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Barbie was fucking snubbed
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this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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Here's a list of tons of leftist movies.
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Poor things was the best movie of the year
It really did blow everything else this year out of the water. I wish they had expanded on socialism more but it is what it is. At least it was shown positively.
The movie about having sex with a mental toddler?
Thats not actually what its about! Stop getting your takes from puritanical zoomers on social media.
I saw it just a few days ago. The premise of the movie is that an infant's consciousness is placed in an adult women's body. At the time when she is taken to Portugal by the lawyer, she walks, talks, acts, and has the motor and social skills of a toddler.
It's wild that people defend the premise of the movie. It's literally just the opposite of the terrible anime trope where an adult woman's mind inhabits a child's body.
Like I get that the movie has a message it's supposedly trying to convey, but when you spend 142 minutes glamorizing how sexy it is to fuck Emma Stone (who is developmentally a child according to the plot) then it doesn't matter what the other message is
Editing to add more thoughts. I understand that the men in the film were antagonists and bad people for taking advantage of Emma Stone's character. My issue with the movie is that you should not glamorize the Bad Thing that you are trying to criticize. If you spend the entire runtime showing how fun and hot it is to fuck Emma Stone, people are going to walk away from the movie thinking "damn I wish that were me fucking her!", not "what a wonderful deconstruction of the 'born sexy yesterday' trope, I think I'll donate money to a women's shelter now"
Except people, like Othello, did walk away with the second interpretation. And i dont think you did understand that the men who take advantage of her are antagonists. Doesnt the film punish them for what they did? Othello has informed me that the film is pretty clear this is bad.
I think you are overly concerned with what horny men with no media literacy are going to think of the film.
The movie doesn’t explicitly punish a lot of the guys actually. I saw the point of the brothel scenes as the main character coming to terms with her position in life and taking charge of her own path after separating from mark ruffalo (I forgot the characters name). The thing about the Johns though is that it was clear that their “punishment” if you could call it that is the only way they could be vulnerable is with a prostitute.
The lawyer is repeatedly punished and the military husband gets shot and turned into a goat, but the rest of the men either got to carry on with their lives with no punishment (her controlling father figure, all the johns that visit the brothel) or are actually rewarded for it (the young surgeon who Gets the Girl despite that he wanted to marry her when he knew she was a mental infant).
Again, my criticism of the movie isn't this theme, it's the glamorous portrayal of the thing the movie is supposedly criticizing. If you're ironically portraying a girl being taken advantage of as sexy, then it's still portraying a girl being taken advantage of as sexy. I really don't think the man who directed it was thinking about how he was skewering men's control over women when he was choosing the perfect angle to film Emma Stone fucking cowgirl style
The johns explicitly didn’t do anything wrong. They were all just embarrassing guys whose punishment was not being able to be vulnerable to anyone other than a stranger. At least that’s how I read it.
imo the guy having exhibitionist sex in front of his kids is wrong. The other johns are probably alright, although it is very skeevy when the madame is explaining how some clients enjoy the fact that the women don't want to fuck them
I took that more as people from the 1800s were weird about sex than anything. Obviously it’s still going to strike a nerve because of the context though.
Depicting something is not the same as glamorizing it. If anything, the sex in this film is deeply unsexy
Agreed that depicting something is not the same as glamorizing it. I think a similar piece of media that does a good job of this is Lolita. Even though the story is told from Humbert's biased point of view, it's clear to the reader/viewer that what he's doing is gross because his attraction to a child is only glamorous to him.
Contrast this with Poor Things, where we spend what feels like half the movie focused on Emma Stone's face in ecstasy as she cums, or lingering on shots of her naked having incredible sex or basking in a post-coital glow in scenic settings. I think you're right about a few sex scenes being unsexy (especially in the brothel... but even then, there are scenes like when she tells the priest he "has a gift" for fucking so good and her relationship with her fellow prostitute) but for the most part the sex scenes are really played up to be exciting.
I know people who disagree with you about Lolita, and think all copies should he burned for it lol, which tells me how subjective those kinds of reads are.
Nothing about it was meant to be sexy lol. It was incredibly awkward and clearly intended to be fucked up, and a commentary on how shitty, controlling, and shallow the men around her were.
If you think the film was showing things in the light you’re describing, it’s more of a self-report than anything else lol.
what is it "about" then
It’s about the development of women’s psychology as they age to partially explain why the special needs aspect is touched on. If you haven’t seen it I recommend it because the movie is well done and not nearly as bad as people who cannot for the life of them understand a metaphor are saying.
To put it in perspective my wife made me watch it and I went in completely blind. Hadn’t even seen a trailer or anything. At first I was like WTF but as the story progressed it became clear this movie isn’t actually about sexually abusing special needs people.
Empowerment, to put it into one word.
The book Poor Things was based on had a huge overarching theme of Sottish people being colonized and exploited by wealthy Londoners from the south, so erasing the Scottish ethnic identify of the protagonist was definitely a strange move. Completely robs the story of its original anti-imperialist message, but I guess there's not much of an audience for that.
I mean Andor did a whole arc that people loved that was an allegory for the Highland closures
yeah its odd that the film chooses to comment on colonialism in Africa instead, it was disappointing but I saw somewhere online that the author signed off on it before he died? idk maybe the writers didn't feel equipped to tell that story, idk I agree they should have kept that in.
Poor Things was great, but idk Beau is Afraid was also really good
Oooh I’ll have to watch!
It had a pretty mixed reception, but I thought it was great personally
i haven't seen a few of the other best picture noms, but i agree with this. especially if you are comparing barbie and poor things directly. on its face poor things is better visually, in its direction/acting, and in its plot. beyond that it grapples with its narrative topics better than barbie, chiefly feminism.
bella has more agency as a character than all of the barbies, even as the 'mental toddler' as others describe. and that agency only grows throughout the movie/with her character development.