The Omens

Robin Wood compared The Omen (Richard Donner, 1976) unfavorably to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, stating that the latter "achieves the force of authentic art" (84). Of this I have no doubt. Chainsaw is an infinitely more effective horror film, genuinely terrifying if not scarring. The Omen is somehow both glossy and shoddy. Plenty of money was thrown around. But too many of the scares derive from cheap reaction shots of agitated zoo animals.

And yet I much prefer The Omen because I don't want horror to be effective. Chainsaw puts me in the position of the victim and because I would rather not be tortured and murdered (I know, right?), the experience of watching the thing is unedifying and irredeemable. By contrast, The Omen is too silly to get under my skin, the threat of a satanic child born of a jackal too far removed from reality to keep me up at night with a knife under my pillow (although the nanny hanging herself at the children's party is as nasty as any scene in Chainsaw). 

Wood also avers that, "The Omen is old-fashioned, traditional, reactionary: the goodness of the family unit isn’t questioned" (79). I find that conclusion baffling since Gregory Peck (typically wooden) kicks off the story with the unforgivable act of not informing his wife (Lee Remick, picking up what I hope was a hefty paycheck) that he has replaced their dead baby with another child. If anything, that affirms the rottenness of the family unit. And they're both awful parents if the scene in which they allow the toddler Damien to wander off is any indication. 

Damien: Omen II (Don Taylor, 1978) was a big disappointment if only because I recall liking it so much as a child (why was I allowed to watch it, though??). But it's pretty creaky overall despite the shocking optics of Lew Ayres, poor thing, under ice (better than over it, e.g., the dreadful Ice Follies of 1939). Omen III: The Final Conflict (Graham Baker, 1981) is the bottom of the barrel with not even a shot of Sam Neill's butt to redeem it.

The Omen: B (Clunky ad copy in the poster below, no? Sounds like something Dick Powell would've came up with in Christmas in July.)

Damien: Omen II: B-minus

Omen III: The Final Conflict: D+

P. S. I'm not watching Omen IV or any of the remakes for the foreseeable future. 

Robin Wood, Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan and Beyond, (New York: Columbia UP, 2003).

Cavalcade (Frank Lloyd, 1933)

Based on the Noël Coward play about two British families during the first third of the twentieth century, Cavalcade would have been a limited series on Netflix were it made today, suffering from the same drawbacks of a property much more concerned with chronicling major events than their impact on human beings. The "cleverness" of having one major character die on the Titanic supersedes the effect of his loss. I wasn't even sure he died, so blasé were the subsequent scenes about his death. And montages pick up the rest of the slack. The one that reduces WWI to three minutes is about two-and-a-half minutes too long. This event happened - we get it, Frank! The only plus is that Lloyd/Coward choked the film with songs. Several dozen hymns, music hall numbers, anthems, etc., some composed by Coward, provide a much more trenchant snapshot of the era than any of the montages or messagey dialogue. 

Grade: C+

National Lampoon's Animal House (John Landis, 1978)

This started off promisingly and would've remained a knockout if Landis had maintained a Gigi-like alternation between the snobs and the slobs. Instead, he piles up set pieces, many of which requiring complete inebriation to find them funny. There had to be a better way to introduce boobs than the scene in which John Belushi slams a ladder against the window of a sorority house to peek in on a topless pillow fight, the comic payoff being that he...wait for it...falls backward onto the lawn. That's comedy genius? The entire dead girlfriend/black roadhouse sequence could've been snipped. So could every scene with Donald Sutherland. Why on earth introduce a nanosecond of "seriousness" into a grossout comedy by having Karen Allen cheat on Peter Riegert with Sutherland and then, even worse, do nothing with it? By the time of the climactic parade desecration, I longed to return to the beginning, marveling over Tim Matheson's butt.

By contrast, I Wanna Hold Your Hand from the same damn year is more raucous, more violent, with a throughline that contextualizes each cartoonish set piece. And yet it flopped miserably whereas Animal House grossed $141 million on a $3 million budget according to Wiki. Why? My guess is that I Wanna Hold Your Hand was driven by female energy and, apart from Grease, that was apparently box-office poison in the 1970s (and beyond?). I hate the world today.

