Speaker 1: We're Tom Lorenzo and this is the Bitter Kitten Movie Club.
Hallo Kittens, Welcome back to another edition of the b
k MC is supplemental edition of the PSO podcast where
we take a look at one film and unpack it
and I want to say terror to shreds, but although
we might actually tear this one dish, this week's film
is Mac Is the Bride, directed by Maggie and written
by Maggie chillenhol starring Jesse Buckley, Christian Bill, Annette Benning,
Uh Peter Sars, Guard Cruz Jake, all of Maggie's friends.
Speaker 2: Family, family she hired.
Speaker 1: I was really looking forward to this entry because we
hadn't seen it, and because it's modern, it's from the
last year, and you know, a lot of the films
we've been doing lately have been films we you know,
really really well, or films that are like thirty or
forty years old. So it's nice to return to the
modern era and also to unpack a film that, honestly,
I didn't have a lot of information going into it.
I wanted to see this film when the trailer first
dropped like eighteen months ago, and it looked amazing to me.
And I know I read a few reviews when it
came out, but I genuinely did not know what the
film was. I knew it was a Bonnie and Clyde
take on the Barida Frankens s liign, but I really
went into this one cold.
Speaker 2: I was surprised that he kind of disappeared.
Speaker 1: I mean, it was there was a well it didn't
get good reviews, right, you know, and well, I do
want to say, let's start with this Magigillen. Hall's directorial
debut was twenty twenty One's feature debut was twenty twenty
ones The Lost Daughter, which we talked about on our
podcast at the time, which is a very good and
it's a very good film. However, I came away from
this film with the idea that, Okay, she's not fully
baked as a director yet. She really she's got skills,
she's got a perspective, she's got a great visual sense.
But I don't feel that. I look at the Bride
and I'm like, this is the this is the work
of someone who's just not there yet. And I do
want to say that part of this was colored by
her appearance. A couple of weeks ago, Magagillen Hall she
appeared on Turner Classic Movies to introduce some films in
one of the one of their programs they bring on
yes and they and.
Speaker 2: They usually a director or an actor, y, yeah.
Speaker 1: And they and one of the and one of the
films that she introduced was Bebbet's Feast, which we had
just done a b KMC about. So we were watching
it and I was alarmed. Actually, I was like, oh, okay,
she doesn't know what the hell she's talking about. Like
Ben Mangawitz, the host actually had to push back again
she got a couple of things wrong, and you know,
it's fine if you don't if you get a few
things factually wrong in the discussion of a film, but
it was more like her perspective on that film was
just not correct. It was you know, she at one
point she said all of the elderly actors were not actors,
and he was like, actually, no, they are like legend
legends in Danish filmmaking. And then at another point she
said the director was only interested in Babet and he
made everybody else look terrible, So that Babbitt and it
was like, no, that's not what's going on in this story.
So I did come away from that thinking she's interesting,
but I don't think she's quite there yet as a director.
She doesn't seem to get certain nuances. And I understand
I'm laying all this groundwork because I know that people
are going to think that sounds condescending or dismissive of
a female director. I can't really help that. Like I said,
her debut film I thought was amazing, amazing. I think
she's very talented. But between that interview and this film,
I came away thinking, Okay, she's just not there yet.
I want to see more from her. It's sort of
like Olivia Wilde when she did Don't Worry Darling. It
just wasn't a fully baked film. And my understanding is
that her new film, The Invite, is supposed to be amazing.
I'm not diminishing a female director. I'm pointing out that
a lot of times when actors move into directing, they
don't always get it right right, and some of them
need time to figure it out. And that was my
take on The Bride, was that great ideas, really great ideas,
great visuals. She pulled out some amazing performances, although really Frankly,
the only truly amazing performance was Jesse Buckley, and I
think probably you just need to point a camera at
Jesse Buckley, But I don't want to diminish her as
a director and as a writer. It's an accomplishment this film,
and there's a lot about it that I actually really
really loved, and very little about it that I hate.
