Episode 56: She-Devil and Bottom Five Team Ups

She-Devil (1989) Notes:

1. Tonally broken performances: Director Susan Seidelman (Desperately Seeking Susan) leaned into her trademark broad, pop-satire style, but the cast never syncs up. Meryl Streep and Ed Begley Jr. play it like a live-action cartoon, while Roseanne Barr is stiff and unsure. The result is three leads who all seem to be in different movies.
2. Meryl’s misfire:  Instead of wit or nuance, she turns romance novelist Mary Fisher into a shrill caricature—high voice, exaggerated movements, cartoon laugh. To me, she looked like she was “trying” to be funny instead of actually being funny.
3. Roseanne’s discomfort:Her deadpan flatness plays as woodenness, especially against Streep and Begley’s circus energy. She hadn’t yet adapted from stand-up and sitcom rhythm to movie performance.
4. Editing gaps: Adapted from Fay Weldon’s 1983 novel The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, the movie hacks down an episodic revenge saga into a 99-minute runtime. That’s why the Linda Hunt subplot feels jagged: one minute Barr’s working in an assisted living home, the next she’s running a women’s agency, as if reels of the movie are missing.
5. Lazy plotting: The screenplay (by Barry Strugatz and Mark R. Burns) leans on coincidence over strategy. The most glaring: Begley’s philandering husband conveniently calls Barr’s new agency for a secretary to sleep with, giving Ruth an easy revenge set-up. Instead of showing Ruth’s cleverness, it makes her victories feel handed to her.
6. Sympathy shift: The satire gets muddled. Ruth’s revenge should be cathartic, but she torpedoes innocent bystanders (like the secretary), making her feel cruel. Meanwhile, Mary Fisher, silly and vain but not truly malicious, ends up inspiring more sympathy than scorn. The real villain is Begley’s selfish, cheating Bob—yet he’s treated more like comic relief.
7. Missed opportunity in Mary’s arc: Mary’s downfall is meant to end with growth: she loses her vapid glam life and becomes a “serious” writer. On paper, that’s satisfying. But because Streep keeps playing her broadly—even in her “intellectual” phase—it feels like another gag instead of an evolution.
8. Feminist satire undermined: The source novel is viciously satirical about gender, power, and revenge. The film waters this down into a camp comedy where women tear each other apart, while the cheating husband gets off light. The intended empowerment curdles into pettiness.
9. Meta-casting contrast: The movie banks on Roseanne’s working-class everywoman image clashing with Streep’s high-art, elitist persona. In theory, that could’ve been biting satire. Instead, it highlights how mismatched they are, reinforcing the tonal dissonance rather than sharpening it.

Production notes:

1. Cinematography by Oliver Stapleton (who framed Streep’s pink mansion in hyper-saturated, doll‑house fantasy tones), shot on Panavision cameras in a steady 1.85:1 aspect ratio with Dolby SR audio. The aesthetic leans glossy and heightened—perfect for Seidelman’s pop-camp satire—but contributes to the overall artifice, working against Roseanne’s grounded, sitcom realism.
2. Production Design & Costume: Santo Loquasto (production design) and Albert Wolsky (costumes) crafted the visual identities—Mary’s bubblegum-pink paradise versus Ruth’s dingy domestic world. It visually reinforces the class/persona divide between Streep’s “elitist” Mary and Barr’s “working-class” Ruth.
3. Editing by Craig McKay: The narrative’s choppy pacing—jarring shifts like “retirement home one moment, empowerment agency next”—is traceable to McKay’s tight, brisk cuts trying to compress a sprawling novel into a 99-minute film.
4. Music by Howard Shore: The score injects a sly, whimsical tone that should build comic tension or satirical zest. Sometimes it heightens scenes well, but often it feels like syrupy commentary on a story already veering off tonal track.
5. Filming Locations & Context: Principal photography began April 12, 1989, around NYC. Key spots include a Stanford‑White mansion turned Mary Fisher’s estate, a Piermont mansion for the retirement home, plus visual cameos from Times Square, the Guggenheim (party scene), South Street Seaport (the job agency), and even Union Township, NJ (Ruth’s house explosion). These recognizable locales ground the fantasy—but also feel patchwork in tone.
6. Director’s Vision: Susan Seidelman—famous for genre-bending and outsider-angled female protagonists—viewed this as a breakthrough for Meryl in comedy. She leaned into caricature deliberately, trusting Streep to “go for it” within the film’s candy-hued, exaggerated aesthetic. But that bravado only worsens the tonal disconnect with Roseanne’s flatter, realist performance.
7. Budget: About $16 million.
8. Box Office: Roughly $26.2 million (domestic).
   • So while it wasn’t a blockbuster, it wasn’t a bomb either. For a dark-ish feminist revenge comedy in 1989 with a first-time film star in Roseanne Barr, that’s actually a solid return.

