2025-11-07 04:40:49
I was predisposed to like The Favourite, since I’m a big fan of all three of its leads, I was immediately won over by its trailers, and of course I’ve been hearing praise for it in the years since. It seemed like there was a brilliant movie that I was guaranteed to love, just waiting for me to make the time to actually watch it.
But that enthusiasm cooled a little bit after seeing the filmmakers’ other projects that followed. Poor Things is also directed by Yorgos Lanthimos from a screenplay adapted by Tony McNamara, and I’d been even more excited to see it. It’s an objectively stunning movie, with astounding art direction, deliberately bonkers performances, iconic but disorienting music, and a tone that mashes together black comedy, slapstick, and an earnest exploration of what it means to be human in a cruel and often brutal world. But as much as I appreciated it, its often weird cinematic flourishes, and its wild shifts in tone, felt too arch and distancing for me to connect to anything. I didn’t feel much of anything beyond revulsion.
And after The Favourite, McNamara created The Great, which is essentially the same mission statement expanded to a full series: all the trappings of a gorgeous, stuffy, historical drama with an at-least-loose basis in fact, presented as dark and bawdy satirical comedy. I’ve only seen the first couple of episodes of that series, and again, it does everything right. But again, it felt as if the spark of it ran out quickly. By the end of the second episode, I already felt like I got everything that it was about.
So I went into The Favourite with a little bit of trepidation. On the surface, it’s the same idea: all the impeccable art direction, costume design, and cinematography of the stuffiest historical drama, in service of a dark comedy with no fear of being too profane, vulgar, or anachronistic.
It comes right out of the gate setting its tone of “we’re taking the piss out of historical dramas,” even before the movie’s gotten started. Over the studio bumpers, we don’t hear anything but very faint sounds of the countryside, with chickens clucking the 20th Century Fox fanfare.
Then a scene with Queen Anne and her closest friend and advisor, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough. It is straight out of a movie about the lives of the royals, with servants slowly folding up the Queen’s robe and carefully removing her crown as she stands, dispassionate and regal, thinking on matters of the court. But as soon as the servants leave, we immediately see the nature of their relationship, a casual familiarity that only comes from a lifelong friendship and mutual love.
And then we’re introduced to Abigail, Sarah’s cousin. She’s initially presented as the stereotypical sheltered, beautiful young woman who’s about to have her naivety and innocence shattered when she’s thrown into the machinations of the royal court. That familiar introduction to a familiar character type is almost immediately undercut when she sees that the soldier across from her in a crowded carriage is masturbating while staring at her, and he grabs her ass while she’s leaving the carriage, causing her to fall face-first into the mud.
I was immediately swept up in all of it. Not just the plot, but the way that the filmmaking and the plot were perfectly in service of each other. All of the weird and disorienting flourishes which could usually make a film seem arch and distancing — abrupt cuts in time or space, bizarre lines of dialogue left to hang there with no explanation, sudden emotional outbursts, camera angles that feel too close or too wide — instead felt intriguing.
There’s a sense that The Favourite is showing you things that might all seem overly familiar if you’ve seen any historical drama at all, but it’s demanding that you look at them in a different way. The Queen is impetuous and tempestuous, swinging wildly between needy insecurity and outraged imperiousness. Her closest friend and advisor is shrewd and manipulative, placating the Queen while pulling all of the strings as her de facto regent. The newcomer is an outsider, perpetually in danger of having her kindness and humanity shattered in an environment that treats lower classes not just with disrespect, but with disregard or outright contempt. The Favourite demands that we see them as real things happening to real, weird, unpredictable, often awful, people, instead of just familiar characters playing out familiar story beats.
One of the most distinctive ways the movie does this, especially early on, is by inter-cutting or dissolving between two disparate images, demanding that you figure out what the connection or significance is. An example from later in the movie is a scene of a nude man happily standing in front of a folding screen in one of the elaborate halls of the palace, as a bunch of noblemen raucously throw fruit at him. It’s not given any explanation, and it’s filmed in partial slow motion, a jarring jolt of surreality. The movie cuts between this and shots of Abigail going about her business. Initially there doesn’t seem to be any connection, but the combination seeds the idea that she’s on her way to becoming as ludicrously corrupt as these supposed nobles.
Even more effective is when The Favourite holds uncomfortably long on a character’s face, often in close-up, and often when it feels like something even more interesting is happening off screen. There’s a scene with a ball, and Sarah chooses a man to dance with while Anne watches from her wheelchair. (I have no idea if the dance is at all historically accurate, but I desperately hope it isn’t, since it is hilariously bizarre). Instead of lingering on the dance and occasionally cutting back to Anne’s reaction, the camera stops paying attention to the dance at all, and it just focuses on her face. It’s not a broad or violent outburst; in fact, her expression is basically unreadable. But the longer the camera lingers on her face, the more you get a sense of the rage that’s boiling underneath. Not the sudden outbursts that everyone in the court has come to expect, but something much deeper, driven as much by fear as by anger.
