Guilty Pleasures
If you're a fan of really bad reviews, then today is turkey day at The New York Times. Section E is stuffed with laughs - provided you're not a participant in the endeavors under review. Basic Instinct 2, Adam and Steve, Brick, and A Safe Harbor for Elizabeth Bishop all fare badly at the hands of Times critics Manohla Dargis, Stephen Holden, and Charles Isherwood. But the palm goes to Alessandra Stanley's response to "Liza With A 'Z'," the rebroadcast of Liza Minnelli's 1972 spectacular. It's weirdly worse than a bad review.
As the orchestra plays the opening bars of Cabaret, the star strides onstage in a white Halston pantsuit and white feather boa and belts "Yes," and Billie Holiday's "God Bless the Child," her eyes shuttered by spiky false eyelashes and her long, painted fingers stretched out like Struwwelpeter's. She was only 26 and flush with the box-office success of Cabaret and she was already beginning to look like a Liza Minnelli impersonator.
But that's not the best. Here's the best:
Of late, she has become a Michael Jackson-ish figure, too preposterous to function even as a nostalgia act.
There's something about "function" in that sentence that I'm just not going to go into. Enjoy!