In fact, I can't say that I hate any part
of it. I just kept getting frustrated with it because
it just didn't feel like she was following through on
some of her concepts. That's my intro.
Speaker 2: What do you want to say? True? Is that Windy
announced The Bride the movie. I was very excited about it.
I was like, that's interesting. It's a different take. We're
going to focus on the bride and not on freakancy.
And then when I read that she was going to
be directed in the movie, I was like, of course,
she's a feminist. She's a wonderful person. She's actually very
interesting as a person.
Speaker 1: And as an artist.
Speaker 2: As an artist, she has very interesting things to say
about the industry, about women in general and all that.
So I was like, she's perfect for that. So I
was very looking forward to and then when it was
also announced that Jesse Buckley was going to be the Brider,
I was like, all right, perfect match. So I was
curious about it. I watched the trailer and I was like,
all right, great, let's see. And then I kind of
forgot about it because people stopped talking about it and
it didn't get very good reviews, as you said, and
then I just was like, well, i'll watch it later.
So I watch it. We watched it separately, we didn't
watch it together. My first reaction, I'm.
Speaker 1: Not because I was watching The Pillies game less.
Speaker 2: Yes, while I was watching The Bride. Yeah, my first
reaction was like, what the hell am I watching here? Yeah?
Speaker 1: You were annoyed.
Speaker 2: I was like, what is going on here? It's just
felt like too much. Then I read a ton of
interviews with her and the pretty much. She admits that
it was too much for her, that she was a
little scared, and that she felt like overwhelmed most of
the time. And then every interview.
Speaker 1: She's sorry to say that comes across, and every interview.
Speaker 2: She gave, she talks about how today most of the
movies are don't really are defined by a gender, I'm sorry,
a genre and she feels like, and then she mentions
like one bet or after another or whatever she talks
about that, well, look at that movie, for example, you
know what is that? So she every interview she kept
repeating the same thing that movies today are not really
defined by one genre, and she felt like she wanted
to do something like that. And I feel that's why
the movie feels a little all over the place. Sometimes.
You know, it's it's a musical, it's a horror movie,
it's a love story, it's all that, which is fine,
But at first I don't. I don't think. I think
for a movie to succeed, that's just my opinion, you
really have to have a core. You have to have
a basic understanding, right of what message you get?
Speaker 1: What are you trying to say here? What is the
point of making this movie?
Speaker 2: What is the message here? I agree, what is the
takeaway here? Otherwise the audience is lost, you know, the
viewer is lost. That's how I feel about it. So
in the beginning, I was like, what am I watching here?
I had no idea, and so that was it. I
appreciate many things about it. Anyway, we'll talk about all
the details.
Speaker 1: But let me that was my first thing, so generally
on the same page, and I don't think there's gonna
be much disagreement about where we where this film fails
for us. So before we turned on the mics, I
brought this up and we both said, all right, let's
talk about that on the mic, which was I really
didn't get the whole Mary Shelley thing. I just didn't
get it. It felt very confused to me. It had
me running off. I mean, I knew the broad particulars
of Mary Shelley life and everything, but the idea to
portray her as this sort of I mean, she came
off fairly crazy, right, she came off like unstable. She
came off I don't know. It's not for me to
unpack who Mary Shelley was. If that's the version of
her that you wanted for this film, that's fine. I
just I what are you doing here? Like, what's the point?
You know, Mary Shelley is the author of the Frankenstein story,
but you actually placed her in this story and then
you had your lead character possessed by her. What is
the point? First off, it confuses the viewer because is
this meta or not? Or are we I mean, at
a certain point. I guess we were supposed to believe
that Mary Shelley from the Grave is telling another version
of this story, and but that's not how the film
plays out, or the film gets very confused about how
that sort of thing plays out. Another example of this
is and yeah, you can be you can interpret these
things anyway you like. But I feel like if you
don't as a director, if you don't have a point
for showing me this, then you're just confusing me. At
the very end of the film, when they're in the
drive in theater and he's talking to her and then
they both appear on the screen. Now they had that
happen earlier in the film, and yeah, that's a subjective
thing there in the movies, and they see themselves up
on screen. But the way that scene was shot, Penelope
Cruz also saw them up on screen. She kept reacting
to them on screen, And I'm like, you can do this,
you can do this sort of fantasy based thing, the
interpretive sort of thing, but you have to have a
reason for it. And I don't understand what's the reason
for that, right.
