Emma Stone | A Screenwriters Perspective: Current and Past Movies.

On December 23, 2023, I reviewed the movie “Poor Things” that starred Emma Stone, with the director
Yorgos Lanthimos is by far one of the worst movies I have ever seen. Like the other horrific movie “Everything Everywhere All at Once”, released in 2022, Poor Things was nominated for several Oscars, with Emma Stone, for completely unknown reasons, winning for Best Actress. Clearly, there is something very wrong with the Academy Awards voting process.

The new movie Bugonia is the fourth collaboration of Stone and Lanthimos, and while not as bad as Poor Things, this movie is insane, weird, disgusting, and disturbing, with an ending that, despite its off-the-wall craziness, I saw coming from a mile away. Emma Stone plays Michelle, a high-powered, very wealthy Pharmaceutical executive who works in an impressive glass building, drives an impressive Mercedes SUV, and lives in a palatial house. Unfortunately, Michelle has an employee named Teddy (Jessie Plemons) who works in one of the company’s warehouses, and is also a beekeeper, who has a dying mother and thinks that Michelle is an alien from another planet who eventually plans to kill everybody on the planet Earth.

Teddy kidnaps Michelle along with his mentally challenged brother Don (Aidan Delbis), taking her to their dilapidated house and tying her up in their basement. They shave her head because Teddy believes that she can contact her alien mother ship with her hair. Michelle’s baldness results in many scenes of close-up arguments between Michelle and Teddy, showing Emma Stone’s head and her face covered in a crazy-looking white powder, adding another strange element to this movie. There are occasional visits from a local police officer, Casey (Stavros Halkias), and ongoing conversations between him and Teddy about the time when Casey was Teddy’s babysitter and hints of child abuse.

Teddy’s mother, Sandy (Alicia Silverstone) has been dying for years and is currently in a local nursing home. It was unusual to see well-known actor Silverstone in a role that has almost no speaking parts that occur within flashbacks.

The ending of this film is both crazy and violent, with an attempt to shock the audience that failed because within a story this insane, the only conclusion that could have happened is the one that did happen at the end.

Like the horrible Poor Things from two years ago, this movie is receiving high 86% ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, once again scoring too high only because the ideas and scenes have never been seen before, and not because this movie is very good or great. The odds are high that this film will receive a Best Picture nomination, and Emma Stone will be nominated for Best Actress, this time hopefully she will not win again.

My rating for this film is 50% only for some of the acting, with an emphatic recommendation to run from this strange nightmare of movie-making.

The unfortunate new trend in movies during the last two years is continuing with the new terrible garbage film “Poor Things”. This new trend is to “be different at all costs. Quality and coherence mean nothing. Be weird or as stupid as possible. Even disgusting is acceptable, as long as it is new and has never been done before.” This film does allow the lucky few to walk out early when William Defoe who plays the mad scientist explodes strange bubbles out of his mouth while eating dinner. Why, how or what food has given him this ability is never explained, but it does provide an opening warning for many to run for their lives before the disgusting avalanche of insanity follows for two more hours.

Most insane are the high 93% Rotten Tomatoes ratings for this horrendous mess. The only sane review is from the long-term veteran Rex Reed, who has comments including: “Poor Things, a surreal mix of science-fiction and pornographic fairy tale by the loopy Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, may not be the worst commercially intended movie ever made. But it is unquestionably the filthiest. Its laughable claim to deliver a fresh take on a woman’s tortured odyssey to liberation and self-discovery serves no other purpose than extracting admission money to experience something you’ve “never seen before” and is nothing more than pumped-up poopery.” All I can say after sitting through this way too long 2 hours and 21 minutes of utter torture is – “Thank God for Rex Reed”.

This terrible movie stars Emma Stone as the reanimated zombie-like character Bella Baxter, who after jumping off of a bridge while pregnant, is brought back to life when the brain of her still living child is transplanted into her skull – a premise completely off the wall even if the technology was in the 2500s, much less the 1800s when this story takes place. Actor Willem Dafoe, plays the mad scientist whose face is extremely scarred and is able to transplant the brains of different animals and human beings. Throughout this movie there are strange creatures who are combinations of different animals – adding to the crazy sickness.

At first, Bella is an insane child, with the brain of a 3-year-old but at a very fast pace, she becomes a fully functioning adult with a high intelligence, even though chronologically she is about 5 years old. From the very beginning of this movie, there are way too many scenes of Bella masturbating with different objects, including fruits and vegetables and her hands – making all of us wonder, why the hell an Academy Award Winning actress would take this role in the first place. ”Way to screw up an acting career”.

Later in this story, Bella runs away with another man Duncan Wedderburn, played by Mark Ruffalo, and there are many almost x-rated sex scenes between the two of them. Later Bella runs off after they lose all their money and becomes a working hooker inside of a hotel and has sex with a series of old disgusting men. Once again I wondered why would a highly respected actor like Emma Stone take this role? This role includes frequent total nudity in too many scenes. I also thought that given Stone has been nominated for a Golden Globe award for this bad movie, that she might now be hoping that she will not win an Academy Award for fear that she would be too embarrassed to accept the Oscar in front of her peers in the industry.

The recently famous standup comedian Jerrod Carmichael also appears in this movie in a small role that has significance so that one wonders why he was even in this film, other than to gain an acting credit.

Much like last year’s horrendous “Everything Everywhere All At Once”, this film is one of the worst I have ever seen, with my rating a zero – and a 100% must-miss embarrassment to movie making.