Of course, you can only do that kind of thing when you’re working with actors like Olivia Coleman, Rachel Weisz, and Emma Stone. The Favourite only works because it has actors who are adept at both drama and comedy, and are fearless in how much of themselves they’ll dedicate to the part. It’s rare to get one actor who can do that, practically unheard of to find three. (For that matter, all of the performances in the movie are outstanding, and I didn’t detect a single false note from anyone. It’s so enjoyable to watch a movie where it seems like everyone at every level just gets it).
The Favourite is full of scenes of surreal dark comedy: moments that are too broad or weird to make sense. Nobles holding a duck race inside the Queen’s court. Sarah getting splattered in the face by blood after Abigail shoots a bird. Harley casually pushes Abigail down a hill after he’s tired of a conversation. Practically every scene of Abigail and Marsham’s “courtship.”
The characters are witty, but there’s actually not a lot of the nasty, verbal sparring of something like The Thick of It, where the humor comes from how cruel clever people in power can be. It’s rarely laugh-out-loud funny, and it’s rarely shocking or vulgar enough to register as so-outrageous-they’re funny. The moments where the sparring escalates to unforgivable behavior don’t have the feel of “oh boy, the game is on now!” but instead are shown almost matter-of-factly, as if there’s a sense of inevitability to them.
It seems like it all shouldn’t work, neither grounded enough to be a straightforward character-based drama, nor quite outrageous enough to be truly daring black comedy. What makes it work is that it doesn’t seem particularly interested in being straightforward or outrageous.
We’re never allowed to forget that our main characters have more going on than is evident on the surface. And it’s not in the sense you’d expect from a story about keeping up appearances in a royal court filled with back-stabbing and jealously; it’s all happening simultaneously.
The Queen genuinely is insecure and impetuous, but she’s not stupid or completely incompetent. She’s aware that she’s being manipulated, and she’s happily using it to her advantage. She keeps constant reminders of the tragedy in her life, visible signifiers of her loneliness. Sarah is shrewd, stubborn, steadfastly convinced she’s always in the right, and brazenly manipulative, but she keeps none of it hidden, because it is genuinely motivated by love: for Anne, for her husband, and for England.
And Abigail is genuinely sincere and initially motivated by kindness, trying to keep her integrity and humanity intact while also desperate to secure a place among the nobles that’ll guarantee she doesn’t have to go back to the horrors of her past. Even while she’s directly monologuing about her true intentions, it’s evident that she’s trying to convince herself of something, not the audience. She’s trying to navigate an environment of uneasy alliances, betrayals, and outright back-stabbing, determined to come out ahead without losing the core of herself in the process.
By the end of The Favourite, you can recognize it as a tragedy. Three characters who are all far from blameless, but whose character flaws or mistakes get punished far beyond what feels like poetic justice. And the “art film” flourishes don’t create a distance between you and the characters as you watch the plot play out, but drive home the tragedy of it. The intercuts between Sarah struggling to write a letter and Anne distractedly asking for the mail. The camera lingering on Abigail as she fully realizes the depth of the relationship she helped to destroy. And the final scene, which seems mundane enough to be ambiguous, if not for the expressionless face of a woman who’s been completely drained of joy and life, a woman understanding the purgatory she’s built for herself, and images of rabbits layered on top of each other in cross-dissolve, ending with a sense of tragedy layered on tragedy layered on tragedy.
2025-11-05 03:50:16
This week’s two-fer was prompted by Adam Koford, who used the track “Siestas ahí” by Juana Molina as background for one of his posts. I was immediately fascinated by it.
I was also fascinated by Molina’s story, who was a sketch comedy actress in Argentina before giving it up to become a musician. So far, I’ve only heard a few of her other tracks and seen a couple of her videos, but there’s a fantastic sense of experimentation and sense of humor. “Siestas ahí” is from her upcoming album DOGA, and I can’t wait to hear the rest of it.
It immediately reminded me of when I was obsessed with Cowboy Bebop and the music of Yoko Kanno for that series. A lot of it is jazz-inspired, because “anime jazz” is the whole mission statement of the series, but she took advantage of the whole “anything goes” vibe to experiment with different styles as well.