Speaker 2: I think there's too many elements tried to be injected. Yeah,
at the same time, My understanding is she gave interviews,
She gave me interviews, and she talks about how well
the writer Mary Shelley, Well, apparently I don't know much.
I don't know all the details. But apparently it was
kind of a dare when she wrote the book, you know,
because she was a woman and she wanted to prove
that she could write a book as a woman to
her friends and all that, and she told that story.
So I think in the idea here was to what
if she had a different story in her head, or
if she framing does not support that, what if she
had a different character, or what if she wanted to
develop the Bride more, you know, as a full on,
you know character, because the apparently this movie is based
on the nineteen thirty five version of Frankenstein correct the
Bride of Frankenstein. And apparently in the movie, the nineteen
thirty five version, the Bride only appears for like two
minutes or whatever, like she's not right. And so the
whole idea was to write a movie and direct a
movie about focusing on the bride. And so what if
Mary Shelley had all these ideas that she never used
for the Bride? But and I got that, all right.
I'm looking at Mary Shelley here in the beginning of
the movie, but why is Jesse Buckley playing her?
Speaker 1: So that was very confused, Bob of me as much
as what are you trying to everything that you were
saying that's lovely? That does not come across in the film, right,
But that's I think I I think it's very clear
that she wanted to look at this from a feminist perspective, right,
I mean in a way that's almost like, well, why
would you not? I mean, you're a female director making
this movie in twenty twenty five, how could you not?
Speaker 2: And focusing on the bride obviously.
Speaker 1: So, so she cast a woman as the mad scientist,
and she cast a woman as sort of the lead
constable who's trying to track down these monsters.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: So all of the basic characters of Frankenstein were gender switched.
But then she did nothing with that. There's a little
bit of time where Annette Benning unpacks her own history
as a mad scientist and her own history with these
kinds of experiments, and apparently she had a husband that
she res but she doesn't go anywhere with it, and
a net Benning just drops out of the film for
like an hour. Similarly with Penelope Cruz, I get what
you're trying to do. I do, but at the same token,
if you're not doing it in a way that's strong
and makes sense, that I am stuck asking a bunch
of questions like why is a Spanish woman working as
a detective in Chicago in the nineteen thirties? Like of
course I'm taken out by that, And yeah, I mean,
I guess you could just throw you know, history and
just let her be a female detective in the nineteen thirties,
as if that was something that existed, Like sure, just
you don't have to explain. But then they had a
male cop, go who are you? And why am I
taking orders from you? Like you can have it both ways.
You can gender switch these stories in a way that
is historically inaccurate, much in the same way you would
have all these for instance, black aristocrats in Bridgeton. You're
deliberately switching it up. But then you can't have characters
act like you know, you can't have characters comment on it, essentially,
because then it pulls you right out of the story
and we'll get into the performances because I know you
have things you want to say about Penelope Cruise's performance.
We'll do that after the break, but right now I'm
just focused on conceptually. This film did not work for me.
You pointed out that it is a musical or horror film,
a love story, or it tries to be all three
of those things, And as soon as she said that,
I was like, well, that actually sounds like an interesting movie,
Like it's not impossible to do a musical horror love story.
