This week I am in love with Not Bakula and enjoying the endorphins from discovering something new and amazing. I can't even bring myself to be snarky about a movie this week; I'm filled with that much love. Today, I am 85% love. (And 15% dorkosity.)

So this week in Questionable Taste Theatre, I present SOAPDISH. Soapdish is more or less the soundtrack to my life; not one day goes by wherein I can't quote this movie. Having a family of performers, way more theatre experience than is healthy, and a work history that includes working next to soap-opera writers convinced me that this movie, while it may seem to be a comedy, is in fact exactly like life.

Nutshell: There's a soap opera, which is hilariously bad. Everyone involved? Hilariously bad. Dialogue? Best ever.



Join us for some of my favorite quotes from this movie, partly because the plot defies description, so I won't bother, and partly because, no joke, some of the funniest lines I've ever heard.

( I like the word Peppy, and the word Cheap. Peppy and Cheap. )

You would think that Il Fantasma dell'Opera>would be the first time in a person's life when she would have seen a man getting it on with an animal.

Well, guess what!

Nutshell: An adaptation of Honore Balzac's short story, Passion in the Desert centers around a French officer who gets separated from his regiment and ends up forming a bond with a female leopard who helps to keep him alive. And, uh...other things.



Yeah, those things.

( I almost can't believe I saw this years ago, mostly because you'd think it would have inured me to ratsex. But nope! )

Group Costume YES:





Group Costume NO:




And finally:



A CHEMISE. HOW HARD IS IT.

(This lady is incredible; she hand-quilted the underskirt for her 18th-century wedding dress, and I don't know if you can see in this picture, but she's embroidered her pocket hoops, which no one will actually see, so she's just hardcore, is what.)

(photos from this dude.)

For the gentlemen who don't give a crap: someday I'll do a post about something incredibly manly. Like...lumberjacking. I promise.

So coming up on Questionable Taste Theatre is a random spate of period dramas. I'm a costume whore, what can I say?

We begin Ye Olde Monthe with the 14th century mystery The Reckoning. (The link goes to the trailer, which is worth seeing.)

Nutshell: Disgraced priest Paul Bettany falls in with a group of traveling actors, led by the MOST SINEWY PERSON IN THE WORLD, Willem Dafoe. When they hit a town that's less interested in morality plays than in convicting the local deaf woman for the murder of a young boy, the troupe ends up caught up in history's first-ever episode of Law & Order: Swyved Victimmes Unit. Which I spoil, so, you know, spoilers.



( She couldn't have done it! SHE COULDN'T HAVE DONE IT! )

This week I celebrate my fat-kid-cakeness love of Thunderheart. It has Val Kilmer before he got crazy, Graham Greene before he couldn't get work any more, and EIGHT POUNDS OF PWN.


Enjoy this beautifully-composed shot...right before this dude is killed-ass.

( Who the hell are you, man? )

1. Spam title of the year: "A true godspeed to your little soldier of love." Thanks, Louisa May Alcott!

2. Also, a true godspeed to that story I overwrote this morning in a moment of great haste! (As soon as I have some leisure I plan to repent.) An additional thanks to the draft I emailed myself last night, which means I lost 300 words and not the other four thousand.

3. Last night, I watched one of the Food Network challenges where the dessert teams compete in the World Championships. This is my last one; I get sucked in by the underdog stories (Team Mexico had to interrupt their training when they were run out of town by a hurricane) and the crazypants stories (Team France brought a private chef with them so they could train without taking time off to prepare meals or go out to eat).

Then something inevitably comes crashing down and the gasp goes up and the people involved burst into tears, and my blood pressure goes up to 615,000/40. Totally avoidable.

( Who wants to look at some crazy sugar sculptures? )

This week's movie is Strange Days, the near-future sci-fi flick from 1995. When it came out it polarized audiences, meaning that I loved it and everyone else in the world thought it was awful. In my defense, I was still so young that I had to be driven to the theatre. And also, I just thought it was awesome, okay? I'll never forget the first time I saw it.

WITH MY GRANDMOTHER HAHAHAHAHAHAH oh god. Sorry, Grandma. I didn't know.

(She liked Ralph Fiennes, I liked the trailer, we thought it was gonna be a cool little noir whatever. I DIDN'T KNOW.)

Nutshell: On the eve of the year 2000, ex-cop Lenny navigates the underworld selling two-bit memories and pretending he's on the cutting edge instead of washed up. When one of his contacts is brutally murdered and the killer sends the experience straight to Lenny, Lenny realizes he's in over his head, and he and his limo-driving pistol-whipping friend Mace have to, you know, save the world. Whatever.


In the future, the leading cause of death is confetti-strike.

( By clicking this tag, you will be going back in time to when I was fourteen and I thought this movie was the shit. )

Okay, so, not content with making a vid showing how much Fantasma sucks, I found some pictures that reinforce how much The Other Boleyn Girl sucks.



( It's an unforgivable crime. Anne Boleyn will hang for this wardrobe! )

An addendum to yesterday's post about how bad "the Other Boleyn Girl" costumes are.



I AM JUST SAYING.

(Also, the one on the pattern cover is better-made. I mean, COME ON.)

So, who's planning to see The Other Boleyn Girl? Nobody, right? And how did you know (besides the casting) that this movie was going to suck even before the reviews told you? It's because humans are genetically able to sense horrible costuming inaccuracies and shortcuts, and act accordingly. The same way we can tell that a dog is about to attack, we know this movie is terrible. Even Cate Blanchett (who shouldn't be throwing a lot of stones about historical inaccuracy) can't bring herself to look directly at this post.

First of all, we'll hit the number-one indication that a movie has taken historical accuracy out behind the house and shot it:



( Where to even BEGIN? )

Bad: Eh, most of today. Weekend looking better, but today has just been one crash after another. Quit it, Wednesday!

Good: Here's a beautiful gallery of pictures from this year's Carnival in Venice,, featuring amazing costumes, of which this is my favorite. Something about the way the veil filters the light.

I need to go back to Venice, the sooner the better.

Welcome to Part Two of the "Tango Shoes" series of posts, in which I show off the pairs of heels that have taken five years off my life!

Part One, The Agony and the Sparkly, featured the pair that's lowest on the totem pole. I have actually retired them, because bleeding feet are not so fun, and because as soon as I strapped on a pair of NeoTangos I realized how much more comfortable they are.

How much more comfortable?

Well, I can actually get my heels off the ground in these shoes:



( The girliest shoes in the land, under the cut. )

Danced from 10:30pm until 5am, with brief breaks when I couldn't feel my feet any more. Beautiful night of tango. I even did what few women have done before me; leading close-embrace milonga in stilettos. Mine were four inches, my follwer's were three inches. The evening had its ups and downs, but I won't even pretend that leading a set of three milongas (hard) in close embrace (hard) with both women in heels (uh, hard) wasn't satisfying and awesome.

The shoes I was wearing?

These:



More about tango shoes than you ever wanted to know, below the cut.

( I call them The Motherfuckers. Ask me how! )