Heaven's Sakes Is That a Spot

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An inky blight spreads across the azure blue of the Pacific Ocean - like the tar beast of Creepshow 2 gone fishin' that inhuman stain is just waiting for some sucker to stick their foot in, just waiting for meat. And Beatriz at Dinner offers up a sacrificial feast to it - Mike White and Miguel Arteta, the duo behind Chuck & Buck and The Good Girl, have the napkins pressed and the knives sharpened and much like Karyn Kusama's film The Invitation last year we're all invited to dine heartily upon their Californian malcontent.

Beatriz, as played by Salma Hayek styled as Cecilia Giménez' reworked Ecce Homo, is a broken saint - her patience frayed, her car crippled, and her favorite bedroom goat strangled dead. For all her outward serenity her aura is static - on the fritz. But unlike the blonde sun-dressed Amy Jellicoes of the world who can absentmindedly spin off their axis, Beatriz is a small brown woman in big white world, and as such she's forced to say it all with a head tilt, and a slow back into the scenery.

Until she doesn't. This Dinner is one dinner too much - what's on the menu is destiny and despair and wine, in equal helpings. (Okay maybe the wine there's a bit more of.) At the opposite end of the table sits the human stain - a slab of 100% prime and pure Grade-A American Horror Story, tender and juicy and joyfully masticated, in the ever and always splendidly weaselly form of John Lithgow, chewing life up feet first.

Sit back and go wow, watching these two spark. In some alternate dimension this is a love story, so perfectly horribly matched are they, but we live on Planet Earth and so romance, dead in its watery grave, is usurped by that other penetrative act called violence - natural laws are pumped dry and we dream of ninja sly rescues in their wake. And if not we drink and we smoke and we foam at the mouth instead.
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