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his week: Book Review: “Hellraisers,” Movie Review: Eat, Pray, Love, The Purple Universe, and more…

Book Review. “Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole, and Oliver Reed” by Robert Sellers (St. Martin’s Press). This book is a cautionary tale, exposing in detail the life and drinking habits of four incredibly famous alcoholics.

Author Robert Sellers has done an exhaustive study of each of his subjects.

These men never had a private moment!

Why did they drink so much? That question is never answered. Well, I guess because you can do it in public and be photographed.

It was the manly thing to do and they reveled in it to excess. Everyone who came in contact with them indulged them in very bad behavior. Alcoholics make mean drunks.

The sheer amount of alcohol consumed is daunting. And the outrageous circus that was the Liz Taylor-Richard Burton hysteria is splayed out across the well-researched pages.

The book is filled with such memorable quotes that I must list only a few gems:

“God put me on this earth to raise sheer hell.” Richard Burton

“I was a sinner. I slugged some people. I hurt many people. And it’s true, I never looked back to see the casualties.” Richard Harris

“Booze is the most outrageous of all drugs, which is why I chose it.” Peter O’Toole

“I do not live in the world of sobriety.” Oliver Reed

“You make a star, you make a monster.” Sam Spiegel

Sellers states that Elizabeth Taylor could—and did!—drink more than Burton.

And, on page 116, horror actress Barbara Steele is mentioned in an episode that took place in Rome with Peter O’Toole. Oh…I guess it’s time to ask Barbara all about Peter! (Photo: my dear friend, FilmsInReview’s editor Roy Frumkes, introduced us to Barbara in Santa Fe, NM in 1994.)

This is the lives of international film stars who were permitted—without exception—to do whatever they wanted to do without criticism. Why were these men so angry and bitter? Three bottles of vodka per day before evening? Who could drink so much liquid per day?

Movies This Week. Julia Roberts stars in Eat, Pray, Love (NO), Robert Duvall stars in Get Low (NO), The Last Exorcism (YES).

Eat Pray Love. Too preachy, indulgent, and everybody cries. Even the extras.

Every woman I know, and millions of others, have read and loved Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2006 memoir Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia. The title tells it all. Now that I’ve seen the over 2 hour version, I am glad I did not read the book.

Liz Gilbert (Julie Roberts) had everything but she’s unfulfilled. She feels empty. She cries. She has a husband, Stephen (Billy Crudup) who, okay, he’s a loser without ambitions, but he adores her. Liz is a successful, published writer with an editor, Delia (Viola Davis) who adores her. But, she wants more. I didn’t believe her “inner struggle” for one minute. It did not ring true.

So, Liz dumps the husband, and immediately takes up with a young actor, David (James Franco), who adores her. But, he’s an off-off Broadway actor with a studio walkup in the East East Village.

Liz needs a few good hardships but instead decides to give her husband everything in a divorce except, according to the movie, enough money to live like a wealthy socialite for a year in Italy, India and Indonesia.

I wept for Liz.

This is an indulgent journey for self-discovery and we are supposed to care.

The first part of the journey is in Italy where Liz finds friends immediately who adore her and a sexy Italian who she hires to teach her the language. He’s got a girlfriend—the love part comes later. Liz eats and gains weight! WOW! Liz is showing all of us it is okay to enjoy life and gain 7 pounds in pursuit of life!

The last time I ate pizza was in Rome in 1994. It was fantastic. (Should I write a book about it?) You pay by the weight. Yes, Italians eat well, but they also walk everywhere. Americans have chosen—we do not walk except up and down aisles.

David is a devotee of an Indian guru so after 4 months in Rome, Liz takes off for an ashram somewhere in India. The film does not name the guru or city. But guess what? The guru is in New York! You’d think Liz would have checked out the guru’s travel schedule or at least told David when he called and asked her how ashram life was. Oh, never mind!

I spent a year in an ashram studying kriya yoga in Bihar, India. (Photo of my guru, Sri Swami Satyananda Saraswati, one of India’s great saints, on left. I named my son after him.) I lived in a dormitory. The entire ashram went silent for one month. In Liz’s ashram you buy a name plate that says “I am being silent.”

Of course I was looking forward to this part of the movie. Instead, it falls dead flat. Soul-searching Liz is befriended by Richard from Texas (Richard Jenkins) a real buffoon with platitudes. I would have sat Richard from Texas down and told him to slap on that name plate—for good.

Empowering women—that is what this is really about—Richard from Texas calls Liz “Groceries” because she likes to eat.

