Im very curious what movie you disliked so much but you seem unwilling to say it on your frankenhooker post (and ignore this if you're uninterested in saying at all)
nah, i was just trying to not be a mood killer in the liveblog. but it was poor things. everything about that movie felt like the film equivalent of nails on a chalk-board, at once noisy and incoherent and stupidly on the nose but without anything deeper to say and expensive when your average b-movie managed the same thing using tape and a budget of rolled up fivers and favours from your mum's boyfriend who's alright at a bit of computer effects
and i get pretentious and a tad obsessive when i see claims of "you just don't get it, it's about this you see? she's taking control of her own story!" and im like. no no i get it. i just think it was shallow at best, offensive on multiple points, and also a wannabe camp attempt at shock value (do people watch genuinely shocking camp films anymore?) many things. so many things, several of which ive not seen anyone mention, but then i was trying not to over-obsess about a film that i disliked so intensely, so i didnt go too deep in my search (the lack of intersectionality in feminist masterpiece "if you're rich, you can follow your dreams and self-actualise and even slum it with the personality-less whores for a bit, and also take a brief moment to feel bad about poor people even if they may "rape and rob and kill you" (seriously what was that bit about?)" the ableism in emma stone's performance, the male gaze inherent in so many of the sex scenes, and perhaps subjectively but the dullness of the sex scenes, the het-focus with a single rushed "women stick together" bit of queer sex, although the other woman had no plotline of her own in this film and just randomly reappeared at the end for some cheap unearned catharsis, the way the storyline is structured like three different movies squashed together, and also the flatness of every dude in the story that still seemed to try to say that some of them were actually quite nice, because idk. they weren't foaming at the mouth villains or whatever, this one's a Nice Guy. and this one's a Eunuch. moving on. if emma stone isn't a born sexy yesterday, then she's doing an ableist caricature of a performance of "weird quirky girl who functions Differently." the joke is, it's both)
like. ive seen better explorations of frankenstein. ive seen better explorations of sex workers. ive seen better explorations of women gaining agency. ive seen better explorations of disabled women. ive seen better explorations of patriarchy, intersectional feminism, socialism (seriously, the way this movie approached politics seemed to be "if we insert a witty line here about being the means of our own production, that's the same as political analysis, right?")
many of those things ive seen specifically done better in 1990 b-movie horror frankenhooker, and as for the rest, i don't have to search all that hard either. put on a john waters film and you've got more going forya for a start.
just. was it good or did Whimsically Naive (but very sexy) emma stone with slightly thicker eyebrows just say blunt things and walk funny?
you didn't ask for any of this rant. you have no idea how many times ive written drafts for this movie and then discarded them. fuckit, i will be self-indulgent once (1 time)
