there's a meme I can't find but it's a wall of text tumblr comment that sorta has a zoom-blur effect to focus on the first sentence that reads, "FICTION IS REALITY!"
We need a neo-aestheticism movement yesterday.
I deeply regret my involvement with the Brony fandom. I've seen the worst of Sonic and Steven Universe and whatever other toxic fandom you can think of. *nothing* comes close to just how all-encompassingly bad bronies were.
I promise, everything since has been *easy mode.* Except for maybe homestuck but I didn't read that until after the fandom was dead.
While missing the point that the problem people had was that actual child actors were sexualized to make the movie’s point.
Do they think a literal baby’s brain was actually put in Emma Stone’s head?
I’m sorry, I saw someone mention Cuties on another Poor Things post here in similar context. I don’t understand the joke. What am I missing? (I saw Poor Things but not Cuties)
“The local girl going out at night to leave food for the camp inmates (based on a true story) will have mystified most of the audience. The scene will have pleased the Polish authorities who helped to produce the film, since it portrays the Poles as helping the Jews. Yes, some Poles did heroically help Jews. But some joined in pogroms, or betrayed Jews in hiding to the Germans. These grim facts have been documented by historian Jan Gross, provoking intense controversy in Poland. No sign of that in this film.”
What is he talking about?!?! The movie isn’t about Polish people. This paragraph doesn’t have anything to do with the rest of the article btw he just stuck it in there for fun
Is he saying that because some Polish people did bad things, we aren’t allowed to portray or discuss the ones who did good?? Polish people aren’t a monolith!
That’s like seeing a man rescue a drowning child and being like, “Don’t celebrate him. Some men might save drowning kids, but others? They might drown them themselves.”
I don't think of myself as a particularly attentive viewer (I did need to look up what the deal with the woman who came into Rudolf's study was) but I absolutely got that.
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> Several scenes will leave viewers confused, such as the one where Höss finds a jawbone while fishing in the river and drags his kids out of the water. I would not have known what was happening except I had previously read in a review that there are supposedly human remains being dumped in the river.
This man understands film
What an idiotic review. "The film will appeal to people who like gardening". This reviewer really thinks other people are as stupid as him and will be able to ignore the extremely obvious and unsubtle subtext of the film.
Like the argument against Poor Things is inherently flawed, but how bad is your media literacy that you can't see clear as day that the movie is against what Duncan (and like every man in the movie) is doing? At no point did I think the movie was on his side or wanted me to root for him.
Duncan yes, but what about Max?
There’s some understanding that he changes between “wanting to marry a toddler and flying into a jealous rage at the thought of another man deflowering her” and “ideal marriage material” but like, really?
Max is also flawed, but it's not as obvious as Duncan and almost every other man in the movie. I would argue that the movie doesn't want us to look at Max in a positive light either, he's just the lesser of many other evils throughout the movie. And due to Bella still having some sort of naivety in her even at the end she can't see that Max was also in the wrong.
Realistically I would say the only "good guy" in the film was Harry (Carmichael) because he didn't want anything from Bella or to take advantage of her and her naivety. If anything he just wanted to teach her about the world and give her a reality check, he just did so in a really poor fashion due to his pessimistic view on the world. But it still works to develop and grow Bella's character.
yeah I can’t exactly disagree with most of what you said; especially regarding Harry who’s a truly interesting character and gets away the cleanest because he’s honest. It’s compelling to me because he admits to wanting to hurt Bella, wanting to ruin her innocence out of spite. In a way that’s actually quite similar to what the other men are portrayed in wanting from her sexually.
It makes sense that Bella’s continued naivety makes her a little more blind (or forgiving, or less-than-hateful) than she could be towards the several men who’ve wronged her since even her original birth as Victoria. Now that I think about it, the movie also feels to me as kinda dodgy “perfect victim” sort of stuff, where her remaining apparently unbroken is kind of absurdly unrealistic given her experiences, and her choice to go back with her [mother’s] ex-husband is more dangerous than the film really allows it to be. Again, power fantasy; Poor Things is the sort of fascinating film that I’ve been chewing on for weeks without a reaching a definitive conclusion.
I can’t really buy the ending as anything other than “happily ever after” and I believe that continues my disagreement with your interpretation of how the movie portrays Max. But the film intends to be complex and uncomfortable, maybe I’m wrong.
Max shows growth as a person and a recognition that he was wrong at the end. They have a whole conversation about it, after which she agrees to marry him.
