Mad Science and Mad Men
Reviews and Comments by Ken Burke
I invite you to join me on a regular basis to see how my responses to current cinematic offerings compare to the critical establishment, which I’ll refer to as either the CCAL (Collective Critics at Large) if they’re supportive or the OCCU (Often Cranky Critics Universe) when they go negative. However, due to COVID concerns I’m mostly addressing streaming options with limited visits to theaters, where I don’t think I’ve missed much anyway, though better options may be on the horizon. (Note: Anything in bold blue [some may look near purple] is a link to something more in the review.)
My reviews’ premise: “You can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself.”
(from "Garden Party" by Rick Nelson and the Stone Canyon Band, 1972 album of the same name)
In that I saw both films reviewed this week just before the Oscars broadcast I wasn’t able to get to them until after the fact, so I’ll try here to provide their due without belaboring details too much. (Shocking, I know.) Speaking of the Oscars, since they’ve been awarded for the 2023 releases you can refer to my predictions posting to see what I got right (16 of 23, 70%) and wrong, which you can also compare to the experts at Variety where they got 15 correct for 65%. Where I didn’t predict a winner the Academy only awarded 1 of my preferences (Poor Things, Makeup and Hair Styling) while Variety also got 1 preference (The Last Repair Shop, Documentary Short Film) when predicting something else, so I've come out about even with those who seemingly know more than me, ha ha!
SHORT TAKES
If you can abide plot spoilers read on, but this blog’s intended for those who’ve seen the film or want to save some $ (as well as recognizing those readers like me who just aren’t that tech-savvy). To help any of you who want to learn more details yet avoid these all-important plot-reveals I’ll identify any give-away sentences/sentence-clusters with colors plus arrows:
⇒The first and last words will be noted with arrows and red.⇐ OK, now continue on if you prefer.
Here’s the trailer:
(Use the full screen button in the image’s lower right to enlarge its size;
activate the same button or use “esc” keyboard key to return to normal.)
Clearly, Poor Things is the oddest, most extreme film of the 2024 Best Picture Oscar nominees (admittedly, even more so than the gloriously-created-world of Barbie [Greta Gerwig, 2023; review in our August 17, 2023 posting] my preference for Best Production Design), with a clear Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931)-like-vibe as a mad-scientist-surgeon in what seems (mostly) to be late-19th-century London (with a stitched-up-face reminiscent of Frankenstein’s monster, the result of his father performing experiments on him), Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), finds the body of a suicidal woman, Victoria (Emma Stone)—as we learn more about her later—with her unborn child, so, in his own strange experiment, he replaces her brain with that of the fetus, then reanimates her, but she’s highly attractive with the only scar on the rear of her neck under her extremely-long-hair. At first, with her infant brain, this young woman, now called Bella, has no memory of her previous life but sees Godwin (whom she ironically calls “God”) as a sort of father as she struggles to find speech, balance, understanding of the world around her, even as she’s increasingly-irresistible to Godwin’s assistant, Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), who proposes to her. In the meantime, she discovers the sexual joy of masturbation, wants plenty of it, frequently, yet Max wants to save her virginity for marriage (he later learns of how she came to be), so instead she runs off to Lisbon with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a sleazy lawyer Godwin hired to draw up the marriage contract for Max.
Bella’s brain begins to mature rapidly (It also grew to better lodge in her skull?), resulting in rejection of Duncan’s controlling-attempts so he turns to drinking and gambling, finally winning a huge sum, but she gives it to some shady crew members who promise to use it to aid the poor (as if!), leaving Duncan unable to pay for the rest of the trip; they’re dropped off in Marseille, make their way to Paris where she finds funds working in a brothel, exasperated Duncan leaving her. ⇒As events continue, Duncan's in a London mental hospital, Godwin’s about to die, Max finds Duncan who tells him Bella's in Paris so Max contacts her; she returns to London with the wedding now on again. However, the ceremony’s interrupted by General Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbott), who tells Bella she’s actually Victoria, married to him, so she goes to his home only to find out how violently-cruel he is. He tries to force her to drink a sedative prior to being genitally-mutilated, but when she throws the liquid in his face he passes out. Godwin dies peacefully, Bella and Max operate on Alfie, putting a goat’s brain in his skull so that he now just peacefully munches grass while they have a happy life.⇐
The costumes, makeup and hairstyling, along with the production design are all marvelously over the top, winning Oscars in each of these 3 categories (plus 8 other noms); however, the biggest win was for Stone who, surprisingly for many predictors—me and Variety included—won the Actress in a Leading Role award over the presumptive-favorite, Lily Gladstone in Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese, 2023 [review in our November 9, 2023 posting]), who some say, despite her winning this award from the Screen Actors Guild, should have been competing for Supporting Actress given the amount of her on-screen-time in that lengthy film (but then she’d have been up against eventual-winner Da’Vine Joy Randolph from The Holdovers [Alexander Payne, 2023; review in our December 13, 2023 posting], so Gladstone faced a difficult path no matter how she chose to compete for an Oscar). Poor Things is still in 700 domestic (U.S.-Canada) theaters even after 14 weeks, but you can also find it streaming free on Hulu, for rent on Apple TV+ for $5.99, yet a week or so ago when I saw it the only choice was a purchase for $19.99 on Amazon, Apple TV+, etc., so I did (you can celebrate your now-more-affordable-options; I'll celebrate that I now own it when it doesn't seem to be available for sale anymore). It’s made $34 million at the box-office (prior to the Oscars), $108.7 million worldwide, may make more now as Oscar wins should stir up some curiosity.
