It’s hard not to associate Zelda Williams and Diablo Cody’s Lisa Frankenstein (Focus, 2.9.24) with Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, which is based on Alisdair Gray 1992 novel but has been more commonly referred to over the last few months as Barbie Meets Frankenstein. Lisa began shooting in August ‘22, or roughly 13 years after the development of Poor Things had begun.

I’ve just stumbled out of Will Gluck’s Anyone But You (Sony, 12.21), and I’m trying to imagine sitting through a more synthetic or robotic Millennial-Zoomer romcom…I wanted to leap into a river of molten lava.

Set on the sunny Australian coast and based on William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, it’s about the usual emotional avoidance crap…pretending and faking feelings and putting in appearances and never coming clean until the very end…romantic hokum at its most hellish and soul-numbing.

Anyone But You is a skin-deep farce of the lowest order…slick and precocious…basically like sitting through a ping-pong game…bad for your soul and UTTERLY HORRIBLE…I felt as if I couldn’t breathe.

Glen Powell has that hunky X-factor thing going on, but Gluck and Illana Wolpert’s script is so arch and fizzy and deeply infuriating in the way it flaunts its plasticity, it nearly smothers Powell’s soul…not even a vague semblance of human-like behavior to be found.

Sydney Sweeney’s boobs are bouncy and undeniable, but to me she’s nothing. Okay, she works hard at the physical farce stuff, but she refuses to relax and is constantly “acting.”

There’s more attention paid to Powell’s brawny, bare-chested physique and his butt cheeks (and the butt cheeks of Joe Davidson, playing an Australian surfer dude) than to Sweeney’s boobs or any other female anatomical diversions…it’s basically empty beefcake with a side order of cheesecake.

I’ll tell you one thing — if Powell had been cast in Paul Mescal’s role in All Of Us Strangers, I would have had significantly fewer problems with Andrew Haigh’s film, cum droplets and all.

I was half into the first 10 or 15 minutes of Anyone But You (mostly occurring in a Starbucks-like outlet) but despised the remainder top to bottom.

It basically plays on the same broad farcical level of Ticket to Paradise, that godawful George Clooney-Julia Roberts South Seas comedy (also shot down under).

My first thought as I watched the trailer for Rose Glass‘s Love Lies Bleeding (A24, 3.8), a blue-collar lesbian melodrama, was “nope, not for me.”

The second thought was “they’re taunting me…they want me to mansplain how the two leads are too butchy and therefore unappealing to Joe and Jane Popcorn.” Which they are.

Plus the fact that Kristen Stewart has clearly tried to butch herself down — not a hint of makeup, shaggy mullet — and Katy O’Brian is too stocky and buffed up, and frankly not all that classically fetching. I’m sorry but we can’t all be beautiful or button-cute.

A queer cinema landmark? Perhaps among a certain independent film sorority or within Venice Beach body-building circles, but you can’t seriously expect guys like myself to say “hmmm, looks interesting…I’ll definitely give it a shot.” C’mon, man…they’re not that attractive! Sorry but I’m more of a lipstick lesbian kinda guy

Bleeding will debut at Sundance ’24, and that’s where it belongs. Costarring Ed Harris, Jena Malone, Anna Baryshnikov and Dave Franco.

A high judicial authority has finally agreed that a certain deranged insurrectionist is disqualified from running for President next year…praise God.

Audrey Diwan‘s Happening (’21) is the second best film I’ve ever seen about the trauma of an unwanted pregnancy and an abortion. (The best is Cristian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, released 16 years ago.) Diwan and cowriter Rebecca Zlotowski has been lensing a lesbian Emmanuelle, which may turn up in Cannes next May.

Emmanuelle was a steamy hetero franchise in the ’70s and early ’80s with Sylvia Kristel in the lead role.

French actress Naomie Merlant, who has played heavy-breathing gay characters in Portrait Of A Woman on Fire and TAR, is the titular character in Diwan’s newbie. Naomi Watts,,Will Sharpe and Anthony Wong costar.

Jimi Hendrix: “There ain’t no straight stuff nowhere except for that Glenn Powell-Sydney Sweeney romcom, and Sweeney is kinda funny lookin’.”