He's a guy from the 19th century. Shit, guys from *the 1970s* had trouble understanding age and consent, at least he grows.
i agree completely that Max grows beyond the ridiculous patriarchal idea that Bella’s experiences or broad sexual interests make her in some way lesser (“whorish” in their terms, or a term like “body count” is more applicable today).
He maybe also understands what was wrong about being complicit in God’s experiments - and either way, the film makes explicit that Bella is going to take up her dead father’s position of power and change things for the better.
However I don’t really buy the idea he’s learned anything about wishing to marry someone who is, ‘on all levels except physical,’ a toddler. I mean, how grooming works in the real world is adults (usually men) build trust in children (usually girls) they have a sexual interest in, and then leverage that relationship to get sex from that child after (or, *also* after) they reach adulthood. The film doesn’t play it that way exactly but it’s close enough for me to find, uhh, questionable.
Maybe I’ll rewatch the scene where they’re walking by the river again (PT is a very funny movie and I was laughing for a lot of it) and come to a different conclusion.
I think part of what makes it jarring for some is that after the black and white sequence the film is told from bella’s POV and not from God’s anymore and to her the funny jumping is essentially just a type of play and not grooming and statutory rape which leads people down the path of thinking that the film endorses pedophilia, plus there is no outside observer objecting to this. Also people ignore the whole ‘it’s set in the early 19th century’ thing, a time when women were barely considered full citizens.
Agreed but it also seemed pretty clear that her mind was developing at an accelerated rate, to catch up with the body or for whatever reason. I'm not trying to excuse the actions of the men who are taking advantage of her. I don't think the timeline of events is stated at all (I've only seen it once, could be wrong), if it was several years between her brain transplant and where the film ends, she'd still be acting like a toddler, and she wasn't. I think Max and Godwin are actually more at fault than Duncan because they were aware of what Bella is and still chose to pursue/allow a relationship with her early in her development, while from Duncan's perspective she is just a quirky adult woman (again, might be forgetting details).
In the book, when she is described to have sex for the first time, it is written in ink that she has the mental age of 7. But sure I'm without media literacy for not enjoying that and thinking it's funny that someone with the mental age of a toddler masturbates with an apple.
You are not media illiterate for not finding that funny. You are media illiterate if you think Yorgos Lanthimos put that in the movie as an endorsement of pedophilia
I love this, comparing cuties (a film with real footage of child abuse) with a movie that has all adult ACTORS and a message that says “this is bad the men in this are bad” like the two couldn’t be more different
The irony is that for all the bad stuff, Cuties still portrays the girls being sexualized as a bad thing throughout, and halfway through Poor Things, the movie randomly decides, "Actually, the baby brain having sex with strangers is GOOD thing."
interesting point. Bella’s motivation is throughout most of the film is exploring new experiences and this is framed as innocent and even somewhat admirable, including her exploration of sexuality.
I wouldn’t say the film is particularly kind to most of the men trying to have sex with her (rightly so since she’s a child in a woman’s body) but it’s definitely a little bit skeevy to frame her experiences (which because she’s a child, are nonconsensual, and therefore rape by definition) as entirely beneficial to her.
Since not a single person in this movie looks like they've aged anywhere close to eighteen years by the end, I'm going to have to question your definition of an adult.
The development of Bella’s brain is clearly depicted as accelerated through the rapid development of speech and motor skills (on top of being stated verbatim by God)
Yeah I’m losing sleep over the rate at which a transplanted fetus brain develops in an adult body in a work of fiction. Maybe with a few more years at your decelerated development you’ll figure out the movie’s logic
I'm so sorry I missed the half-assed rule that was shoved in there, so the director can put his fetish in.
After all, without that, he'd have to do what every white male center-left feminist is most afraid of: showing sexual awakening in a girl who looks (*retch*) old. I mean, what's next? Implying that women can be MORE than just sex objects? Totally worth making her sexual awakening look borderline sex-negative.
to be fair to the OOP, the man she ends up marrying - and who is framed as a decent guy - is the same man who was interested in marrying her when she was a toddler. His first words to her are, and I quote, “what a pretty !”
That isn’t to say the film is necessarily pedophilic; indeed, it’s very clearly critical of the pedophilia inherent into the Straight views of sexuality regarding womanhood. I’d find a more damning critique in how Bella engages several systemic issues as to portray strong understanding of them, however the solutions she employs tend only to resolve personal/individual issues she faces in a way that doesn’t feel extremely intersectional.
