The Things I Do For "You People": A Review Of The Craptastic Liz & Dick

Oh god, I'm Ann Romney!

No, I'm just a glutton for punishment because I actually watched ::::gulp:::: Liz & Dick, that spectacularly craptastic Lifetime movie wherein Lindsay Lohan plays Elizabeth Taylor. It premiered Sunday night while Dexter and Homeland were recording, so I set the DVR to record the 11PM showing. Well, Monday came around and, lo and behold, there was no Liz & Dick but some other Lifetime fiasco. I thought the universe was saving me, but, yes, glutton that I am, I recorded it Monday night.

Here's what I thought, bullet-point style--which suits the review just fine because there were many times I wanted to put a bullet in my TV set while this mess aired:

• WTF is Theresa Russell doing in this mess? I've always liked her quirky acting, and she's always made some avant-garde choices in films, but I think she just needed a paycheck. How else do we explain why she's here?
• Lindsay Lohan. Where to begin? First off, she sounds as much like Liz Taylor as I do--actually, I think I'm a better Liz. Her face--Lohan's, not Liz's--has that alcohol-bloat going on even before Taylor starts drinking incessantly in the film.
• I felt like I was watching a little girl playing dress-up because Lohan could never seem to fill Taylor's shoes, roles, or life. The only resemblance to Taylor was the violet eyes.
• It was a typical cheesy Lifetime production, with some really bad backdrops so we would think we're in Rome, or Gstaad, or Puerta Vallarta, or, well, anywhere other than a soundstage in Canada.
• When she's drunk, and swallowing fistfuls of pills, I felt we were watching The Lindsay Lohan Story and not Liz Taylor.
• Grant Bowler was fine as Richard Burton, though he did peak my interest when he removed his shirt.
• The semi-English accent that Taylor had, comes and goes in the Lohan performance, as though she'd forgotten where she was and what she was doing.
• Lohan's greatest acting feats were drinking, smoking and rolling her eyes.
• Oddly enough, though Taylor and Burton met on Cleopatra, the Lindsay Lohan Liz wore the Egyptian cat-eye make-up almost all the way through the film.
• Liz got fat. Lindsay plays Liz getting fat except Lindsay doesn't even get fat--through make-up or prosthetics. A scene where she as Taylor, bemoans being called Cleo-Fatra, Lindsay is as thin as a rail.
• One of the biggest travesties and guffaws, was actually having Lindsay film scenes from Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? She was just awful, and where Liz Taylor took to making herself look drunk and disorderly and unkempt, Lindsay's "scene" kept her in Laura Petrie Capri pants and tousled hair.
• The producers seemed to think that if they slapped a turban on Lohan--and they slapped quite a few on her--she'd seem more like Taylor. All I could think was, Lipstick on a pig.....
• One of the greatest guffaws of the film was when Lohan, as Liz, is told that Burton has died. Cue eye roll and dead faint. Cue Bad Acting Police.

What have we learned:

We learned that Lindsay's lost the promise she displayed as a younger actress. Sure, in The Parent Trap she made me long for Haylie Mills, while in Freaky Friday she made me wish for Jodie Foster, and in Herbie The Love Bug, she made me want for Dean Jones, but she had promise in Mean Girls. 

That's all gone now. She's stiff as an actress, and the scenes with Lohan are often so short--vignettes really--that you wonder if it was done that way because Lohan  couldn't sustain a scene longer than two minutes.

We learned Lifetime makes crap movies and doesn’t have the budget of an access cable channel. It was cheese from costumes to backdrops to locations sights; apparently standing in front of a beige building with a Vespa in the background, signals the fact that we're in Italy.

We learned that I’ll sit through two hours of crap, not craptastic, TV just for this blog.

Oy!