Probably more mindblowing for an American audience that barely gets any exposure to this kind of material from its own industry. For my taste, Guadagnino plays it way too safe. I was waiting for it to push beyond the melodrama into something more wild or messed up, and I never really got that. He's constantly flexing with impressive camerawork, great editing and a fantastic score, but what is it all in service of? There's not a lot more to this than very basic melodrama. Tennis is used a metaphor for innuendo and relationships, which becomes a bit eye-rolling as the film goes along. On top of that it's not nearly as sexy as some people are suggesting, it feels like a lot of foreplay and innuendo without a real pay-off at any point. His camera doesn't shy away from nudity or sweat, and Trent Reznor's score puts in a lot of work in turning up the heat, but you want it to push beyond that at some point. For me it doesn't really develop into anything surprising and the conclusion it ultimately goes with feels kinda lame because of it. Still, it does a good job at intriguing you with the personal struggles of the three main characters, all of which are well portrayed by the actors. Zendaya is a bit hard to read at times, though it could be intentional with the character she's playing. There's enough merit to the complexity of the characters and technical aspects that kept me from being bored, but the entire time I kept thinking about how much more interesting this could be with someone like Paul Verhoeven at the helm.
6/10
This was a lot of fun and felt fresh through and through. For me, the 2+ hours passed by like nothing. I enjoyed most of the dialogues, of course the camera work, the soundtrack and the overall vibe. The final 10-15 minutes made me smile nonstop, this was just really good cinema. I personally also loved the ending shot. Left the theatre with a big grin and a good feeling.
Good Movie, based on true facts.
About the beginning of the era of freedom in Portugal.
"A Revolução Dos Cravos" (Carnation Revolution).2.3 points -> Cinematography (0-3)
1.5 points -> Acting and Characters (0-2)
2.4 points -> Plot (0-3)
0.9 points -> Score (0-1)
0.8 -> enjoyed the movie. (0-1)
Aka. 8.0 points
With 'Poor Things', director Yorgos Lanthimos has created a film that has quite a few similarities with the box office hit 'Barbie'. Both are about women who start out as objects without any self-determination and, in the course of a journey, find themselves and discover their freedom. Both films also impress with fantastic costumes, good performances, and, most importantly, a phenomenal production design.
But, while I enjoyed 'Barbie', this Frankenstein story is in a completely different league. Lead actress Emma Stone delivers perhaps the best performance of her career, and Mark Ruffalo and Willem Dafoe are also great here. The absurd humor worked perfectly for me. I haven't laughed more in a movie all year than I did in this one. And ultimately, the world that Lanthimos creates is one that has never been seen before. It's really difficult to create something "new" in film in the 21st century, but that's definitely the case here.
All in all, I not only give "Poor Things" my highest recommendation, but it is also my favorite film of 2023.
Not for epileptics my god
A very powerful movie. One that starts and ends on a statement. A movie that takes a stance, that don't pander to a wider audience, an audience this movie doesn't touch, but still remains accessible. A movie that unabashedly portrays reality, that shows a community with all its struggles, contradictions, camaraderie, and diversity. A rare movie in which each and every character is important; each and every life is important. Amazing when it's loud but even more so when it get quiet. A movie that shows moments when grief is too much to bear and moments when life and joy explode. A film that is moving without feeling manipulative. The kind of film we definitely need more of.
The most powerful moment of this for me was the credits, when the movie halts to a deafening silence. It felt crushing, and the weight and intensity of everything in the previous +2 hours hit me like a brick wall.
You seem to think the world is worth saving and I find this really fucking entertaining to watch. I followed this my whole life and now I’m happy that everyone gets to watch too
Honestly, screw Shiv. Her narrow-minded hatred for Ken led to the point, where she rather handed the family's company to a man she knew for a few weeks only and lied to her all along, and her betraying, joke of a husband who used her as a stepping stone. Instead of keeping Waystar and becoming CEO in a few years when Ken eventually messes it up. But no it was more important to Shiv to see Kendall fail, rather than keeping her chance alive to win, what a petty, loser mentality is that.
And thus Nero pushed his wife down the stairs, and then he had Sporus castrated and married him instead.
This is probably the best ending we could have gotten for this series. There are enough collective wins and losses that no matter who you're rooting for, there's something to be happy about in the end.
The writing was masterful, perfectly capturing the character development of various characters throughout the course of the series, especially Greg and Roman. We also got a glorious shot of Roman that blew me away since I don't particularly find myself all too fold on this series' cinematography (look for the shot of him looking at a tray, using it as a makeshift mirror, it's fantastic), and it's by far the best shot of the series.
