Candles out
May 29, 2013, 12:00 PM | Updated: 3:12 pm
The reviews are in and according to the film critics I’ve read so far, they loved Michael Douglas as Liberace in the HBO movie Behind the Candelabra.
It premiered on a holiday Sunday night at 9:00 p.m. after summer break started, which meant a lot of kids were watching television. And since this depressing, graphic drama about a few gay lives in show business had more behinds than candelabras, I would hardly be able to consider it family entertainment.
But that’s difficult to find on television anymore whatever the time of day is. My reason for even talking about the production here is not to protect kids. That’s for mom and dad to do. It’s just that it was such a cheap, cheesy, exploitation movie at the expense of a much-admired entertainer who has been dead for 16 years. Director Steven Soderberg managed in just two hours of television to paint a grotesque portrait of not a pre-Lady Gaga flamboyant queen, but an aging, insatiable, manipulator of young men.
To me, it was insulting to Liberace, gays, even Rob Lowe, who comes off looking like Lily Tomlin after a bad burrito. And after all this trash aired, HBO received its highest ratings for an original movie in nine years. Oh well.
I’m Pat McMahon.
