Some couples love board games. Some couples love bungee jumping. Some couples love things I can’t blog about because my grandmother reads this sometimes. My husband and I have, as our guilty marital pleasure, made-for-TV bio-pics, the more obscure the subject, the more wooden the acting, the more ridiculous the wigs, the better.
We love to linger in the opening moments of, say, "American Prince: The John F. Kennedy Jr. Story," and predict the cheesy lines that will be uttered. We especially love it when the lines are even cheesier than we could have imagined (Actress portraying Daryl Hannah, clutching bruised face: “John? It’s…it’s Jackson.” Actor playing JFKJr.: “Baby, I’ll be right there.”) I will always have a special place in my heart for Cybill Shepherd as Martha Stewart, because "Martha Inc." premiered the week Lucy was born and seemed to air every night thereafter, which gave me a lot of time to appreciate the deliciously over-the-top Cybill-as-Martha mid-kitchen meltdowns.
So you can imagine our delight when, in flipping through our options the other night, we stumbled across “The Linda McCartney Story.” Immediately we set the TiVo to record and came up with our predictions. (Me: “But Linda! The lads and I love meat!” Adam: “But Paul! What if someone thinks to isolate my back-up vocal track and notices that I can’t actually sing?”)
And TLMS did not disappoint. It was as deliciously cheesy as one of those nut-encrusted holiday Yule treat cheese log things. It was, in a word, fabulous.
There actually was a reference to vegetarianism (Linda, upon receiving her breast-cancer diagnosis: “But I told people that eating veggie would keep them healthy!”) and a discussion of Linda’s crappy singing. The wigs and the eighties clothing were painfully, exquisitely awful, as was the actress who played Yoko Ono, and whose job for the entire picture was to twine her body around John Lennon’s back and glare at everyone else in the room (well done, Linda Ko!)
Plus, as an added Xmas bonus, there was a scene in which Paul snarls at Linda, “Screw Mick Jagger,” and Linda snaps, “I already have!” You can’t buy dialogue like that. And, as if that wasn’t enough, the film concluded with a prolonged, dramatic death-bed scene followed by Linda’s memorial service, during which the director kept cutting meaningfully to a white peacock. Was Linda the peacock? Was the peacock Linda? Was the entire movie a parable about reincarnation? Or peacocks? We have no idea. We were too busy imitating Linda’s husky deathbed rasp and saying things like “Beware of one-legged women!” and “Pre-nup! Preeeeeeeeee-nup!” to care.
And Chrissy Hynde is in the movie! Bonus!
I don’t know if it’s going to be on the air any time soon, but if it is, let me heartily recommend “The Linda McCartney Story.”
And let me also recommend elfyourself.com, where you can digitally cut ‘n paste your face onto a dancing elf’s body. I did it with Al Sharpton because, given the tools and the free time, who wouldn’t want to see a dancing elf Al Sharpton?
Happy holidays to everyone, and may the New Year bring you the thing you love the most (Is it too early to start hoping for a made-for-TV movie about Donald Trump?)
Update to clarify: My husband has asked me to state for the record that we were not making fun of the tragedy of Linda McCartney dying of breast cancer. We were making fun of the tragically bad acting of the woman portraying Linda McCartney dying of breast cancer.