Much was made today about Liza Minelli’s movie “Liza with a Z” playing at the Toronto Film Festival.
Granting that Minnelli’s heyday was about 30 years ago, I don’t get it. I’ve seen the woman perform in various films. She can’t act, that I can see; she always acts pretty much like Liza Minnelli. Her singing sounds to me like a parody; I’ll grant she’s always on tune and such, but she’s always either sounding like, or just short of sounding like, a parody of a Broadway star. On top of that she’s spectacularly ugly and always has been but I’d discount that if only I thought she could act or sing.
Is she popular just because she’s Judy Garland’s daughter? Or were standards of acting and singing skill different in the 60s and 70s (I was born in 1971.)
She had a brief window of entertainment value in the 60’s and 70’s. Beyond that she’s (like her mother) a chronic, dissipated alcoholic, and has survived more on being a “personality” than anything else since then. Her die-hard gay fans (again like her mother) have been her mainstay over the years.
Kinda like when she made her debut on Jack Parr’s old nighttime show. They introduced her as some foreign born singer, who was gonna’ be big. The name they gave her was culled from the syllables in her mother’s name, rearranged somewhat. After she sang, and wowed the audience, Parr revealed her true identity. Agree with the above, her 15 minutes was over 30 or so years ago.
Minnelli was a genuine Broadway star, one of the old-school Broadway belters like Ethel Merman or her mother. She also made a big splash when she went into movies; her character in The Sterile Cuckoo was scintillating (though the movie wasn’t) and she was terrrific in Cabaret. Later films were spotty, and she had health and drug problems, but in her prime she was a star in every sense.
Gee, I guess this proves the old saying that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I have always thought Liza was stunning. Not beautiful in the boring, beauty-queen way, but the kind of beauty that Edgar Allan Poe described, which has “strangeness in the proportion.” I wish I looked like Liza, at any age.
As a hetero male, let me just say that when Cabaret came out, and I was 17-ish, my reaction to the Mein Herr outfit (the one under the “she’s” link in Otto’s post above) was:
Liza Minelli may not do anything for you now, but that’s because she’s getting up there in years. She was quite attractive in her heyday, and was a very attractive middle-aged woman.
