"Does it looks like I'm in a fucking coma?": How LiLo inspires me to be true to myself
Last night I was lucky enough to catch a screening of a film that was out earlier this summer, a film that will be regarded as a classic of the medium. Not a classic in the way of Renoir or Bergman or even Spielberg; no, I’m talking about the Showgirls, badly computer-generated animal print cover-up, vh1 marathon, midnight showing kind of classic that is Lindsay Lohan’s, errrr, Chris Sivertson’s I Know Who Killed Me.
I was treated to one of the most entertaining blow by blows of the absurd plot after two friends, Jan and Natalie, braved it opening night in July. If memory serves me right, LiLo had just been busted with the “not my pants, therefore not my coke” incident and the execs behind the film decided to lay low in terms of promotion (as if they were going to promote it tons anyway, I think they knew this was a tosser). From what my friends said, nothing made sense, plots points were seemingly, or possibly literally, pulled from Lohan’s ass, and apparently there was not only gratuitous violence but I was promised excessive stripper scenes for Lohan complete with random limbs and digits falling off, possibly even onstage, mid-show. Oh me, I had to see this.
Luckily (again, I use this word because I mean it, my luck has never been this good), my good friend Kristen alerted the Tacos to a weekend of not one, but two midnight showings at the lovely Brattle Theater. Sadly, one Taco, who would have choked on her own laughter, missed out, but three of us boldly made the sojourn to Harvard Square, pumping ourselves full of our drink of choice (PBR for Kristen, pretty drinks for Em, and Hendrick’s for me), courtesy of one great guy we know and another we don’t, but sure would like to, then marched over with a very nice buzz and high hopes of a good crowd.
We weren’t disappointed. Choosing the balcony, we were mostly alone in our own viewing world, save one girl in the back who was joined by a male companion halfway through (I’m guessing Brattle workers, finishing their duties early to catch as much LiLo wonder as possible?!) and responded positively to our ridiculous commentary throughout. But the crowd below was a crowd for us; the title credits began and we saw our star’s name fade in and her face creep out from behind a lush, red curtain, ready for stripping action. I was beside myself, truly, for my friends didn’t tell me that we get to begin with such titillating material, I thought this came later on and that I had more time to prepare myself. But I didn’t, so I gulped, sat up straight, and drank in the oh-so amateur moves.
Being the blog-whore that I am, I recall Lohan commenting on how much dancers having learned to “dance” herself. We’re not talking respect in the “their life is so hard and degrading and I would never wish that upon anyone” kind of Hollywood fake sympathy; no, no, no, we’re talking, “OMG, pole-dancing’s hard! I had bruises everywhere! It is not easy!” Well, sorry to say, my favorite train wreck, your dancing was “eh” at best. You kind of just slid your back down the poll and remained in a squat position, arching your hoo-hah out to the crowd. I definitely think those little Kardashian sisters (yes, the tweens) had a better grip on the art of the pole, but I guess when you have one installed in your house and several older sisters and a mom who encourage and bestow their secrets upon you, you’re destined for pole-dancing greatness.I have to say that Jan and Natalie, the two lovely ladies who went opening night, provided me with the best synopsis ever, enabling me to know exactly what was coming up so I would know, and could relay, why we should continue to be excited about this film. And when I couldn’t remember, I was more than pleasantly surprised to hear a juicy line of dialogue that I’ve attached to a memory of my friends’ faithful rendering; “Did Aubrey fuck you like that?” or “You just bought one [baby] off the crack-whore down the hall who had one to spare.” and of course the Ask.com query “bleeding wounds unexplained.”
Something I wasn’t warned about, though, was that it is really, actually creepy at parts, esp when Lohan ventures into a shed that turns into a cellar with a hundred or so prosthetic limbs hanging from the ceiling, all the while being pursued by a Blue Man with a baseball cap (Tobias Fünke’s evil brother?! Kristen thinks so) wielding ice-like glass shards designed by way of Māori tribal carvings. Strangely enough, the gore was done well, or at least well enough to make Kristen and me squirm while Emily slept through the madness (How she did that, I do not know, we were literally shrieking out of disgust, horror, and lack of normal movie-going inhibitions (read: manners)). I feel like I could write pages more about the stigmatic twins video, the hilarity of Lohan’s amputated limbs and battery operated prosthetics, and the red herring wannabe gardener that really has no place in the film whatsoever. But sometimes words cannot do justice to genius.The technical elements of the film were, well, just crazy. Kristen thought the DP was obviously channeling Kieslowski, the Three Colors Trilogy, while I kept throwing out “Godard!” when we’d get a random filter change or a switch to negative. Feeling that there were too many connections to begin referencing, Emily deemed it “Art House Mad Libs,” a description we all found fitting. But what we all found most fabulous about the film was the script; especially out of LiLo’s mouth, we couldn’t remember the last time we had heard such profundity. Though upon further reflection, I believe I can pinpoint my last time as being LC’s opener on the first season of Laguna Beach: “I’ve always been the nice girl. But this year, I realized sometimes you just have to go after what you want.”
Funny, that seems to fit nicely with the theme of I Know Who Killed Me. Jan and Natalie initially concluded that Lohan chose this piece to kill off Lindsay as Aubrey from the public mindset and usher in Lindsay as Dakota, the chain-smoking, sex-loving “adult” who prefers the word “fuck” to just about any other in the English language. But I don’t know if it’s that simple. Perhaps she just saw the script as her moment to rise above Hollywood superficialty and get down to the nitty-gritty of real life struggles, like little girls that turn to stripping when their moms turn to crack, communities that come together when the innocent go missing, and all the limbs that unexplainably fall off when you’re so cosmically linked to the twin you don’t know you have that you end up really feeling their pain.
I think LiLo sums it up best when she says, “Sometimes you get cut, that’s life.”
Labels: bad movies, Brattle Theater, Lindsay Lohan, prosthetics, Tacos
posted by Alison @ 3:03 PM
0 Comments