The thing is that I never got the sense that
that was what she was doing. In fact, it wasn't
until the final shot of the two monsters grasping hands
as they that was when I was like, oh, she's
really doing this as a love story, because it was
pretty confused up until that point. And this is what
I keep coming back to. Fine, you want to do
this as a love story, well you can't spend the
entire film having Frankenstein lie to her about what he did,
about what her name is, about who right, and then
have her what just forgive that. They never get to
that point. They never really explain why she makes that
shift at the end of the film, like she was
really angry when she found out that he had lied
to him and then okay, no, it's a love story. Similarly, Listen,
I did laugh when they started doing putting on the Ritz.
I don't know if you got the reference, but it
is a reference to young Frankenstein. It's an iconic reference
to young Frankenstein. But again, there needs to be some
consistency when you apply that sort of thing. Similarly, at
the end of the film, when the credits were rolling,
they played the monster match, and again it's like, if
you wanted a campy take on the iconography of Frankenstein
and you wanted to make all these references, I would
be on board with that, But you can't drop in
one every hour and then not follow up. So yeah,
I actually thought the musical number was fun. It was
fun to watch. They were all screaming their heads off,
and the choreography was really great. Didn't really wasn't really
well explained about what was going on in that scene.
But the thing is, you can't just have one musical
number dropped in the middle of a movie. You got
to follow up on that. There has to be an aesthetic,
there has to be a consistency to that world. So
quite frankly, there should have been more than one musical number, right.
Speaker 2: She explains a lot about the process of making the
movie and why she did certain things. She talks about
the you know, very much inspired by nineteen thirties musicals
and how fake there were, the Hollywood fantasy of the
nine thirties and that's why they.
Speaker 1: Had which is not a very sophisticated take on that
at all. It's just like, I'm sorry, it's not I.
Speaker 2: Feel that, like things are not very consistent, and they
I don't know, they feel like separate elements in the movie.
It doesn't feel like.
Speaker 1: One now, there's no cohesion to it.
Speaker 2: Yes, there's not one big thing. But anyway, I, like
I said, at first, I was like, I have no
idea what I'm watching, but I'm gonna watch it and
you know, go with it, and again everyone is great.
I also, I actually thought that that Benny did a
very good job with whatever she had. I mean, she
came across as this intelligence and I liked that that approach,
that she was an intelligent woman, didn't wasn't surprised by anything,
like you know, she you know, just yeah, all.
Speaker 1: Right, why don't we take a short break and then
we'll get into some of the performances, and also some
of the things like you just did that we actually
like about this because I have to. I don't hate
this movie. I just think it's a deeply flawed one. Okay,
all right, we'll be right back. We're back chatting about
The Bride. And I did want to get into some
of the performances. I mean, the performances are fun across
the board. I don't there's not a single one that
I didn't like. Jesse Buckley fucking amazing, I mean seriously,
and especially when she had to do the rapid fire
shifts between she was playing Ida, she was playing the Bride,
she was playing Mary Shelley, and she would sometimes have
to do all three in the same sentence. Fun to watch,
great to watch. And when she does that primal scream
thing like just you just feel it coming up from her.
Speaker 2: She's wild.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she is completely wild.
Speaker 2: I did not understand the split personel and in the
beginning before she actually died, So I don't get that.
Speaker 1: I don't get any of that stuff. The Mary Shelley's
I don't get it when she's not well utilized, when.
Speaker 2: She's at the restroom with everybody else or the club
or whatever, and then she started like, well, speaking in
tongues or whatever. It just made no sense to me.
I was like, why is she doing that?
Speaker 1: I said, we were going to talk about the performances
and what we liked. But that is one of the
main flaws of how the story is told is that
we are never told who Ida is. And I mean
there is a certain as you pointed out, in the
original BRIDI Frankenstein Elsa Lanchester is only in it for
like two minutes and all she does is scream. She
gets no lines, she gets no name. So this film
is a response to that. So it's it's we're going
to have her speak her truth throughout the entire film
over and over and over again, and we're going to
have her seek out her name, right, you know. But
that quest to find out her name, to find out
her identity has no weight to it because we the
audience don't know who that person was. And I get it,
there's like this twist at the end because she was
working with the cops and blah blah blah. But I
think the tragedy of Ida would have been a little
bit more, a little easier for the audience to grasp
if we had actually seen Ida as a fully realized person, right,
We never got to see that. She started acting crazy
in her first scene and then she was dead two
minutes later.
