oliviafarag

This movie obviously is meant to send up shallow celebrity culture and in this regard it's actually quite fun to watch.

But as soon as it starts to take itself too seriously that's when you think 'maybe I'll stop watching here'.

I liked the deliberate hammy acting from all the cast except Nicole Kidman who tries waaaay too hard to be like Jennifer Aniston in this movie, a ditzy, goofy, sexy intellectual. She has no comedic timing and was badly misdirected - one minute giving her familiar American voice then going full Aussie and in one scene not even acting her persona at all, just being regular Nicole. Aesthetically she looks perfect in that Hollywood way so I won't comment on her personal beauty choices.

I made it through to the end and don't think the overall idea itself is bad but the ending was way too cheesy for me.

To be honest it probably deserves a higher rating but this film just wasn't my cup of tea. It's about grotty teenage boys growing up somewhere in England and a young weasley kid who captures and trains an eagle. Then his brutal father figure does something tragic. In between there are lots of uncomfortable scenes of boys going through various rites of passage.

I saw this as part of Art Gallery of NSW's monthly film festival. An interesting curation of arthouse movies. The theatre was packed (probably cos it was free). The audience complained it needed subtitles because the Yorkshire accent was so heavy and mostly discernable. It didn't bother me because you could still get the gist of each character's sappy mood. And also reading the trivia afterwards it's hilarious that the misaphonious accent is part of the film's lore.

I get it, people are curious about sex but this so-called 'arthouse' movie is just so wrong on so many levels.

To be as objective as possible I will disclose that I am a writer and the first issue straight off the bat is this premise that a dead woman has had her unborn fetus' brain implanted inside her head.

I know science can be weird and implausible and this storyline borrows heavily from Frankenstein but there is a thing called A REALLY MESSED UP IDEA. We are basically asking the audience to accept the concept of butchering a woman's body who then 'blossoms' into a sex-a-holic. So we can think it's cute and laugh and stare at her. There's no dignity for her soul. Quasimodo had dignity, Edward Scissorhands had dignity, but here she has none.

The director asserts that it was 'important for the character that she did not feel embarrassed or ashamed'. The director is a pervert going by his other films where all the actresses get gratuiously naked. Nudity in itself is not shameful, but exploiting it is.

William Dafoe was in Body of Evidence with Madonna, Mark Ruffalo was in In The Cut, both erotic thrillers. Which is fine, just own it that you have some sort of weird fetish to be in these types of movies.

The ultimate question is: did the lead character of Bella Baxter really need to be implanted with a baby brain? If the storyline is already stretching the limits of believability, couldn't they have just brought the dead woman back to life and carry on as normal? Or is it wrong to show a fully grown mature woman enjoying sex with lots of random men, so they had to make her stupid and innocent to make her more 'appealing' to the audience?

I rest my case.