Film Box
Casted_Runes said:I just saw Poor Things and it was fantastic. In a sense, it’s like the “adults only” version of Barbie (2023) and gives a lot more of what I hoped for from that film: a fundamentally feminist narrative woven subtly within a fantasy tale. Both films are about a woman living a relatively charmed life - but as a prisoner of her specific environment. Something inside them longs to explore the outside, and they do, becoming fully-rounded human women in the process. Poor Things is set in a fantasy version of Victorian society and tells the simple story of a woman’s growth and self-discovery, in a remarkably odd and imaginative fashion. It’s funny, filthy, beautiful, moving, and one of the best films I’ve seen in the last five years.
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and written by Tony McNamara, based on a novel by Scottish author Alasdair Gray, the film stars Emma Stone as Bella Baxter, a “pretty r****d” in one man’s words. A Frankenstein-esque creation of Dr Godwin “God” Baxter (Willem Dafoe), she has been made from the corpse of a woman whom we see in the film’s first shot throwing herself from Tower Bridge. Baxter’s assistant, medical student Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), falls in love with Bella. But her longing for freedom is wetted by Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a “pretty moron” who takes her on a Grand Tour of Europe during which her childlike state matures, and she finds herself becoming a person apart from what men have always wanted of her.
This is a film with a lot of very frank sex and language, including a refreshingly nonexploitative but still explicit lesbian scene, yet it feels so much more mature than most other Hollywood films which deal with similar material. Lanthimos has explored such themes before in The Favourite (2018), his film about Queen Anne’s fictionalised (and probably fictional) semi-lesbian relationships with her ladies-in-waiting. Both films are leavened by black comedy, although Poor Things reaches further into fantasy. Bella Baxter’s sexual escapades across Europe could have seemed sordid or fetishised in another director’s hands, but Lanthimos handles them with good humour, honesty, and maturity.
The visual look of the film is gorgeous, using saturation, desaturation, black-and-white, fish eye lenses, and other techniques to mirror the emotional as well as physical landscape. The settings are characters in the plot. London, Lisbon, and Paris are evoked with as much magic realism as, say, Mordor or Narnia.
Perhaps most importantly, the characters are developed or revealed with a keen understanding of and compassion for their natures. This is a feminist text, but not preachily so. Bella Baxter is at one level a comment on the heroine of Victorian literature, the abused and “ruined” woman who must kill herself to earn our sympathy. Without even realising what he’s doing, Dr Baxter - himself a victim of a sadistic patriarch - rewrites Bella Baxter’s story so that she’s not just a prettily tragic suicide, but a New Woman, divorced from men’s hangups about sex and sexuality and who finds the tools to self-actualise. She’s every woman, but also her own woman. Not just a poor thing, or a pretty child, but a human undefined by her sexual choices and how her successive male jailers interpret them.
Rating: 4/4
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I love this review.
The book was amazing. I haven't seen the movie yet, I'm always terrified to see the movie for a book I really loved. I'm glad it sounds like it stands up to the absolute hilarity of book, which I celebrated as a feminist retelling of Frankenstein, but with the protagonist as a sympathetic monster the entire time.
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and written by Tony McNamara, based on a novel by Scottish author Alasdair Gray, the film stars Emma Stone as Bella Baxter, a “pretty r****d” in one man’s words. A Frankenstein-esque creation of Dr Godwin “God” Baxter (Willem Dafoe), she has been made from the corpse of a woman whom we see in the film’s first shot throwing herself from Tower Bridge. Baxter’s assistant, medical student Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), falls in love with Bella. But her longing for freedom is wetted by Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a “pretty moron” who takes her on a Grand Tour of Europe during which her childlike state matures, and she finds herself becoming a person apart from what men have always wanted of her.
