NO WIRE HANGERS!!!!

So, I watched Mommie Dearest tonight (after getting home from seeing The Devil Wears Prada omg. More on that later). That was such a strange movie. So... arch. I must say I was a bit disappointed. I didn't find it as hilarious as I thought it would be. Don't get me wrong though, there was hilarity scattered about. Such as the late-night pruning session, or the infamous wire hangers sequence. My favourite however was towards the end when Mommie Dearest (aka Academy Award winner Joan Crawford) steals her daughter's role on a daytime soap opera. LOL. That wire hanger sequence was fucked up though, right? And the ajax! My god, THE AJAX!!!!! I've never seen so much ajax before in my life. In a hilarious light bulb moment for me, it was only during the scene where Crawford wins her Academy Award that I realised the movie was actually set in the 1940s! Nothing struck me as being the 1940s about this movie. And the fact that at the very start of the movie, Faye Dunaway as Joan looked about 60 years old, I was under the illusion the movie was based in the later years of her life. LOL. Couple that with the film's lack of time. As in, they don't seem to know when any of these events took place so they just filmed them and put them all together. It randomly jumps forward in time (within literally half a scene, Joan's daughter has turned from a rebel to a nun in waiting). The only way of telling if we've jumped forward years at a time is the aging makeup used on the maid character played by Rutanya Alda. And bad aging makeup at that! And speaking of the maid, what an awful woman she is! She's the witness to all these apparent beatings and drunken stoopers yet she never says a thing. Truly bad-but-they-thought-it-was-shakespeare filmmaking is very hard to come by.

Did Joan Crawford really get the last word Christina Crawford? DID SHE? LOL, that ending was a hoot. It's a bit late to have your character ask if Joan got the last word, when clearly in our fell swoop her daughter destroyed it. I actually yelled at the screen at this bit "No! She didn't!" And, omg, Xavier Berkley!

How in the heavens did anybody think they were making a good movie here? Those performances are all awful (no Gina Gershon-esque shining light here. Poor Faye Dunaway!) and the whole thing looks an ugly thing to watch, that makeup work was horrendous! Those eyebrows! The lipstick! The face-paint! Naomi Robson should take some tips from her. It's all just so absurdly stupifying. It feels more like a two-hour episode of Dynasty than a fact-abiding biopic on a Hollywood legend. Still, there were plenty of laughs to be had. "Don't worry. You can call me anytime you want. Collect!" That's what the girl you're sending off to boarding school after you beat her with a wire coathanger wants to hear, isn't it. That makes it all better.