"Tony, I see something terrible is gonna happen."

Girrrrl. you aint seen the half of it !




Yes, Kim Richards - that adorable tyke from Witch Mountain films and TV's Nanny & The Professor and sultry teen of Hello, Larry & Tuff Turf is having her big comeback on the most vile of the Real Housewives shows on Bravo. These ostentatious, neurotic, selfish, petty, desperate broads make the Orange County cows look like Carmelite nuns. Oh! it's so delicious.

And in the category of the "walking wounded" (I love how they call everybody a "housewife" even if they are divorced or single) is our Kimmy Richards. At age 46, she would rather stay at home with her brood of teens who don't really need her anymore and look at the old scrapbooks than go shopping with the other bitches or her bossy younger sister Kyle (who tells all of America that she promised their dying mom that she would "look after" her sister Kim.) Kyle didnt have half the career that Kim had - though she was in 1978's Halloween as little Lyndsey who ran for the hills at the end. Kim is stand-offish and pouty in social settings and claims she's shy...Kyle tells the audience that her sister is just judgmental.

The Richards sisters (aunts of Paris & Nicky Hilton) offer good drama to the show with their arguments and old emotional wounds exposed for the world to see.
KYLE: "...and after all I did for you!"
KIM: "After all YOU did for ME?!!!"



A reviewer at Defamer/Gawker summed KIM up this way:

Kim Richards
Oh dear. This woman is a little loco nuts, isn't she? There was this amazing, tour-de-force opening scene with her where she first said: "My mom gave me some really great advice. Don't make your kids your whole life." Who says that to a person, let alone THEIR OWN CHILD? "Don't make my mistake, daughter. I shouldn't have spent so much time loving you." Not that parents SHOULD make their children their entire lives, no of course not, but why say it? If you have to say it, you have a problem.

Then, just after that awful bit, amazingly in the same scene, Kim did this incredible reenactment of going out with her niece Paris Hilton that was just the saddest, most glorious thing I've seen since the last sad-but-glorious thing on one of these shows. "It's funny, I went out with Paris and the photographers were like 'Kim! Kim!' And Paris was like 'Huh?' And I was like 'I was here first!' and Paris was like 'Wha?' And the photographers were like 'Kim is an icon!' and Paris was like 'I'm an icon!' and I was I like 'But I was an icon first!' and the photographers were like 'Kim! Kim!'."

OK, I'm not really doing it justice. But it was so devastating. And did you notice how she clearly realized midway through her bizarre, spastic reenactment that it was a stupid, empty, braggy story and yet she couldn't stop? There was this cold bit of lightning in her eyes as she realized that she wasn't telling a very good story and you knew she wanted to just stop talking, but she couldn't. And then she laughed awkwardly as if it was no big deal that she, a grown woman with children, had just spent three minutes explaining how the paparazzi think that she is as relevant as Paris Hilton, her sister's daughter. Good work, lady. Some other good work is that Kim is looking for a new mansion to lease, rather than, I guess, buying a smaller more reasonable home. She's pretty post-divorce broke, yet wants to live in a mansion and have another kid, at 46. Good thinking!

Too Fun To Die

I think Nathan Lane is the male Ethel Merman - he delivers. Bebe Neuwirth brings her charms to her devotees, and I appreciate Kevin Chamberlin's homage to Jackie Coogan's screechy voiced Fester. I'm pleased that the always wonderful Jackie Hoffman has a steady new gig as Grandmama in this seemingly critic proof hit show.

John Lahr's New Yorker review says: As Grandma Addams, Jackie Hoffman, with her pug-dog mug and cartoony caterwauling, manages to raise the show’s temperature a few degrees. “Stay outta my shit or I’ll rip your leg off and bury it in the back yard,” Grandma screeches at her grandson Pugsley (Adam Riegler), adding, “I love you.”

I love Jackie Hoffman and her video blogs (and her GOOFING on a certain sci fi church next door to theater.)



more Jackie blogs here and here and here

Extreme Makeovers '79

I beg you to click on Poseidon's Underworld hysterical blog recap of the 1979 melodrama/love story called THE PROMISE.

The film's love birds are Stephen Collins (TV's Tales of the Gold Monkey; 7th Heaven) and foxy Kathleen Quinlan (Lifeguard; Twilight Zone: The Movie 3rd segment 'Helen Foley/It's a Good Life remake).

Beatrice Straight ("Dr. Lesh" from Poltergeist) is the evil mom of rich boy Collins who hates his commonor girlfriend (Quinlan is hagged up in the first half). Mom pays for Quinlan's post-car accident facial surgery if she vows to stays away from her son. And then the drama begins...




Melissa Manchester sang the theme song ('I'll never say goodbye"). 1979 was big for Missy - she also did the Ice Castles film theme. Now that I think of it - the two '79 films would make a great tortured love double feature.

Please have a peek at this recap of The Promise:

For the Hag in All of Us

Lucille La Verne, who played a hag in MGM's A Tale of Two Cities, showed Walt Disney that she could provide the voice of the Wicked Queen AND the Old Hag - by taking out her dentures in his office. She got both parts.