This is a film with a lot of very frank sex and language, including a refreshingly nonexploitative but still explicit lesbian scene, yet it feels so much more mature than most other Hollywood films which deal with similar material. Lanthimos has explored such themes before in The Favourite (2018), his film about Queen Anne’s fictionalised (and probably fictional) semi-lesbian relationships with her ladies-in-waiting. Both films are leavened by black comedy, although Poor Things reaches further into fantasy. Bella Baxter’s sexual escapades across Europe could have seemed sordid or fetishised in another director’s hands, but Lanthimos handles them with good humour, honesty, and maturity.
The visual look of the film is gorgeous, using saturation, desaturation, black-and-white, fish eye lenses, and other techniques to mirror the emotional as well as physical landscape. The settings are characters in the plot. London, Lisbon, and Paris are evoked with as much magic realism as, say, Mordor or Narnia.
Perhaps most importantly, the characters are developed or revealed with a keen understanding of and compassion for their natures. This is a feminist text, but not preachily so. Bella Baxter is at one level a comment on the heroine of Victorian literature, the abused and “ruined” woman who must kill herself to earn our sympathy. Without even realising what he’s doing, Dr Baxter - himself a victim of a sadistic patriarch - rewrites Bella Baxter’s story so that she’s not just a prettily tragic suicide, but a New Woman, divorced from men’s hangups about sex and sexuality and who finds the tools to self-actualise. She’s every woman, but also her own woman. Not just a poor thing, or a pretty child, but a human undefined by her sexual choices and how her successive male jailers interpret them.
Rating: 4/4
more reviews at ijustsaw.art.blog
I love this review.
The book was amazing. I haven't seen the movie yet, I'm always terrified to see the movie for a book I really loved. I'm glad it sounds like it stands up to the absolute hilarity of book, which I celebrated as a feminist retelling of Frankenstein, but with the protagonist as a sympathetic monster the entire time.
Betty said:
I love this review.
The book was amazing. I haven't seen the movie yet, I'm always terrified to see the movie for a book I really loved. I'm glad it sounds like it stands up to the absolute hilarity of book, which I celebrated as a feminist retelling of Frankenstein, but with the protagonist as a sympathetic monster the entire time.
I just watched it recently, Betty! You'll love it!
I love this review.
The book was amazing. I haven't seen the movie yet, I'm always terrified to see the movie for a book I really loved. I'm glad it sounds like it stands up to the absolute hilarity of book, which I celebrated as a feminist retelling of Frankenstein, but with the protagonist as a sympathetic monster the entire time.
I just watched it recently, Betty! You'll love it!
“There’s nothing wrong with Ellen. It’s just that she loves too much.”
Oh, there’s something wrong with Ellen, all right. Possibly the first and probably the best of the “psycho girlfriend” genre in cinema, made famous by Glenn Close’s and Michael Douglas’ sleazy Fatal Attraction (1987) - and Clint Eastwood’s directorial debut Play Misty for Me (1971) - this 1945 film is the eerie portrait of one of the evilest, most pathological women in fiction. It’s also available on YouTube for free (which I wish I’d known before renting it via a streaming service!).
Ellen Berent (Gene Tierney) is a beautiful socialite who seduces a novelist, Richard Marland (Cornel Wilde), purely because he looks like her late father. Her lack of interest in him as a discrete entity is signalled early on when, not knowing his identity, she admits to not liking his book very much.
She’s apologetic on finding out he wrote it, and when it happens that they’ll be sharing a ranch in Mexico, where she and her family have gone to scatter her father’s ashes, a whirlwind romance leads to marriage. But Ellen wants only him, and for him to only want her, living alone together at the Back of the Moon (their rural retreat) without interference from either his writing, her family, or his crippled little brother (Darryl Hickman)…
Leave Her to Heaven, its title taken from a line in Hamlet where the old king’s ghost tells the prince to not seek vengeance against the widowed queen, draws heavily on Greek mythology. Ellen’s characterisation is inspired by the Electra complex, based on the story of a woman who fell in love with her own father. Of course, from a Freudian perspective, most little girls go through a period of being “in love” with their fathers. Ellen just never grew out of that period. The dialogue I quoted at the start is from her mother, in response to Richard’s questioning. She may be reassuring herself as much as Richard.
