Movie Review: Bugonia

On December 23, 2023, I reviewed the movie "Poor Things" that starred Emma Stone, with the director Yorgos Lanthimos is by far one of the worst movies I have ever seen. Like the other horrific movie "Everything Everywhere All at Once", released in 2022, Poor Things was nominated for several Oscars, with Emma Stone, for completely unknown reasons, winning for Best Actress. Clearly, there is something very wrong with the Academy Awards voting process.

The new movie Bugonia is the fourth collaboration of Stone and Lanthimos, and while not as bad as Poor Things, this movie is insane, weird, disgusting, and disturbing, with an ending that, despite its off-the-wall craziness, I saw coming from a mile away. Emma Stone plays Michelle, a high-powered, very wealthy Pharmaceutical executive who works in an impressive glass building, drives an impressive Mercedes SUV, and lives in a palatial house. Unfortunately, Michelle has an employee named Teddy (Jessie Plemons) who works in one of the company's warehouses, and is also a beekeeper, who has a dying mother and thinks that Michelle is an alien from another planet who eventually plans to kill everybody on the planet Earth.

Teddy kidnaps Michelle along with his mentally challenged brother Don (Aidan Delbis), taking her to their dilapidated house and tying her up in their basement. They shave her head because Teddy believes that she can contact her alien mother ship with her hair. Michelle's baldness results in many scenes of close-up arguments between Michelle and Teddy, showing Emma Stone's head and her face covered in a crazy-looking white powder, adding another strange element to this movie. There are occasional visits from a local police officer, Casey (Stavros Halkias), and ongoing conversations between him and Teddy about the time when Casey was Teddy's babysitter and hints of child abuse.

Teddy's mother, Sandy (Alicia Silverstone) has been dying for years and is currently in a local nursing home. It was unusual to see well-known actor Silverstone in a role that has almost no speaking parts that occur within flashbacks.

The ending of this film is both crazy and violent, with an attempt to shock the audience that failed because within a story this insane, the only conclusion that could have happened is the one that did happen at the end.

Like the horrible Poor Things from two years ago, this movie is receiving high 86% ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, once again scoring too high only because the ideas and scenes have never been seen before, and not because this movie is very good or great. The odds are high that this film will receive a Best Picture nomination, and Emma Stone will be nominated for Best Actress, this time hopefully she will not win again.

My rating for this film is 50% only for some of the acting, with an emphatic recommendation to run from this strange nightmare of movie making.

Movie Review: Regretting You

The new movie "Regretting You" is a formulaic drama/tear-jerker based on the novel with the same name written by Coleen Hoover, which serves to prove how difficult an art form screenwriting is. There is a predictable, tragic event within the first 25% of this story, and then the problem is, where do you go from there? Unfortunately, the remainder of this story includes an entire daytime soap opera, with multiple discoveries of cheating that happened years earlier, with an on-again, off-again teenage relationship story fillers that, for the most part, provide scenes to make this rather bad movie its two hours.

Regretting You stars Allison Williams as Morgan Grant, McKenna Grace as her daughter, Clara Grant, with Scott Eastwood as her husband Chris, and Jenny Davidson (Willa Fitzgerald) married to Jonah Sullivan (Dave Franco). They all create a love quadrangle involving two couples, all of whom have many secrets of infidelity. The problems with this movie are that it is too predictable, too boring in too many areas, with no real message after the two hours are finished.

This screenplay required many more rewrites and looks like it was rushed into production. The central climax/tragedy in this story happens too soon, and could have been corrected by more setup in the first act of this screenplay. The acting is OK, but due to the slow and boring parts, and the soap opera-like story there is no way this movie will be in theaters any longer than two weeks. This time around the extremely low Rotten Tomatoes of 30% is correct, with a recommendation to miss this movie.

Movie Review: Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere

Most fans of the great entertainer Bruce Springsteen will probably think that the new biopic "Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere" is about how someone born in Freehold, New Jersey, in September 1949, came from nowhere and became an international sensation. This movie would be about a sequential story spanning many years of squalor and hardship, including sleeping on couches, living in a car, and in bad hotel rooms, with no money, hunger, and desperation, and somehow never giving up the impossible dream of becoming a famous singer. This film would also be about his friends in "The E Street Band" and how their friendships grew, and how they all overcame so many years of bad times and then finally tremendous success.

Unfortunately, this movie is not about any of these things. The screenwriter/director, Scott Cooper, decided to make this entire movie about a small moment in time in Springsteen's career after his album "The River" was released, when Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) spent time in a rented house in Colts Neck, New Jersey, and records a new album on low-quality sound equipment and spends too much of the remaining movie brooding and depressed over releasing this new album "Nebraska" as he recorded it originally. This includes many disagreements with his manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong), and his off and on again relationship with a single mother Faye Romano (Odessa Young), which, due to his conflicts and depression he treats very badly in this film. Ongoing flashbacks with Springsteen and his abusive alcoholic father (Stephen Graham) are at times hard to watch, because his father turned his anger and rage over his horrible life and bad jobs out on his wife and son, a life reality familiar to too many of us.

Most impressive are the way too few singing performances of Jeremy Allen White, who closely masters the sounds and single style of one of the greatest singers of all time. Anyone would have to admire the amount of hours of training and practice to master a voice as challenging as Springsteen's.

Once again, in an effort to do something new and different, a great opportunity was lost with this movie because just about everybody would rather see a true biography and not a small, depressing excerpt of the career of Bruce Springsteen. This is the reason behind the low ratings of 61% on Rotten Tomatoes, making a movie that should have been a huge hit, a big miss, for reasons that are so obvious. Overal I also rate this movie a pass, only recommending the scenes of some good acting and the too few singing performances of Jeremy Allen White.