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Post by Ryan_MYeah on Dec 19, 2023 20:50:39 GMT
Poly representation for the win.
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rhodoraonline
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Your Generosity Hides Something Dirtier and Meaner
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Post by rhodoraonline on Dec 19, 2023 22:47:31 GMT
Poly representation for the win. Did you see the movie? Your review?
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Post by Ryan_MYeah on Dec 19, 2023 23:05:24 GMT
Poly representation for the win. Did you see the movie? Your review? I did. I’m still digesting it and want to see it again, but it was amazing. I wasn’t as entranced as I was for The Favourite (that’s a tall order regardless), but Lanthimos shows why he’s better when he isn’t directing his own scripts. Absolutely bonkers in world building, and just as thematically deep, walking a nice gamut of themes ranging from expression and discovery of sexuality, god given choice vs man-made enforcement of roles, specifically the unrealistic expectations placed on children forced into adulthood, and enforced normalcy in an unequal society that is anything but normal. Visually it’s just sumptuous, and the photography and production design stars in their own right. Ensemble cast across the board is aces, including and especially Emma Stone’s contender for performance of the year, but Mark Ruffalo’s prim tantrum child is no slouch either. i loved it, I loved it, I loved it.
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Post by pacinoyes on Dec 20, 2023 0:01:28 GMT
I sorta reviewed this in the Great Performance Thread (Stone - in the performance of 2023 - the fact that she's losing awards to Gladstone is........depressing........and wrong tbh) but I will say that there is no other film in 2023 I've seen so far where you can't guess what the next scene will be, look or feel like or the tone of it....in that way it's genuinely exciting and involving. One of the years best - maybe just behind Past Lives for me atm - and that's mostly because at the very end it starts to run out of gas and is more (too) on the nose which is always a thing with Lanthimos.......but still......
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Post by countjohn on Dec 20, 2023 0:58:18 GMT
And here we gooooooo...... I thought this was a complete piece of trash. The worst movie of the year and probably of the decade so far. Terrible pacing and the vaunted cinematography is faux arthouse posing with no point of view. But the biggest problem is I just got nothing from Bella as a character. At the beginning Stone is doing a fairly standard robot girl routine with clipped speech and stilted movements. Then suddenly she reads a book and starts acting like a relatively normal person and talking about "philosophy" and "socialism" (putting those in quotes because saying the words is about all she says about them, I guess if she'd expounded on that at all they wouldn't have been able to have another sex scene every ten minutes). My first reaction was negative to Stone's performance but the character as written is just so ill conceived I'm not sure there was anything for the actor to do about it, there were just no meaningful character beats so everything the character does is going to feel false. And I'll just say it, the sex made me pretty uncomfortable. It's established that she has the mind of a toddler and she's speaking in third person baby talk and we're supposed to think it's funny and cute that all these men are having sex with her. Then just the sheer amount of it, I'm not averse to graphic sex but they easily could have just had 3 or 4 sex scenes here and used the surplus runtime to give Bella character traits beyond liking sex. Giving this a 2/10 with an extra point for the art department doing great work and the score. The dramatic content is devoid of anything good. When talking about its BP chances some people have compared it to Shape of Water and EEAAO in terms of "weird" BP winners. While I am not a fan of either of those movies either I think that is a deeply insulting comparison. There are at least some positive things I can point to about those movies, other things where I can understand why other people liked them even if I didn't, and things I might have changed about them to theoretically make them good movies. I see none of that here, this is just a giant turd and I'm surprised so many people beyond the usual reddit brigade that goes for anything superficially "weird" or "edgy" are going all in for this. but I will say that there is no other film in 2023 I've seen so far where you can't guess what the next scene will be, look or feel like or the tone of it....in that way it's genuinely exciting and involving. I would say the opposite, I guessed every major plot shift pretty quickly. When they're sitting on the bench talking about how they need money I assumed she'd become a prostitute and then we'd have a big montage of her having sex with all these weird men, I figured she'd run off with the old husband and then he'd turn out to be evil and she'd find out why she killed herself in the first place, exc. Then just in general if you were going to guess what was going to happen in the next scene every time you could just always guess "Bella's about to have sex" and be right a pretty significant chunk of the time.
