kay_rock

We've got Lolitas and Madonnas and wh***s and even a drunken madonna wh*** but I've yet to see a fully realized female human being. Sure, they dun did give one of them girlies an edjumucation so what am I whinin' 'bout, right? Never mind that she's as ditzy as a bag of hair. Not one woman in this show, not even the mother of the boys who died, is anything other than a two-dimensional caricature trying to feed a skinny white boy. How much does Taylor Sheridan hate women? Because that's a LOT of hate.

It is 2025, not 1955. And here they are giving us a burlesque show with burly men burling about doing manly things and women as window dressing, flashing their boobs and shaking their under-aged booties for the titillation of old men and lots of twangy music. Please. This is so outdated that it almost feels like a historic piece harkening back to the worst days of male memory.

I never thought I'd see anything that made Yellowstone look like an intellectual drama, but they managed to do it here. They had a great premise. This had promise. And I kind of wonder why I'm surprised they broke that promise from the getgo. Of course they did. We're in full lash-back mode, here. The only thing we're missing is a troop of tap-dancing people of color.

I love Billy Bob Thornton. I'm disappointed that he would read this script and say "yes."

We all deserve better.

I love horror. I love horror comedy. I even love ridiculous horror.

This, I could not love.

The premise was only shakily offered before we're off to the races with body swapping. Very little conversation led up to their accepting the idea and the reality of the "game" and being willing to jump right in.

Upon swapping, the first thing they do is to make out with each other and spill their secrets. Without knowing with whom they're making out or swapping secrets. Except, there never does seem to be much trouble with that - they all seem to know who each other is.

By the time it gets to the nitty gritty, I had already sprained my eyeballs from rolling them at the inanity and had a hard time buying into anything that was happening.

This couldn't have been pulled off if not for the exquisite acting of the cast.

It is possibly one of the best "unreliable narrator" stories I've seen on film. It's a hard concept to do in a movie without resorting to a lot of kafka-esque dream-like sequences, and although there are definite hallucinatory aspects to the story, it mostly sticks in what APPEARS to be a linear narrative. It's only as the story evolves that you realize you probably can't trust anything you're seeing as you vacillate back and forth between one perspective of reality and another. You are led moment by moment to draw conclusions that can't really be made. There are many moments that make you realize that everything preceding them probably didn't happen, or only vaguely happened. You want to "figure it out" and you think you are being given clues, but they are merely breadcrumbs cast on water and dissipate as soon as they land.

We are led to distrust one character as his behavior is so inconsistent, but is it? Or is her grasp on reality inconsistent? The actor perfectly nails this dual nature, embodying two different personalities so fully that he is dubious in both.

I am normally not thrilled with a lot of loose ends and unanswered questions, but I think the fact that we are left never knowing what exactly happened is perfect because it places us so squarely in the mind of the protagonist who herself is completely lost. I have my theories of what really happened, which place the quasi-antagonist in a position of being neither wholly innocent nor guilty in the final reckoning, but only the filmmakers know for sure what happened before and during the story. Which is ok, because the protagonist herself doesn't know, and we are firmly entrenched in the quick-sand of her perspective. It isn't important what happened. It is only important how she feels, and we feel it with her.

"How can I believe you?" she asks at one point.

Her husband replies "You never will," with a pain so poignant that you WANT to believe him. Can you? Maybe. But maybe not.

Layered through all of it is a marvelous, sometimes impressionistic and sometimes literal story of colonialism and modern-day racism that adds to the oppressed isolation of the protagonist.

I wanted to stand up and golf clap at the inverted ending.