Monday Movie Meme

Movie Madness. Share on your blog movies that feature maniacs, lunatics, psychos, crazed behavior or mentally tortured souls. And be sure to link back here to The Bumbles.

Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood. Vivian Abbott Walker is such a big personality that it takes two actresses -- Ashley Judd and Ellen Burstyn -- to play her. She's the ringleader of the Ya Yas, a group of Louisiana neighbors who grew up together from girlhood to through their teens and motherhood and beyond. Their rallying cry, "Ya Ya!" does make them seem more than a little crazy. Vivian is a lot crazy. At times her approach to life seems wild and unique and liberating. But at other times, it's indulgent and Vivian seems as immature as her children. One incident, when Vivian was being treated with a dangerous but very popular barbiturate called Milltown, is very dark and we see how quickly a colorful personality can slide into a dangerous one.

Nuts. Barbra Streisand plays Claudia, a high-priced New York call girl. She kills a very nasty, abusive john, Leslie Nielsen. (I guess she called him "Shirley.") Claudia has issues. She's rebellious, stubborn, pushy and, well, nuts. Yet she insists she's fine, it's the rest of the world that's nuts. Richard Dreyfuss plays the attorney who defends her sanity in court.

Finally, in tribute to the late great Elizabeth Taylor, here's her greatest loony role: Cathy from Suddenly, Last Summer. It was quite shocking for 1959, and if not for the considerable artistic credibility of Katharine Hepburn and Liz's star power, it never would have been made. Hepburn is wealthy matriarch Violet Venable. She promises to donate a ton of money to Dr. Montgomery Clift's mental hospital if only he will lobotomize her troublesome niece, Liz Taylor. Hepburn tells Dr. Clift that Cathy is horny and hostile and keeps spouting "crazy talk" about what happened last summer, when she went traveling with Cousin Sebastian, an incredibly talented writer and Hepburn's beloved son. Sebastian died tragically last summer, but the story Liz recounts is so gothic, so sordid, so scandalous and nuts that it can't possibly be true, can it? Of course it can! After all, this is Tennessee Williams!