It’s #8 on my 2023 Top 10 list, with the CCAL highly in support—Rotten Tomatoes 92% positive reviews, Metacritic 88% average score. If you’d like to know more about it, this video (10:09 [ad interrupts at 5:00]) does a marvelous job of exploring inspirations, symbolism, meaning, etc. without getting into the realm of Spoilers. I’ll close with my usual tactic of a Musical Metaphor, which, in this case, may be as odd as the film, but what came to me in an inspiration after watching a PBS documentary about my fellow-Texan-singer/songwriter was Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” (1963 album of the same name) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8Jz3VW7rYk with lyrics that could easily come from Max about his lost Bella just as they could come from her about her constantly-evolving/unresolved persona: “In dreams, I walk with you / In dreams, I talk to you/ In dreams, you’re mine all of the time / We’re together in dreams […] In beautiful dreams.” If nothing else, the content of this song (also used for spooky-impact in another “out there” film, Blue Velvet [David Lynch,1986]) speaks to the dreamlike presence of Poor Things, a unique trip I encourage you to consider taking.
Here’s the trailer:
The Zone of Interest is a marvelously-subtle-but-ultimately-disturbing film that implies the horrors of the Holocaust during WW II without directly showing any of those atrocities. Somewhat based on a 2014 novel by Martin Amis, a fictional story inspired by historical people and events, this adaptation (written by Glazer) is even more historically-focused on the juxtaposition of Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), Commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1943, in his official and family existences. We see Höss, his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller, in another fine role from last year, in addition to her wife-accused-of-murdering-her-husband in Anatomy of a Fall [Justine Triet, 2023; review in our January 24, 2024 posting], for which she received an Oscar nomination as Best Actress in a Leading Role), and their 5 young children living in relative luxury while just over the wall of their spacious garden we know that horrors are occurring on a daily basis, which we “witness” only from the audio of screams, gunshots, and a frequent noise buried in the soundtrack which sounds to me like a burning furnace. Höss is fully dedicated to his assignment, even approving of the design for a new crematorium which will be more efficient, accommodating a larger number of victims, yet he also comes across as a caring father who frequently takes his children to the nearby river to play.
To his disgust, though, one day on such an outing he finds human remains in the river, gets his children home quickly, then dresses down his workers for being so careless with their operations. Based on his success at this post, Höss is promoted to be Deputy Inspector of all the concentration camps, but this forces him to relocate to Oranienburg, near Berlin. As a compromise with dejected Hedwig he gets permission to allow her and the children to stay in their Auschwitz home where they have become comfortable in their surroundings, although when Hedwig’s mother (Imogen Kogge) visits, she leaves after just one night, disturbed by the burning furnaces. ⇒Eventually, Höss is sent back to Auschwitz to oversee the execution of 700,000 Hungarian Jews, which delights this man, but as he’s leaving a going-away-party, he stops on an empty staircase and vomits, implying he’s aware at some level of the atrocious murders he’s developed such success with. Then there’s a cut to the present day where janitors are cleaning the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (I’ve been there, a most sobering, revelatory experience), then we cut back to Höss continuing his staircase descent.⇐
When I faced the difficult task of ranking my Top 10 of the 2023 releases it wasn’t easy to assign numbers (after #1 Killers of the Flower Moon, #2 Past Lives [Celine Song; review in our August 31, 2023 posting]) because all those on the list have strong aspects in their various elements, but I finally decided to rank The Zone of Interest (the title never is explicitly explained, at least not to my understanding, but it does allude to interesting possibilities) as #10, although you can easily find arguments that could rate it higher at another of those intriguing videos (12:33 [ads interrupt at 4:50, 9:40]) which explores inspiration, symbolism, meaning, etc. without getting into the Spoiler zone. One aspect of this film not noted there is that a rundown house near the camp wall was converted to this film’s upscale Höss residence, with a garden planted too, so that much of the footage was shot at Auschwitz, given further chilling authenticity to the final product, nominated for 5 Oscars, winning for Best International Feature Film and Best Sound. It’s been out for 13 weeks in domestic theaters (still in 534 of them), taking in $8.2 million so far, $24.2 million globally. If it’s easier to stream than to find in the marketplace you’ll see it can be rented for $5.99-$7.99 at Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, etc. (here's another one I recently bought for $19.99, now no longer an option [?]). It’s a quiet, slowly-paced, unnerving experience with beautiful visuals, greatly lauded by the CCAL with positive reviews at Rotten Tomatoes at 93%, an astonishing 92% average score from Metacritic, so you’re being actively encouraged to see it, as long as you don’t object to the (necessary for many of us) subtitles, as the dialogue’s in German, Polish, and Yiddish.
Hopefully, you also won’t object to my choice of a Musical Metaphor (which I admit is stretching it a bit), Pink Floyd’s “Hey You” (1979 album The Wall) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AXic upcf_4 as I think lyrics such as “Hey, you, out there in the cold, getting lonely, getting old / Can you feel me? […] Hey, you, out there beyond the wall, breaking bottles in the hall / Can you help me?” could clandestinely be coming from Höss as he’s secretly-sickened by the ongoing tragedy just beyond his stately garden wall; I don’t want to give him too much credit for being revolted by his embrace of the Holocaust, though, as the actual guy this film’s based on after the war was convicted and executed for his crimes, but I want to hope that even in the darkest corners of the darkest humans there's some decency lurking, even if it has scant chance to rising usefully to the surface. Or, if nothing else, the riot footage in this video speaks to what happens beyond Höss’ idyllic wall, even if what’s shown here isn’t exactly the same brutality as what he was so efficiently in charge of.
Related Links Which You Might Find Interesting:
A couple of options: (1) Netflix gets just 1 Oscar, Apple gets none; (2) The 12 most shocking Oscar upsets of all time (I'd probably add Emma Stone's 2024 win, no offense to her performance).
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