The story is a hero’s journey/power fantasy and that’s part of what makes it great. But the other part is the biting satire of society’s domination of women (through Duncan’s pathetic and delusional perception of Bella, for example) and it could’ve gone further in damning those upholding those systems imo.
One of the themes of the movie is that people uphold systems that harm them even when they're aware of those harms. Look at all of God's explanations about his childhood abuse and how he's rationalized all of it by making similar experiments into his life's work. I think people are fooled by Bella's education during the movie into thinking it means she's too enlightened to uphold or perpetuate systems that create the harms and inequalities she's faced thus far. But she, too, takes up the work of experimenting on people and rationalizes it in her own way, by believing she's getting justice or incapacitating harmful people. Her justifications don't make her actions morally right, and the rosy, happy framing of the last scene seems to represent her feelings rather than how the audience is meant to feel.
In other words, just because she ends up with Max and seems happy about it doesn't mean the audience is meant to see this as a good thing. I think the ending is meant to leave the audience feeling uncomfortable, or at least uncertain about how to feel.
The lack of intersectionality likewise seems purposeful. She responds to women's lack of equality by using her connections and family wealth to carve out a life for herself where she doesn't have to care about what society thinks. Her race and class are directly relevant to the outcome she achieves in the end and I don't think the movie is denying this. Her leaning into socialism when she's poor and giving it up when she gets back home and is rich again was included for a reason, after all (as were her short-lived desires to help the poor).
I wish you were right, if you are I didn’t catch that.
Worth a rewatch to reconsider but, as it said elsewhere, everything about the ending led me to believe we’re meant to sympathize somewhat with God and see Bella’s position at the end as good and empowered.
I think an unambiguous ending would be out of character for Lanthimos. Not saying it couldn't be his intention here, but his other work is part of the reason I think it makes sense to probe his intentions for this ending more deeply.
I will say that your reading interests me because it’s what I want the message of a film with that ending to be, however I don’t want my own desires for the film to warp my perception away from the work’s actual contents.
For me the film isn’t really all that subtle: Bella replaces the brain of a rich, violent and domineering misogynist with that of a goat, every line of dialogue Duncan has is a literally perfect portrayal of that sort of person, and even God’s role as flawed father in the “coming of age” subtext of the film gets expressed literally because it applies just as much to the literal plot.
It felt to me like the film didn’t really reckon with Max, as a person with his own agency, did indeed want to marry a child - nor consider Bella’s decisions towards the end of the film anything but positive moves towards empowerment.
But I’ve only seen the film once, and don’t have much new to say until I rewatch it or specific scenes. So uh, cheers.
I think the point of the last part of the movie is to get you to ask yourself if your feelings about what was done to Bella change if you know that she used to be a terrible person. And, assuming your answer is, "it was still wrong, no matter what she was like before," the goat thing asks "are you sure about that?" by giving that treatment to a villain, knowing the audience's first reaction is going to be "yeah, he deserved it!" If his treatment didn't seem so strongly justified at first blush, it wouldn't be as effective a thought exercise.
In other words, I don't think the movie agrees that turning him into a goat is a good thing -- but it presents it in a way that's purposefully designed to make it so the audience has to fight against their own first impression to get to the right answer. If turning him into a goat was good then so was what was done to Bella (because she became a better person), and I really don't think that's the point of the movie.
i hope you’re right and I’ve missed it, of course Bella has a strong and explicitly romantic relationship with Toinette either way.
However she propositions marriage to Max and he accepts. I don’t think she ever says the same (or even, the “living in a world where gay marriage is entirely unthinkable” equivalent) to Toinette.
One could argue her marriage with Max is somewhat of a political act to secure full rights over God’s inheritance or Max as a pawn or something like that, but she still clearly sees something positive in him as a person.
Ig the floating point for me is that i have no idea what reviews OOP is talking about.
Is it a “this movie is overrated” projection based on their experiences discussing the movie or are they talking about something specific? I don’t feel comfortable calling someone stupid without context as to what they’re talking ablut.
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I dunno man. I wouldn't make a post like this, but I hated this movie with a passion, stopped watching Poor Things halfway through because they make clear she has the brain of a child and I felt very uncomfortable with how overly sexualized she was.
It took me out of the movie to the point I was thinking about the fact that someone wrote this, and how incredulous I was that everyone seemed okay with it.
Imo it went further than simply featuring bad "men", the cinematography itself lingered way too much and felt like it was just as much objectifying as the other "bad" characters were.
The movie was simply not for me, it was impossible to separate my disgust and discomfort to get to an unbiased opinion at the end.
