I just Netflixed Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? starring none other than ElizabethTaylor and her on-again off-again partner in wine (and hubby), Richard Burton. The movie is based on Edward Albee's play of the same name, and let me tell you something, it should come with a warning label that says: "Pour yourself a drink, this is going to be one fucked up evening."
Liz and Richard are on fire! Their relationship in real life as we all know was one stormy tumultuous passion feast-ival, so I guess it's no surprise that they electrify the screen together. She plays a blousier and uglier Liz than she was in real life at the time, a college president's daughter who believes she married beneath herself, and Richard plays her husband, a professor, not the head, of the History Department. Add booze. They fuckin' hate each other. Add booze. Lizzie is FANTASTICALLY unlikeable and constantly riding him for being a failure and he barks back with equal intensity like a sad miserable sack. Add booze. The dialogue is so rapid fire and loaded, you could rewind each line over and over again and still miss something. Boooooze. But talk about tense! Talk about resentment! Talk about booze! Oh my.
Anyway, the funniest thing about the flick is that a week before I saw it, I caught Creepshow on t.v. The one where Ted Danson is buried neck deep in the sand by Leslie Nielsen as the tide comes in because Ted is screwing his wife? Anyway, there's another vignette in Creepshow called "The Crate" which concerns this crate locked away in a college lab basement and this a janitor finds it and calls on this professor he knows to check it out who happens to hate his wife in addition to everyone else who hates his wife. After a little plotting and planning, he decides to send this nag of a hag of a wife down there to check some shit out because she's such a nosy bitchy busybody? And the end of the story? The monster eats her. Yay! After watching Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf I see that they obviously based "The Crate" on it and I just happened to see the shit backwards.
If you haven't seen it or read the play, do so. But pour yourself a drink first, and be prepared to cringe. A lot. And probably say "Aaaaaawwwwwkwaaaaarrrrrrrd!" out loud a few times between sips.
5 comments:
GREAT film. Also check out "Boys in the Band" Both will wear your a** out by the end. You'll feel like you've been rode hard and put up wet.
Thanks for the ride lady! Creepshow scared the shit out of me. Remember the guy who was eaten by cockroaches? EW! The scariest was the lake sludge monster thing that was eating the teenage swimmers. It might have been Creepshow 2. Either way, I'm still traumatized.
Virginia Wolfe is one of the best movies ever. You never see stuff that ballsy anymore. I had to watch it for English class back in college. I was all ready for a snooze fest and my roomates were pissed because I was hogging the VCR. By the end of the movie everyone in my house and half of the neighbors were crammed into our living room glued to that glorious train wreck.
I love when Burton pulls out a shot gun and the umbrella shoots out.
Have you seen Streetcar Named Desire? That's another one.
Fantastic movie and Liz got the accolades for playing a version of herself I'm pretty sure. Awesome all the way.
Quieter but also bristling with brilliance and dialogue and delivery rarely seen since: The Lion In Winter.
'The Crate', Adrienne Barbeau. Cool, but certainly not as good as the cockroaches, that was TRULY disturbing.
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