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Post by finniussnrub on Dec 20, 2023 3:25:00 GMT
And here we gooooooo...... I thought this was a complete piece of trash. The worst movie of the year and probably of the decade so far. Terrible pacing and the vaunted cinematography is faux arthouse posing with no point of view. But the biggest problem is I just got nothing from Bella as a character. At the beginning Stone is doing a fairly standard robot girl routine with clipped speech and stilted movements. Then suddenly she reads a book and starts acting like a relatively normal person and talking about "philosophy" and "socialism" (putting those in quotes because saying the words is about all she says about them, I guess if she'd expounded on that at all they wouldn't have been able to have another sex scene every ten minutes). My first reaction was negative to Stone's performance but the character as written is just so ill conceived I'm not sure there was anything for the actor to do about it, there were just no meaningful character beats so everything the character does is going to feel false. And I'll just say it, the sex made me pretty uncomfortable. It's established that she has the mind of a toddler and she's speaking in third person baby talk and we're supposed to think it's funny and cute that all these men are having sex with her. Then just the sheer amount of it, I'm not averse to graphic sex but they easily could have just had 3 or 4 sex scenes here and used the surplus runtime to give Bella character traits beyond liking sex. Giving this a 2/10 with an extra point for the art department doing great work and the score. The dramatic content is devoid of anything good. When talking about its BP chances some people have compared it to Shape of Water and EEAAO in terms of "weird" BP winners. While I am not a fan of either of those movies either I think that is a deeply insulting comparison. There are at least some positive things I can point to about those movies, other things where I can understand why other people liked them even if I didn't, and things I might have changed about them to theoretically make them good movies. I see none of that here, this is just a giant turd and I'm surprised so many people beyond the usual reddit brigade that goes for anything superficially "weird" or "edgy" are going all in for this. but I will say that there is no other film in 2023 I've seen so far where you can't guess what the next scene will be, look or feel like or the tone of it....in that way it's genuinely exciting and involving. I would say the opposite, I guessed every major plot shift pretty quickly. When they're sitting on the bench talking about how they need money I assumed she'd become a prostitute and then we'd have a big montage of her having sex with all these weird men, I figured she'd run off with the old husband and then he'd turn out to be evil and she'd find out why she killed herself in the first place, exc. Then just in general if you were going to guess what was going to happen in the next scene every time you could just always guess "Bella's about to have sex" and be right a pretty significant chunk of the time.
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Post by Kings_Requiem on Dec 20, 2023 3:39:17 GMT
My thoughts largely echo countjohn's. This was just a repetitive slog. Absolute randomness mixed in with a ridiculous amount of sex scenes. I'm not sex or nudity averse in movies, but this was just excessive. It felt like every other scene. This is the first Lanthimos film that hasn't felt like he was in complete control of the narrative, lacks his usual precision. In the end it just feels like a big goof and not in a fun way.
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Post by finniussnrub on Dec 20, 2023 3:48:36 GMT
Well unlike the prudes above who faint from sex scenes evidently (Just a joke gentlemen), loved every bit of this madness, though I see why some might want to cut Abbott, I didn't mind because I thoroughly enjoyed what they did there, and it also did certainly tie the film from front to back. Found the narrative moved beautifully from gorgeous setting to gorgeous setting in the depiction of the discovery of life, through hilarious and grotesque means, though also occasionally strangely life affirming at times as well. The performances are wonderfully insane, and Stone in particular is extraordinary in successfully pulling off every extreme choice with such ease. With a character, that isn't like anyone we see, who develops in a purposefully completely different way, of extremes of a brain that isn't developed properly and isn't in a body that is developed properly, however as unorthodox as it is, I felt Lanthimos/McNamara/Stone created an internal logic, that made sense for the character, even if it wouldn't make sense for reality.