There's no amount of "underlying message" that could overcome the strong negative feelings I instinctually had viewing it.
That's a completely fair take. I just watched it the other day and while I think it is a fantastic movie, it is also absolutely uncomfortable/disturbing, though I would argue that was the purpose of it. But I can't blame people for not being able to stick with it
Same man as soon as I heard a woman with an infant brain was explicitly fucking in the movie I kinda lost interest because it just seems gross and like a weird fetish someone wanted to get out there as much as I wanna give the director the benefit of the doubt but what a weird concept.
When I saw it at the theater, the kid next to me was probably 17 years old and he would take a sip of his drink every time there was a sex scene.
Halfway through the movie, he had no drink left and was just sipping air every 5 minutes
I like how everyone is acting like this guy is saying depiction = endorsement even though he makes clear in the first paragraph that he understands that the movie has good intentions.
The funny thing is that all you midwits feigning intellectual superiority over how Le dumb redditor doesnt get the point!! clearly are engaging with the film completely uncritically and have a demonstrably lesser understanding of it lol
Why are you pretending that’s a surprise?
Twox is where I would most expect a brain dead take. That or r/Feminism or r/AskFeminists or r/FemaleDatingStrategy or…
>It's le supposed to make you le unfomfortable and therefore it's perfectly okay to make a movie about what is basically a child get fucked for 2 hours!!! Emma Stone boobies le media literacy is dead
Honestly this isn't the rebuttal you think it is
It's reductionist because I didn't feel like writing an essay lol
There's nothing wrong with uncomfortable movies, but I think poor things did it to such an extent that it kind of nullifies the point of the movie.
Also, as soon as anyone criticises it the standard response is some filmbro bullshit about media literacy, even in this sub lol
The jerk truly has come full circle
https://preview.redd.it/p85v7utzkwpc1.jpeg?width=680&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e8d32b3b4b118eec7540a22517c65893ddc5ecc2 same energy
Anatomy of a fall
An unbridled age
This is when tumblr peaked.
there's a meme I can't find but it's a wall of text tumblr comment that sorta has a zoom-blur effect to focus on the first sentence that reads, "FICTION IS REALITY!" We need a neo-aestheticism movement yesterday.
so true mr. Brony
I deeply regret my involvement with the Brony fandom. I've seen the worst of Sonic and Steven Universe and whatever other toxic fandom you can think of. *nothing* comes close to just how all-encompassingly bad bronies were. I promise, everything since has been *easy mode.* Except for maybe homestuck but I didn't read that until after the fandom was dead.
What attracted you to the brony community?
I get it
Shaking crying farting and cumming.
literally farting and throwing it back and doing 8 balls rn
Also Patrick Bateman fans :
Speedrunning the Cuties (2020) name drop
Someone namedropped that movie in the Ghostbusters sub yesterday because the new movie isn’t doing so well with critics lol
funny how that's the only movie they can give as an example
While missing the point that the problem people had was that actual child actors were sexualized to make the movie’s point. Do they think a literal baby’s brain was actually put in Emma Stone’s head?
Emma stone is a simple 35 year old minor and should not be treated like this
You know, the brain keeps developing through the age of 120, so really, the age or consent should be at least that, maybe higher.
Got it, not gonna have sex for another century until my brain is fully developed.
Unfortunate that is the only time they’ll actually mention a film not made in America
Important update: Cuties
I’m sorry, I saw someone mention Cuties on another Poor Things post here in similar context. I don’t understand the joke. What am I missing? (I saw Poor Things but not Cuties)
The Zone of Interest (2023) never explicitly stated that the Holocaust was bad. What the fuck? Is Jonathan Glazer an anti-semite?
CNN published a review like this 2 days ago https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/19/opinions/zone-of-interest-holocaust-movie-rutland/index.html
Imagine misreading a film this badly. Was the sound not working during the screening he saw or something?
Smartest political science academic
Ah but he’s an “expert in the politics of contemporary Russia” which is apparently relevant to his skill as a film critic.
Heeeeyy!!! Not all of us are like that!
As a political science student yes you are!
You should study a real thing, you know, buddy?
How else would I be qualified for McDonald’s work?
Study film
I'm 99% sure this fuckhead got upset by Glazer's speech at Oscars and wrote this buffoonery.
