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Those of you preparing to eat a pile of mashed potatoes the size of a baby tomorrow (and that should be all of you) might want to pace yourselves just a bit. You see, this Sunday, Lifetime is serving up a honkin' hunk of cheese that you'll want to save some room for. Because this, folks, is Liz & Dick, the much-publicized Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton biopic (haha, that's a mighty big word for this movie — then again, so is "movie") starring Lindsay Lohan. (And the guy who hosts Australian The Amazing Race, whatever.) The film, in fact, goes beyond cheese and into an almost dadaistic realm of cheap and tacky absurdity that, frankly, defies explanation. Though, come, let me at least try.
Liz & Dick begins with Taylor and Burton meeting on the set of Cleopatra and ends with Burton's death in 1984. So we're talking a 20-plus-year span here, one that the production makes no real efforts to address beyond some uninspired costume changes and maybe a few makeup lines on Lohan's face and some gray dust in actor Grant Bowler's hair. Beyond that things stay mostly the same, as we are dragged through one Life Moment after the next. Liz and Dick initially can't stand each other, of course. She's a preening diva, he a drunken rake, and they bicker and trade barbs and all that, and I suppose we're supposed to think it's a wonderful bit of a sparkling foreplay. But it's not. It's dead and stilted, and slightly uncomfortable considering Lohan and Bowler's nearly twenty-year age difference. (In real life, Burton was only seven years Taylor's senior.) The two have exactly zero chemistry, and Bowler seems to have been cast simply because he bears a passing resemblance to the great British thespian and could be secured on the cheap.