Reading/Watching Log #117

It is the first day of spring in the southern hemisphere, and I reach it like a castaway onto an island full of fresh water and fruit. Damn, that was a gruelling winter. I hate the cold and the dark at the best of times, but there was something in the air this year that made absolutely everyone sick – continuously and relentlessly.

I suspect I caught more than one thing at once, which ended up playing havoc on my immune system, and after five whole weeks of feeling like absolute crap, my doctor finally prescribed me some antibiotics just to help fight whatever the hell was going on in my Petrie dish of a body.

My blog has been so quiet lately because I honestly haven’t had the energy to write anything. By the time I got home from work, I just wanted to crawl into bed and fall unconscious, but now – well, hopefully I can start plumping up these entries again.

And yes, I will eventually post my reading/watching list for July.

This month’s theme: PIRATES!

Woman of the Month

 

Debbie Jellinski from Addams Family Values

It’s time to showcase a comedic villainess.

I was surprised to discover that Addams Family Values was a flop when it was released back in 1993, as in my opinion it’s far better than the first film, and Joan Cusack damn near steals the show as its villain. She plays Debbie Jellinski, a woman engaged in that noble profession of marrying rich guys and then killing them to inherit their fortunes. She’s been doing it for a while, successfully offing her unfortunate string of husbands and evading law enforcement, but what elevates her from being another run-of-the-mill black widow is Cusack’s performance.

There is truly nothing more fun than watching her go from the wide-eyed, earnest, virginal (yet still aggressively sexual) Debbie in the first half of the film to the cruel, materialistic, vindicative monster-bitch (who remains aggressively sexual) in the second. Joan Cusack just oozes malevolence from every pore, her facial expressions and body language so completely predatory and over-the-top.

Her incredulous “you?” when Fester admits he’s a virgin, her wriggling glee when she watches the Nightline exposé on herself, the look of dark intent when she preps the bomb to take out her latest husband – all done in an array of colourful sundresses. Her manipulations even get Wednesday and Pugsley sent to summer camp.

The craziest thing is that if Debbie had just been upfront about her intentions, the Addams family probably would have welcomed her as one of their own (Morticia is cool with her scheming, it’s the pastels she objects to). They even wish her good luck as she’s about to murder them and make her escape.

What was a pretty clichéd villain is elevated entirely by Joan Cusack’s deliciously evil performance. She practically slithers her way through the role, and is the larger-than-life villain that the previous film lacked; the perfect dark foil not only to the Addams family, but also the obnoxiously chipper camp leaders. Not everyone can paraphrase the Wicked Witch of the West (“I’ll get you, and your little hand too!”) and own it.