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Shannon Penrod

Penrod: I Shouldn't Watch Movies When I Have Covid...

Blonde D- Netflix


Let’s not mince words, shall we? Blonde is a steaming pile of crap. Let me be more specific…It is an overdirected, misogynistic, thinly veiled, anti-abortion steaming pile of crap. Writer, director Andrew Dominik attempts to tell the life story of poor Marilyn Monroe, the beautiful but befuddled starlet, who just can’t seem to find her daddy. In doing so Dominik joins the legions of men who fuck Marilyn Monroe and leave her for dead without bothering to know who she was. I marvel at how, in this day and age, a film this putrid can get made? If I have to watch one more biopic of a legendary woman that has her whispering and preening while men knock her around, I’m seriously going to throw up on someone. It’s like the "me too" movement has only left room for men to openly abuse and mistreat woman if they are icons and it happened in the past. It’s misogyny porn and Dominik is the king. He doesn’t even pretend to tell her story – just pieces together the parts of her story where she is in a relationship with a famous man. Wow. What a heinous disservice to a woman who was known to be wildly intelligent, extremely well-read and genuinely kind. She certainly had a lot of creeps in her life; it is a shame she was put in the hands of one more.


Beyond all of this, Blonde fails on so many other levels. It’s really self-indulgent story telling; there are long, endlessly long sequences that serve no other purpose than to show off lighting and camera techniques that are not new and not clever. The cast is one of the biggest crying shames. Ana de Armas is lovely and the only thing that remotely saves the film, but she is wasted in bad writing and epically bad direction. In one scene after watching the premiere of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, she numbly looks at the camera and whispers seductively, “I killed my baby for this?” Yeah. She deserves an award for having tolerated the script. Bobby Cannavale makes a real attempt to save the movie as Joe DiMaggio but is ultimately turned into a cartoon character by one of the weirdest directing choices I have ever seen. What a waste. And it’s LONG…really long…like the Queen’s funeral long…and no where near as compelling. So bad. So bad on all levels.

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