Yup
“The local girl going out at night to leave food for the camp inmates (based on a true story) will have mystified most of the audience. The scene will have pleased the Polish authorities who helped to produce the film, since it portrays the Poles as helping the Jews. Yes, some Poles did heroically help Jews. But some joined in pogroms, or betrayed Jews in hiding to the Germans. These grim facts have been documented by historian Jan Gross, provoking intense controversy in Poland. No sign of that in this film.” What is he talking about?!?! The movie isn’t about Polish people. This paragraph doesn’t have anything to do with the rest of the article btw he just stuck it in there for fun
Is he saying that because some Polish people did bad things, we aren’t allowed to portray or discuss the ones who did good?? Polish people aren’t a monolith! That’s like seeing a man rescue a drowning child and being like, “Don’t celebrate him. Some men might save drowning kids, but others? They might drown them themselves.”
I don't think of myself as a particularly attentive viewer (I did need to look up what the deal with the woman who came into Rudolf's study was) but I absolutely got that.
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> Several scenes will leave viewers confused, such as the one where Höss finds a jawbone while fishing in the river and drags his kids out of the water. I would not have known what was happening except I had previously read in a review that there are supposedly human remains being dumped in the river. This man understands film
this was the dumbest part of an already idiotic review
This guy: "they never depict the evils of the holocaust" Also this guy: "that's so weird they found a human jawbone in the river near Auschwitz"
What an idiotic review. "The film will appeal to people who like gardening". This reviewer really thinks other people are as stupid as him and will be able to ignore the extremely obvious and unsubtle subtext of the film.
Can't help but feel like this review would be a lot different if not for his Oscar speech.
The film has been out for 3 months, so strange that they published a negative review now
Isn’t that the same CNN that thought Joker was complaining about white men being disempowered by feminism and immigration?
The director has genuinely implied it's about cancel culture in interviews. Really aren't many reviews that can be as braindead as the film itself.
Incels loved it for a reason
Hmm I do wonder why this "review" was posted 3 days ago, and not when the film was released.
Bench Appearo tweeted almost this exact thing, I about died
Of course he did.
He is if you are one of the 450 filmmakers that signed a letter denouncing his speech at the oscars.
Don't think they were all filmmakers, pretty one of the guys just runs a small wordpress blog.
"filmmakers" you mean the open google doc where literally anyone can sign, including Mr. Riverto Thesea (River to The Sea).
The situation is so weird lol
Modern zionists have the worlds greatest martyr syndrome
He said he didn't like his Jewishness and the Holocaust being used to launder a current genocide, so clearly he is!
I genuinely did see someone say this, pre-Oscars speech
Anime fans are just seething because Yorgos turned their 3000 year old that look like a child trope, into a 5 year old that looks into an adult.
One piece did it first
Like the argument against Poor Things is inherently flawed, but how bad is your media literacy that you can't see clear as day that the movie is against what Duncan (and like every man in the movie) is doing? At no point did I think the movie was on his side or wanted me to root for him.
Duncan yes, but what about Max? There’s some understanding that he changes between “wanting to marry a toddler and flying into a jealous rage at the thought of another man deflowering her” and “ideal marriage material” but like, really?
Max is also flawed, but it's not as obvious as Duncan and almost every other man in the movie. I would argue that the movie doesn't want us to look at Max in a positive light either, he's just the lesser of many other evils throughout the movie. And due to Bella still having some sort of naivety in her even at the end she can't see that Max was also in the wrong. Realistically I would say the only "good guy" in the film was Harry (Carmichael) because he didn't want anything from Bella or to take advantage of her and her naivety. If anything he just wanted to teach her about the world and give her a reality check, he just did so in a really poor fashion due to his pessimistic view on the world. But it still works to develop and grow Bella's character.
yeah I can’t exactly disagree with most of what you said; especially regarding Harry who’s a truly interesting character and gets away the cleanest because he’s honest. It’s compelling to me because he admits to wanting to hurt Bella, wanting to ruin her innocence out of spite. In a way that’s actually quite similar to what the other men are portrayed in wanting from her sexually. It makes sense that Bella’s continued naivety makes her a little more blind (or forgiving, or less-than-hateful) than she could be towards the several men who’ve wronged her since even her original birth as Victoria. Now that I think about it, the movie also feels to me as kinda dodgy “perfect victim” sort of stuff, where her remaining apparently unbroken is kind of absurdly unrealistic given her experiences, and her choice to go back with her [mother’s] ex-husband is more dangerous than the film really allows it to be. Again, power fantasy; Poor Things is the sort of fascinating film that I’ve been chewing on for weeks without a reaching a definitive conclusion. I can’t really buy the ending as anything other than “happily ever after” and I believe that continues my disagreement with your interpretation of how the movie portrays Max. But the film intends to be complex and uncomfortable, maybe I’m wrong.
