This was phenomenal!

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Story didn’t really grip me in anyway, but damn this film looked beautiful. This whole fantasy late 19th century aesthetic hit fr.

This was amazing

this is my friend who hasn’t been f***ed in 20 years

This movie is something else.

Yorgos is that dude

seeing some of the most incredibly vapid examples of "critique" I have ever seen about a film, deeply embarrassing.

It was pretty good, needed her to get f***ed more

And she gives up on helping the poor.

Example?

We needed more Qually in this tbh

This is some hot mid 🔥🔥

Finally saw this and realised that Yorgos is just not for me

The only film from him I remotely liked was The Favorite

I thought this one was pretty bad minus the great visuals. Any commentary that it was doing on women's agency was totally eclipsed by the grotesque s***scenes... It was so unnecessary

Finished with the book. Watching the movie. Will post some thoughts, comparisons, etc

You thought the s***scenes were grotesque? They just sort of seemed sort of comical / cartoonish to me.

Haven't heard good things from people who read it beforehand. Interested in your opinion

Yeah that too

movie was good but ngl rewatch was boring. great film visually and aesthetically, great performances too but the narrative was boring the second time around

This is on Hulu now!

Watching tonight

Hoo boy, okay. So, to summarize my thoughts of the movie and the source material:

Book

It's much more cynical than the movie, and at its core, it's a very political novel. It just so happens to have a reanimated figure on a journey of sexuality, femininity, and social change.

I'm gonna spoil the biggest difference between the book and the movie, but basically, the book is famous for its meta-approach to how it tells it's story and how unreliable the narrator is. It's basically a manuscript that McCandless wrote, but here's the kicker: At the end of the manuscript, there's another ending: an extended letter/epilogue, written by the real "Bella" Baxter, who prefers her real name Victoria. Essentially she debunks the whole story as BS from the fragile ego of a man who didn't accomplish much and was envious of how Victoria herself was outside making real change as a doctor, while he floundered with manuscripts that she didn't think much of.

In the book, Victoria and Godwin were actually in love, but he told her he was dying and kept pushing her away to other men. She married McCandless out of convenience even though she grew to like him, but her one true love was always Godwin. Obviously in the movie, they went for something different, because Willem Dafoe is like 700 years old and him being romantically involved with Emma Stone would induce mass projectile vomiting and push the movie to an NC-17 rating.

Bella's condition was dubbed 'erotomania,' and she gets around, word to Pac. You learn about her influences and how she pushed for socialist and suffragist movements. She also had three sons and two died in World War I, which did irreversible damage to her mental and disillusioned her on her ventures. You get to see the negative press she got for pushing for birth control measures as well. This is what gives the book it's feminist edge: her having the last word with the epilogue, her accomplishments put on display, as she's one of the few female doctors around at the time, then she tries to navigate an imperialist, capitalist, racist world with her own ideas, even though she gets massive pushback. This is all left out of the movie

The book also plays out differently during key moments. Bella refuses to go with the general when he objects the wedding. Instead, they all convene at Baxter's home and that's when the negotiations escalate into a showdown with a gun. Bella manages to grab hold of the gun but she's the one who's shot in the foot, not the general, and she basically tells him that she recognized him at the brothel in Paris (he's a kinkster in private) then she tells him to f\*\*\* off literally. He leaves, and the next day, he shoots himself in the head. It's a much darker conclusion.

The movie is not awful, but it's very disappointing and makes me wonder if Yorgos and screenwriter Tony McNamara were actually aware of the source material, or if they got summary notes from the intern who brought them coffee on set.

There's stuff to appreciate of course, like the world that Yorgos created here. It's vibrant and very easy on the eye in its otherworldliness. Emma Stone also commited to her role and it's apparent from start to finish. Mark Ruffalo had by far the worst accent in the film, but he provided a number of the movie's laughs. That dinner scene was hysterical.

The movie lost steam for me after the first hour, and fumbled the ending with the generic evil General doing generic evil s***. Also the writing was piss poor, and Yorgos presented only parts of the book he wanted to show, which unfortunately makes the movie open to misinterpretation of the pedophilic and statutory nature.

In the end it's a struggle to see what point the movie was trying to make if it left out the most important part of book-form Bella in favor of s***scenes. This is why the 'feminist' label on this movie, to me, feels disingenuous and surface level. I get that the book is messy and complicated and some things inevitably get left out, but why not show more of Bella becoming a doctor and implementing her ideas? They even got the wrong person to play the American on the boat/ship (I'm talking about Harry Astley, the character played by Jerrod Carmichael). In the book, Astley is the imperialist British guy, and Dr Hooker is the American cynic. It's small things like these that make me wonder if they really went through the source material or nah

Overall, book was pretty good. The movie was disappointing coming off from reading the book, but I get that the sprawling and messy nature of the source material makes it hard to adapt. The film critics do seem to love it tho, so

I know for a fact there are multiple people out there about to give their d***s multiple carpet burns watching this movie

good lookin and the worldbuilding is there but all this movie made me do is bump my letterboxd score of The Favourite from 9 to 10