A great round of applause is deserved for the writers, directors, actors, everyone involved with this project, as well as the showrunners for being willing to end the show on a high note instead of running it into the ground like so many other shows are wont to do nowadays.
Another excellent episode. I felt my heart ache at the parallels made between Logan & Ewan’s brotherhood and Kendall & Roman, the key connections between the women Logan loved, and so many other thematic elements utilized in the masterful fashion the final season of this show has excelled at doing. Can’t wait for the finale.
Also four words.
Kirean. Culkin. Emmy. Now.
“Just to know ! Does this season has woke stuff?? So i can skip like the other season”
Last season was about the AIDS epidemic. Gay people do not equal woke. I highly suggest you figure out the correct use of the term or stay far away from everyone.
am I the only one who thought in the beginning that Logan dying was a ploy to somehow fuck over the kids again :sweat_smile::upside_down:
……nah it was just me & maybe I ended up caring for the bastard in the end (help)
I'm a Logan Roy team but I'm also a Siobhan team, it's just heartbreaking to see from time to time that Shiv getting undermined by her family, especially her dad.
Greg scenes are painful to watch. It’s been 3 season and he’s still the same idiot. Adults normally grow over time unless they are retarded or mentally challenged. He doesn’t seem like a retard so why make his character a retarded idiot.
I'm a whore for war room episodes
In a show where words come 100 miles a minute, when noise is the norm, silence deafens. What is not said haunts the space between giants, desperately grabbing for loose roots hanging from a cliff.
Never has the word “what” held this much power. And the fractured relationship tells you what they’ve lost.
Succession has never been mediocre. But this season we are seeing such a tour de force it borders on overwhelming.
Like some sort of fanciful Greek tragedy playing out in front of you. You can't bring yourself to like anybody, but you also can't bring yourself to hate anyone either. It's a pit of vipers and everyone is a victim and a hunter. A powder keg of the modern era. Magnificent.
I could watch Serandon and Lange read the phone book together and still be entertained. This show is riveting, though! I can't believe I'm being tugged along on this journey that I already know how it ends...
Ok we said we liked the chos in the kitchen in the first season. But non stop family chit chat is not interesting at all. It was nice to see relations but %50 percent chitchat was unecessary
i don't get the point of this film, it's like it tries to tell you something but it's also retarded
I think we could not catch all the details but I just wanna share one
During the scene where he buys guns, the seller says "Holds six shots in the clip, one shot in the chamber. That's if you're dumb enough to put a round in the chamber."
In the end, he uses exactly seven shot.
It’s incredible how many great actors you can shoehorn into your movie and get the worst performance out of everyone; Christian Bale, on the other hand, is the only good one here.
John David Washington is so one-note here, as he has the same tone of voice and facial expression throughout. You can tell Robert De Niro is phoning it in regarding his line delivery and lack of interest.
The whole movie feels like an overdose of “acting pills”. It’s a plotting movie that thinks it’s clever and funny but ends up being confusing and boring.
The hesitancy of Jeff while giving his number to Claire got me curious. He was leaving his number to the fridge guy at the beginning of this episode as 773-555-0901. He told Claire as 0902. A sad tiny detail.
i cannot believe this is a real tv show and i also cannot believe i watched this fml
Only after the episode ended did I have time to stop and have the realization that there were no cuts once you were in the restaurant.
my anxiety was THROUGH THE FUCKING ROOF
[9.5/10] The most ingenious choice that Greta Gerwig’s Little Women makes is to chop up the story so as to juxtapose present and past. It not only immediately marks this adaptation as distinct from its predecessors, but helps to recontextualize and connect different parts of the story to make it feel new again.
The audience has a chance to meet and appreciate Freidrich before Laurie has burrowed into their hearts. By the same token, the joy and connection between Amy and Laurie can be front and center from the get-go, without springing it on the viewer halfway through the story. And the bookend approach allows Gerwig to put Jo’s drive and travails as a writer into the spotlight early.
But the biggest advantage it confers on the film is how it allows Little Women to constantly contrast the lives that these young girls imagined they would lead one day, with the lives each finds themselves inhabiting in the future. Like the novel it’s based on, Gerwig’s adaptation is anchored squarely around considering the wildest dreams of its titular set of sisters, and measuring them against the paths actually available to women in their time, and the places their choices and passions take them. The jumps back and forth and time allow Gerwig to check expectation with reality, to trace cause and effect, and to resolve the two with poignance and grace.
It also allows Gerwig and company to flesh out each of the young women at the center of the narrative. Jo March still commands the story and the screen. Saoirse Ronan throws herself into the role, conveying all the punch, heedlessness, and subtle vulnerabilities of the character with endearing abandon. It is both a dream role and a hard one, but Ronan makes it look effortless.
