Kinds Of Kindness (2024) If this Yorgos Lanthimos 2 & 1/2 hour slog into upside-down weird absurdity had come out a decade or so ago, we might have reviewed it like this?
"A trio of stories taking place in a warped Bizarro World of casual cruelty, insanity, routine carnage, sexual assault and demented obsessions......all designed to make you scratch your head in disbelief, cringe in your seat, or snicker at the lunacy of it all...."
That overall description of the film still holds true......but with one unsettling observation....
In 2024, is the behavior of the characters in "Kinds Of Kindness" all that Bizarro?
In about 8 weeks from now, we face the very real danger of the United States falling into the hands of one the most despicable, depraved and psychotic human beings who ever walked the face of the earth.......thanks to millions of people who sacrificed their minds and sold their souls to worship him like a deity. (Especially the most supposed pious of them....)
So forgive us if we don't gasp and sputter at this film's steeped-in-irony spectacle of watching people who've incorporated madness into their everyday lifestyles.
There's a reason we titled our Friday current events post "Weekend Madness Wrap-Up". How can any fictitious plunge into Bizarro World that filmmakers splatter on the screen ever hope to compare with today's daily headlines?
We'll not go into a tedious recitation of the three separate stories on display here, cast in repertory theater style with the same core group of actors playing different roles in each episode. (Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, Willem Defoe, Margaret Qualley, Joe Alwyn, Mamoudou Athie)
Imagine an R-rated 'Twilight Zone' stretched out to the butt-numbing length of a self-indulgent Culture Vulture film festival entry. Unwatchable even with its deliberate excesses of sex and violence.
Yes, the film's no doubt designed to provoke an audience into heated discussions and arguments about its themes and intentions.....but we smell a pretentious poseur in Lanthimos, so we're not buyin' into it.
If you're a cinema completist who simply must watch it, (BQ's excuse), view it as a deliberately warped funhouse mirror image of...uh....'the way we live now'. Where every normal value and guardposts of civilized society are out the window.....gone with the wind. Everybody else can get the same effect by just turning on the nightly news.
Our strong advice.....absorb it only in half hour increments at a time....like periodic teaspoons of foul tasting medicine.
(Honestly, if there'd been any actor in this less charismatic than Emma Stone, we're not sure we could've sat through even 10 minutes of it, let alone 164.)
1/2 of a star, and that's only for Emma.
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