Grade: B-minus and falling

Around the World in 80 Days (Michael Anderson, 1956)

Quite possibly the worst film to win the Best Picture Oscar, Around the World in 80 Days is so godawful that you long for the right-wing program of The Greatest Show on Earth, something/anything to contextualize the endless travelogue footage. Where DeMille constantly cuts to anonymous heterosexual couples with 2.5 kids to underline the circus as great American family entertainment, Anderson (who??) ties his vacation slides to the gaze of characters played by Cantinflas or David Niven or whoever with no coherent ideological purpose or discernible narrative exigency. Was 1956 America really that thirsty for images of flamenco dancers and bullfighters and quaint non-Westerners and sunsets and elephants and buffalo, etc.? 

I haven't read the Jules Verne novel on which the film is based. But I would be shocked if it were as shoddy as the lazy narrative ellipses, unexplained story logic, and time-wasting dénouement here. Reeking of cynicism, Anderson has no clue what to do with his camera. Many scenes play out mostly in master shots as if the camera were too weighted down by the elephantiasis of the production to allow for any cuts. Even the storied cameos are pointless. A close-up of Frank Sinatra playing the piano and...that's it? Not a word sung or even spoken? 

Then there's Edward R. Murrow's intro which features three whole minutes of Méliès' A Trip to the Moon and some shots of missiles. And an utterly wasted Shirley MacLaine as an Indian princess rescued by white savior Niven. And marauding Native Americans. And the inhuman 163-minute running time (at least in the version I saw). ARGH!

Grade: F

Other Hollywood films which deserved the Best Picture Oscar much more than Around the World in 80 Days: I mean, practically any damn movie but (coughs) The Searchers, Edge of Hell, Tea and Sympathy, Written on the Wind, Bhowani Junction, The Girl Can't Help It, Invasion of the  Body Snatchers, The Killing, Great Day in the Morning, Hollywood or Bust, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Rock Around the Clock, Baby Doll, The Wrong Man, Bigger Than Life, Seven Men From Now, Don't Knock the Rock, Shake, Rattle and Rock!, Rock, Pretty Baby!, While the City Sleeps, etc.

The Greatest Show on Earth (Cecil B. DeMille, 1952)

I was on Faceplace discussing how deathly boring I found The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, 1956) and mourning the dearth of camp in it, despite the infamous "Oh, Moses, Moses, you stubborn, splendid, adorable fool" line. A friend replied that it has nothing to do with camp and is instead of work of deep moral seriousness or something to that effect. That was enough to remind me to watch it again in the distant future. For now, I got plenty of moral seriousness from The Greatest Show on Earth.

To be clear, this is a repulsive right-wing tract extolling the virtues of Christianity and the white nuclear family against the threats of unions, Communism, and moral unseriousness. I was therefore expecting a slog of the most dreadful proportions until the early scene in which a priest arrives to bless the circus train. And from that point on, I was hypnotized by DeMille's loony commitment to his conserative project. In this, it reminded me of another right-wing 1952 film, Leo McCarey's anti-Communist My Son John. DeMille cannot match McCarey's depth of feeling. But I was fascinated by how DeMille took the time to include close-ups of anonymous families watching the circus. They were his constituency and the film amounts to his direct sermon to them which juices the endless footage of circus acts with an ideological charge that would have been lacking in a straighter film. Is this right-wing camp? Or is that just another way of saying it's kitsch in that camp is what I like and kitsch is what you like? In any case, I was unpleasantly surprised.

Grade: a B+ that makes me itch

Other Hollywood films which deserved the Best Picture Oscar much more than The Greatest Show on Earth: Strange Fascination, Clash by Night, Sudden Fear, Way of a Gaucho, Bend of the River, Son of Paleface, Has Anybody Seen My Gal?, Paula, The Marrying Kind, Limelight, The Narrow Margin, The Lusty Men, Rancho Notorious, The Bad and the Beautiful, The Big Sky, Monkey Business, Park Row, Ruby Gentry, No Room for the Groom, This Woman is Dangerous, Actors and Sin, The Star, etc. 

