Mixed Reviews: Poor Things

Last week the televised Academy Awards came and went and I never noticed. But I did hear about the winners the next day, and once again I shook my head in disbelief  about who was passed by and who was lauded. Now I like the actress Emma Stone as much as anyone else I've never met, but it seems clear that she won the Best Actress award for her boldness in showing her vagina to the world.

I haven't seen the movie, scared off by the reviews. They all mention that Stone, playing a demented child-woman, sticks all sorts of things into her vagina in her quest for and love of orgasms. Call me old-school, but watching people have orgasms (or sticking stuff into their vagina, for that matter) is not what I look for in a film. Still, hating to rush to judgment and miss out on a cinematic milestone, I read a few reviews. Some excerpts follow:

Rex Reed: "Poor Things, a surreal mix of science-fiction and pornographic fairy tale, may not be the worst commercially intended movie ever made. But it is unquestionably the filthiest. In a chaotic cacophony of mixed reviews, it has been described as weird, exhausting, repugnant, raunchy, garish, demented, twisted and bonkers."

The Guardian: "That cooing note of kindness in the title is misleading- in fact, there is pure vivisectional ruthlessness in this toweringly bizarre epic. Poor Things is a steampunk-retrofuturist Victorian freakout and macro black-comic horror."

The New York Times: "As the story stalls out and all the showy minutiae, the viscera and icky yuks just keep on coming, the cumulative effect becomes bludgeoning. It isn't long into Poor Things that you start to feel as if you were being bullied into admiring a movie that's so deeply self-satisfied there really isn't room for the two of you."

RogerEbert.com: "It's the best movie of the year."