6 minute read
‘Angelyne’
from Sunday Signal May 29, 2022
by Signal
ENTERTAINMENT
‘Angelyne’ — the Myth, the Billboards, the Fame, the Woman
By Richard Roeper
Signal Contributing Writer
1/2 (out of four) A five-episode series available now on Peacock.
Half the celebrities in the world today are famous for being famous — although I guess many of them actually DO have talent, ranging from the ability to dance suggestively in yoga pants on TikTok to saying stupid things on YouTube to getting plastic surgery and yelling at each other on “reality” TV to setting up payas-you-play accounts that are for fans only. These are skill sets, people!
Not that this is anything new; some 60 years ago the historian Daniel J. Boorstin published “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America,” in which he defined celebrity as “a person who is known for his well-knownness.” From Zsa Zsa Gabor to Paris Hilton and the Kardashians, there’s a long and shallow history of inexplicably well-known individuals — and one of the undisputed pioneers in that field is the cartoonishly busty, sugary blond, pink Corvette-driving phenomenon known as Angelyne, who burst onto the Los Angeles landscape with a series of billboards in the 1980s and somehow became something of an icon, despite the fact that was pretty much it: the billboards.
Now her story gets the limited series, “based on a true story but certain events have been fictionalized” treatment in the wicked smart, cleverly meta, whimsical and yet occasionally melancholy “Angelyne” on Peacock, with Emmy Rossum delivering a sparkling and splashy and yet honest and authentic performance as a woman who willed herself into becoming a Hollywood icon — and on some level, that truly IS a talent.
Told in the style of a mockumentary, with Angelyne and others giving “interviews” straight to camera, and also employing the occasional “I, Tonya” technique of characters breaking the fourth wall to dispute or comment on events, the series is based in part on Gary Baum’s 2017 article for the Hollywood Reporter that exposed the while adding to her legend by tooling around Los Angeles in a pink Corvette, much to the delight of tourists and locals who are thrilled to catch a glimpse of — and buy some merchandise from — a real Hollywood star.
Yet that’s the thing: Despite all the billboards and the talk show appearances and the blink-and-you’ll-missher guest spots on TV and in the movies, Angelyne was just … Angelyne. (The Los Angeles Times once noted her billboards “have had a better career than she has, appearing in ‘Get Shorty’ and ‘Volcano,’ as well as TV’s ‘The Simpsons,’ ‘Moonlighting’ and ‘Futurama.’”)
Rossum does a beautiful job of conveying the sadness and insecurity in Angelyne’s eyes, even as she indulges her narcissism and manipulates the men in her life to the benefit of her own career. There’s a poignant scene when Wallach’s grown daughter (Molly Ephraim), who deeply resents Angelyne for turning her father’s world upside down, sees Angelyne in the
parking lot of a grocery store and is ready to confront her — but softens when she sees the run in Angelyne’s stockings and the rather depressing spectacle of this no-longer-young woman in full makeup and wardrobe, loading paper bags of groceries into her car. Not that we ever get to see the “real” Angelyne — the woman who comes home after a long day of driving around town and selling magazines, photos and other trinkets out of her car trunk, takes off the wig and the makeup and turns off the persona. Laemmle Theatres • Santa Clarita Signal That’s the point, really; even after the 3col (4.75”) x 5.9” details of Angelyne’s upbringing and personal life are revealed in the artiAd insertion date: cle, she just keeps on going as AngeAd creation/delivery date: lyne, as if that other person doesn’t exist and never existed. Thanks in large part to Rossum’s deeply sympathetic and almost protective performance, “Angelyne” turns Angelyne into the kind of star she always wanted to be. Copyright 2022 Chicago Sun-Times
Tuesday, May 24, 2022 at 11:06:09 AM CASCS _ LEM0529-0602.qxp
PHOTO COURTESY IMDB true story behind the billboard mySunday-Thursday, May 29-June 2, 2022 thology — but it’s a stylized, dreamy, sometimes appropriately trippy and frothy mix of established facts and flights of fancy. ALL the narrators in “Angelyne” are unreliable.
Showrunner Allison Miller and the crack writing team deliver a fastpaced, time-jumping, consistently witty and sharp fractured fairy tale, filled with pink-on-pink-on-pink visuals and set to the lush pop sounds of the Electric Light Orchestra, among others. TM NEWHALL
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