On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954)

Near the beginning of his BFI monograph on On the Waterfront, Leo Braudy writes, "it is tempting to argue that naming names before the HUAC put Kazan into a moral and psychological quandary that paradoxically made him a better director." (8). That may be so. But film history would have survived, and then some, had Kazan kept his quandary to himself and, Abraham Polonsky, whose career was destroyed by the HUAC, been allowed to continue writing and directing masterpieces like Force of Evil (1948), a far superior film than anything Kazan ever achieved and featuring the greatest screenplay in Hollywood history.

So while Braudy offers a welcome refresher on the more immediate subject matter of corruption within the longshoremen's union, that does not negate the fact that On the Waterfront remains easy to read as an apologia for naming names. The structure of apology supersedes any contemporary muckraking into corrupt unions. Or as V.F. Perkins put it in Film as Film, "[t]he personal story overwhelms the political morality-play" (146).

Even at that, though, a director for whom casting is 90% of the art of cinema, as Kazan admitted, will always come off too messagey, actorly, and middlebrow for my tastes. For those who find Rear Window inferior to On the Waterfront, feel free to cluck along with Braudy's assertion that "[c]asting therefore was a crucial element in Kazan's preparation for a film, a procedure totally unlike, say, Hitchcock's, in which the director's total vision of the film dictated a more condescending attitude towards the actors as objects themselves" (45). Me, I'll take Hitch's vulgar Freudianism, breaking the fourth wall, and genius last shot any day.

Still, Brando's performance is for the ages, as if that were ever in doubt. When Terry confesses that "I don't like the country. The crickets make me nervous," he ain't heavy; he's my brother. 

Grade: B+

Other Hollywood films which deserved the Best Picture Oscar much more than On the Waterfront: er, Rear Window, Track of the Cat, Bait, The Other Woman, The Barefoot Contessa, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, A Star is Born, Johnny Guitar, Silver Lode, and such ineligible avant-garde shorts as Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, Gyromorphosis, Evolution, Form Phases IV, etc. I assume Anatahan was ineligible too but if not, throw that on the list as well.

Spencer (Pablo Larraín, 2021)

Spencer reminded me most not of Jackie (2016), Larraín's previous foray into iconic female suffering, but László Nemes' Son of Saul (2015) which strongly suggests the problems some audiences will experience with this biopic. A glimpse into the routines horrors of the Auschwitz death camp, Son of Saul follows the Sonderkommando as they try to make themselves small enough to avoid the ambient violence as long as possible. They scurry about, coming together only in brief meetings and speaking in clipped, sotto voce phrases. Similarly (and I use that word with much trepidation), Princess Diana (a jaw-dropping Kristen Stewart) spends most of Spencer's running time avoiding the royal family during Christmas 1991 at the Sandringham Estate. She talks in a near-constant whisper even when she's wings away from the icy glowering of The Queen (an intimidating Stella Gomet). And she escapes into sundry nooks around the estate, most memorably a walk-in refrigerator with shelves of fancy desserts. The question remains, however, as to whether or not anyone should spend a nanosecond more pondering the grief of a privileged figure who continues to command so much media real estate, even up to this very moment with the promised sixth season of The Crown and the unspeakable Diana: The Musical. 

I say Larraín justifies the expenditure by focusing on a comparatively banal moment in Diana's life whereas Jackie is consumed yet again with the overdetermined event of JFK's assassination. This way, the film becomes a more generalizable parable on private vs. public. Also to Larraín's credit is the fact that the most affecting moments pull the focus away from explicit suffering. Several scenes are devoted to Diana briefly escaping her grief by confiding in her Royal Dresser Maggie (Sally Hawkins, typically fantastic). And, in the most moving scene of all, Diana wakes up Harry and William (Freddie Spry and Jack Nielen) in the middle of the night for a role-playing game that tries to say everything that royal propriety prevents them from making explicit. Coupled with a career performance from Stewart, these moments make Spencer a refreshing parallax view on a life too easily understood.

Grade: A-minus

The Mad Max Trilogy!