Filmed in lush Technicolour, this earlier film improves on both Misty and Attraction. It’s more disturbing than either, despite its U for Universal (G for General Audiences in America) rating. Neither of the later films was all that interested in their antagonists as characters, presenting them more as force-of-nature psychobitches without histories or motivations, less grounded in a detailed arc than many slasher villains. (Close pushed for a more psychologically astute ending to Attraction that happens to somewhat reflect Heaven’s, though test screenings led to the visceral but absurd finale that we got.)
Tierney is magnificent as Ellen Berent. Unlike Alex Forrest (the Close character), you can see why someone would like and maybe fall in love with her. She’s beautiful, yes, a sexual icon of her era, but that’s not all she is. She’s also convincingly kind and normal to people who don’t know her well, and even to people who do. When her sister Ruth (Jeanne Crain) finally blows up at her, it’s only after two violent incidents, a lot of provocation, and probably a lifetime of making excuses for her sister. We don’t really like to believe the worst of each other, especially those we’ve known for so long.
One of the joys of movies like this is thinking about their themes and hidden meanings, below the protective surface that censorship demands. My suspicion is that Ellen was a victim of incest by her father, which her mother maybe to some degree suspected but didn’t have the language to address, and this is what lies behind Ellen’s pathology. A film from 1945 cannot address this directly either, leaving you to wonder why it is that Ellen became so obsessed…
Sidenote: A supporting role is played by Vincent Price before he entered his horror phase. Unless you count this as a horror film, which in a way I do.
Rating: 4/4
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I just saw Kinds of Kindness and it was certainly an experience. A trilogy of short stories themed around sex, relationships, abuse, and power, it may be director/co-writer Yorgos Lanthimos’ coldest and most contemptuous film, with a title as playfully un-apt on a surface level as Todd Solondz’s Happiness (1998), another film about sad and neurotic people in a modern world where warmer feelings have been leached out. Kinds of Kindness is an absurdist comedy with humour as dark as a night in the mines, reminiscent here and there of the surrealist director David Lynch.
It probably isn’t for a lot of general moviegoers partly because it’s a film that doesn’t do much of the legwork with regards to meaning and intent for you, in fact not much at all, but perhaps largely because it’s so unrelievedly bleak, cruel, and cynical, with no major characters that are likeable or even charming really. The three stories star Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, and Willem Defoe in varied combinations of relationships with each other and playing different characters each time. The effect is a bit like watching cells break apart and coalesce under a microscope, which I think is an apt description of Lanthimos’ narrative approach here. His two prior films, The Favourite (2018) and Poor Things (2023), were historical dramas which although highly stylised and tied to the director’s particular vision, presented more in the way of three-act stories with clear goals.
Kinds of Kindness, on the other hand, is Lanthimos unmoored from considerations of closure and clarity or, well, kindness. Even when truly dreadful things happen to the characters - like self-harm, dismemberment, and date rape - they don’t grow or change or become kinder people as a result. Almost all of them are utterly selfish, manipulative, sometimes pathetic, sometimes controlling. The first story sees Plemons as a man whose life is dictated to the finest detail - from what he eats and what he reads to whether or not he has children - by his employer (Defoe). The second casts Plemons as a man whose wife (Stone) returns from an ill-fated boat trip and seems like a different person. The third forefronts Stone as a cultist seeking a prophesied woman who can bring people back from the dead. The stories are linked by a non-speaking (as I recall) character called RMF, an older man tangentially connected to the main players’ lives and sometimes used as a pawn by them.
The third is my favourite story, which is the one with the most narrative propulsion, mystery, and suspense. It also ends on a note so incredibly cynical it’s like the ending of a conte cruel or tale of the unexpected. The second story is the next best in my ranking, with a weird and compelling monologue by Stone about an Isle of Dogs that leads to an amusing end-credits sequence. The first story is good, but more of an aperitif for what follows.
