Emilia Perez: A Review - No es Bueno

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Yikes. A very bad musical.

Emilia Perez, written and directed by Frenchman Jacques Audiard, is a Spanish-language musical that chronicles a Mexican drug kingpin’s transition from a man into a woman.

The film, which is France’s official Oscar submission, stars Karla Sofia Gascon as Emilia Perez/Juan Del Monte – the drug kingpin, Zoe Saldana as Rita Castro – his/her lawyer, and Selena Gomez as Jessi – Juan’s wife.

The movie has garnered a whopping 13 Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best International Feature, Best Actress (Gascon) and Best Supporting Actress (Saldana).

The premise for Emilia Perez - where a brutal Mexican drug cartel kingpin yearns to live as his true self and therefore uses his vast wealth and power to undergo a transition and become a woman, is an undeniably intriguing one. Unfortunately, writer/director Jacques Audiard fumbles this premise so egregiously that the film is not just bad, but an absolutely lifeless and rather ridiculous bore.

One of the biggest problems with Emilia Perez is that it is a musical where the music is atrocious and the choreography pedestrian. Instead of being a conduit to heighten emotion, the music in this film acts as a barrier to emotion and genuine drama.

The film’s musical numbers all feel extraordinarily flat and lifeless, and cinematographer Paul Guilhaume’s camera does nothing to enhance  them, as he spends a lot of time with his camera swirling around with little to no motivation.

The film also lacks a visual crispness, distinctive color palette, and compelling framing, so it looks, and therefore feels, like a mediocre television show. Audiard has said he set out to make an opera, but to me he has made little more than a soap opera.

I would appreciate Emilie Perez for its audacity if it actually had any, but besides its premise, the film is as dramatically conventional and uninspired as can be. No doubt the film, and its supporters, thinks it has a lot of very interesting things to say on a lot of very important topics, but the reality is that it is unrelentingly allergic to profundity.

The performances in the film have received a lot of praise and award recognition, but I found them to be less than stellar.

Zoe Saldana has won a bevy of awards this year and is a favorite to win Best Supporting Actress at the Oscars, and while I acknowledge that she does a lot in the movie, from singing and dancing to emoting, I didn’t find any of it to be captivating.

This is not to say that she does a bad job, just that what she does in the context of the film, is more admirable in its effort than it is remarkable in its result.

Karlas Sofia Gascon, who plays both Juan and Emilia, is fine, I guess. She is nominated for Best Actress at the Oscars, and because of a scandal involving nasty tweets she once posted she has no chance to win, but I think she shouldn’t win because she gives a rather one-note, shallow performance.

I don’t think it’s entirely Gascon’s fault, but we never get to know Juan or Emilia in the course of the film, instead we get to see someone play-acting and not fully inhabiting the character.

And I will add, the notion that no one recognizes Emilia as the female version of Juan is one of the more absurd leaps that the film asks audiences to make…and that’s saying a lot considering that this is a Latin pop/rap musical.

Selena Gomez does her best as Jessi, Juan’s wife, but she, like the rest of the cast, isn’t given much to work with and doesn’t do anything of note with what she is given.

If I had stumbled across Emilia Perez on Netflix one night and watched it without all of the award’s hype and all the rest, I would simply say that it was an overly ambitious film that took a very big swing and missed badly. No harm in that…in fact, good for you for going for it. Better a big swing and miss than a tepid attempt and miss.

But for some reason, Emilia Perez has 13 Oscar nominations, the most of any film this year, and for a while there pre-Gascon scandal, it looked like it might win Best Picture. Thanks to that Gascon scandal, it looks like it will lose most of the major awards except for Saldana in Best Supporting Actress…so that’s good.

Of course, the reason why the film was so lauded by the Academy and by some notable critics, is that it preaches to the choir in regards to trans issues…so much so that the film literally canonizes Emilia in its final scene. And no…I’m not shitting you.