Mad Max (George Miller, 1979) is like the first hideous draft of a student essay whereas The Road Warrior (aka Mad Max 2) (George Miller, 1981) is what happens after, I'll be blunt, I take a red pen to Mad Max and correct the rather fundamental mistakes. I mean, like wow. Where are we at? WHEN are we even at? This is supposed to be post-apocalyptic? How do we know? What is the point of the night club scene? Why does the head mean dude lead the other mean dude into the water? Why is Brian May's score blaring over basic dialogue? And, the most pressing question of all, how on earth did this gross $100 million while its infinitely superior sequel grossed only $36 million? Were 1970s folk still hankering for Walking Tall/Death Wish revenge fantasies as late as 1979? Guess so.

The Road Warrior is three minutes longer but feels 45 minutes shorter. Miller takes just a few moments to set up the basic narrative premise. Was that so hard? And then, even better, he wastes no time with boring characterization or subplots. We get strapped into the rollercoaster and it doesn't stop blowing our wigs until the final credits. And, gawd bless close captioning, did you know the bad guys are called Smegma Crazies and Gayboy Berserkers? Tight, imaginative, with a twist modestly foreshadowed early on, this zero-body-fat actioner seems so easy that you wonder why there aren't dozens more.

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (George Miller and George Ogilvie, 1985) uses its bigger budget to dazzling effect. In place of the sere visuals of the first two, Miller gives us Bartertown, a ramshackle colony run on pig shit and lorded over by Tina Turner as Aunty. The byzantine design is mirrored in the city's elaborate codes of conduct, a few of which are chanted by the inhabitants, e.g., "Bust a Deal, Face the Wheel," "Aunty's Choice" being one of the wheel options. Who wants life beyond the thunderdome when it's so fun here? Miller even maintains our interest in the dreamier middle section in which a group a children in dire need a conditioner engage in some seriously distorted oral culture. But the third act sags in what amounts to an empty retread of The Road Warrior. Great theme song, though.

Mad Max: C

The Road Warrior: A-minus

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome: B+

Led Zeppelin IV (Atlantic, 1971) songs graded!

When it comes to Zep (and Sab and numberless other brontosauri), it's simple. I would like to be clodhopped, pretty please. Keep your ballads and Tolkeinisms and prog peanut butter out of my head-banging and ass-shaking chocolate, thank you kindly. So this is how their greatest album shakes down for me. 

1. "Black Dog" - A

2. "Rock and Roll" - A bit hokey, yes, but I love how it sounds as if the album is already climaxing. A

3. "The Ballad of Evermore" - Nice. B+ (2/25/22 update: Ya know, I do dig this. I just don't need a change of pace here. But, ok, A-minus.)

4. "Stairway to Heaven" - Although I listen to Heart's Kennedy Center rendition just as much nowadays. A+

5. "Misty Mountain Hop" - OK this track DANCES! And it's a quintessential karaoke classic to boot.  A+

6. "Four Sticks" - A-minus

7. "Going to California" - Yeah, no. B

8. "When the Levee Breaks" - A+

Grade: A

A Tribute to Bill Weber aka The 25 Greatest Films

My #1 NYC film bud Bill Weber died last year and the I Love Everything forum (where I first met him under his Dr. Morbius screen name) paid tribute to him with a film poll. Voters chose 25 films from a list of nominees, a process I've never understood. Why not have everyone just vote and then tally from there? Astoundingly, though, my ancient top 10 list somehow appeared on the list. So that left 15 slots I used to honor Bill rather than Cinemah which delivered me from worrying about a particular title missing the top 100 or whether or not Twin Peaks: The Return is a film or a TV show. 

Bill was a film omnivore. The man would see damn near anything as long as tickets were cheap (apart from several sojourns to the NYFF) and it wasn't directed by Quentin Tarantino. We saw dozens of films together in the four years we shared oxygen in NYC: the preview print of The Ladies Man with ten minutes of must-see extra footage; the rare 130-minute version of Good Sam; still-undersung masterpieces like Laughter in Hell; becoming-sung masterpieces like The Mad Fox; a reel from Gregory Markopoulos' Eniainos; etc. But the screening I cherish the most is Surrender (Allan Dwan, 1950) which we saw in MOMA's Republic Rediscovered series, precisely because it was such a nothing film, perfectly serviceable but I couldn't tell you a damn thing about it beyond the fact that it kicked off a 48-hour obsession with Vera Hruba Ralston. It's a measure of Bill's determination to support even the least propitious aspects of NYC film culture and his energy will be sorely missed.

