Poor Things
Victoria McCandless is a free-spirited, highly sensual woman who drowns herself to escape her abusive husband. In the aftermath, she is brought back to life by an eccentric scientist named Godwin Baxter. He replaces her brain with the brain of her unborn child and changes Victoria's name to Belle Baxter. Godwin finds his scientific dreams fulfilled through Belle, but must deal with the complications of her jealous husband learning about her existence.
Wokeness: 40%
Overall Score: 60%
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User Submitted Reviews
Kurt Hansen
Little less nutty than it thinks it is
Poor Things is nominated for an Oscar because it's an art or film student's love child and dream. Fortunately, as it moves forward, the story isn't all that complicated that us "regular" 9-to-5 kinds of people won't be able to understand it and, actually, it's quite good.
We could live without, say, 45 minutes of over the top sex scenes, women on women, on circus freaks, men playing dress-up and the kinky stuff added in order to offend, like, Jerry Falwell. I was not offended; I got tired of the film pandering to the cause so, for that, it gets a mild woke rating.
Created: 02-13-2024
DigitalEntombment
A vacuous, feminist girl power fantasy that falls into droll idiocy
Poor Things runs the gamut of coming of age story to borderline pedophilia apologetics. While I cannot recommend watching this film, it's director Yorgos Lanthimos has done a lot with the source material. Poor Things is a film version of the same-named first book of the series that tells the story of our protagonist Bella (Emma Stone) from the prospective of Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef). Somehow the film manages to promote post-modern fifth wave feminism beliefs through anatavistic fetishism of the female body, Poor Things' cinematography for the entire film could be less charitably viewed as an exploration of The Male Gaze.
The first two acts are quite entertaining and light hearted. We slowly learn the horror of Bella's existence and origin story, the proverbial God (Willem Dafoe) and his inhuman experiments on the recently dead. In twenty minutes, Bella grows from infant to teenager, from catching a ball to catching venereal diseases. At it's core, Poor Things is a feminist power fantasy with quite a bit of character development along with a spectacular Victorian steampunk backdrop.
As Bella runs off with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) to explore the greater world, the film goes into a blender of original, inspired story telling and post-modern male hating effigy burning. The line running through the second half of the film can best be summarized as: the only way a woman can find happiness and freedom in this world is by selling her body for money and be happily alone ever after. Bella is naked for about a quarter of the movie with graphic sex scenes and various sundry along the same lines. She cultivates a clinical appreciation for sexual appetites during the final act of the film, but the dissonant tone is as conflicted with reality as the texture of the scenery is absurd.
Yorgos did a fantastic job of making this degenerate drivel into a fun and entertaining film, but I cannot recommend it for casual viewing.
6.5 out of 10 anonymous johns who knock your teeth out for fun.
Created: 03-16-2024