Specifically, it reminded me of “Wo Qui Non Coin,” from Cowboy Bebop Blue, a track tied to Edward and performed in Japanese and French. It’s credited to Kanno’s multi-lingual alter-ego Gabriela Roman, and performed by Edward’s voice actor Aoi Tada.
The most obvious similarity is in the vocals, but there’s also a feeling of experimentation, a sense that being accessible or even charming doesn’t mean you can’t also be a little weird and avant-garde.
2025-11-04 06:26:39
I have a long-running mental side project of assembling my own personal golden record, what I’d want included on the artifact to represent the best of humanity, on the off chance anyone ever decides to start another Voyager project.
My version would have to be a USB stick or something, because it’s mostly videos. I’m sure the aliens could figure out how to use it, even if they do try inserting it upside down on their first attempt.
And my agenda is a little different from the original’s. It’s not so much letting other species know what we’re all about, but my finding a piece of media that I love so much that it’s not enough to just like it; I want to make sure the entire universe is aware of how much I love it.
The list is ongoing, but at the moment, in no particular order:
fig 1: The “Never Gonna Get It” breakdown from En Vogue’s “My Lovin”
fig 2: The opening credits to Police Story 3: Supercop
fig 3: The Kenzo World ad by Spike Jonze starring Margaret Qualley
fig 4: The newspaper in Blood Simple
fig 5: The lab explosion in Darkman, in particular the transition at the end
fig 6: “Don’t panic, it’s just me, Gracie Law” from Big Trouble in Little China
fig 7: Kate Bush dancing in the moonlight in the woods in the video to “The Sensual World”
fig 8: “Babylon Band” from Kutiman’s Thru You
fig 9: “Electronic Behavior Control System” from Emergency Broadcast Network, in particular: “One more time, for the last time, ready? Yes.”
fig 10: The moment in the video for “White Knuckles” by OK Go where he high-fives the dog
2025-11-03 13:37:33
Bugonia is a black comedy horror thriller, a label that might suggest that it has a consistent tone, when it’s actually more like wild shifts which prime you to expect that literally anything might happen next. It’s got a moment of gory slapstick that was one of the most surprising laugh-out-loud moments of anything I’ve seen this year, and it’s also got several scenes that made me more intensely uncomfortable than any horror movie I’ve seen this year.
I probably should’ve expected that, since Poor Things, the only other Yorgos Lanthimos-directed movie I’ve seen at this point, often seemed to take pride in casually throwing in things that were gross or uncomfortable. In that movie, it had a thematic purpose — it’s all about finding wonder and beauty in a world that’s often cruel and brutal — but it more directly felt as if it were eager to make it clear that it wasn’t going to be pulling any punches. I think it’s actually used to better effect in Bugonia, where it illustrates modern society’s tendency to put an insincerely kind and compassionate face on cruelty and reckless disregard for other people.
The premise is that Teddy Gatz, played by Jesse Plemons, is a worker at a fulfillment center for a huge biomedical company led by Michelle Fuller, played by Emma Stone. Teddy is obsessed with conspiracy theories — among them, he’s a beekeeper, and he believe that the company is responsible for colony collapse disorder. He has a plan that he believes will save the planet, and he’s enlisted his kind-hearted and loyal cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) to help him kidnap Fuller. He believes that she is actually an alien from the Andromeda galaxy, and that he can force her to arrange an audience with Andromedan royalty by the time their mothership arrives back in Earth orbit, on the night of the next lunar eclipse in four days. Once on board the mothership, they’ll demand that the Andromedans leave Earth, which will make Teddy and Don heroes for solving all of humanity’s problems.
So the bulk of the movie is a mentally ill man holding a woman captive in his basement, pressuring her to admit to things that are clearly insane. That pressure descends into violence and torture, all while Fuller tries various tactics to take command of the situation and convince one or both of them to release her. We also gradually learn more about the trauma that Teddy’s gone through, with surreal flashbacks to his mother’s illness and experimental treatments conducted on her, and a cop clumsily trying to atone for abusing Teddy years ago as his babysitter. It’s all bleak and awful, and it makes most of the movie’s humor of the pitch-black variety.
The “meat” of Bugonia is made up of the scenes between Teddy and Michelle. He asserts his beliefs about the Andromedans and their tactics with the confidence of true conspiracy theorists who’ve spent years doing extensive research — in other scenes, the often-bizarre soundtrack plays soaring and majestic music showing how he thinks of himself as a hero who’ll be praised once his plan succeeds. Meanwhile, she’s used to being in control at all times, and being able to “dialogue,” negotiate, or threaten her way to victory in any situation. She tries multiple tactics to keep the men talking, all while maintaining a tone of practiced sympathy and compassion.