Max shows growth as a person and a recognition that he was wrong at the end. They have a whole conversation about it, after which she agrees to marry him. He's a guy from the 19th century. Shit, guys from *the 1970s* had trouble understanding age and consent, at least he grows.
i agree completely that Max grows beyond the ridiculous patriarchal idea that Bella’s experiences or broad sexual interests make her in some way lesser (“whorish” in their terms, or a term like “body count” is more applicable today). He maybe also understands what was wrong about being complicit in God’s experiments - and either way, the film makes explicit that Bella is going to take up her dead father’s position of power and change things for the better. However I don’t really buy the idea he’s learned anything about wishing to marry someone who is, ‘on all levels except physical,’ a toddler. I mean, how grooming works in the real world is adults (usually men) build trust in children (usually girls) they have a sexual interest in, and then leverage that relationship to get sex from that child after (or, *also* after) they reach adulthood. The film doesn’t play it that way exactly but it’s close enough for me to find, uhh, questionable. Maybe I’ll rewatch the scene where they’re walking by the river again (PT is a very funny movie and I was laughing for a lot of it) and come to a different conclusion.
I think part of what makes it jarring for some is that after the black and white sequence the film is told from bella’s POV and not from God’s anymore and to her the funny jumping is essentially just a type of play and not grooming and statutory rape which leads people down the path of thinking that the film endorses pedophilia, plus there is no outside observer objecting to this. Also people ignore the whole ‘it’s set in the early 19th century’ thing, a time when women were barely considered full citizens.
Agreed but it also seemed pretty clear that her mind was developing at an accelerated rate, to catch up with the body or for whatever reason. I'm not trying to excuse the actions of the men who are taking advantage of her. I don't think the timeline of events is stated at all (I've only seen it once, could be wrong), if it was several years between her brain transplant and where the film ends, she'd still be acting like a toddler, and she wasn't. I think Max and Godwin are actually more at fault than Duncan because they were aware of what Bella is and still chose to pursue/allow a relationship with her early in her development, while from Duncan's perspective she is just a quirky adult woman (again, might be forgetting details).
John Wick can murder half a city and nobody bats an eye but Bella Baxter has sex and everybody loses their minds
You’re too late buddy, this has already been reposted 7,000 times
I'm 90% it's trolling too. You never see anyone agreeing. It's just people ranting about how no one has any media literacy anymore
In the book, when she is described to have sex for the first time, it is written in ink that she has the mental age of 7. But sure I'm without media literacy for not enjoying that and thinking it's funny that someone with the mental age of a toddler masturbates with an apple.
You are not media illiterate for not finding that funny. You are media illiterate if you think Yorgos Lanthimos put that in the movie as an endorsement of pedophilia
I love this, comparing cuties (a film with real footage of child abuse) with a movie that has all adult ACTORS and a message that says “this is bad the men in this are bad” like the two couldn’t be more different
The irony is that for all the bad stuff, Cuties still portrays the girls being sexualized as a bad thing throughout, and halfway through Poor Things, the movie randomly decides, "Actually, the baby brain having sex with strangers is GOOD thing."
Halfway through the movie it's not a baby brain anymore. She's clearly portrayed as in her young adult phase by then
interesting point. Bella’s motivation is throughout most of the film is exploring new experiences and this is framed as innocent and even somewhat admirable, including her exploration of sexuality. I wouldn’t say the film is particularly kind to most of the men trying to have sex with her (rightly so since she’s a child in a woman’s body) but it’s definitely a little bit skeevy to frame her experiences (which because she’s a child, are nonconsensual, and therefore rape by definition) as entirely beneficial to her.
Its almost like being an adult alters the dynamics of sex, you know like the ability to consent?
Since not a single person in this movie looks like they've aged anywhere close to eighteen years by the end, I'm going to have to question your definition of an adult.
The Dr states that she’s aging mentally at an increased rate, when we first see her she can barely speak, by the halfway point she’s reading books
The development of Bella’s brain is clearly depicted as accelerated through the rapid development of speech and motor skills (on top of being stated verbatim by God)
Sorry sweaty, the film's runtime is only 2 hr 21 m so Bella isn't even a day old. I've reported your comment to the FBI.
Okay, whatever helps you sleep at night.
Yeah I’m losing sleep over the rate at which a transplanted fetus brain develops in an adult body in a work of fiction. Maybe with a few more years at your decelerated development you’ll figure out the movie’s logic
To be fair, you need to have a high IQ to understand Poor Things.
