The Other Three Hour Tour
Costume dramas.
Costume dramas with Eddie Izzard.
Costume dramas with Eddie Izzard dancing the Charleston, adventures at sea, starlets, rich eccentrics, guys who catch cannonballs with their stomachs and… crime!
I had you at costume drama?
The Cat’s Meow
Slenderly? Yes. What’s known for certain is this: during a jaunt on William Randolf Hearst’s 280-foot yacht, the Oneida, one of the guests took ill and, shortly thereafter, died.
The Cat’s Meow
The historico-Hollywood glamor fermenting this narrative brew is a fractured love triangle whose sides are starlet Marianne Davies, her jealous lover, Hearst, and Charlie Chaplin. Charlie–and who would have thought of Eddie Izzard playing Chaplin–is determined to win Davies’s heart. Marianne says she wants to be faithful to her Willy, but even so the two of them sizzle and stalk each other all around the ship, playing “Yes you will,”/”No I won’t!” , and making Hearst crazily jealous. (Of course, it’s hard to find time to be jealous when you’re William Randolf Hearst and everyone else on the ship is madly sucking up to you, but successful entrepreneurship is all about knowing how to prioritize.)
Someone once told me that there is no food that does not go with either garlic or cream. (Yes, I can hear you reaching for the Internets right now so you can let me know about five hundred exceptions to this rule.) The underlying idea behind this statement was that garlic would go with any savory food and cream could cover the rest.
I think perhaps my abiding love for mysteries, which is revealing itself to me more and more clearly as I write these posts, comes from the fact that mystery plots are the garlic cream sauce of storytelling devices. You can add a mystery to an adventure and it makes it more interesting. You can add mystery to a romance and thereby delay the onset of smoochies, thus amping up the Unresolved Sexual Tension. Puzzles, conundrums and unsolved crimes slot perfectly into literary novels, horror stories, and SF.
And, like garlic, when they’re just straight “whodunnit”–when the only point is who killed the victim and why–they’re not nearly as interesting and rewatchable as when they’re stirred in and amplifying a cornucopia of other delights.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying The Cat’s Meow
You have a limited amount of time, so why spend it reading about things that suck or are only kind of okay? Favorite thing EVER is not a review site. We're unrepentant fans, and this is the stuff we love. Hope you like gushing, because we're about to embarrass ourselves.
Is a very fun movie; I got to see a premiere of it w/Bogdonavich and some of the actors (not Eddie, sadly) there for Q&A.
I do like costume dramas – woo roaring 20s! Which reminds me, I should totally do Some Like It Hot for ftE…
You should, you should, you should!
Just saw it this year and really enjoyed it! Oh Eddie Izzard, you own my heart. <3
Lurve your garlic cream sauce metaphor!
Thank you, Kelly–I hoped you would!
I will be employing it at my earliest convenience. Mm, garlic cream sauce…