Everybody raise a glass! Raise it up the master’s ass!

Hello, Ducks!

Starzina Starfish-Browne here with your Eric’s! Daily! Horoscope! for  Thursday, February 07, 2013.  We have just this moment learned that the last of the people who worked at Our old company prior to its acquisition by the Evil Acquiring Company (EAC) and who subsequently caused Us to lose Our position in the new regime has now been “made redundant”, as They say.  How do you spell “schadenfreude” and, more to the point, can you put it under “Special Skills” on a résumé ?

Meanwhile, from The Happy News That Actually Affects Us Department, We learned yesterday that the murder mystery We wrote for a local dinner theater has been accepted, subject to very minor revisions, and that a contract (and, subsequently, a blessed, blessed check) are imminent.

Which brings Us to the subject which is going to comprise the bulk of today’s e-pissode:

Our review of Les Miserables.

Could it have been any MORE miserable?  We don’t think so.  First of all, lettuce just say, whoever allegedly “directed” this fillum should be horsewhipped, then drawn and quartered, and all the pieces shot.  Since when is “Extreme Closeup” the answer to everything?  Especially when, with a few notable exceptions, none of the stars are wearing any makeup.  Not that they couldn’t have found a few spare hands to apply some, since, if you skip ahead to the credits, you will note that the entire populations of both Hollywood and France worked on this picture.  Of course, with the constant Extreme Closeups of people simultaneously singing and crying, half of those workers were clearly on permanent Booger Check Patrol.

Now, We are not going to attempt to tell you the entire story (which, as near as We can tell, was longer than the French Revolution), but We shall sketch in the salient points.  It concerns Hugh Jackman, who can sing, and Russell Crowe, who hits the same “note” over and over again and sounds as though someone were (subjunctively) kicking him in the balls.  Russell is the sheriff or some such of Paris (France, not Texas, which you can tell because everybody has British accents and calls each other “Monsieur”) and is in pursuit of Hugh, who is some sort of criminal. Russell’s pursuit is hampered by the fact that, although he looks exactly the same throughout all nine hours of the movie (except for a succession of varying Smart Gay Hats), he can only recognize Hugh when Hugh shoulders some heavy object a la Christ carrying His cross.  Hugh adds to this difficulty in recognition by disguising himself more and more as Marty Feldman throughout the course of the fillum.

Once the Hugh-Russell rivalry is thoroughly established, about thirteen hours into the fillum, Anne Hathaway turns up.  Of course, she only looks like Anne Hathaway for a few seconds before she starts selling off her hair, and her teeth, and her coochie.  She then treats Us to Our first Up-The-Nostril Extreme Closeup of the fillum as she sings the soul-stirring ballad, “Where Is My Oscar™ For Best Supporting Anorexic?”  Then she dies, because (A.) there were really no good roles for women in the French Revolution and (2.) if you play a whore AND you die, you are practically guaranteed an Oscar™.  Plus, as she said in a subsequent interview, “Judi Dench won an Oscar™ for eight minutes in Shakespeare in Love.  I am in this fillum for eight minutes that seem like an eternity; engrave my little gold statue NOW, bitches.”

It should be noted that, in a bizarre coincidence, once they cut all of her hair off, Anne Hathaway looks uncannily LIKE an Oscar™.  Except when she sings; then, she looks like the Reach™ toothbrush guy with the flip-top head.  (Did We mention that she only sold her BACK teeth?)

Once Anne is dead, about eighteen hours into the fillum, the director decides that, in order to wake up the audience, he will resort to the tried-and-true device of a fillum with a fillum.  So, when Hugh goes off to find Anne’s now-orphaned daughter, Crumpet, We suddenly find Ourselves in BizarroWorld, with innkeeper Helena Bonham Carter, who has apparently never bathed or changed her clothes since she made Sweeney Todd, and her husband, Jerry Lewis, as the guardians of the child.  They sing “The Worst Pies In London”, even though it’s Paris, while putting a prosthetic leg through a meat grinder.  Once they finish singing, about nineteen hours later, We discover that Jerry Lewis inexplicably has a quasi-French accent, while everybody else at the inn, and, indeed, in the entire fillum, has a British accent.  Except for Helena Bonham Carter who, as usual, never speaks above a mumble, so We never find out what kind of accent she has.  Apparently, Jerry Lewis is from a different part of France.

Helena and Jerry have a daughter who is Chinese.  Or a Mongoloid idiot…We may have dozed off somewhere in here; the fillum had been going on for three days at this point.  At any rate, their little China girl becomes important (much) later on, when little Crumpet grows up to be a pretty blond girl who can’t sing, and little China girl grows up to be Xena, Warrior Princess.

