HE to Academy member who saw Poor Things at Fox Zanuck on 11.18: “Do you agree that Poor Things is basically Barbie meets Frankenstein? Or, if you will, Barbie meets Terry Gilliam + multiple orgasms + Fellini Satyricon?
“A feminist journey of self-realization and self-fulfillment in which Barbie channels Radley Metzger?
“What did the proverbial room seem to think or feel about it? It was speculated back in Telluride (where it was rapturously received, to put it mildly) that the older Academy crowd might have problems with it.
“Jeff Sneider tweeted that he didn’t like it. Bill McCuddy told me the same thing, Perhaps it’s not as ‘Academy-friendly’ as some believe”?
Academy member to HE: “The somewhat younger crowd (average age around 45 ) went wild for the film. After a slow start they seemed to resist the tone, but they were eventually mesmerized by the film’s audacity.
“Emma Stone was applauded repeatedly during the q & a. She expressed her complete trust for her director as a key part of her willingness to repeatedly bare all.
“There was no mention of the screenwriter or screenplay during the q & a.
“And YES, it’s Barbie on steroids. Ten nominations, seven wins. Academy-friendly.”
The Film Stage’s Luke Hicks, filed on 9.1.23:
Posted on 10.2.23: Barbie and Poor Things are almost exactly the same movie — an attractive, spirited and completely naive (or childlike) young woman in her 20s encounters the big, bad, male-corrupted world for the very first time and somehow finds her way through the thicket, and emerges at the end of the tale with an emboldened, seen-it-all, “done with that bullshit” feminist attitude.
The only difference is that Poor Things is somewhere between throbbingly and obsessively sexual in an early ’70s sense of the term, and Barbie is plastic-ironic PG-rated by way of the Mattel corporation and a determination to be gay without actually being “gay”. Plus the only sexual act Barbie engages in, at the very end, is asking about birth control (“I’m here to see my gynecologist”).
Poor Things is obviously more perverse, not to mention more wildly imaginative in a Terry Gilliam kinda way, and Barbie is certainly slicker and more superficial in a consumer-friendly, vaguely toothless, wind-up-doll sort of way.
But when you get right down to it and boil out the snow, they’re pretty much the same movie, and this will factor heavily into the final voting for the Best Picture Oscar.
THR‘s Scott Feinberg, posted on 9.3.23: “While more than a few [Telluride] attendees found Poor Things — which I will only describe as Frankenstein meets Barbie, and which Searchlight will release on Dec. 8 — a bit too weird, and/or risqué and/or lengthy for their taste, the critical response to it has been off the charts.”
Critic friendo: “I agree completely [about the Barbie-Poor Things parallels]. I would add, however, that both movies are show-offy yet half-baked. In this context I’m almost enjoying the pile-up of woke piety — the Poor Things splooge fest.”