Anyone still waiting to pile on troubled
actress Lindsay Lohan got their chance during and after Sunday’s premier of “Liz & Dick,” the Lifetime television mini-series about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, starring the Mean Girl herself and Grant Bowler.
The savagery of professional critics was predictable and uniform. And though it’s usually difficult to gauge a thumbs-up-to-down ratio on most topics across the social network, in the case of “Liz & Dick” mob lynching is an understatement.
The professional critics:
"‘Liz & Dick’ was a peculiar, drab, damp little TV-movie indeed, wasn’t it?” asks Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly. “The ‘story’ — that is, the life that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton shared, chronicled here primarily during the 1960s, after meeting during the making of Cleopatra (1963) — was so much richer in reality than it was in this dinky, tin-eared production. Instead, the primary interest in watching ‘Liz & Dick’ was to behold Lindsay Lohan trying, with varying, wobbly degrees of effort, to make her own career comeback. When it came to Lohan ‘doing’ Liz: She done her wrong."
"There are moments in ‘Liz & Dick’ when Lindsay Lohan looks a lot like Elizabeth Taylor,” says Alessandra Stanley in The New York Times. “There are others in which she looks like Elizabeth Taylor doing a ‘Saturday Night Live’ impersonation of Lindsay Lohan."
“‘Liz & Dick’ is a wildly graceless biopic," says Los Angeles Times television critic Mary McNamara.
More bad news:
“It should come as no great surprise that Lifetime's 'Liz & Dick' movie starring Lindsay Lohan is spectacularly bad,” chimes in MTV.com. “After all, it's Lohan, more memorable in the tabloids than she ever was as an actress. No, the mystery here is whether Lifetime actually believed it had a major 'television event,' as it says."
"‘Liz & Dick’ isn't even good as junk food goes . . . It's redundant and boring in a way no star could save," the Chicago Tribune added.
"Don't miss ‘Liz & Dick’ . . . if only because it is spectacularly bad and a classic of unintentional hilarity . . . Lohan is woeful as Taylor from start to finish," Hollywood Reporter said.
"It’s so terrible, you’ll need to ice your face when it’s over to ease the pain of wincing for two hours," San Francisco Chronicle piled on.
Short takes:
"cheap-looking [and] exploitative" – Huffington Post
"redundant and boring in a way no star could save" – Reuters
"you'll find more exciting chemistry in a high-school lab" – TV Guide
On Twitter:
"Liz & Dick" seemed like the only topic on Twitter on Sunday night, and the Huffington Post does a good job of encapsulating the snark – in 140 characters or less – in a pick of 100 scathing tweets from celebrities and others about what was intended to be Lohan's comeback role.
Regular “Chelsea Lately” panelist Heather McDonald: “Just finished watching #lizanddick I couldn't take my eyes off of it. I want to wear pastels & throw vodka bottles against the wall.”
Columnist Jo Piazza: “Lindsay Lohan is superb in this role when she doesn’t open her mouth.”
“Family Biz” actress Kate Corbett: “It's like watching the kid from ‘The Parent Trap’ in a school play being stalked by a gladiator with a drinking problem.”
Model Jessica Stam: “LizandDick was just luscious & if you didn't see it you'll miss all of the SNL references this weekend.”
Actor Aaron Hammond: “Don't know what's more bruised right now. My soul or Lindsay's legs.”
Stand-up comedian Morgan Murphy: “I never thought I'd say this but . . . I feel bad for Dina.”
Gawker blogger Rich Juzwiak: “I literally know no more about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton after this movie and I knew virtually nothing about them together before.”
And then this one:
Lindsay Lohan: “Hey guys! #LizandDick is on @LifetimeTV! Got any questions for me? Please send them my way.”
To which two tweeters said:
“Are you in jail?”
“When did you realize that your life was spinning out of control?”
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