I've waited 12 years to see this when Andrew announced it right when The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford dropped.

Saw this shit Monday morning at Dolby headquarters in NYC in Dolby Atmos with laser projection.

Glad to have seen it in a theater as the sound design and mixing are insane. And having the curtain being masked for the different aspect ratios was awesome. Especially when we hit the mid-way point and the curtain opens up for a specific shot to go wide.

With that said. This is a grueling, punishing 3 watch. This is a film you only watch ONCE. If someone watches this more than once, they're definitely a sadist and/or a serial killer. By the 2 hour point I wanted to be over as you are trapped with Marylin in this surrealistic nightmare. There's brutal rape in this.

This is like being in a slaughterhouse and experiencing it through the eyes of a mentally ill animal. A sensorial, emotional surreal nightmare where by each passing minute you're watching Marilyn go through some sort of emotional, physical, or mental abuse.

Anna de Armas deserves a nom. As does the cinematographer. SO does Nick Cave and Warren Ellis for the score.

Now I see why no one wanted to make this and why it's NC-17.

Drops on Netflix on September 28th. Watch at your own discretion.

Men we ain't shit.

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America from 9:00 on: https://youtu.be/GUwLCQU10KQ

im not even gonna look up whatever pretentious reasons they gave for the aspect ratio, color, etc.

I thought it wasnt actually based on a true story, but highly fictionalized?

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"The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in." - James Baldwin

It's an explicitly fictional biography of Marilyn Monroe, so yeah - not a true story exactly. I really liked the book. It's basically about somebody who spends so much time making themselves into what people want that they lose themselves. It's sad and difficult and it seemed really weird that they made a movie about it because when it's difficult it's ... DIFFICULT. Really frank descriptions of rape and more generalized sexual awfulness of the era. It makes the book work, but I don't want to see it in a movie and if it's not done extremely well then it'll absolutely play gross and exploitative.

______________________________

"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"

--Walleye's Dad

... because one of the biggest problems I had with the movie is that it boils down to "maybe if she'd had a daddy or been a mommy, she could've escaped all this and been saved." And not only does that feel really reductive, it also... just feels incorrect? We've seen a number of icons melt down despite parents and families before.

So I'm curious how much the book tries to come to any conclusions about the "why" of it all-- or if it even attempts to reach any conclusions. I felt watching the movie that you kind of have to either make Marilyn a more full-blooded character... or eschew any attempts to come up with the "why" and focus on the abstract, horrifying march to inevitable slaughter.

I kind of suspected from the discourse that the movie would be more of the latter, which would be horrifying but at least a clear, singular vision... but its hollow attempt to look into Marilynin conjunction with watching the march of exploitation and abuse she was led through felt like a bad marriage imo. (And also elicited eye-rolls.)

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And yeah, Jesus, "reductive" is right. I appreciate the confirmation that I don't want to see the movie.

It's been more than twenty years* but the book was basically about the collision of American celebrity and womanhood. Her life is basically told as a horrifying, dramatic version of a pretty simple principle: being a woman in America means everybody telling you exactly what you are. The genius of the book# is that Oates locates a real person underneath all of the layers of femininity-on-demand. Marilyn Monroe was brilliant and funny and thoughtful and ambivalent and sad, like a normal, interesting person. So watching her fall again and again and again for the idea that if she just becomes what everybody wants her to be then she'll be happy and loved is really tough.

So the book pretty much the "horrifying march toward inevitable slaughter" - which is a really sharp and intuitive call on your part. So nicely done. If there's actually a movie that I'd want to watch in here, then it sounds like you would have had a better handle on how to write it properly. I still probably wouldn't want to watch it, because the book was more than sufficiently gruesome. But the fact that there's a real person in there losing a 700 page battle with the concept of identity and the push/pull of negotiating that identity with the world really made the book go.

Like I said, it's been awhile. But the book left me with a lot of admiration for Joyce Carol Oates and the idea of the fictionalized biography, particularly for somebody like Marilyn Monroe - whose life was constantly being fictionalized for an American audience, publicly and sloppily.

*I ... hated typing that.
#it's incredibly good, so I recommend it with the caveat that it's crazy long and, apparently like the movie, is gonna make you hurt

______________________________

"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"

--Walleye's Dad

... where it'd be really hard to get your ideas across in the adaptation from page-to-screen. That a lot of what conveys the themes would be in the prose rather than the dialogue. Because I think the idea of "watching her fall again and again and again for the idea that if she just becomes what everybody wants her to be then she'll be happy and loved" feels like it's there in pieces in the movie... but ultimately, there's just a *lot* of dialogue about both Daddy and Baby, and when that happens, the "be what everybody wants you to be" stuff-- which I believe is in there in fits and starts-- feels outweighed.

Then again, perhaps I'm the one being reductive in my read of the movie. I think Dominick's a pretty brilliant craftsman-- the movie obviously looks and sounds fantastic-- but his sledgehammer subtlety might not have been right for actually creating a character at the heart of the thing. Because he doesn't seem especially interested in the complicated inner workings of what might make an icon tick-- he's more interested in the death march, the way that the media and Hollywood and the audience is complicit in her inevitable demise.

Which I think could be an interesting movie. If anything, maybe he didn't go far *enough.* Maybe going full surreal, full detachment could've been a compelling move. There's some provocative imagery and moments here, some that worked, some that... really didn't. (Cutting to a Cuban missile launching as JFK forces her to give oral sex, cutting to Marilyn singing "Bye Bye Baby" after a miscarriage, etc... some of this feels very film school, very Baby's First Provocation.)

If not full surreal, then I think you've got to commit to making Marilyn as full-blooded as possible, as complicated and interesting as possible. But outside of a stretch of the Arthur Miller-Some Like It Hot era-- the best stretch of the movie imo-- so much of Marilyn's POV that we get is her being angelic, abused, or both. And the Daddy/Baby stuff is just brought up so frequently throughout the 3 hours.

As I said on Letterboxd, imagine THE SOCIAL NETWORK if you removed all of the wit, humor, and energy... and instead spent three full hours hammering home the "Zuckerberg was driven by a girl not liking him" bit in deadly serious fashion every 5 minutes. That's kind of the vibe I got. Which isn't ideal!

But again, maybe I'm the one that mentally checked out and there's more meat on the bones than I'm giving it credit for. I'd be interested in your thoughts on the movie as someone who read the book. But yeah, it's not an especially *pleasant* autumn watch, lol.

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and im just talking about the view itself.

the creative decisions about how to present this to the viewer. the aspect ratio, the (changing) color, the pulse lighting in a scene towards the end, etc.

just seemed like overkill when you tack that on to rape, drug abuse, vomit, abortion, talking fetus, internal vaginal shots (wtf), etc.

maybe im not artsy/sophisticated enough to get it but just the process of watching was unsettling to me.