So, the film is set up to be a vehicle by which mindless Academy members and spineless critics can signal their virtue regarding trans and diversity issues. But then a funny thing happened on the way to Oscar gold…namely LGBTQ activists took umbrage with this specific depiction of a trans character…and Mexicans got pissed at an ill-informed Frenchman (Audiard) making a movie about the problems in Mexico. Uh-oh.

So Emilia Perez went from a liberal darling to a dastardly racist and transphobic villain almost overnight and Academy members and critics were confused because they don’t actually believe in anything…which ironically enough is also true of the film Emilia Perez.

Regardless of the controversy around the film and Gascon and all the rest, the reality is that this is not a good movie and it should never ever had gotten one single Oscar nomination, never mind 13.

The truth is that Emilia Perez says more about the people advocating for it and sucked in by its ruse than anything else…and what it says, like the movie itself, is nothing good.

My recommendation is to skip Emilia Perez entirely. It is not a good movie and its isn’t even a good-bad movie…it’s just a bad-bad movie. I watched it so you don’t have to…and trust me…you really don’t have to.

©2025

Avatar: The Way of Water - A Review - Blue is the Dullest Color

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An underwhelming, unneeded sequel that is just as forgettable as the original. It’s time to close Pandora’s box.

One need to look no further than the box office and Oscar ballot to understand why we are doomed as a nation, a civilization, and a species.

In the last year, two movies dominated that speak volumes about the monumental moronity of the masses. First there was Top Gun: Maverick, a hellaciously stupid, completely unnecessary, thirty-five years too late, second-rate sequel to the gay-themed, feature film Pentagon commercial that was the original Top Gun (1986). Maverick has made over a billion dollars since it premiered in May of 2022 and just got nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards.  

And there’s also Avatar: The Way of Water, a ten-years too late sequel to a movie everyone saw but nobody remembers – Avatar (2011). The Way of Water is a three-hour and fifteen-minute middling monstrosity that has made over two billion dollars at the box office and also been nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars.

After going to the movie theatre to see Maverick like a sucker, I promised myself I wouldn’t do the same for The Way of Water. I figured if writer/director James Cameron wanted to vomit out retreads of his immensely uninteresting Avatar world onto to audiences for the rest of his career, he could do it without my twenty bucks.

But since I am a tremendous big shot in Hollywood, I recently got a screener of The Way of Water and in service to you dear reader, I decided to watch it and review it.

To give context to my thoughts on The Way of Water, let me just briefly recap my feelings on the original Avatar. Basically, I thought it was an instantly forgettable, painfully dull venture that was dreadfully written and looked like a high-end videogame. I never watched it again after seeing it in the theatre, and never thought about it and never had any interest in a sequel.

Which brings us to…the sequel.

Avatar: The Way of Water is even more dreadfully written, even more forgettable and an even more dull movie than the original. It is a putrid and puerile piece of pissant moviemaking that serves no purpose whatsoever.

Unlike say the money printing machines that are the Star Wars or Marvel movies, Avatar has no compelling underlying mythology that can enrich and elevate its pedestrian story. Instead the film franchise attempts to satiate the viewer’s need for psychologically rich archetypes and mythology with vapid, vacuous, trite and insipid American cultural politics.

Speaking of the story, the plot of The Way of Water is as flaccid as the one in the original Avatar. On the planet Pandora (not to be confused with the music streaming service), Jake Sully, a former disabled human Marine and current Na’vi leader, husband and father, must protect his Na’vi family from the evil of human militarism and colonialism.

Sully’s old Marine unit was wiped out in the original Avatar – don’t worry I didn’t remember that either, but all are back now with their consciousness implanted into newly lab-grown Na’vi. So all those old, completely forgettable characters you didn’t remember from the original are back!!

In order to protect his family, which consists of his wife, two teenage boys, one teenage girl, and a younger kid whose gender I cannot for the life of me remember, Sully takes them away from the Omatikaya - forest Na’vi, and to the Metkayina - water Na’vi.

The movie is mostly a teen angst drama revolving around the struggles of the Sully kids to fit in with the water Na’vi, surrounded by predictable battle scenes between good guys and bad guys.

