I'm usually smug and proud of my choice to not have cable.
This is not one of those times I envy all of you!!!
"Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It's a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”
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I love that the photographers in this, all are able to use one flash bulb when they are shooting Liz!
Didn't any of the producers or prop people know that the flash bulbs had to be changed after every shot?!
Jeeze, this is a pile of dog poop.
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LOL, I watched this last night. I wish I would have checked in here with you guys while it was on. Lindsay was AWFUL! She didn't even TRY to sound remotely like Liz!
The script made no sense, the performances were completely awful- it was just ghastly all around. At a few minutes to ten, I had to check to see when it ended- there wer literally 5 minutes left in which they covered their re-marriage, re-divorce and Burton's death- and then it just stopped. I imagined Lifetime saying "OK, that's it, wrap it up now!"
I think everyone is to blame. Lindsay had the capacity to be good, but she had to have known that she was in over her head here. I can't believe she didn't even attempt to create a character that was remotely like Elizabeth Taylor.
I say this about the twenty-five or so minutes I watched last night. I just couldn't take any more after that.
Did Eddie Fisher even have more than a few lines? No signs of Monty and how his worsening condition effected Liz? Not so much as a cameo of Mike Nichols in the Virginia Woolf era and how this guy who was then best known as a standup had to deal with two power houses in his film directing debut? Why did Richard's wife Sybil care about this happening over his many other liaisons that happened over the years? How about how Joseph Mankiewicz felt about how much of a fiasco his project became or how the romance actually stirred the box office recoups from the film bombing? We got so little answers about why this character was acting in such a way that was either behaving in the extreme or behaving as stiff as a background prop.
Even if the dialogue was as stilted and the performances were still bad, the storytelling could have been done so much better to at least make it an innocuous film experience. The film's story had tunnel vision on only Liz & Dick yet told so little about them and their place in Hollywood history as well as why we should care about them. It could have helped to have the people around them have some weight on their lives, though Ifor Jenkins was close, I guess.
Also a little disappointed there were absolutely nothing on Boom!. If you wanted boozy trashy fun of that relationship, that film was the zenith. It also would have shown how quickly they both became relics in their industry. Katrina Longworth wrote a good piece on the film failing to focus on how they went from the talk of the town that got people into seats to just being tabloid fodder that drew little box office. Instead, the film just shows tabloids on their breakup, hideaways on boats and tax-haven countries, and whatever but not the industry side that could not have moved away from their type of star fast enough.
I like run of the mill TV biopics. I loved the Natalie Wood one a few years back because at least that was simply a career biography that had plenty of cameos of major stars who were connected to Natalie personally and professionally while also highlighting her turbulent relationships with her mother, Warren Beatty, and Robert Wagner. Same for the Sherilyn Fenn one as Liz Taylor. This, however, was like a bad writing exercise, making things complicated for very little reason.
I am looking up stuff on the imDb page. Apparently Creed Bratton from The Office played Daryl Zanuck and Steve from Sex & The City played Ernest Lehman.
I didn't watch, but now based on this thread, I totally want to see it now for the train wreck it sounds like.
I honestly have no idea who I would have cast in this movie, if I was making it. Lindsay Lohan definitely would not have been in the running though. Elizabeth Taylor has a very distinct look, so I think it would be a hard role to cast. Then again, this is a Lifetime movie, so nothing should surprise me. I saw one last week that I questioned the casting.
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I don't know if it was more confusing for those of us who knew the story or those who didn't: They showed Liz and Dick making three films and La Lohan later remarked that they were together twelve years and made twenty-some films. They also showed a couple "serious" financial discussions about being broke immediately followed by Dick buying a yacht, a million-dollar diamond or a private plane- what happened?
Mike Nichols must have not wanted to be mentioned- I noticed that they only showed dead people.
Honestly, I think Lifetime had to know that Lindsay was gonna s@#t the bed on this one. How could they not? They probably got more ratings for the trainwreck than they would for a quality movie. They were hoping for the next Showgirls.
"The sexual energy between the mother and son really concerns me!"-random woman behind me at Next to Normal
"I want to meet him after and bang him!"-random woman who exposed her breasts at Rock of Ages, referring to James Carpinello
JoeKV, the screenplay was shockingly inept (and, as others have said, unfortunately pretty dull). The timeline was made very unclear--it was even unclear I felt about when Richard and Liz got their final divorce, etc. By the last ten minutes it felt like everyone involved had finally given up any hope and were just happy to get to the last page of the script and end--no real reason to have that framework of them in Heaven/Hell, or whatever.
They also introduced a ton of characters with no explanation as to who they were--and if someone was brand new to this story (which surely some young Lifetime/Lohan fan would be) I think they'd have no idea, for example, that that guy was Richard's brother until it's finally mentioned about half way in.
So was Lindsay cast purely for the stunt quality? I mean she's 26. She looked like she was playing dress up in her mother's clothes, particularly as the film went on--and the film starts with Cleopatra, which Liz did when she was in her early 30s and goes from there. If they actually were planning to do more of the pre Burton years, casting Lohan and her age (and even the connection to both being former child stars) may have made it make SOME more sense.
Betty, I agree that they probably didn't expect great things from Lindsay except for people to tune in--which I imagine many people who never even turn on Lifetime, did. I wish, then, that they had decided to go full on camp with it--it really felt like nobody knew, or cared about what kind of movie they made.
It's truly awful, badly written, badly shot, badly acted. Each scene is so fast you get whiplash watching it. It tried to cover so much whilst managing to cover nothing at all. The ending felt like they ran out of time so just did a 10 min wrap up. Lohan was awfully miscast and completely out of her depth, I have to say though the interview moments I thought she acted pretty well ( of course it was nothing like Taylor but she performed well). The rest of her performance was amateur hour, when we jumped forward to Burtons death it was like looking at a bad 80s drag queen, I guess that's not her fault though, the casting director should be shot
Namo i love u but we get it already....you don't like Madonna
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