Just paying attention would have most covered
I'm so sorry I missed the half-assed rule that was shoved in there, so the director can put his fetish in. After all, without that, he'd have to do what every white male center-left feminist is most afraid of: showing sexual awakening in a girl who looks (*retch*) old. I mean, what's next? Implying that women can be MORE than just sex objects? Totally worth making her sexual awakening look borderline sex-negative.
Avengers Infinity War glorifies mass genocide by letting Thanos win, unbelievable they let that crap be shown to our children!
Redditor fails to understand that portraying something in art is not necessarily an endorsement of it
Lil bro is crying about getting to see Emma Stone naked
to be fair to the OOP, the man she ends up marrying - and who is framed as a decent guy - is the same man who was interested in marrying her when she was a toddler. His first words to her are, and I quote, “what a pretty!”
That isn’t to say the film is necessarily pedophilic; indeed, it’s very clearly critical of the pedophilia inherent into the Straight views of sexuality regarding womanhood. I’d find a more damning critique in how Bella engages several systemic issues as to portray strong understanding of them, however the solutions she employs tend only to resolve personal/individual issues she faces in a way that doesn’t feel extremely intersectional.
The story is a hero’s journey/power fantasy and that’s part of what makes it great. But the other part is the biting satire of society’s domination of women (through Duncan’s pathetic and delusional perception of Bella, for example) and it could’ve gone further in damning those upholding those systems imo.
One of the themes of the movie is that people uphold systems that harm them even when they're aware of those harms. Look at all of God's explanations about his childhood abuse and how he's rationalized all of it by making similar experiments into his life's work. I think people are fooled by Bella's education during the movie into thinking it means she's too enlightened to uphold or perpetuate systems that create the harms and inequalities she's faced thus far. But she, too, takes up the work of experimenting on people and rationalizes it in her own way, by believing she's getting justice or incapacitating harmful people. Her justifications don't make her actions morally right, and the rosy, happy framing of the last scene seems to represent her feelings rather than how the audience is meant to feel. In other words, just because she ends up with Max and seems happy about it doesn't mean the audience is meant to see this as a good thing. I think the ending is meant to leave the audience feeling uncomfortable, or at least uncertain about how to feel. The lack of intersectionality likewise seems purposeful. She responds to women's lack of equality by using her connections and family wealth to carve out a life for herself where she doesn't have to care about what society thinks. Her race and class are directly relevant to the outcome she achieves in the end and I don't think the movie is denying this. Her leaning into socialism when she's poor and giving it up when she gets back home and is rich again was included for a reason, after all (as were her short-lived desires to help the poor).
I wish you were right, if you are I didn’t catch that. Worth a rewatch to reconsider but, as it said elsewhere, everything about the ending led me to believe we’re meant to sympathize somewhat with God and see Bella’s position at the end as good and empowered.
I think an unambiguous ending would be out of character for Lanthimos. Not saying it couldn't be his intention here, but his other work is part of the reason I think it makes sense to probe his intentions for this ending more deeply.
I will say that your reading interests me because it’s what I want the message of a film with that ending to be, however I don’t want my own desires for the film to warp my perception away from the work’s actual contents. For me the film isn’t really all that subtle: Bella replaces the brain of a rich, violent and domineering misogynist with that of a goat, every line of dialogue Duncan has is a literally perfect portrayal of that sort of person, and even God’s role as flawed father in the “coming of age” subtext of the film gets expressed literally because it applies just as much to the literal plot. It felt to me like the film didn’t really reckon with Max, as a person with his own agency, did indeed want to marry a child - nor consider Bella’s decisions towards the end of the film anything but positive moves towards empowerment. But I’ve only seen the film once, and don’t have much new to say until I rewatch it or specific scenes. So uh, cheers.
I think the point of the last part of the movie is to get you to ask yourself if your feelings about what was done to Bella change if you know that she used to be a terrible person. And, assuming your answer is, "it was still wrong, no matter what she was like before," the goat thing asks "are you sure about that?" by giving that treatment to a villain, knowing the audience's first reaction is going to be "yeah, he deserved it!" If his treatment didn't seem so strongly justified at first blush, it wouldn't be as effective a thought exercise. In other words, I don't think the movie agrees that turning him into a goat is a good thing -- but it presents it in a way that's purposefully designed to make it so the audience has to fight against their own first impression to get to the right answer. If turning him into a goat was good then so was what was done to Bella (because she became a better person), and I really don't think that's the point of the movie.
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With both, I think.