My favorite part of Bugonia — apart from the moment of gory slapstick I mentioned earlier — is a sequence when one of their “dialogues” falls apart, and we see the aftermath. While they’ve been talking, each confident that they’ve got the upper hand in the conversation, he mispronounces the word “shibboleth,” and she can’t help but correct him.1
He’s outraged by her condescension, and he hits her, putting a shockingly violent end to the scene. In the next scene, we see the outside of the house, and his car shaking back and forth as he sits inside, screaming in impotent rage while Don stands by helplessly. When Teddy gets out of the car, Don puts a hand on his shoulder to comfort him.
It’s such a good sequence because it demonstrates how Bugonia not only navigates wild shifts in tone, but uses them to challenge expectations about the power dynamics. I think the movie mocks Fuller’s use of the word “dialogue,” instead of just “talking,” to underscore the idea of people who are saying all the things they’ve convinced themselves are true, instead of actually communicating with each other.
We’re certainly never expected to root for Teddy or sympathize with him, but the movie practically demands that we try to understand what drove him to this point. The feeling of powerlessness as our lives are destroyed by people with no accountability, and the desperation to feel that if we do enough research or take some bold action, we can actually have control over our lives again. There are several earlier scenes where Teddy is trying to convince Don that Fuller’s tears are fake, to try and exploit their pity, and there’s a very real sense that he’s trying to convince himself as much as anyone else that he’s doing the right thing.
Meanwhile, Fuller should by any measure have all of the audience’s sympathy, but she seems Zuckerberg-like in her inability to convince anyone she is really a human being. She’s so thoroughly immersed in corporate speak and insincere compassion, that even when she tries to relate to her captors instead of antagonizing them, it still reads as a manipulative power play. It’s far from the most upsetting thing in the movie, but it’s still an intensely discomforting manipulation of our sympathies to see a kidnapping victim saying exactly the things she should be saying in a horrific situation, and feeling little beyond “I don’t trust her.”
And as a capper to that sequence, Don’s reaching out to comfort Teddy is a sign that he’s possibly the only character in the entire movie who still understands what it means to be human.
For much of Bugonia, I had the sense that it was a little too clever and too arch for its own good. Its dark, or surreal, or brutal elements have a way of distancing you from the material; this movie is way too smart to be straightforward and tell you directly everything it’s about. That meant that I had no idea how it could possibly end in a satisfying way. Any of the obvious possible outcomes would feel, well, obvious.
But even though I think the movie ends well, I also think that the movie doesn’t depend on its ending. It gives you an idea of what it’s about in the opening scenes, it spends a couple of hours obfuscating and unraveling that, and then it goes back to saying “yeah, that’s what it’s about.” It’s a movie for people in a society that’s in threat of collapse, demanding that we at least try to understand what’s happening, to be less certain that we’re the only ones who have all the answers.
I wasn’t aware going in that Bugonia is a remake of a Korean film called Save the Green Planet! At least based on the synopsis2, it sounds like the plot is near-identical, and the changes made for Bugonia were all changes for the better. But I don’t think this is a movie that relies on its plot or even its premise, apart from that core idea of people struggling to be convincingly human.
2025-11-03 05:04:18
Images of the ASL for “no” taken without permission from Lifeprint.com, which is full of lessons on learning other signs as part of its ASLU tutorials.
I had a lot of fun this year trying to keep up with the Spooktober theme, even if I couldn’t commit to doing a new entry every day like the truly hard-core can.
There were a surprising number of hits this month, surprising because I didn’t have any agenda beyond “what looks spooky and what am I in the mood for right now?” I think the most fun I had was with Freaky, while I think the “best” movies I saw for the month were Under the Skin and The Witch.
It’s been enjoyable enough that I wanted to keep the ball rolling with a new theme every month, but nothing’s really calling out to me for November. I considered:
Although I like the idea of getting into Halloween season, I think I have to admit that the most fun of Spooktober for me has been:
Which is something I can do year-round, honestly. Also I love starting up new categories for this here blog. (And then abandoning them within a month or two).
So I’m keeping “One Thing I Like” for new stuff I’m watching, in an attempt to keep myself focused, instead of indulging in multi-thousand-word essays that try to sum up everything the movie already says more effectively. And then I’ll also resolve to watch at least one movie a month that’s been hanging out neglected on my to-watch list, as part of “Backlog Zero.” That’ll let me indulge the part of myself that loves writing dad jokes in blog post titles. (i.e. the entirety of myself).
2025-11-02 03:02:53
On his Letterboxd profile, Mike Flanagan describes himself as “Kate Siegel’s husband,” and they’re the only remaining celebrity couple I’m allowing myself to be charmed by. I love the idea of the two of them making horror movies together, having horror movie watch parties with all of their friends, and casting all of their friends over and over in the horror movies they make together.
