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Anna Nicole Smith gets the Lifetime movie you did not know she needed

Fri, 28 Jun 2013 17:00:00 +0000

“Anna Nicole,” a biopic of the massive-chested, Playboy-modeling, Guess-jeans-selling, Marilyn Monroe-looking, short-lived, drug-addled tabloid fixture, premieres Sunday night on Lifetime. The movie is directed by Mary Harron, who has previously made such films as “American Psycho,” “I Shot Andy Warhol” and “The Notorious Life of Bettie Page,” an unexpectedly polished résumé for someone slumming it in Lifetime movie land. Disappointingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, the lowbrow juju of the Lifetime movie — one of the strongest forces in all of television – triumphs over whatever highbrow aspirations Harron had for the project, if, in fact, she had any. “Anna Nicole” has an extraordinarily hazy point of view, tonally sympathetic to Smith but unwilling to explore any of the details, sloppy but particularizing, that might mitigate and humanize her increasingly terrible behavior. If Anna Nicole Smith was in some way emblematic of our celebrity moment— and she was, a decade before Paris Hilton, famous for being some version of herself — “Anna Nicole” does not make that case: She seems as much an unfortunate joke as ever.

“Devious Maids” skewers the one percent

Fri, 21 Jun 2013 19:41:00 +0000

I was recently having a conversation about working class people and television, and how it has become nearly impossible to find the former on the latter. Sitcoms used to have a blue-collar tradition, from “All in the Family” to “Roseanne,” but in recent years that's been all but abandoned. People on television are usually rich, nearly so, or becoming so. They are typically untroubled by financial practicalities or only marginally bothered by them. Into this desert of class diversity comes Lifetime’s cheeky new melodrama “Devious Maids,” premiering Sunday, which features five working class Latina women, but still just flickers in and out of class consciousness.

“Devious Maids” comes from Marc Cherry, the creator of “Desperate Housewives” and a man who clearly believes in sticking to certain naming conventions. Tonally, the shows are very similar: comedic super-soaps about a group of women with a central murder mystery, crazy plot turns, and a knowing, winking tone. The stars of “Devious Maids” are not housewives but Latina domestic servants, all working for crazy rich people in Beverly Hills. In the first minutes of the pilot, a maid, Flora, is murdered by a person unknown. When her employer, a camp character on the order of Cruella De Vil, breaks down, it’s not because of the death, but the mess: “My maid was murdered! Who is going to clean all this up?” she screeches.

Another Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton biopic is on its way

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 17:45:00 +0000

Only months after Lifetime's release of "Liz & Dick," the Linday Lohan-starring biopic about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton's tumultuous romance, BBC Four has announced plans for its own version of the love story. Expectations for this one are a little higher, though: "Les Misérables" actress Helena Bonham Carter will star as Elizabeth Taylor, alongside "The Wire's" Dominic West as Richard Burton.

The movie, "Burton and Taylor," will focus on the pair's relationship during Noel Coward's play "Private Lives" in 1983, when they came together onstage after two previous, explosive marriages, hoping to reunite. The play itself was about a couple who have come together after a divorce and discover that they each have new partners. Bonham Carter told the Daily Mail, "Elizabeth was 51 [when she took on the role in Private Lives], still every inch a star, still beautiful and they still needed each other but this was professional." The two didn't marry a third time, but Bonham Carter says the movie is "about this sliver of their lives together. They were huge stars and they'd never been onstage together before."

The movie is to be released in the fall of 2013.

Jennifer Love Hewitt producing “Pride and Prejudice” show on Lifetime

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 18:00:00 +0000

Jane Austen's classic 1813 novel, "Pride and Prejudice," has a few good TV and film adaptations, but the next one will probably not be counted among them. Lifetime (yes, that Lifetime) has announced that Jennifer Love Hewitt (yes, Jennifer Love Hewitt) will turn Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy's nuanced love story into a television show called "Darcy's Town." The show will be set in the present day in a small Virginia town.

Hewitt's show is the second present-day Austen show slated for network TV. CBS recently bought a TV drama inspired by Austen's "Sense and Sensibility" by "Boardwalk Empire's" Margaret Nagle.

h/t THR

“Breaking Bad”: The Lifetime special

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 22:37:00 +0000

This clip at Entertainment Weekly splices Walter White's universe into a very different kind of family drama.