Here’s the thing, The Way of Water is like every bad teenage angst movie ever made, but cliched characters speaking bad dialogue don’t magically become interesting just because their skin is blue. And make no mistake, teenagers are no less annoying when they’re blue either.

The movie at one point feels like Blue Rebel Without a Cause, with Sully’s middle son Lo’ak as bargain basement James Dean and a four eyed whale as Sal Mineo’s Plato.

The movie has lots of scenes of laughing at people trying to learn new skills, like when the Metkayina teens mock the Sully kids for struggling to learn how-to-live in water, and when Spider – a human child raised by the Na’vi, laughs at the reincarnated Marine Colonel now trying to live in his new Na’vi body. Everybody laughs except for those watching.

Speaking of Spider, he’s like every dreadlock wearing white kid who thinks he’s black, as well as every skateboarding douchebag who thinks he’s interesting and tough. To say that Spider is the most annoying and embarrassing character to hit the big screen in ages would be a massive understatement.

As for the women in The Way of Water…they are all Na’vi and they are all repellant, hyper-emotionalist shrews of the highest order. If I wanted to spend hours on end with grating hags, I would’ve stayed married to my first, second or fourth wife (FYI…my third wife, Barbarella, was an angel…who unfortunately died from injuries sustained in a freak pole dancing accident - RIP).

The cast of The Way of Water, which include Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Kate Winslet and Stephen Lang are tough to judge because they’re basically animated blue beings. No one sounds very believable or anything, but acting in CGI isn’t exactly easy.

Edie Falco, plays General Ardmore, one of the few actual human characters, and as much as I love Edie Falco and respect her as an actress, she is actively awful in this movie.

Jack Champion, who plays Spider, is just atrocious as well.

As for the most important part of The Way of Water…how it looks…I have to say that it looks…fine. Granted, I didn’t see it on the big screen and watched a digital screener on my rather big tv, so my opinion on the visuals is to be taken with a gigantic grain of salt. I will say this though, a movie having nothing going for it except that it looks like a fantastically high-end video game, is not a very strong argument that it’s a good movie.

The bottom line is that Avatar: The Way of Water is a very long, very boring and banal, very derivative and dull cinematic venture. James Cameron has made some great, and I mean great, movies. Both Terminator films are absolutely fantastic, and Aliens (1986), True Lies and even The Abyss, are flawed but exceedingly well-made, entertaining films. That said, Cameron will no doubt make a bazillion dollars with his Avatar franchise, but he won’t make anything artistically or cinematically worthwhile, which is a shame and feels like a waste of his talents.

Which brings me to my final point. Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water, are two movies that aren’t original and aren’t good, and yet they’ve dominated the culture for the last year. The fact that there are people out there who think these movies are awesome is a strong indicator that America is a country and empire is steep and steady decline.

Culture is the canary in the coalmine, and with Maverick and The Way of Water, that poor son of a bitch of a bird is down in the darkness, flat on his back in the muck and the mire, wheezing his last bitter breath.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

©2023

The Crown Just Cast an Australian to Play Princess Diana and I am in a Woke-Fueled Rage!

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 39 seconds

If wokeness is going to survive, the scourge of actors portraying characters that are in any way different from themselves must end now.

I consider myself a devout crusader for the Church of Wokeness, a brave Knight of the Woke Table if you will.

Whenever an injustice is committed here in Hollywood I am the one who fiercely follows the crowd and does the most courageous thing imaginable…write a scathingly pithy article about it.

My specialty is scouring the trade papers searching for violations of the new woke Hollywood commandment that “Actors shall not portray characters that aren’t exactly identical to them in real life”. I call this the “No Acting Allowed” rule.

This noble calling of mine isn’t an easy one, there are so many micro-aggressions and so little time to cancel all who commit them, but still I soldier on.

The newest and most heinous of injustices that I unearthed occurred the other day and was so horrifying it literally left me shaking.

*Trigger Warning for the sensitive – a story of brutal casting violence follows.