And yet, this adaptation makes time for the other March sisters to falter and flourish. Amy is vivid and real from the jump, with her questioning of her own talents, her sense of being second to Jo, and her truth-telling relationship with Laurie put front and center. Meg’s chance at a life of elegance and plenty, the love that pulls her away from it, and the joys and hardships of that choice are given time to breathe. And Beth remains the heart of the film -- still a little too pure for this world, but one who suffers for her own goodness, reminds a kindly neighbor of what’s been lost, and spurs her sister to take up what she’s put down.
All the while, Little Women is utterly gorgeous to look at through the March Sisters’ misadventures. Gerwig and cinematographer Yorick Le Saux capture the bucolic beauty of scene after scene draped in New England splendor. The pair construct tableaus of faraway elegance and local beauty in turn. But these visuals aren’t gratuitous. Beyond making the movie a treat to watch, it helps sell the contrast at the heart of the film. Scenes set in Jo’s youth have a golden hue, an inviting glow that conveys the idyllic, hopeful tone of those early days. And the ones set in her adulthood are darker and starker, visually communicating the various cold realities the March family has had to grapple with in later years.
As necessary as it is to contend with those cold realities, it’s just plain fun to vicariously share in the joy that Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy share with their mother and friends in their family home. Apart from its structural choices, apart from its character focus, the greatest strength of Gerwig’s Little Women is how well it captures this sense of young people at play, of a headstrong young woman in their element, and that unfathomable, spontaneous vigor of youth.
The March Sisters, and their friends and close confidants, fight and babble and hug and exalt together. There’s a move toward Gilmore-esque speed and overlap in conversation after conversation, expressing the happy chaos that envelops these lives. This story is founded on the breadth of possibility forged in such a simple, familiar environment, on the pleasures and satisfactions found despite absences and meager means, on blessings shared and passed around. The warmth of the March household would not work if those who orbit and inhabit it, did not seem so real in their rough-and-tumble interactions and simple joys.
Those joys, however, are meant to run up against the expectations of adulthood that clash with allowances of youth. That’s the role Aunt March plays -- the naysayer to the slack existence her brother and his wife and children have made for each other. But Gerwig does not make her a villain. Instead, she is merely practical, a woman who knows from her own experiences which choices are permitted and which invite difficulties, delivered with an amusing wryness that makes her endearing even as she aims to stifle her nieces’ dreams.
That’s the crux of Gerwig’s adaptation. The March sisters imagine wondrous lives for one another, borne on the backs of each’s great talent. Jo pictures herself as a bold writer in the big city who never marries anything but her art. Meg sees glimpses of a life where she’ll never have to work, where there’s time for things like acting and society and beautiful dresses. Amy envisions the life of the genius painter overseas who stands with giants. And each finds those dreams running aground on the many limitations of the real world, with tethers made extra taut for the declaratively fairer sex.
All except for Beth, whose dreams lie in the simple doing of good, the making of music for those around to hear it rather than for the masses, despite her prodigious abilities. She is the cinch of Little Women, not merely in her death which brings the March sister home. But in her life of quiet kindness at home, in her peace with what must come and the joy to be found despite it, a joy they found together in the attic and can still share and revive no matter how big or little they are now.
Jo, Amy, and Meg each regains a measure of that golden glow in the shadow of the house they grew up in. Amy loses the artists life in Paris she imagines, but finds happiness in a partner who vindicates her talents and for whom love triumphs over station. Meg is denied by circumstance of the beautiful things and easy life she once pictured, but is buoyed by the care and satisfaction of family and a life built with the man she loves. Even Jo turns away from the “spicy” stories that sell to stuffy cigar-smoking New York publishers and finds her truth, finds her greatness, in the bonds fraught and familiar at home, with a winking-but-joyous connection to a beau of her own. And each is seen sharing the fruits of their talents, passing them on to a new generation of young men and women.
There’s a degree of wish-fulfillment to the close of the film, a heartstring-tugging image of familial warmth in a bucolic setting. But Gerwig earns that warmth. The happiness crafted in a humble home is measured against the metes and bounds of the wider world, and found no less worthy. The choices afforded to women of any station at the time are reckoned with and suffered in, with the ensuing joys and small, self-possessed rebellions made more potent in that unfair crucible. The losses each suffers, the distance between the lives they dreamed and the lives they live, is laid bare in the cuts between past and present.
But in the end, Gerwig does as Alcott did, and makes the fulfillment each chooses meaningful by those terms. The hardships great and small each endures, make it more than a publisher-mandated happy ending when, despite that difference between past imagination and present truth, each of these little women realizes they’re living the lives they truly want.