HAG (sung to the tune of Madonna's Vogue)

my loving salute to character actresses and the screen ladies over a certain age.

HAG

What Are You Looking At?

Let it sag.
Let it sag.
Hag, Hag, hag
Hag, Hag, hag

Look around everywhere you turn you’ll find them
In shawls, or covered in lace (just look around)
You try everything you can to ignore
The pain of life on their face [it’s on their face]

When all else fails and you long to be
Something younger than you are today
I know a place where you can get away
It's called a movie show, and here's where they go, so

Chorus:

Come on, hag
Be a hard-working character actress [character actress]
Hag, Hag, Hag
Come on, Hag
Let your careers go with the flow [go with the flow]
You know you can do it

All you need is a great talent-agent
So use him that's what he’s for [that's what he’s for]
Look inside your bag, make sure y’have your medication
Make youngin’s open the door [open up the door]

It makes no difference if it's gray or white
In a bun or up with a curl
When the producer calls for a matronly wife
You're a superstar, yes, that's what you are, you know it

Come on, hag
Be a hard-working character actress [character actress]
(Hag, Hag, Hag)
Let it sag
Let your careers go with the flow [go with the flow]
You know you can do it

Take it where you can get it
so don’t cry or over-fret it
The gypsy hag of a musical
That's where you’ll feel so beautiful
Magical, Lucille Ball
So get onto that soundstage

Come on, hag
Be a hard-working character actress [character actress]
Hag, Hag, Hag
Let it sag
Let your careers go with the flow [go with the flow]
You know you can do it


Hag, [Hag]
Take it where you find it [move to the music]
Hag, [Hag]
Hags will have to bind it [go with the flow]

Beulah Bondi, Alice Pearce
Mary Wickes, they were fierce
Barbara Pepper, LaWanda Page
Broads who all embraced their age

Marie Dressler; Billie Burke
After 50, made it work.
Shirley Booth, a classic frump
Gladys Cooper, with a dowager’s hump

They had wisdom, they had sass
Marjorie Main, kicked some ass
Ellen Corby, embraced her grays
Bette Davis in her Disney Days

Ladies with their flab unfurled,
Jayne Mansfield’s Wild Wild World
Don't just stand there, let's get to it
Be a hag, there's nothing to it

Hag, Hag, Hag, Hag

Oooh, you've got to
Be the old bag on that marquee
Oooh, you've got to just
take a cue from dear ol’ Aunt Bea
Oooh, you've got to just,
Hag !

Skidoo! Skiday!

This is one of Mark and my favorite movies. Actually, I think Mavis and I first saw it at the Film Forum years ago! How on earth can I describe it? Otto Preminger made a film about LSD that stars Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Frankie Avalon, Groucho Marx (as crime kingpin "God,"), Mickey Rooney; several of the Batman villians - of which Preminger was one: Burgess Meredith, Frank Gorshin, and Cesar Romero; Arnold Stang (!), Michael Constantine as Gleason's cellmate who proudly declares, "I'm a rapist!" ... Carol Channing doing a striptease on Frankie Avalon's swinger bed while hubby Gleason trips on acid for for the first time, demanding, "Give me a flower!" Watching it demands a group experience: you can't help but blurt out "Norton!" after almost every one of Gleason's lines, such as his grilling of daughter's boyfriend John Philip Law: "What is he, a faggot?" Not only that, Slim Pickens and Harry Nilsson (who sings the film's credits!) are the prison guards. Imagine Slim Pickens on acid.

Here's Nilsson on "Playboy After Dark" promoting the film. Otto Preminger is already there on Hef's couch:


The great thing is that TCM is now showing it, so I don't have to resort to my badly bootlegged copy to show people this unbelievable film.

Sextette

Without a shred of self-effacing irony , Mae West played a sex bomb (at age 91?) in 1978's film SEXTETTE. oh, and what a cinematic gift she gave us! Miss West was living in her penthouse at The Ravenswood Apts on Vine Street, Hollywood -- and she was listed in the phonebook at the time (just in case a producer needed her). We all need her.

"We used to go to dinner with [Mae West] every Thursday night. Rumor had it that she was 91 years old when she made that and she wasn't very good at remembering her lines. I do remember one scene that I had to come into the bridal suite with her (she was my bride), and I used to have to say, 'Oh darling, I feel like the first man who landed on the moon' and her line was something like, 'That's a small step for man and a giant leap into the boudoir', but she could never remember it. I don't think she even knew that the Americans had landed on the moon, so there was a kind of lack of connection with this line! We did it again and again and again, and she kept forgetting, and every time we stood outside the door waiting to begin she'd tug at my sleeve and say, 'What's the line?' She'd get so, so annoyed with herself! One moment we walked in and I said, 'Darling, I feel like the first man who landed on the moon,' and she said, 'In a minute you're going to feel like you landed on Venus,' and into the boudoir we went!" (Timothy Dalton)