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Post by RiverleavesElmius on Dec 20, 2023 4:38:58 GMT
And here we gooooooo...... I thought this was a complete piece of trash. The worst movie of the year and probably of the decade so far. Terrible pacing and the vaunted cinematography is faux arthouse posing with no point of view. But the biggest problem is I just got nothing from Bella as a character. At the beginning Stone is doing a fairly standard robot girl routine with clipped speech and stilted movements. Then suddenly she reads a book and starts acting like a relatively normal person and talking about "philosophy" and "socialism" (putting those in quotes because saying the words is about all she says about them, I guess if she'd expounded on that at all they wouldn't have been able to have another sex scene every ten minutes). My first reaction was negative to Stone's performance but the character as written is just so ill conceived I'm not sure there was anything for the actor to do about it, there were just no meaningful character beats so everything the character does is going to feel false. And I'll just say it, the sex made me pretty uncomfortable. It's established that she has the mind of a toddler and she's speaking in third person baby talk and we're supposed to think it's funny and cute that all these men are having sex with her. Then just the sheer amount of it, I'm not averse to graphic sex but they easily could have just had 3 or 4 sex scenes here and used the surplus runtime to give Bella character traits beyond liking sex. Giving this a 2/10 with an extra point for the art department doing great work and the score. The dramatic content is devoid of anything good. When talking about its BP chances some people have compared it to Shape of Water and EEAAO in terms of "weird" BP winners. While I am not a fan of either of those movies either I think that is a deeply insulting comparison. There are at least some positive things I can point to about those movies, other things where I can understand why other people liked them even if I didn't, and things I might have changed about them to theoretically make them good movies. I see none of that here, this is just a giant turd and I'm surprised so many people beyond the usual reddit brigade that goes for anything superficially "weird" or "edgy" are going all in for this. but I will say that there is no other film in 2023 I've seen so far where you can't guess what the next scene will be, look or feel like or the tone of it....in that way it's genuinely exciting and involving. I would say the opposite, I guessed every major plot shift pretty quickly. When they're sitting on the bench talking about how they need money I assumed she'd become a prostitute and then we'd have a big montage of her having sex with all these weird men, I figured she'd run off with the old husband and then he'd turn out to be evil and she'd find out why she killed herself in the first place, exc. Then just in general if you were going to guess what was going to happen in the next scene every time you could just always guess "Bella's about to have sex" and be right a pretty significant chunk of the time. You're out of your fucking mind! Honestly, this is such a braindead take I may put you on ignore just because of it. When 90% of people are seeing it for the brilliant masterpiece it is, maybe it's high time to consider the problem is YOU.
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Post by RiverleavesElmius on Dec 20, 2023 4:50:43 GMT
Ugh! I fucking hate people! They ruin (or at least try to ruin) wonderful things like no other creature in this stupid fucking mistake of a planet.
This film is a MASTERPIECE! The best film of the year, the best film since LICORICE PIZZA and the 2nd best film of the decade after LP, funniest film of the decade and one of the funniest films ever made. Emma Stone gives a MAGNIFICENT Career-best performance that is THE greatest performance of the year and TOWERS over all the rest like Blanchett's in TAR last year. But she WILL win that Oscar.
This movie's unpredictable genius and nonstop hilarity brought me so much joy and hope. A triumph on EVERY level.