Bottom Five Team-Ups:

5. Elvis Presley & Mary Tyler Moore — Change of Habit (1969)

You’d think the King of Rock ’n’ Roll and America’s sweetheart would make for a fun, fizzy pairing. Instead, Elvis plays a ghetto doctor and Mary Tyler Moore is — wait for it — a nun. The movie tries to juggle civil rights, autism, and forbidden romance, but it mostly juggles our patience. Presley looks uncomfortable, Moore looks like she’d rather be anywhere else, and their “almost-kiss” scenes are weirdly unsettling. Some call it one of Elvis’s better movies, which only proves how catastrophically low the bar had fallen by the end of his film career.

4. Tobe Hooper & Stephen King (with Robert Englund) — The Mangler (1995)

Two titans of terror should’ve delivered nightmares for the ages. Instead, they delivered a movie about… a possessed industrial laundry press. Yes, a killer washing machine. Director Tobe Hooper (Texas Chain Saw Massacre) adapts a flimsy Stephen King short story, ropes in Freddy Krueger himself, Robert Englund, and plays it with a straight face. Englund’s makeup was so elaborate it made Freddy look like a quick job, the shoot in South Africa was exhausting, and the result is a campy clunker often cited as one of King’s very worst adaptations. The horror here isn’t the machine — it’s that anyone thought this was a good idea.

3. Dustin Hoffman & Warren Beatty — Ishtar (1987)

On paper: two of Hollywood’s biggest names in a desert-set comedy from Elaine May, who’d scored big as both writer and director. In reality: the kind of disaster that becomes shorthand for “bomb.” Hoffman and Beatty play lounge singers dropped into Cold War intrigue, but neither is remotely funny, the tone lurches from farce to political thriller, and the budget spiraled into the Sahara. Critics roasted it, audiences avoided it, and though revisionists now argue it’s not that bad, the brand name “Ishtar” is still a punchline nearly 40 years later.

2. Sylvester Stallone & Dolly Parton — Rhinestone (1984)

If ever there was proof that not every star pairing is a good idea, this is it. Dolly plays a country singer trying to turn Stallone into Nashville’s next big thing. What we get is Sly warbling in sequins, mugging through comedy he can’t deliver, while Dolly does her best to hold the thing together with charm alone. Marketed as a fish-out-of-water musical comedy, it sank fast, earning multiple Razzie nominations and tanking Stallone’s attempt to show a lighter side. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a karaoke night that everyone regrets in the morning.

1. Richard Burton & Elizabeth Taylor — Boom! (1968)

After the volcanic brilliance of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), Burton and Taylor became Hollywood’s most bankable couple — so studios kept pairing them. Unfortunately, their next few outings (Doctor Faustus, The Comedians) fizzled, and instead of quitting while they were ahead, they doubled down with Tennessee Williams’ and delivered a huge dud called Boom! On paper, it had everything: Williams’ pedigree, director Joseph Losey (the acclaimed film noir director of the 1951 version of M and Crimonal), John Barry on the score, and the biggest celebrity couple in the world. What audiences got was a pretentious, kaftan-draped slog where Taylor struts cliffside, Burton broods, and Noël Coward pops in as “The Witch of Capri.” A critical and financial catastrophe at the time, it now has a cult following as high camp — John Waters swears by it — but as a star team-up, it’s proof that chasing past glory can blow up in your face.

Notes about Terrence Stamp:

Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) Terrence Stamp as Bernadette — a trans woman with both grace and bite — is one of those perfect left-field casting moves. The film’s costumes and ABBA soundtrack are the obvious hooks, but Stamp’s quiet dignity keeps it from being just camp. He brings Shakespearean weight to a bus ride full of sequins.

Superman II (1980) “Come to me, son of Jor-El! Kneel before Zod!” With just a cape and an arched eyebrow, Stamp cemented himself as one of cinema’s all-time comic book villains. He didn’t need CGI or laser beams; his menace came from sheer presence — a perfect opposite to Reeve’s aw-shucks Superman.

The Limey (1999) Steven Soderbergh’s art-house revenge thriller turned Stamp into a late-career indie badass. As Wilson, he’s raw grief wrapped in Cockney slang, a man out of time searching for his daughter’s killer. The editing riffs, the 1960s flashback clips, and Stamp’s gravitas made it a cult classic.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016) Not a lead role, but proof Stamp could still pop up decades later and steal scenes. As Abraham Portman, he added warmth and mystery to Tim Burton’s gothic YA fantasy. It’s a nice bookend to see him still in the fantasy realm after all those years of Zod.