Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, August 14, 1993 TAG: 9309240349
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DIANE WERTS NEWSDAY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Instead, they sneer, they snarl, they simper, they snap!
``Face it, Mama, I was the slut of all time!''
Oh, yes: They also slap. That's Mama's response to Elizabeth Taylor's outburst in ``Butterfield 8,'' tonight at 8 on TNT, kicking off the film series you've been waiting for:
Bad Movies We Love.
Not bad B movies, not the Ed Wood cheapies or the Hercules dub-jobs or the drive-in bimbo flicks. We're talking Hollywood howlers - big-budget, big-name, big-aspiration melodramas, so gleefully lurid and hopelessly overwrought that you can't stop asking yourself: Whatever were they thinking of?
Well, what we're thinking of is line-parroting, finger-pointing, movie-trashing fun, and TNT provides it all tonight by way of movie mavens Ed Margulies and Steven Rebello. They write the Bad Movies We Love column for Movieline magazine (of which Margulies is executive editor), and they've compiled a new book by the same name ($12 from Plume), and now they host monthly TNT screening marathons from their BMWL ``penthouse.''
This weekend's visit offers not only Liz-as-tramp in ``Butterfield 8,'' but also Elke Sommer's beehive parade in ``The Oscar,'' Lana Turner's million-dollar wardrobe (and 2-cent performance) in ``Love Has Many Faces'' and Kim Novak's diabolically deficient double-turn in ``The Legend of Lylah Clare.''
Get the common theme? Women - Hollywood once called most of these movies ``women's pictures.'' Margulies, calling in from his current book-promotion tour, notes that ``women's movies then and now are always overly melodramatic soap operas'' that not only beg to be loved but also beg to have their oh-so-serious approach punctured. Notorious duds like ``Ishtar,'' he notes, are ``just bad movies, period. A comedy that's not funny can't be unintentionally funny. Overwrought drama when it's not good is what causes laughter.''
Which means, says Margulies, that ``we're living in the golden age of bad movies right now. I think 1959-1963 was the last really great era. But now Julia Roberts is churning them out as fast as she can, and Sharon Stone, and Mickey Rourke, and the Burton and Taylor of our era, Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith. Between the two of them, they're able to make movies like `Shining Through' and `Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man' and `A Stranger Among Us' and `Guilty as Sin' - this is no ordinary couple.''
It's nice to see that Margulies and Rebello aren't mired in the past. Their ``Bad Movies We Love'' book skewers such latter-day turkeys as ``Fatal Attraction,'' ``Cocktail'' and ``Sleeping With the Enemy,'' along with time-tested trash like ``Duel in the Sun,'' ``Flamingo Road'' and ``Kitten With a Whip.''
The goal on the TNT series is to showcase films that aren't out on video. In the Sept. 18 salute to bad-girl starlets of the early '60s, you can finally record your own personal copy of ``Claudelle Inglish,'' in which not only does Diane McBain's character ``sin and they let you thrill to how much fun that is, but Claudelle dies for her sins.'' October will feature ``the inevitable tribute to that bad movie goddess, Joan Crawford,'' with not-on-video selections like ``Queen Bee'' and ``The Story of Esther Costello.''
Now when you're in the mood to watch the most arch actor-impersonators, you know where to turn. Don't even consider going to sleep - you'll be transfixed all night.
And thanks to Liz in ``Butterfield 8,'' you'll have the perfect retort when it's all over.
``Sunday morning, and there's scotch on your breath!''
``Well, it's good scotch.''
Channel surfing: more movies, more movies ...
Jean Harlow gets the TNT retrospective treatment Sunday night, when Sharon Stone hosts an hour profile of this '30s ``bad girl who breaks all the rules.'' For somebody who died at 26, Harlow had an action-jammed career, from being under contract to Howard Hughes in her platinum blond phase when her acting was ``a national joke,'' to her eventual MGM stardom when she fully tapped her ``unique gift to make sex funny.'' TNT surrounds the hour's various airings (Sunday, Aug. 19, 22 and 25) with six Harlow films.
AMC has the week's splashiest cinema salute: ``Hollywood on Hollywood'' Monday night. Ron Howard hosts this Richard Schickel analysis of filmdom's view of its own denizens - from the ``passionate innocents'' of '30s fantasies like ``A Star Is Born'' to the ``passionate high-rollers'' of '90s films like ``The Player.'' Schickel includes dozens of clips, from movie-struck cartoons like ``Hollywood Daffy'' and little-known flicks like ``Inside Daisy Clover,'' along with the expected entries (``Singin' in the Rain,'' ``Sunset Boulevard,'' ``Sullivan's Travels'').
by CNB