Sometimes I feel a few filmmakers are just trolling us by making some of the worst movies imaginable only to have A-listers willing to appear in them and critics savor them.
I’ll admit Yorgous Lanthimos is an acquired taste. Yet, I think he’s trying so hard to be the next John Waters, except Waters actually knew he was making bad movies and his throw it all on the wall attitude showed in his movies. He also didn’t take himself too seriously as his style of filmmaking was his soapbox. Lanthimos like Taiki Waititi thinks his bad taste should be hoisted up as something more special like a kindergarten student who brings home the worst drawings ever and wants them placed on the refrigerator door.
So much was made about Emma Stone shaving her head in Bugonia that I think the Oscar voters say it as something more than it was. Her performance as Michelle Fuller, the CEO of a major pharmaceutical company in the Atlanta area, is mostly a reactionary role. She’s kidnapped by the deranged Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons), a conspiracy theorists who actually works at a lower level job at the same company. With help from his cousin, Don (Aidan Delbis), who is on the autism spectrum, they sneak on to her property, knock her out, and take her back to their place in an isolated old country house.
Teddy believes that Michelle and other bigwigs are aliens. He’s actually a psychotic person and lacks any sympathy even though his mother, Sandy (Alicia Silverstone), is in a coma as the result of participating in a clinical trial for a drug Michelle’s company was developing.
Also, Teddy is a victim of sexual assault by his former babysitter, Casey Boyd (Stravos Halkias) who has now become a county deputy. (I like that for legal reasons, it’s never really mentioned which metro-Atlanta county sheriff’s office he works for. Also, Halkias is a little too much of a big guy to be a law enforcement officer.)
All this would make sense that Teddy is having mental issues and only can get Don to participate because of the autism. Yet, I feel this movie also makes autism look like it’s something really bad. There is something seriously wrong with Tedd and this movie tries to use sexual assault and personal trauma to explain it. Lanthimos thinks he’s turning them into a modern-day version of George and Lenny but it feels more out of touch especially in this time.
This is a remake of the South Korean movie Save the Green Planet! But it also reminded me somewhat of The Rapture in which Mimi Rogers plays a promiscuous woman who becomes a born-again Christian and starts a family. After the murder of her husband (David Duchovny), she and her daughter believe they’re living in End Times and began to prepare for the Apocalypse. It was a low-budget movie but at least the performances (Duchovny aside) kept you wonder if Rogers’ character has lost her mind up to the end when the truth is revealed.
The problem here is neither Plemons nor Stone make their character’s the least bit sympathetic, so we really don’t care what happens to them. And when the movie might be trying in the final act, it goes off the rails. I’m going to spoil it but you’ll thank me. It turns out Michelle actually is an alien and she was working with other aliens who exist in a realm that looks like something out of Barberella meats Perversions of Science to conduct a “human experiment.”
And it ends with Michelle and the other aliens deciding that they need to kill off all human life form on the planet. So, the movie ends with everyone on Earth, including you and I, dying because it was all a human experiment.
Didn’t South Park do this exact same thing over 20 years ago? Yet, when they did it, there was some satirical humor there. This is like a middle finger.
But the real middle finger is the fact this movie actually got a nomination for Best Picture and Stone got a Best Lead Actress nomination. Yet Chase Infiniti didn’t receive squat for her role in One Battle After Another. A few years back, Jimmy Kimmel, who had hosted the Oscars, criticized the decision of voters to nominate Don’t Look Up, which divided audiences and critics, while overlooking the megahit Spider-Man: No Way Home, which both critics and audiences like.
I think voters just see certain names on the credits and just decide it should be nominated. Stone is not a bad actress. I just feel she reads her press too much lately.
One thing I will give this movie credit for is finally showing how heavy a severed head is. On average, a human head weighs 10-12 pounds. And if you get hit with one coming right at you at full blast, it will knock you out at least. It’s not a giant hacky-sack.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 