Speaker 2: I think the scene's in the car when they actually
having a conversation about when she questions him and then
he finally tells the truth and she goes like, well,
who was I? I don't know who I am. I
don't know who I was.
Speaker 1: More of that, more of that exactly you had. She
also had that idea about Ida or the bride inspiring
women all over to go foul in, and it was
just dropped in with no follow up. And I know
that there was a post credit scene or whatever with those,
but that was actually a good concept. You had an
idea there, and you just didn't go with it because
you kept throwing everything at the screen and.
Speaker 2: The Bonnie and Clyde thing, and then they're in the
paper and that's why every women in the country was
trying to write it's just be her.
Speaker 1: It was trying to do too much, all right. More
about the performances, I thought Christian Bale gave a great profile.
I thought he was also he actually found humor in
that character. And you know it's you kind of inevitably
are going to compare it to Jacob e Loordi. Both
of these films came out in the same year Gamma
Del Torros Frankenstein and this. And I had my issues
with Del Torros Frankenstein, mostly because I don't think Frankenstein
is a is a sexual slash romantic figure. I don't
think he works that well. That's more of a vampire
thing than a Frankenstein thing. So and then Jacob Elordi
was this highly romanticized version of the character, borderline beautiful.
I mean, they did make him look like but he
was borderline beautiful. And I didn't agree with that, and
I didn't like it. And Christian bale I was like
that that's closer to what if you want to do
a romantic frank and sign, that's what you do. You
do this pathetic, somewhat grotesque figure, and they did. They
made the point of showing like he's not some beautiful
His body was grotesque, right, And he's like an inceel,
like he doesn't understand women at all, he doesn't understand
roman at all. He wants it, and that wanting is
you know, it's your heartbreaks for him, but at the
same time, you're like, no, this person should never ever
ever enter you know, no. And I think he managed
to straddle that line where you feel the romantic side
of this character, but you also know there is no
way that this character is literally a monster.
Speaker 2: No. Again, he's conversation with the doctor the scientists. It
was very interesting when he's talking about like, you know,
I want to feel somebody, I want to you know,
I want to feel love and all that have have apartments.
Speaker 1: Really well done, and and.
Speaker 2: You know the scientists like, yeah, well, yeah, all right.
I had that it's not a big deal. But you know,
she she doesn't understand that, you know it. He never
experienced anything. So I just thought it was moments like that.
I thought it were interesting and deep in a way,
but then it sort of like evaporates and then then
we're back to them dancing or running with a gun. Yeah.
I mean it's beautiful. It looked beautiful. The costumes were gorgeous.
The everything about it looked beautiful. It looked expensive.
Speaker 1: The production design is amazing, the costumes, especially obviously hers.
Speaker 2: Yes again, uh.
Speaker 1: Sandy Powell, the legendary costume designer, did the costumes for
this and again I don't mean to sound condescending, but
cogentle on Hale gave an interview and I was like, oh, girl,
you you really don't have the instinct shit where she
fought with Powell about the orange dress and she's like,
it's too bright. I wanted a brown dress, and Sandy
Powell apparently said to her, I don't do brown. And
they fought over this, and you know she she admitted
Maggie gentle on Hale, she said, when I saw it
on set at night, I realized that Sandy Powell is
a genius. And I was like, Weney, it took you
too long to come to that realization. I mean, the
best thing about the one of the best things about
the films is the visualization of her is how not
just the orange dress, but the hair, the hair, the
stain on her face and everything. At one point she
picks up a piece of black tool and puts it
in her hair like a veil. Just clever shit like that.