Some time the following week, a few strapping young tenors turn up in the fillum as a small perk for those of Us who are not into daddies, Hugh being in full-on Marty Feldman mode by now, and Russell having been kicked in the balls more times than We can count.  The main tenor, plot-point-wise, is a freckle-faced youth whom We imagine would be quite attractive under other circumstances, but (A.) many of the strapping extra tenors around him are more attractive and (2.) those freckles are very distracting.  Seriously, you couldn’t slap a little CoverGirl™ on that?

A triangle quickly (“quickly” being, in this fillum, a relative thing) develops between Freckles, Crumpet, and Xena Warrior Princess, and just as quickly is resolved when everybody realizes that Xena is a lesbian.  Also, she dies, as do all of the strapping extra tenors.  (Hey, if she’d only sold her coochie, she could have competed with Anne Hathaway for that Oscar™.)

Nine and a half weeks (and an interminable crawl through the sewers of Paris) later, Freckles and Crumpet are married, Russell kills himself when a production assistant inadvertently shows him the dailies, and Hugh decides to die when he realizes that his metamorphosis into Marty Feldman is complete.   All of the dead people are reunited in the afterlife, except Russell, who may finally have learned to kick himself in the balls.

FIN

Speaking of the French Revolution, We shall be playing The VD Match Game on Friday and Saturday, February 15 and 16, at 7:30 at L’Etage.  You can obtain tickets here http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/331562 and find more info here
http://www.facebook.com/events/279672565493605/  Our Sistah Ovella, for those of you who know her, will be playing also.

Here is a little Aquarius fillum, for Our birthday Aquarians:

And here are the HorrorScopes:

Despite having given up thirteen months of Our life to watch that miserable fillum, somehow it is all made better by the fact that it is Ashton Kutcher’s birthday.  Our horoscope, meanwhile, is below.  We are too faint with hunger to answer it as usual; We must go steal a loaf of bread.  Please feel free to answer it in Our stead.  (Hey, that rhymed!)

You need to make an extra effort today — though that may come naturally. Your drive for success is fully activated, and you should find that your energy is pushing in the right direction.  Just because you have extremely positive feelings about someone doesn’t mean that everyone else does, so make no assumptions today. If no one is as excited about them as you are right now, don’t worry about it. You need to tone down your excited feelings anyway — and let other people see for themselves what’s so great about this person. Only then can they understand why you are feeling the way you do, and only then can they come over to your way of thinking. A stint of long, hard labor means that your social life falls by the wayside for a brief amount of time. It’s worth it. After all, you can’t live on love alone. Other projects and career prospects take precedence now.

 (Your Your-O-Scopes:

http://www.humorscope.com)

(Meanwhile, why We didn’t think of this sooner, We’ve got no idea, but better laid than necking, as they say (and how right they are!).  For real live actual ass(tromlaogical) ho(roscopular) advice, please visit Our good friend AstroGeek here:  http://agskylab.blogspot.com/.  Our Own epistular musings are of use to you only insofar as making you feel better by comparison, but he will give you actual pertinent advice for your very own lives, based on upon the positions and transitations of all manner of planets, planetoids, asteroids, Altoids™, hemorrhoids, and other heavenly flotsam, jetsam, and Jetsons.  Plus, he knows all about Uranus!)

*****************************************************************************

Starzina Starfish-Browne was born in the wagon of a traveling show…well, okay, not really. She was actually born in Lowake, Texas, the daughter of a beautician and either a garage mechanic or the town mailman. At sixteen, she escaped her humble beginnings by running off with Doctor Browne’s Traveling Medicine Show and, more to the point, Doctor Browne. Following the dissolution of this unfortunate entanglement (Doctor Browne was a Virgo and Starzina is, of course, an Aries), which produced a daughter, Starzina entered a contest in Soap Opera Digest and won a scholarship to Oxford (yes, in ENGLAND), where she earned her doctorate in the newly-created dual major of Astrology and Human Sexuality. There is absolutely NO TRUTH to the rumor that Starzina’s second daughter has Royal blood, despite tabloid photographs allegedly depicting her cavorting on the Italian Riviera with Princes William and Harry, clad only in Prussian helmets and armbands of questionable taste. Starzina currently resides with her daughters in Philadelphia, the City That Loves You (On Your) Back, where she enjoys Double Coupon Day at the local SuperCruise and “encouraging” the coxswain of the Penn rowing team.