Enjoy:

“Liz & Dick”: An instant camp classic

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 17:27:00 +0000

Only once every several years does a piece of pop culture come along that's so eminently quotable, so brilliantly miscast, so beautifully unself-aware, that it attains instant cult status the moment it is released, kraken-like, upon a camp-hungry populace. So scooch over a little in the pantheon today, "Showgirls" and "Battlefield Earth" and "The Room." Make some space in there for "Liz and Dick," the greatest terrible thing to come along in years.

From the beginning, the Lifetime movie, casting reliable train wreck Lindsay Lohan as the scandalous Elizabeth Taylor in her Richard Burton–marrying heyday, was dubiously touted as LiLo's big comeback vehicle. That she had made it through the shooting of an entire project without getting fired seemed sufficient, in at least the minds of Lohan and her publicists, to signal a triumph, the beginning of Lohan being known again as an actress and not just that lady who keeps fighting with her parents and driving on sidewalks. Lifetime eagerly — and with all apparent seriousness — promoted Sunday's "world premiere event" with a heavy rotation of television ads and billboards featuring a violet-eyed Lohan groaning under the weight of the world's largest ring pop. Yet even when the early reviews faintly praised Lohan's "almost decent" performance and debated how calculated its "pure genius … for belly laughs" was, who could have predicted it would become quite the glorious collective bonding moment it was?

LiLo’s Lifetime joke

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 19:06:00 +0000

In its review of “Liz & Dick,” the television movie about the storied, passionate, decades long, true lust and love affair between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton — i.e., the Lifetime movie in which Lindsay Lohan plays Elizabeth Taylor — the Hollywood Reporter describes the film as an “instant classic of unintentional hilarity.” I vehemently disagree. There is nothing “unintentional” about it.

“Liz and Dick,” which airs on Sunday night, where it should serve as a perfect final mouthful to a long weekend of binging, is, after all, a Lifetime movie, a camp genre unto itself. The Lifetime movie is where Douglas Sirk lives in infamy, flattered by endless imitation as he rolls over in his grave, mimicked slavishly and poorly, his plots grown ever more sordid, but his earnestness never topped. A movie in which Lindsay Lohan-as-Elizabeth Taylor regularly lectures the camera about how she and Richard Burton (Grant Bowler) invented paparazzi and the celebrity photo frenzy, a movie in which Lohan-as-Taylor downs a bottle of pills and booze and sobs through the resulting dangerous, but entirely manipulative suicide attempt, a movie in which Lohan lies on a bed with cucumbers on her eyes even as said eyes are drenched in her infamous Cleopatra makeup is ridiculous, yes, but it is not unknowing. You can hate Lifetime movies, and still see that “Liz and Dick” is exactly what a Lifetime movie is supposed to be, instantly hootable, usually ludicrous, rarely dull. Snuggle up.

“The Houstons” comes way too soon

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 13:10:00 +0000

Whitney Houston died eight and a half months ago this past February. By May, her family was filming a reality TV show. The simultaneously low-key but exploitative series that has resulted, “The Houstons: On Our Own,” began airing last night on Lifetime. The premiere episode ended with the family gathered beside Houston’s grave on Mother’s Day, sobbing. The series doesn’t gloss over the grief: It puts cameras on it. And even when they’re standing back, filming the family from a “non-invasive” distance, the whole thing feels pretty wretched.

“The Houstons” features Bobbi Kristina, Whitney’s daughter with Bobbi Kristina Brown; Whitney’s brother Gary; his wife, Pat; their 14-year-old daughter Rayah; Bobbi Kristina’s controversial 23-year-old boyfriend and formerly adopted brother, Nick; and occasional appearances by Whitney’s mother, Cissy. The 19-year-old Bobbi Kristina — who goes by Krissi — introduces herself to the camera as the daughter of the “infamous badass” Bobby Brown and the “beautiful princess” Whitney Houston, which sums up the strange frequency the show’s participants are all operating on: both hyperaware of what “the world” thinks, and unaware ov how strange and removed describing one’s father as an “infamous badass” sounds.

Walters to interview Lindsay Lohan next month

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 17:01:00 +0000

NEW YORK (AP) — Barbara Walters says she will interview Lindsay Lohan next month for ABC's "20/20" newsmagazine.

Walters announced on Monday's edition of her talk show, "The View," that the interview will air on Nov. 16. It paves the way for Lohan's would-be comeback project, "Liz & Dick," which premieres later that month.

The Lifetime biopic stars the 26-year-old actress as screen diva Elizabeth Taylor. It spotlights Taylor's quarter-century love affair with celebrated leading man Richard Burton, whom she married and divorced twice.

Grant Bowler, whose credits include the TV series "True Blood" and "Lost," plays Burton in the film.