The film opens with a perfect opening song choice: “Sweet Dreams” by Eurythmics, which contains the lyrics: “Some of them want to abuse you, some of them want to be abused.” If you find yourself struggling to understand Kinds of Kindness, that’s its thesis right there.
Rating: 3/4
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I just saw In a Violent Nature and it was really good. I would have thought that there were no more places to take the slasher film, a subgenre that’s been played both straight and ironically in just about every permutation imaginable. But this Canadian entry manages it, pitching somewhere between (very) black humour and a genuine example of the formula. It’s clearly a riff on the Jason Voorhees, Friday the 13th movies, to a point where you could call it a spiritual sequel, but its deconstruction of the formula expands to all movies about mad supernatural killers who stalk twenty-something teenagers.
It’s basically a psychological drama about what it would be like to be such a villain, the first film to seriously ask, ‘How does it feel, moment to moment, to be a motiveless horror movie construct?’ For a slasher fan, it sheds new light on all those Jason, Michael, Freddy, etcetera flicks that came before. That it’s also incredibly gruesome in its practical effects is a lovely bonus.
The killer here, like all his predecessors, does in fact have a crude motivation open to discussion by fans. And like all the great (and not-so-great) slasher movies of the past, what happens in the current storyline is motivated by horrific events in the past. A rural part of America is haunted by Johnny (Ry Barrett), the zombie of a boy who was killed by loggers in the so-called White Pines massacre. A group of young people find a locket by the remains of an old fire tower and take it, an event which is followed by Johnny’s emergence from his slumber.
The narrative is told mostly from his mute and undead perspective as he walks the woods, killing whomever he finds in search of the locket, often in the grisliest manner possible. Very little music plays as he goes his gory way and the rest of the film is largely matter-of-fact in presenting its plot. Its stroke of genius is in how it assembles all of the tropes and elements of a slasher film so that you can tell the exact same story from the victims’ perspectives, then turns them on their heads so that you see it only through the eyes of the killer.
Back when slashers were enjoying their heyday critics would complain that they would present themselves too much from the killer’s POV, which they found sadistic and often sexist, but really this wasn’t the case beyond certain shots. The main perspective always rested with the Final Girl and her cannon fodder friends. That’s why some of the worst slasher films are just nonentities walking in the woods and talking nonsense between kills.
One of In a Violent Nature’s best scenes is when we hear the story of the White Pines massacre. All slashers are at heart campfire tales, the sort of overdone rickety tale-telling that you do with your friends, and as the tale is told here we see the camera move behind and around the circle of characters, having shown that Johnny is in the woods just beyond their gathering.
We only glimpse the interpersonal relationships that these characters share, for example, that one of them is going through a tough time and another doesn’t like him, a conversation glimpsed through a window of the inevitable cabin in the woods. The more traditional version of this film would show us inside the cabin and have us observe all this character stuff. In a Violent Nature reveals only what scattered bits and pieces Johnny would see or hear.
This definitely isn’t a film for everyone. There were walkouts in my screening, mostly of couples on dates. I’d hazard a guess that they were expecting a straightforward slasher piece with loud music, melodrama, and easily digestible themes. A lot of In a Violent Nature at a surface level is just walking around through beautiful cinematography (the woods have rarely looked so lovely in this genre) punctuated by extremely gory kills without much chase or mainstream-style suspense.
It’s probably too weird for casual genre fans and is aimed more squarely at those with a nigh-on obsession with the genre, as well as more critical viewers who’ll enjoy the careful and intelligent deconstruction of narrative formula. In its way, it does for the slasher film what Scream (1996) did, though inevitably with far less cultural impact.
I liked the gore, and I liked the moving nature of the monster, who despite his atrocities accords to a nature that wasn’t of his making, really. A monologue near the end of the film captures this perfectly. The title “In a Violent Nature” has two meanings, one nature itself, the other the nature of the beast. And how those two natures unite in a sad little boy called Johnny.
Rating: 3.5/4
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