella Versace (complete with a caricature of Donatella's rumbling, accented basso) will age about as well as her iconic turn in Showgirls as Cristal Connors.
K-11, the directorial debut of Kristen Stewart's mom Jules Stewart, is like a weird nightmare you just woke up from, in which you went to jail, watched someone shit out a balloon full of coke, stared at No.2 pencil-drawn chola eyebrows for way too long, heard someone howl, "I want a jailhouse fuck and I want it now!" while never quite grasping why anyone is doing what they're doing, ever. And did you get buttfucked? It's too fuzzy to be sure. It's the B-est, gayest, longest episode of Oz. It's madness, borderline camp and it seems to be aiming for something as sleazily quotable as Showgirls. It can't touch those debased heights, but any movie featuring an old, effete prisoner shouting, "I ain't leavin' here without my laxative! I'm in pain, god damn it!" either knows what it's doing or at least is wise enough to stay out of its own ridiculous way.
Warning: Minor spoilers.
"Did Chuck have AIDS?" someone off camera asks Rufus as he's storming out of frame. The setup is a candid interview, maybe for a reality show, maybe for a Maury-like talk show, and Rufus, a pastor, is refusing to answer questions about the man his wife caught him cheating with chapters and chapters ago in R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet saga.
Great bad movies are fueled by their ridiculous details. Miami Connection's are stellar to the point of bonkers. This is not just a great bad movie — it's a phenomenal one. The 1987 pulp movie played only in Orlando and then after being avoided, was forgotten. But now it's being revived by Drafthouse, showing in theaters all over the country including New York's Landmark Sunshine tonight. For sheer singularity, it merits reconsideration.
Margarita Pracatan is at least 60, extremely Cuban and quasi-known for her wacky covers of pop songs. They are irreverent not just to their source material, but to the ideas of melody and rhythm. On Friday, she performed her one-woman show, Stranger in the Night, at New York's Laurie Beechman Theater under the direction of Zach Udko. It was one of the wildest entertainment concepts I've ever witnessed. For over an hour, Pracatan stood in front of a pidgin-English PowerPoint presentation and discussed her love of money, her hatred of marriage and her frequenting of hotel bathrooms with her riffs on pop songs like Lionel Richie's "Hello," Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream," Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe" and Maroon 5/Christina Aguilera's "Moves Like Jagger" interspersed. Before singing "Jagger," she told the crowd, "You can sing with me, 'cause I don't know this song." Every time she stepped up to the keyboard, she regarded it warily, as if it were her first time ever setting eyes on it. I believe that her "Teenage Dream" rendition linked to above uses the wrong preset beat. Oh well, incoherence is her aesthetic.
The most stimulating thing about camp cinema is the ambiguity of intention: It's practically a game to figure out how aware the participants were in the creation of something so bad that it's good. Things can look so ridiculous that you'd assume any actors/directors/producers involved would have to realize it, and yet their perseverance in and clear commitment to an inevitable bomb suggests a glorious lack of awareness.
GLAAD points out that AMC's new Small Town Security is the only reality show that is currently featuring a trans man in its cast. That's great. "Lieutenant" Dennis Croft's portrayal is sensitive (at least it was in last night's series premiere) and allows him to articulate his transitioning, his gender identity, his lack of choice in the matter and all of those other things that deserve mentioning and repeating. It's an uncharacteristically even-handed move for the genre.
At last night's Melbourne stop on her Born This Way Ball tour, Lady Gaga debuted the song "Princess Die," and everything about it was ridiculous. "It's about some of the most deep and personal thoughts I've ever had and it's called ‘Princess Die. D-I-E. D…I…E," she announced, motioning to her Lisa Frank journal with a highway unicorn on its cover.
Rock of Ages is so stacked with clichés and tropes that it feels like a comprehensive overview of American mythology, as dictated by pop culture. Set in a backdrop of L.A. that looks very much like a backdrop, the film tells a story about an aging rock star attempting to resurrect his career. By the end of the film, he's done so, courtesy of American pop culture's most relevant song of the past decade — Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'." As sung by Tom Cruise.
With the return of Dallas and tomorrow's release of Rock of Ages, it's a so-bad-it's-at-least-worth-enduring kinda week. So apropos only of that, here's a hilariously awful song from I-can't-believe-it-is-Fabio's 1993 album After Dark. Over an 808-based Skinemaximal sound that makes Paula Abdul's "Rush Rush" sound like real hood shit, Fabio mumbles, "It's strange how I feel! Everything seems so unreal." I empathize. The hook goes, "When somebody loves somebody desperately, everything comes out so natural." Affection: the greatest laxative of all.
On this week's episode of The Jennifer Love Hewitt Handjob Hour The Client List , Love's character Riley cleared the snorkel of one of her youngest clients yet: a third-year law student. In the past, I'd complained about the lack of erection realness on this otherwise delightful romp of a show (actually, it's kind of a drag when she isn't jerking dudes off, because I don't care about her absentee husband unless she's hallucinating that she's jerking him off, which she periodically does). However, on last night's show, a guy pitched a tent and the results were as gritty as you'd expect from a show about happy endings on Lifetime.
On this week's episode of The Jennifer Love Hewitt Handjob Hour The Client List , Love's character Riley serviced a slightly older dude. But have no fear: he was just as improbably cut up and handsome as anyone who's blown by The Rub to get tugged at. It's a good thing this happy-ending massage parlor exists otherwise these extremely hot dudes would never get off. Poor guys.
On Sunday's episode of The Jennifer Love Hewitt Handjob Hour The Client List , Love's character, Riley, was introduced to T.J., yet another improbably gorgeous dude who's into professional handjobs from hot ladies. Yep, one of those. T.J. came to (and probably on) her with a broken heart, she gave him "enough hot memories" to last six months while he's working on his oil rig. I wonder what the hot memories-to-orgasms conversion rate is.
If there is a key piece of dialogue to extract from Rena Riffel's sprawling, two-and-a-half-hour, opium-paced Showgirls 2: Penny's From Heaven, it is this:
The Iron Lady, the Margaret Thatcher biopic for which Dame Edna won an Oscar earlier this year, is out on DVD/Blu-ray/subway bootleg today. But more importantly, it is pure camp. Please accept this reel of highlights with an accompanying laugh track as evidence.
Sunday is full of chin-stroke provoking TV, so it's really nice to see some unabashed trash thrown in the mix. If Lifetime's The Client List makes good on the promise last night's premiere suggested, it is bound to become the Showgirls of television. Here is is in a nutshell: Jennifer Love Hewitt gives handjobs and speaks in a slight Southern accent.