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Post by RiverleavesElmius on Dec 20, 2023 4:55:00 GMT
Honestly, if you ask me if I'd rather talk with a Trump supporter or with someone damaged enough to hate a genius jewel like this, I think I'd need to flip a fucking coin. 🤬
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Post by countjohn on Dec 20, 2023 5:38:16 GMT
This film is a MASTERPIECE! The best film of the year, the best film since LICORICE PIZZA and the 2nd best film of the decade after LP At least you have no. 1 right
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Post by pacinoyes on Dec 20, 2023 10:46:40 GMT
Well unlike the prudes above who faint from sex scenes evidently (Just a joke gentlemen), loved every bit of this madness, though I see why some might want to cut Abbott, I didn't mind because I thoroughly enjoyed what they did there, and it also did certainly tie the film from front to back. Found the narrative moved beautifully from gorgeous setting to gorgeous setting in the depiction of the discovery of life, through hilarious and grotesque means, though also occasionally strangely life affirming at times as well. The performances are wonderfully insane, and Stone in particular is extraordinary in successfully pulling off every extreme choice with such ease. With a character, that isn't like anyone we see, who develops in a purposefully completely different way, of extremes of a brain that isn't developed properly and isn't in a body that is developed properly, however as unorthodox as it is, I felt Lanthimos/McNamara/Stone created an internal logic, that made sense for the character, even if it wouldn't make sense for reality. Well said ^ There is not a performer I can think of - and basically all I do is think about acting (and, um Tennis) all the time - who has conveyed the darkly comic range that Emma Stone has - within satire (!), within 1 year (!?!) - this year. She has also done it for sex btw - when is the last time an actress has used sex - not been used BY sex - as Emma Stone in 2023? We get very few English language satires anyway, and they almost never work either ..........what Emma Stone is doing here and in The Curse is genuinely a different stylistically form of acting within her 2 roles. Her performances are not just out of this world but transcend the world of mere mundane "reality" too.........it is not only odd to see an actress give performances of such range - just physically for one thing here - but to do it within such a confined ironic space - and be free of those confines and not be random, repetitive or dull. At one point she says something to Ruffalo like "So you'd marry me or kill me - those are my only choices" in such a way (in the scene overall) where she - not the dialog, but the actor - satirizes him, herself and fulfills the movies purpose at the exact same time ....... This IS the PTA / DDL combo that people long for .......what could Lanthimos ask of her next? What wouldn't she do - what couldn't she do? - in service of anything he can create?
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Post by wilcinema on Dec 20, 2023 13:33:33 GMT
Yorgos's best. It's been on my mind since Venice.
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Post by stephen on Dec 23, 2023 0:12:01 GMT
Me watching Poor Things as the people behind me leave midway through:
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futuretrunks
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Post by futuretrunks on Dec 23, 2023 0:47:56 GMT
It's decent, perhaps Lanthimos' best film, though that's not saying much. Stone is good, Ruffalo is hilarious. Probably the strongest expression of Lanthimos' comic sensibility. But it's far from a great film; I spent so much of the movie quite apathetic.
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Post by finniussnrub on Dec 23, 2023 0:56:29 GMT
Me watching Poor Things as the people behind me leave midway through: What scene was it? For my crowd it was the dad with his sons scene.
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Post by stephen on Dec 23, 2023 1:00:53 GMT
Me watching Poor Things as the people behind me leave midway through: What scene was it? For my crowd it was the dad with his sons scene. I think it was the part with the dude spider-creeping up to feel her hair.
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Post by mikediastavrone96 on Dec 23, 2023 1:24:44 GMT
I thought it was really great, though I do feel in the last 30 minutes when it had the chance to continue expanding it instead atrophies into a more conventional, tidy narrative. The film is at its best when it keeps up this madcap energy but it instead goes through the exact redundant narrative progression it feels like any other storyteller would immediately go to. But it already kept up that high frequency for so long that I'm just splitting hairs for why the film is not a masterpiece imo.
I find the feminist discourse around the film very interesting. Those dismissing it because of the nature of Stone's character having a newborn's brain - that she cannot consent to any of her experiences or is just stumbling into them like Forrest Gump with no agency - seem to me to be ignoring the nature of genre and how it often functions as metaphor. But I've also seen some say her sexual awakening is what ultimately liberates her and idk, the vast majority of her sexual experiences are blatantly exploitative and she finally claims her agency at the time where she is most settled in her sexuality. I definitely think the movie is feminist - this movie is as concerned with patriarchal forces looking to trap and exploit women as any movie this side of Barbie - but how we get there is more nuanced than the dichotomies I'm seeing. I'm glad the film is pushing back against sexual repression, though, especially on film now that it seems we're turning a corner from the incredibly chaste 2010s.
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Post by stephen on Dec 23, 2023 2:20:36 GMT
As for my thoughts on the film, I didn't think it was as perfectly calibrated as The Favourite, and indeed I do feel it could probably have done with a bit of deft tightening here and there, but for all of its excess it never felt exhaustive, which I feel it easily could have. Stone's performance is like watching a one-man band perform a grand symphony while navigating a tightrope across Niagara Falls in a thunderstorm, where there are so many places that it could have gone wrong that it is a flat-out miracle that she made it to the other side with such skillful alacrity without missing a single beat. It's not just awards-caliber work; it's decade-defining stuff.