As for the poll, it was lots of fun. Kudos to Eric Henderson for all his hard work on it and for the gorgeously distressed screen grabs with Morbs silver and gold medals attached to the titles Bill loved the most. I'm glad 2001 won the poll. Bill adored the thing and even though I could never convince him that I did, in fact, dig it, I'm thankful he prodded me to finally see it on 70mm at MOMI. His beloved Mulholland Dr. hit high. Eric and I and a few others snuck in our beloved Showgirls, a subject of countless arguments with Bill. I learned about Contactos from the nominations list. It's one of the those rare films where you mutter, "well, goddamn, this is inventing a new cinema language," fitting for a film in which oppressed silence becomes a structuring principle. Bill loved Spielberg way more than I do. So I included A.I., his one unassailable masterpiece, to whatever extent it's a Spielberg film in the first place. 

The poll results (click the link halfway down the page to expand the entire thread) overall were perfectly honorable. Even the appearance of the one film I actively loathe (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) makes sense. The only remotely head-scratching entry was Jurassic Park which Bill hated. But I suppose it hit you hard if you were born in the mid-1980s with a JP Happy Meal awaiting you after the screening. I'd sit through it again if I could watch it with Bill.

 

1. Some Call It Loving (James B. Harris, 1973)

2. The Hart of London (Jack Chambers, 1969-1970)


3. Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959)


4. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975)


5. Blow Job (Andy Warhol, 1964)


6. Thanatopsis (Ed Emshwiller, 1963) 


7. Submit To Me Now (Richard Kern, 1987)


8. Illusions (Julie Dash, 1980)

9. Angel Face (Otto Preminger, 1953)


10. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975)

11. The Ladies Man (Jerry Lewis, 1961)
12. Contactos (Paulino Viota, 1970)
13. Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944)
14. The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, 1942)
15. Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven, 1995)
16. A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001)
17. This Is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, 2011)
18. La région centrale (Michael Snow, 1967)  
19. Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt, 2016)
20. 7 Women (John Ford, 1966)
21. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, 2005)
22. Losing Ground (Kathleen Collins, 1982)
23. The 47 Ronin (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1941)
24. A Canterbury Tale (Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger, 1944)
25. Zorn's Lemma (Hollis Frampton, 1970)

Loveless ranked!

On the occasion of the 30th birthday of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, here is a ranking (and grading!) of each song.

"Soon"  - After 40 minutes of post-rockin', this - a more conventional track that's like rising from Plato's cave to hear song anew. And then, at the very end, the album's finest moment. It sounds as if the song is continuing in another version, a demo maybe, or heard from another room, throwing you back over the rest of the album to wonder if every song-sound was but a mere moment mined from some sort of celestial stream playing endless variations of My Bloody Valentine music for eternity.  A+
"To Here Knows When" - The archetypal Loveless track. The one that most exemplifies the hibiscus cover of blurred, massed guitars. It asks, how much can you sandblast a track and still have a song? A+
"Touched"  - A+ Why is this track so slept on?!? Because it's a fragment? In its propensity to induce obsession, Loveless is nothing but fragments. The whalesong moans and the strings ache. And then the whalesong aches! All in 56 seconds!
"What You Want" - Ache so good. A+
"When You Sleep" - Come on, baby, make it ache so good. A+
"Loomer" - Sometimes (whatever emotion) don't feel like it should, you make it ache so good. A+
"Only Shallow" - This will always delight because, as the first track, it means, "holy shit I get to listen to Loveless again!"A+
"Blown a Wish" - A song this good, thousands of bees sharing their plaints all at once, can be this low in the ranking? That's Loveless for ya, baby. A+
"I Only Said"  - The roving hook has a touch too much sharpness. And maybe it's a tad too long. Maybe! It's still an... A
"Sometimes"  - The opposite issue. It could use a tad more acuity. Still, yes, an... A
"Come In Alone"  - Too conventional overall. But still damn good so don't come for me! Most albums sag in the middle anyway. Who cares? Look out all the A-plussery surrounding it! A-minus

P. S. Please buy me this duvet cover kthxbye.

Tina: The Tina Turner Musical

The Mr. surprised me with a ticket to see Tina: The Tina Turner Musical Saturday, October 30th at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre with the incomparable Adrienne Warren in her last performance (or close to it) as Tina Turner. As usual, I had mixed feelings. 

