Before I get into this week’s post, a special note for BGW subscribers! After the Severance finale next week, come right here to BGW for my spoiler-laden interview with the show’s breakout star, Tramell Tillman, AKA Mr. Milchick, AKA Mr. Milkshake! Paid subscribers will also get to see the whole video interview, so if you’ve been waiting to upgrade, this is the time! See you again next week!
I love critics. The work we do is so vital and necessary. As I’ve said at the launch of this platform, criticism is how we fight fascism and it’s also how we grow in critical thinking. Last year, I made my list of the best films of 2024 —many of which had only been seen on the festival circuit at that time. Now that most of the films have had a theatrical run or are streaming, the masses have had their chance to weigh in on what’s really good with these industry faves. After reading their reviews, even some films that I initially enjoyed, like Anora, I’m now looking at sideways. Check out the best critiques of the most popular films of the season.
Anora’s male fantasy of sex-worker representation— As you may have read in my piece last year, I initially enjoyed this gritty Gen-Z Pretty Woman. But since the film has left the festival circuit and more audiences have been able to view it in theaters and on streaming, I’ve been reading the reviews of sex-workers, and let me tell you, they are not on board. In a scathing and heartbreaking review/personal essay, sex worker Marla Cruz writes: “Anora embodies the dehumanizing consumer fantasy of a devoted worker who loves the consumer so much she does not conceive of her servitude as labor.” The whole piece is well worth the read.
It’s also super creepy that director Sean Baker—who has now made several films about young women sex workers in danger—made his 23-year-old (at the time) star Mikey Madison responsible for whether or not a film with a large percentage of nudity and sex scenes would have an intimacy coordinator. Madison decided that she felt comfortable enough with Baker that she didn’t want an intimacy coordinator—removing the agency of other nude cast members, including her younger co-star Mark Eydelshteyn who was 19 or 20 at the time of filming and didn’t even speak English fluently. (My next piece for BGW will be on intimacy coordinators, how they keep actors safe, and why it’s so egregious the profession is not required on set.) Madison is no stranger to acting, but this is her first lead role, and with her youth and inexperience as #1 on the call sheet, it’s really on writer-director-producer Baker to have instituted an intimacy coordinator and not scapegoated his young star to avoid having one. Creep!
Also, sex worker, therapist and educator Raquel Savage created a Red Light Rules test of four questions by which to measure the portrayal of sex workers on screen. She scored Anora a failing 1 out of 4.
Conclave’s condescending intersex representation— The most memeable film of the year, Conclave is about the process that leaders of the Catholic church undergo when it’s time to pick a new pope. Conclave didn’t really do anything for me personally because, despite the idea of “secret progressivism” in the film, the Catholic Church as an institution is still very much in power and very much unchanged at the end of the movie. Yet intersex filmmaker Pidgeon Pagonis found the film frustrating. “The world needs to know about the injustices intersex people face. And for once, we had the stage. But instead of opening the doors, Conclave left them locked.” Read the spoiler-filled review here.
Dune: Part Two’s non-existent Muslim representation— The sci-fi/fantasy epic continues in this film starring the whitest white man, Timothee Chalamet, and Zendaya on a planet called Arakkis that’s clearly Iraq and filmed in the Middle East. It’s a story of colonization and appropriation, with many white stars ripping off Arab and Muslim culture with no Arab and Muslim actors. “The film simply relegates its cultural inspirations to exotic, Orientalist aesthetics, which is frustrating at a time where such communities are openly discriminated against and demonised,” writes Furvah Shah in Cosmopolitan.
Javier Sethness for The Commoner writes: “And Broadly speaking, it is hard to dissociate the stark anti-Muslim prejudice and chauvinism against Arabs and Amazighs evident in the Dune films from current events: specifically, Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. The symbolic violence seen in Villeneuve’s erasure of the centrality of Islam and MENA culture to Herbert’s fictional universe for his own adaptation is ironically part of the same continuum as the ongoing mass-violence committed against Arabs and Muslims, especially in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Occupied Kashmir, Syria, Iraq, Xinjiang, and Burma (Myanmar), among other places.”