The injustice of which I speak is that Netflix just announced that on their hit show The Crown, Princess Diana – the most iconic of British Royals, will be played by Elizabeth Debicki who is…gasp…Australian!

I know, I know, it is an awful and tone-deaf maneuver, especially considering the history of it all. I mean, Australia really only exists because the British wanted their riff raff out of sight and mind, and they certainly didn’t want them portraying their most beloved of royals on some binge-worthy tabloid drama. An Australian portraying Princess Diana only highlights how far the once mighty British Empire has fallen.

Think of it this way…imagine if you will, an Aussie women worthy of having a tv show or movie made about them…I know it is far-fetched but just try…and then imagine a non-Australian actress playing that woman…talk about a dingo stealing your baby!

Now, some people may be thinking that since Elizabeth Debicki is a gloriously gifted actress blessed with exquisite skill and talent that it is just fine for her, despite the black mark of her Aussie background, to play Princess Diana. That is blasphemy…wokeness never considers ability!

Oscar winning actress Octavia Spencer concurs as she recently declared in regards to casting, “Nothing can replace lived experience and authentic representation…it’s imperative that we cast the appropriate actor for the appropriate role…”

What Spencer was actually talking about was the woke sin of able-bodied actors playing disabled characters, but if we follow her ideology to its logical conclusion, we end up crucifying the Aussie interloper Debecki for daring to play the very English Princess Diana. 

I wish there was a woke time machine so we could see who Octavia Spencer would cast instead of Oscar-winner Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot and Oscar-nominee Leonardo DiCaprio in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.

Those able-bodied bastards are acting abominations. Their crimes are almost as bad as cis-gendered actors playing trans characters.

Halle Berry recently said she was contemplating playing a trans character but after being shouted down by my woke comrades, Halle apologized, and the world was once again made safe from acting.

I wish someone stopped Felicity Huffman from playing a trans character and scoring an Oscar nomination for her work in the dreadful 2005 movie Transamerica.

Thankfully we woke got revenge on Huffman when she was sent to prison for that blasphemy! She actually went to prison for trying to bribe a college into admitting her daughter…but that’s beside the point…the important thing is she was ultimately punished! I don’t think that punishment went far enough though. If it were up to me Felicity Huffman would have the scarlet letter of a penis sewn onto her forehead, so that with every step she took her forehead penis would swing before her eyes and forcefully remind her of the unforgivable trans-phobic sin she committed.

Another transgressor of woke trans dogma is Scarlett Johansson. ScarJo was set to play a trans man in the film Rub and Tug, but woke warriors fired up the outrage machine and forced her to back out.

In addition, the monstrously white ScarJo had previously earned woke ire when she starred in Ghost in the Shell as a character that was Asian in the original source material. Oh the humanity!

Of course, even if an actor is the same race or ethnicity as a character they aren’t safe from the righteous sword of wokeness.

Zoe Saldana thought she could play Nina Simone in a bio-pic about the legendary singer. Not without woke outrage she couldn’t! Saldana’s crime was that she is light-skinned and Simone was dark-skinned…in other words Zoe Saldana wasn’t black enough. Saldana has since apologized for her heinous hate crime.

A similar thing happened with Ruby Rose, a lesbian actress cast in the role of lesbian superhero Batwoman. Rose was excoriated by the woke brigade on social media because apparently she wasn’t lesbian enough.

To avoid this woke backlash and the cancel culture mob, white actresses Jenny Slate and Kristen Bell quit their roles voicing black characters on cartoons.

Slate stated, “black characters should be played by black people” and that her portrayal was “an act of erasure of black people.”

Bell said, “ This is a time to acknowledge our acts of complicity.”

If only that Aussie Elizabeth Debicki would do her part and acknowledge that playing Princess Diana on The Crown makes her complicit in the erasure of English people and declare that English characters should only be portrayed by English people, then we could be one step closer to eradicating the art of acting and finally living in the glorious utopia of talentlessness we woke are obviously so desperate to manifest.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020