Starting with the bad, why oh why are almost all second acts of Broadway musicals so criminally boring?!? I asked this of my pal Jody and she offered, "because shows don’t need second acts. They should just have a killer first act and charge less!" And deader-on words were never Facebook Messengered. One theory holds that the second act is where the dramaturgists (here, Katori Hall, Frank Ketelaar, and Kees Prins) hang most of the story information out to dry. But the problem seems simpler than that - mainly, a concentration of ballads. Even my beloved Xanadu (the film!) features just such a misstep in "Suspended in Time." One ballad is often bad enough. But several have you wondering if Junior's is open after 11pm (it is!). 

Also, the audience around us was poorly behaved during the second act - chatting, on their phones, etc. Maybe they had too much to drink and/or they were rightly bored. Or maybe this is the fate of the jukebox musical. Broadway music, especially in its post-Show Boat incarnation, does not call for a direct engagement with the audience. But rock 'n' roll does which places the jukebox musical in an itchy spot. For instance, one scene in Tina recreates Turner's triumphant gig at The Ritz. Warren as Turner even welcomes us to The Ritz and elicits a response from the audience. Of course, we aren't supposed to actually respond just as we aren't supposed to look over our shoulder when a character sees something in the distance/at the back of the theatre. Nevertheless, that tighter performer/audience bond characteristic of rock 'n' roll gives some theatergoers the license (or so they perceive) to chat and respond back and check messages on their phones. Luckily, no one lit up a cigarette.

As for the great, the moment in which Turner records "River Deep, Mountain High" was a masterpiece of staging, set design, and incendiary performance. Weasely Phil Spector hops up in his production booth and lords over the recording like some demented deity. Turner is alone in front of a giant wall meant to stand in for Spector's Wall of Sound. And after several run-throughs of the opening vocal (which the real Turner was never quite sure she got right), she belts out the song in competition with the Wall and comes out if not victorious, then on equal standing which is incredible enough given Spector's typical cacophony. 

The scene after takes place years later in the home of Ike and Tina Turner. But even though the new set slid into place in mere seconds, we would not let the show continue due to several minutes of applauding. Warren stood in place and waited for the hooting to die down. There were even calls for an encore which was presumably impossible since the narrative had already moved on. Or rather, tried to move on. Al Jolson would have complied. But his standard of story-pausing audience interaction hasn't been the norm in about 100 years. Warren eventually gestured slightly with her hands for us to sit down. But for a good three or four minutes, Broadway and rock 'n' roll felt as one - the audience feeding off the performer, the audience feeding off each other, the performer feeding off of us. It's a moment I feel privileged to have witnessed.

@Zola (Janicza Bravo, 2020)

This winning and irrepressibly inventive film is based on David Kushner's Rolling Stone article "Zola Tells All: The Real Story Behind the Greatest Stripper Saga Ever Tweeted," itself based on a viral Tweetstorm from Aziah "Zola" King. A straightforward account of King's tale, about two strippers taking a gig in Florida with equal parts comedic and nightmarish consequences, would have been wild and unpredictable enough. But Bravo has embellished the story with all sorts of trills that lend the film a lived-in texture: a boy rhythmically bouncing a basketball as musical counterpoint to one transitional shot; the creepy hum of florescent lights in a liquor store; Tweet notification sounds firing off at various points in the film; and a score of memorable cameos including the always welcome Ts Madison. Taylour Paige plays Zola with an eye on revealing the thin line between toughness and vulnerability. But Riley Keough (Elvis Presley's granddaughter and thank gawd, the King is not around to see this) walks off with the film in her slangy drawl and Nomi-Malone-in-Goddess hair and makeup. With dozens of lines ripe for endless quoting, @Zola awaits your obsession.

Grade: A