Emilia Perez’s offensive and retrograde Mexican and trans representation— This film about a trans Mexican cartel leader who later gives back to her victims’ families through charity work, was not filmed in Mexico, starred zeroes Mexican actors in main roles and was written and directed by a white French man who does not speak English or Spanish. It’s no wonder that Mexicans were outraged by the film: “It shows a Mexico full of stereotypes, ignorance, disrespect and profiting from one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises,” Mexican actor Mauricio Morales tweeted. “Maybe. .. just maybe, believe the Mexicans.” GLAAD echoed these criticisms in a round-up of reviews of why its also “a step backward for trans representation,” noting that the first reviewers hyping the film as “progressive” were cisgender and not trans”:
“Who gets to dictate what “progress” looks like: the well-meaning cis people desperately trying to prove they’re not transphobic by hyping up a regressive mess, or the actual LGBTQIA+ community who have been speaking out against it since the now-infamous “from penis to vaginaaaaaaa” song clip started making the rounds on social media?”
Mo’s “disneyfied” take on Palestinian struggle: I wrote a raving review of season 2 of the Netflix TV show Mo, the show about a Palestinian refugee seeking asylum in Houston for the last 22 years of his life. The comedy shows not only the plight of what Palestinians endure as “stateless” people in a crumbling American dream, but also the horrendous U.S. immigration system. However, The Middle East Eye had serious concerns about the only Palestinian show on TV, calling it “the most frustrating view of the year”:
“Mo 2 is a Disneyfied version of the Palestinian cause: a confused, watered-down domestic comedy that wants to have its cake and eat it; an irrefutable emotional saga with a lot of heart that nevertheless feels ill-fitting in the morally and politically charged post-7 October world.
The importance of Mo in maintaining the Palestinian narrative at the forefront of popular American culture is unquestionable; yet for anyone absorbed or engaged with Palestine outside the US, it offers little but rehashed ideas in a reductive form.” Ouch!
No Other Land’s “normalization” of Israeli apartheid: This is another film that I marked as one of the best movies of 2024, and is now an Oscar winner for Best Documentary—still, as I predicted last year, with no distributor. For Palestinians who have been able to see the film at festivals or indie theaters, there has been some critique, not so much about the film, but it’s co-star and director, Israeli filmmaker Yuval Abraham. Though he is essentially a “pariah” in Israel after his involvement in the film and criticism of the Israeli government, he still manages in his press tour and even on the Oscar’s acceptance speech stage to center Israeli feelings over Palestinian lives in what Mondoweiss has called “liberal Zionist hasbara” [meaning propaganda]. The BDS Movement has derided the film as an act of “normalization,” of Israel’s atrocities in and occupation of Palestine that partners with Israelis for validation, and has called for a boycott of the film”:
“Palestinians do not need validation, legitimation or permission from Israelis to narrate our history, our present, our experiences, our dreams, and our resistance, including artistic resistance, to the colonial system of oppression that denies us our freedom and inalienable rights,” the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel that founded the BDS Movement said in a statement. “It is therefore imperative for us to challenge the racist conditions, whether covert or overt, imposed by the colonial West and its hegemonic institutions, which do not platform Palestinians except with the permission or validation of Israelis.”
Wicked’s lack of character development: On a lighter note: y’all know I love me some Wicked: Part One, and consider it the most radical film of 2024, teaching us how to fight fascism through fiction. I even compared the film to the Broadway musical to the book. But I’d only seen the Broadway musical on YouTube prior to writing my piece, and only after having watched the film. YouTuber The Writer’s Block has studied the Broadway musical and raises some excellent points in this video essay on why the film adaptation misunderstood the Broadway musical. What’s funny is that the musical adaptation and the film adaptation were written by the same people, so perhaps “misunderstood” isn’t the right word, but The Writer’s Block makes a case for why the adapters and Jon Chu as a filmmaker undermined plot, character development and visual story from the musical in favor of visual spectacle in the film. Elphaba’s character arc is also a big sticking point for The Writer’s Block, because she starts out confident, she wears stylish clothing and doesn’t have much room to grow from beginning to end as compared to Elphaba on Broadway. Cynthia Erivo has talked about how she never wanted Elphaba to be played as a “joke,” but there is something lost when the protagonist has no real character flaws. The only thing I strongly disagree with from the essay is that The Writer’s Block does not take into account that Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba is BLACK, as opposed to the other versions of Elphaba, and the way she moves in the world of Oz on film must be different from the way white Elphabas move on the Broadway stage due to the consequences of white supremacy. However, other points were made, including the centering of Glinda in the film vs. the Broadway musical:
There’s nothing wrong with still enjoying films even after they’ve been critiqued! The joy of critique is offering a fuller understanding of a piece and expanding the way we think about the art we consume and the impact it has on the most marginalized communities. With the widest lens possible:
Stay watchin’,
Brooke
Leave a Reply