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.
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:
(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.