Well, it’s time for Liz to take off for Bali and she goes to see her toothless guru, Nyomo (I. Gusti Ayu Puspawati), who started her on this journey a year ago with psychic predictions about her future. He predicted she would return and learn from him. In a glorious jungle villa, Liz settles in. Soon she meets Felipe (Javier Bardem) a successful import-exporter Brazilian suffering from an ugly divorce. He is wounded and I did not care.

Liz doesn’t want to give up her self-discovery to find “balance” to merge with Felipe, but he adores her. They have a fight but Liz’s guru Nyomo tells her it is okay to love. And she finds her “word.”

I couldn’t believe how narcissist Liz was yet everyone adored her.

Did author Gilbert confide how much her journey to balance cost? Gilbert paid for the trip with an advance she received on a book she planned to write. So it was a journey with a manuscript due-date.

The screenplay is by director Ryan Murphy and Jennifer Salt. They left nothing out of the book, hence the long running time. I was bored after Italy. There were so many trite conversations about spirituality and balance and finding oneself, I cried too—of boredom.

IMDb.com lists Ryan Murphy of directing 81 episodes of the sexually-charged Nip/Tuck. There’s no sexual tension between Liz and her men. Bardem—who should have been exuding his raw sexual energy—plays Liz’s manservant.

Roberts, looking lovely and real (I loved those mosquito bites on her arms in India), cries a lot. Everybody cried. This was a journey laden with tears. I saw extras crying.

Movie stars of Roberts’ status require a strong equal-status director to actually direct them with a strong hand and stronger vision. Murphy, who has quickly risen to fame with his hugely successful TV series “Glee” is not up to the task.

Murphy must have given Roberts a wide perch for interpreting her presentation of Liz and the entire production. It is said they will work together on another project, a comedy to be released in 2012. Let’s hope Roberts meets up with Christian Troy. (Photo of Roberts with Swami Dharamdev of Hari Mandir, Pataudi, where “Eat, Pray and Love” was shot for three weeks in September–October last year.)

The Last Exorcism. Clever and makes you believe.

I just returned from my yearly ayahuasca retreat, this time at Tierra Vida Healing in Pucallpa, Peru. Among the books I brought along was Interview With an Exorcist: An Insider’s Look at the Devil, Demonic Possession, and the Path to Deliverance by Fr. José Antonio Fortea.

I have a complete library on exorcism and THE LAST EXORCISM is not about the Catholic Church’s highly regulated rite. It is set in the American Bible Belt.

As Michael W. Cuneo writes in American Exorcism: Expelling Demons in the Land of Plenty, the cultural phenomenon that is an essential part of neo-Pentecostal communities in the U.S., is “generally referred to as a ‘deliverance ministry.’ In the process, exorcism was converted from a rare and forbidding procedure into a kind of suburban home remedy.”

“Suburban home remedy” is the premise of THE LAST EXORCISM. God-fearing hillbillies are scared of demons and need carnival ministers to pluck those devils from their swollen bellies.

Rev. Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian) has been a fire and brimstone preacher since he was ten-years-old. He knows all the tricks of the trade. When a child dies in a botched exorcism, Marcus decides to have a documentary crew film him doing a real exorcism. It will show all the stage magic hokum that allows folks to believe a demon is being released from their bodies.

Marcus belittles the God-fearing nincompoops who believe they are possessed but, as he says, he’s got bills to pay. He is a jaded fraud. He picks a letter at random and off they go. Marcus’s film crew consists of Iris (Iris Bahr) and an unseen cameraman. To read the rest of my review, go to: reelrave.com/review/905.

The Universe was Born Purple. Historically, the color purple has been associated with royalty and power, but the secret of its power lies in the glands of tiny shellfish creatures.

The earliest archaeological evidence for the origins of purple dyes points to the Minoan civilization in Crete, about 1900 B.C. The ancient land of Canaan (“land of the purple”) was the center of the ancient purple dye industry. Rome, Egypt, and Persia all used purple as the imperial standard. Purple dyes were rare and expensive; only the rich had access to them.

A spectacular first photo from an orbiting $900 million space telescope reveals that the cosmos began as a stunning haze of purple, red, magenta and violet light—with a bright band in the center of the Milky Way.

It’s a composite snapshot of what remained of the fireball left by the Big Bang, the explosion that scientists say created the universe at the dawn of time, 13.7 billion years ago.

The “all-sky” photo was recently released and is the first of four promised by the European Space Agency from its Planck telescope.

The 5-foot-tall telescope, which took 16 years to build, was launched nearly a million miles into space 14 months ago. The light it recorded dates back to about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Read more: www.nypost.com/.