And then if you look the like her, her tights
are like turquoise and her boots are red. And none
of this, none of this is accurate to the nineteen thirties,
Like those boots that she was wearing were straight out
of the Victorian era. The whole thing had sort of
a steampunk vibe to it. But it looked amazing to
be a film, and Doctor Euphronis's laboratory also looked amazing on films,
just had that universal pictures kind of nineteen thirties. One
final thing about that all of these references. You have
references to Young Frankenstein and the Monster mash and but
you don't really have it. You set this film in
the nineteen thirties, which is when the original Frankenstein films
came out, and you even refer like I said that
her laboratory had a certain Universal Pictures feel to it.
I thought that would be more of an homage to
Elsa Lanchester somewhere in that film, and I didn't see it.
You're making all these other references, but you're not going
to reference the original iconic bride of Frankenstein. That seems
strange to me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I again, I think she had too many ideas.
I think she wanted a modern take. Maybe that's why
she avoided the original movie. And you know, there's a
ton of elements and they're interesting, but when you put
them all together, it feels like too much and there's
not a I don't know.
Speaker 1: It was a good idea for a movie, but yeah,
she just didn't follow through on it. And I am
looking forward to what she does next because I do
think she's interesting and creative, but everything about this film
felt underbaked and confused.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, and I think everybody gate. I mean,
for the most part, everyone gave a phenomenal performance. I
do think Penelopecrusis is an amazing actress. Yeah, she is
absolutely fantastic. If you haven't watched any any one of
her Almodover movies, I mean, she's incredible, incredible.
Speaker 1: But she struggled with this.
Speaker 2: But she she's not good in English. That's the bottom
line here.
Speaker 1: She's not She's not good in English. She can be good, I.
Speaker 2: Don't think she can. But anyway, I think it's it
And because the character is not very well developed, you know,
there's not much there as a character, you combine both
and it was just like what are you doing there?
I mean that's how I felt the whole time. I mean, like,
what's the point of this character? And it's you know,
she's not doing a very good job.
Speaker 1: I think the film. I'm sorry, go ahead, Yeah, I
think she had this concept, like I said, with the
female constable, female and scientist, but then she muddled it
up because she wanted her husband in there and she
wanted her brother in there. So there were like storylines
with these two male characters that are just muddying up
this story. If you had focused on the female detective,
as odd as that character was, and the female scientist
and the female monster, you could have had something there, right.
Speaker 2: I mean, it took me a while to understand, what's
your fascination with this? With this you know actor? Right,
and even that was not well and then like and
then and then she when she gave interviews, she talks
about like, well, he was he's fascinated with movies and
musicals and blah blah blah, and then with with and
then his attraction to the bride is because she's she's
sort of like an actress.
Speaker 1: It was it just so it was not well fought out.
And that's basically, uh huh, the take on this film.
Do you have anything else you want to add?
Speaker 2: No? I mean I I I have to say that
when I watched it last night and then when I
finished it, I went to bed and I was like,
oh my god, what did I just watch? But then
I woke up this morning and I thought more about it,
and I things begin to make more sense.
Speaker 1: It's definitely an interesting idea for a film.
Speaker 2: Right, And I was like, all right, now I get
certain things. And then I watched a couple of interviews.
I was like, all right, but again, we talk about
this all the time. You wouldn't have You shouldn't have
to do all this homework now to appreciate some form
of art.
Speaker 1: I agree. So an interesting take, but way too confused
and muddled. That's it for us this week. I have
to put together a list of films for July's BKMC,
which I have not done yet, and I don't think
it's going up until Monday, so I don't have a
list for you just as of yet, and I don't
I don't know how many. I think there are five
Fridays July, in which case we might take next Friday
off because it's July third, and who the hell's listening
to a podcast on that weekend? So we'll be back soon.
I just don't know when it'll either be next week.
Or the week after with the next BKMC. Please check
out Tom and Lorenzo dot com for the list of
films to watch, and once again thank you for listening.
I love you.
Speaker 2: Bye bye bye