But what floored me even more than Stone, if only because he had a higher bar to clear for me considering I usually can't stand him when he goes over-the-top, was Ruffalo. Somehow, he managed to modulate his overcooked tendencies to a character that is so ludicrously buffoonish that to underplay it in any way would cause it to fall apart. Duncan Wedderburn feels like the odious yin to Ken's yang this year; two sides of the same goofy coin, and I found myself delighting every time Ruffalo cropped back up in the story even after I felt his part was done. Dafoe was predictably great and despite having on paper the part most outre role to play, he was perhaps the most grounded of the entire ensemble. Also have to give shoutouts to my girl Kathryn Hunter for carving her Rylance-esque path of scene-stealing supporting parts, and Hanna Schygulla's fantastic all-too-brief scenes on the cruise liner.
Also, come on, Barbie may have burned the world's resources on pink paint but that doesn't justify it winning Production Design awards over this film, which feels like Gilliam with an actual budget behind it.
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tylosaur
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Post by tylosaur on Dec 23, 2023 8:25:28 GMT
This is the first new film I've seen since Parasite where I came out immediately yearning to watch it again. This is my favorite film of the decade so far. Stone and Ruffalo absolutely crush it.
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Post by Billy_Costigan on Dec 24, 2023 6:03:29 GMT
There's a lot to like but I'm conflicted. It's mostly pretty great but it's better in the first half when it leans into the comedic absurdity. The 3rd act becomes too preachy. Jarrod Carmicheal's character is completely unecessary. There was no real subtlety and it seems like his only purpose is spell out the themes and ideas to the audience. I didn't mind the sex scenes but it seemed like the prostitution scenes went on for too long. I felt like we got the point after the first john. I don't know why we needed 4-5 more. Regarding the ending. I don't know how I feel about the timing of finding out about the ex husband. It didn't feel all that necessary in first place. If they did want to address it, I think they could have done so earlier in the story. Coming home and reuniting with Godwin felt like her journey came full circle. Going out AGAIN and getting trapped at this point felt off. It seemed like we were wrapping up only to add another 20 mins. It reminded me of Django Unchained after Candie Land Emma Stone is perfect. This is the best performance of her career and she should win the Oscar. It's the best of the decade so far. This is also one of my favorite Mark Ruffalo performances. Best Supporting Actor is stacked but I wouldn't mind seeing him win for this.
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forksforest
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Post by forksforest on Dec 24, 2023 6:52:10 GMT
I haven’t walked out of the theater feeling like “this is why I love movies” this year until Poor Things, although The Holdovers came close. It hit all the notes for me and left me wanting to engage further. Gorgeous production, eerie but appropriate score, hilariously absurd and well acted all around. Like others, I feel like Ruffalo is pretty lackluster if not a sore spot in ensembles (eg Spotlight), but my god, who knew this caricature of a role would be so perfect for him. Emma Stone, idk, she always manages to surprise? It’s strange, I’ve never loved her as an actress but she really has been hitting it out of the park with her choices ever since La La Land.
My favorite by Lanthimos by far - I enjoyed but wasn’t as hyped about The Favorite as everyone else.
I get why people find the third act was unnecessary but I think it rounded out her story nicely and fit better to have us revisit her past, with the agency and knowledge she’d gathered from the first 2/3s of the film/her experience. But I will say I didn’t really care for Carmichael’s part here, overall whatever, it was still great to see Stone play off him and his role in her quest.
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Post by Pittsnogle_Goggins on Dec 26, 2023 22:34:26 GMT
Absolutely loved this. It did get a bit too repetitive in Paris and drag too much after she returned to London but it was overall pretty great. Stone is absolutely worthy of Best Actress and would make a deserving winner. Ruffalo was quite amusing as well.
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Drish
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Post by Drish on Jan 8, 2024 17:22:02 GMT
@viced, what did you think of this??? Only 2 stars?
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