While I’ve been in the process of catching up on Flanagan’s movies and TV series, I keep hearing about the entry that seems like it must be a mistake: a prequel to an almost universally-panned horror movie cash-in produced by Hasbro and based on their Ouija board toy.1 I’d never seen it because of course I haven’t, why would I? But the consensus has always seemed to be “no honest, it’s a lot better than you’d expect.”
Since the “elevated horror” of The Witch was a little unsatisfying for spooky Halloween watching, I figured I’d squeeze in one more entry. I watched Ouija: Origin of Evil in the hopes that it would be “elevated trash.” I was not disappointed.
You can immediately recognize this as a Mike Flanagan movie, with an opening where Siegel appears as the bitchy, money-hungry daughter of a grieving man visiting a spiritualist hoping to contact his late wife. The spiritualist (one of our protagonists) is played by Elizabeth Reaser, who would go on to be in The Haunting of Hill House. A little bit later, Henry Thomas shows up as a priest, and he’s been battling it out with Siegel and Rahul Kohli to be Flanagan’s Most Frequent Collaborator.
I guess you could say the signs start even earlier, with the old-school Universal logo to indicate that this is a period piece set in 1967. (If you’re ever in danger of forgetting that this is set in 1967, a car design or a TV broadcast mentioning the Apollo program will pop up within a minute or so, reminding you). Nothing seems inauthentic, but also there’s a strong sense that the goal isn’t authenticity so much as vibes. It’s setting the scene for a spooky throwback scary movie, immediately establishing a tone of “fun thriller” instead of anything to be taken too seriously.
And that’s the feel I got throughout: this isn’t a funny movie, and it’s never played for laughs, even though I found myself laughing out loud more often as it got more and more absurd as it rushed towards the ending. But it does feel as if it’s intended to be as fun as it possibly can without getting too silly.
It almost feels like a challenge: this assignment is basically a 90-minute-long ad for a toy2, and it has to match up with the story and characters of an earlier branding cash-in that pretty much every one who saw it agreed was garbage. (But it made shit tons of money). Every aspect of this seems to be working together to make it irredeemable trash. But what if… and hear me out, here… what if we tried to make it pretty good instead?
So there are lots of jump scares and gooey, gruesome, black ghouls, and glowing eyes looking out from the darkness. And plenty of filmmaking flourishes like weird angles, and split diopter shots, and shots filmed through the warped glass of a planchette. I watched it streaming on Peacock, which made it all the more distracting to see the reel-change markers placed prominently in the corners every few minutes. I’m assuming that those were added digitally to keep pounding home the idea that you’re watching an old-fashioned classic horror movie from the 60s.
And the movie gets a whole lot of mileage out of a little girl being creepy AF in the foreground or, even better, the background. Lots of glazed-over white eyes and screaming with the mouth stretched unnaturally wide, but my favorites are when she’s lurking behind the other characters acting weird as all hell.
There’s one shot in particular, where she’s unnaturally jerking her head into different positions, each one with an eerie clicking sound, that made me laugh out loud, because I realized that the movie had decided to drop the pretense of being creepy PG-13 spooks and just go bonkers.
While I was watching it, I assumed that the last act was where the movie went off the rails. This is where it had to stop being its own thing and start taking care of the prequel business of setting up everything that would appear in the earlier movie. But thinking back on everything up to and including its last (pre-credits) shot, I think it feels less like a derailment and more like popping the movie into all-wheel-drive and deliberately choosing to take it off road. Bad horror movies often feel like the filmmakers had no understanding of or appreciation for restraint; the end of Ouija: Origin of Evil felt to me more like the work of filmmakers blessedly free from the curse of restraint and wanting to just go a little nuts.
I’ve seen several 4-star or even higher reviews of Ouija: Origin of Evil that describe it as excellent, but personally I wouldn’t go that far. I think a lot of people were understandably primed for it to be awful, were shocked to see filmmakers actually put effort into what could otherwise have been a purely cynical attempt to build a toy-marketing-driven horror franchise, and that surprise unnaturally inflated their opinions of it.
It’s pretty good, though, and it does deliver on the promise of fun PG-13-rated spooky horror.3
The superlatives I would give it: it’s the second best-produced commercial I’ve ever seen, after that Kenzo perfume ad by Spike Jonze and Margaret Qualley. And it’s the second most surprisingly fun and entertaining horror movie prequel that entirely improves on its predecessor, after Orphan: First Kill. Also, it’s perfect for watching on Halloween night, so if you haven’t seen it, you’ve got 364 days to prepare.