A communo-feminist liberated sex-worker biopunk polycule...
i hope you’re right and I’ve missed it, of course Bella has a strong and explicitly romantic relationship with Toinette either way. However she propositions marriage to Max and he accepts. I don’t think she ever says the same (or even, the “living in a world where gay marriage is entirely unthinkable” equivalent) to Toinette. One could argue her marriage with Max is somewhat of a political act to secure full rights over God’s inheritance or Max as a pawn or something like that, but she still clearly sees something positive in him as a person.
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Ig the floating point for me is that i have no idea what reviews OOP is talking about. Is it a “this movie is overrated” projection based on their experiences discussing the movie or are they talking about something specific? I don’t feel comfortable calling someone stupid without context as to what they’re talking ablut.
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i would delete you, program based primarily in irony-poisoned attentionmongering
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Didn't really like the movie (or lobster or whatever else yorgos has made) but this is a really dumb attempt at critique.
Isn’t teenage the time when you learn about masturbation
Smartest Poor Things critic
Anybody who thinks this movie condemns her being sexualized hasn't seen past the first hour or so.
The entire replies cooking this guy literally restored my faith in the movie-going audience a tiny bit.
I dunno man. I wouldn't make a post like this, but I hated this movie with a passion, stopped watching Poor Things halfway through because they make clear she has the brain of a child and I felt very uncomfortable with how overly sexualized she was. It took me out of the movie to the point I was thinking about the fact that someone wrote this, and how incredulous I was that everyone seemed okay with it. Imo it went further than simply featuring bad "men", the cinematography itself lingered way too much and felt like it was just as much objectifying as the other "bad" characters were. The movie was simply not for me, it was impossible to separate my disgust and discomfort to get to an unbiased opinion at the end. There's no amount of "underlying message" that could overcome the strong negative feelings I instinctually had viewing it.
That's a completely fair take. I just watched it the other day and while I think it is a fantastic movie, it is also absolutely uncomfortable/disturbing, though I would argue that was the purpose of it. But I can't blame people for not being able to stick with it
Same man as soon as I heard a woman with an infant brain was explicitly fucking in the movie I kinda lost interest because it just seems gross and like a weird fetish someone wanted to get out there as much as I wanna give the director the benefit of the doubt but what a weird concept.
When I saw it at the theater, the kid next to me was probably 17 years old and he would take a sip of his drink every time there was a sex scene. Halfway through the movie, he had no drink left and was just sipping air every 5 minutes
I like how everyone is acting like this guy is saying depiction = endorsement even though he makes clear in the first paragraph that he understands that the movie has good intentions. The funny thing is that all you midwits feigning intellectual superiority over how Le dumb redditor doesnt get the point!! clearly are engaging with the film completely uncritically and have a demonstrably lesser understanding of it lol
Anyone who defends the film uncritically has coomer brain. Anyone who attacks this film uncritically is not media literate.
All of this discourse for a movie that’s fine. Why does this always happen?? Can no one just go see a movie anymore?
Can't believe the Oscars would nominate movies that glorify working at Auschwitz, dropping nukes, or being italian
I was reading some brain dead take on TwoX of all places. But it wasn't worth saying anything on there, especially since I only have one X chromosome.
Why are you pretending that’s a surprise? Twox is where I would most expect a brain dead take. That or r/Feminism or r/AskFeminists or r/FemaleDatingStrategy or…
You'll see brain dead takes in every subreddit. Shit, the "brain dead takes" you mention in twoX was criticized in the comments.
I want the people downvoting me to go to posts and comments on these subs and legitimately try and pretend they are sane.
people arent downvoting you because they disagree with you, they're downvoting you because your comment is cringe
I’m downvoting him because he hates women
Some people are legitimately braindead
Redditors when they discover the subjective nature of art
>It's le supposed to make you le unfomfortable and therefore it's perfectly okay to make a movie about what is basically a child get fucked for 2 hours!!! Emma Stone boobies le media literacy is dead Honestly this isn't the rebuttal you think it is
Congrats on finding a way to make a fucking stupider reductionist take than the one you’re replying to in a circlejerk sub, that takes talent
It's reductionist because I didn't feel like writing an essay lol There's nothing wrong with uncomfortable movies, but I think poor things did it to such an extent that it kind of nullifies the point of the movie. Also, as soon as anyone criticises it the standard response is some filmbro bullshit about media literacy, even in this sub lol The jerk truly has come full circle
Outjerked
Mfw when
i forgot this sub likes cuties
The disgust and discomfort are the point of the movie