Ally, Ally, All Come Free

I'm having a very surreal and oddly enjoyable time watching a Hallmark TV Movie staring Ally Sheedy and Meatloaf. It's a "drama," so they say: Citizen Jane.  No relation to Citizen Kane.

Meatloaf is god awful and brilliant in this. He's a detective on the trail of the person who murdered Ally's niece. At first, he's just painfully bad. But then something strange happens ... his performance grows on you (sort of like a fungus). A half hour into it, you're transfixed by the monotone delivery. The ssssllllloowww manner in which he walks and speaks and reacts.

And. Then. You're. Hooked.

This just might be the best performance by an 'actor' in the history of the art form. Still, through all that, it remains horrible. I can't explain the paradox. Then again, I could never explain the existence of Meatloaf period. Stop right there! Before you go any further ... He was wonderful in Fight Club as the Testicular Cancer Guy with Breasts, so there you have your precedence.  And in the Paradise video.  Can't forget Rocky Horror.  What about Roadie? Damn, the guy's a regular thespian.  Inside the Actor's Studio material for sure.

And Ally? She's the reason I rode this wave on a channel surfing Saturday night. You see, Ms. Sheedy rocked my world in the 1980s. Her one-two punch of Breakfast Club goth-chick and St. Elmo's Fire Alex/Kevin girlfriend had me reeling.

I identified with Andrew McCarthy's Kevin in St. Elmo's more than any movie character to that point in my young life: he was almost exactly my age, he was a (wannabe) writer, everyone thought he was gay because he didn't have any recent conquests, and he was secretly in love with Ally (well, with her character, but let's not quibble).

For me it started and ended with her eyes.  Then continued with her voice and her mannerisms. Her ... everything.

She knocked me for a loop all over again as John Candy's love in Only the Lonely in 1991. But there were danger signs ahead, I knew even then. Certain features you knew wouldn't stand the test of time. The softness was, just a touch, harder than in her brat packing days.  Pointy features pointing a bit more.

Fast forward eighteen years and not much has changed with my life. I might as well have been put into suspended animation, waiting for something to snap me out of it.

But I think our 'romance' is over.

The danger signs were justified. The years have not been kind to her, with a hard edge where only sweetness once lived. Now to be fair, it could be the shrew of a character she's playing here. And the years have not been kind to most of us as we drift into our late forties (they were never all that sweet to me to begin with).  But it's not her looks that have soured (it was never really her looks that got to me, so much as her aura, that glow).

Oh well, we'll always have Georgetown.  Here's looking at you, kid.


Still, the ravages of age have been more than kind to some.  My #1 top dog, big cheese Hollywood I-gotta-have-her gal, Mary Louise Parker, 45, looks WAY better than she did when I discovered her in Fried Green Tomatoes (the only thing good about that flick, in my eyes). And that movie was released in 1991, the same year as ... Only the Lonely.


As Paul Harvey would say, "And that's the rest of the Story ..."

The paint is no longer sticky for sure.  For those that made it this far, hope you enjoyed watching it dry with me.