Tossing cookies on the stars, part one

We’ve seen lists and ‘memes’ naming favorite movies, actors and actresses, as well as the worst of all time and those guilty pleasures that keep us comfy on sleepless nights. But has anyone bothered with movie stars we hate? As I’m presently snowed in and apparently indifferent to other options, I’ve begun looking at the women and men who turn me off. Below is the first part of this reckless endeavor, four who make me want to blow chunks. (We should total ten personalities by the time we’re finished.) If there’s an audience for this nonsense, let me know in the comments and it may inspire me to continue…

Lucille Ball
My concept of Hell could take place in a heavenly environment — a lush island paradise, a beautiful forest, a night with Halle Berry — while my head splits from a repetitious cacophony, a tape loop of Desi Arnaz’s booming, insincere chortle (“ha! Ha! HA!”) alternating with the piercing ‘whaa-whaa’ cry of Lucille Ball… sonic saltpeter to render me impotent before my hot and eager Halle. Yes, I’m well aware that everybody loves Lucy, and that Orson Welles was chief among her early supporters. She was the first performer I ever knew by name, her face unavoidable on TV during my formative years when I was spending way too much time before The Tube. And even then I picked up on the coarseness and phoniness… along with a strain of neurosis. Karl Freund’s camera may conceal some of it in I Love Lucy, but it’s hard to miss in the less-loved Here’s Lucy and The Lucy Show, where jittery unease threatens to transform Lucille McGillicutty into Judy Garland with neon orange hair and a raspy, two-pack-a-day voice. (In her later years, she could’ve been dubbing lines for Eugene Pallette.) Then there’s the disturbing lack of sexuality: to me, Lucy has always been a neutered automaton. That may partly explain her failure to hit as a movie star — one downside of the woman’s career her fans are loath to acknowledge. (Going from film to TV in the 50s and early 60s was tantamount to running off with the circus.) Of course, when she could be herself on talk shows or a Dean Martin Roast, her elegance and intellect shone through. But by that point, for me at least, it was far too little much too late.

Nicholas Cage
There was once great promise, and a welcome balance of the sublime — Rumble Fish (1983), Birdy (1984) — with the ridiculous — Vampire’s Kiss (1988), Guarding Tess (1994) — plus a ‘feel-good’ box office champ — Moonstruck (1987) — and respectable cult movies — Raising Arizona (1987), Wild at Heart (1990). Yes, there’s much to admire about Nicholas Cage, yet all of it seems to evaporate during any given moment of, say, City of Angels (1998) or Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (2001) or Lord of War (2005): is the actor unrehearsed and distracted, is he reading from cue cards? My initial disgust came a few minutes into Leaving Las Vegas (1995) — as an alcoholic, I can tell you that that film is absolute bullshit from beginning to end. However, his precious, moping, horse-faced drunk won accolades and an Oscar, along with my unresolved ire. Since then, the hangdog puss has been perfectly suited to a train wreck of an oeuvre: The Rock (1996), Con Air, the laborious, inept Face/Off (1997), De Palma’s risible Snake Eyes (1998), Scorsese’s misguided Bringing Out the Dead (1999). Recently he’s been looking rather old and haggard, especially when standing alongside Jessica Biel in Next (2007). In Joel Schumacher’s 8MM (1999), Cage never questions why his supposedly hardened detective would wince nearly to tears after watching just a handful of frames from a snuff movie. Perhaps the actor interpreted the situation as symbolic of his own career.

Rosie O’Donnell
Imagine a Hammer film, Peter Cushing tinkering in an Eastmancolor lab, distorting chromosomes to create a race of hermaphroditic Amazons. Off the operating table slinks a buxom biglandular goddess — Victoria Vetri perhaps, or Ingrid Pitt — but downstairs in the dungeon lurks an army of surgical failures, raucous broads with anchor tattoos, beer guts and facial hair, lorded over by… Rosie O’Donnell? Years ago, I nicknamed her ‘Sluggo,’ befitting the bullying arbiter who challenges our conventional definitions of femininity. She was spot on as the wise Palooka in Ted Demme’s lovely Beautiful Girls (1996). Otherwise, the career has been a patchwork of schlock movies and caustic talk shows. In The Flintstones (1994), she transformed the slender and demure cartoon Betty into a beefy, cackling shrew. On TV, she’s been punchy and self-serving, flaunting an obscure code of ethics while hawking the trailer park caviar of Twinkies and Ding Dongs. Overweight and visibly unhealthy (there’s a lot of rage under that flab), she once offered connoisseur evaluations of junk food on her morning show, pushing the “it’s OK to be fat” philosophy on the gullible, obese minions. As it stands, she may be responsible for promoting more gluttony, diabetes and clogged arteries than any other celebrity.

Adam Sandler
The popularity of Adam Sandler, both as comedian and actor, doesn’t baffle me. He’s tailored for the masses, specifically young suburban males wont to ‘high five’ and wear baseball caps backwards. I won’t pretend to know this culture firsthand, for it is foreign, uncouth and intimidating. On their weekends they make box office successes of things like Billy Madison (1995) — easily one of the worst films of all time — and Happy Gilmore (1996), where, with the right kind of eyes, you begin to see the genius of Jerry Lewis. Sandler reminds us of Jerry in jerk mode, but not the technically proficient Jerry — the genius Jerry — of The Bellboy (1960) and The Errand Boy (1961), but rather the lost, dithering Jerry of The Big Mouth (1967) and Don’t Raise the Bridge, Lower the River (1967). Sandler’s stabs at pathos are as trying as Jerry’s: Click (2006), where Adam The Everyman reevaluates his humanity, is interminable. He often casts himself with beautiful young women, in the process divulging an oversized ego. If he thinks he’s handsome and desirable, that could be the funniest joke of all, the delusional toad believing he’s a prince. Beady-eyed, slack-jawed and slug-like, his characters tend to shift from idiocy to normalcy, passivity to frenzy without explanation, insinuating a cunning, sinister bipolar neanderthal, one whose life has evolved into a perpetual performance. Sandler may lack the intellect to examine this existential quagmire properly — we’d need an update of Persona with Adam and Jerry as patient and nurse… or vice versa…

More to come, if you want it…