I get it that filmmakers have their way of making their works in their own individual artistic way. But Blonde proved to be, as the heading reads, extremely convoluted.
Before I got into the negatives of the movie, I must say that the onbly saving grace of Blonde is Ana De Armas. I mean she alone carried the movie singlehandedly. Throughout the movie her emotionally draining performances were excellent but somehow I could also feel that she carried messy load of making this movie. It's like she's saying "enough is enough". It's as if she couldn't wait to get out of making this movie.
And that alone is the singular positive note about Blonde.
Otherwise, everything about Blonde was not only messy. But it went on and on for almost three hours. Granted that many of us knew the background to the story of Marilyn Monroe even to the last hours of her life. Whether it was conspiracy or not, it doesn't matter. Nonetheless, the public is aware of the gist of her tragic story and her legacy of being the pop culture icon that she was.
But that's no excuse in dragging the movie for the film runtime without any interesting take on the episodic events that happened in her life. Heck, even Netflix other Documentary about her is far more engaging than this movie.
In terms of the styles like the aspect ratio throughout the entire movie was jarring. I mean since many of us are already attuned to the 16:9 format I guess it's ok that the filmmakers could take certain artistic liberties to showcase the movie in 4:3. Yet that too is also dragged by the constant changing of color palates from colored to black & white, and vice versa. I mean certain scenes looked as if they randomly change the color; which is not only annoying but equally didn't provide any continuity logic to the story.
Another thing that many audiences were out off are by the excessive amount of nudity. Given the film rating, I suppose the filmmakers could utilize nudity to serve the story. However, it looked as if they were literally exploting the actors especially on the part of Ana De Armas. So much so that the movie could have crossed the line into softcore porn and making the film appeared in bad taste.
Like many of us who are familiar with the Marilyn Monroe story, we definitely knew about her marriages to Joe Dimaggio and Arthur Miller as well as prpoerted affair with the late JFK. Yet the continuity of the movie was so disjointed that each of those relationships appeared to come into screen out of nowehere. This was especially so when Marilyn was suddenly summoned into Kennedy's bedroom without much background of how they knew each other in the first place. Not to mention Marilyn peforming oral sex and describing her imminent action afterwards. Again as if the filmmakers were teasing us that they were indeed making a softcore porn.
So all in all, Blonde was a bad movie all around with the exception of Ana De Armas' performance.
And if only (and that's a big IF), the Academy were to consider De Armas for a nomination I really hope they would dismiss the movie entirely but solely focusing on her performance alone.
Before I got into the negatives of the movie, I must say that the onbly saving grace of Blonde is Ana De Armas. I mean she alone carried the movie singlehandedly. Throughout the movie her emotionally draining performances were excellent but somehow I could also feel that she carried messy load of making this movie. It's like she's saying "enough is enough". It's as if she couldn't wait to get out of making this movie.
And that alone is the singular positive note about Blonde.
Otherwise, everything about Blonde was not only messy. But it went on and on for almost three hours. Granted that many of us knew the background to the story of Marilyn Monroe even to the last hours of her life. Whether it was conspiracy or not, it doesn't matter. Nonetheless, the public is aware of the gist of her tragic story and her legacy of being the pop culture icon that she was.
But that's no excuse in dragging the movie for the film runtime without any interesting take on the episodic events that happened in her life. Heck, even Netflix other Documentary about her is far more engaging than this movie.
In terms of the styles like the aspect ratio throughout the entire movie was jarring. I mean since many of us are already attuned to the 16:9 format I guess it's ok that the filmmakers could take certain artistic liberties to showcase the movie in 4:3. Yet that too is also dragged by the constant changing of color palates from colored to black & white, and vice versa. I mean certain scenes looked as if they randomly change the color; which is not only annoying but equally didn't provide any continuity logic to the story.
Another thing that many audiences were out off are by the excessive amount of nudity. Given the film rating, I suppose the filmmakers could utilize nudity to serve the story. However, it looked as if they were literally exploting the actors especially on the part of Ana De Armas. So much so that the movie could have crossed the line into softcore porn and making the film appeared in bad taste.
Like many of us who are familiar with the Marilyn Monroe story, we definitely knew about her marriages to Joe Dimaggio and Arthur Miller as well as prpoerted affair with the late JFK. Yet the continuity of the movie was so disjointed that each of those relationships appeared to come into screen out of nowehere. This was especially so when Marilyn was suddenly summoned into Kennedy's bedroom without much background of how they knew each other in the first place. Not to mention Marilyn peforming oral sex and describing her imminent action afterwards. Again as if the filmmakers were teasing us that they were indeed making a softcore porn.
So all in all, Blonde was a bad movie all around with the exception of Ana De Armas' performance.
And if only (and that's a big IF), the Academy were to consider De Armas for a nomination I really hope they would dismiss the movie entirely but solely focusing on her performance alone.