Quick Hits: 'Don't Worry Darling', 'Barbarian', 'Do Revenge', and 'Blonde'

It's the friggin' Battle of the Sexes over at your local multiplex/Netflix queue!

After two years of COVID-inflected cinematic drought, our first full-bodied fall movie season is underway. There are, to put this in quantitative terms, a shit-ton of movies coming out these next few months. Spooky movies! Quirky movies! Awards-y movies! Even for someone like me, a Substacker and AMC Stubs Premiere™ member¹ with no children to tend to, it’s a grueling release calendar.

So here, rather than go on and on and on about one specific film — in reactions I wind up publishing two months past any point of relevance — I’m challenging myself to digest this fall’s celluloid smorgasbord at a faster clip, keeping up with the Kardashians conversation and then, you know, moving on to the next one. With any luck you’ll have seen some of these films, disagree with me, and we can really put the comments section to work 🤞🏽.

‘Don’t Worry Darling’

Is ‘Don’t Worry² Darling’ even, like… a movie at this point? Harry Styles famously said yes, it is, maybe the most movie a movie can be, at the movies. But my gut tells me that anyone paying money to see this in theaters (your only option right now) is doing so less as an independent viewing experience than, well, the culminating act of months of behind-the-scenes drama/gossip we’ve all followed like a schadenfreude-coated sporting event. You want to see if all that stuff made its way on-screen.

Spoiler alert: it doesn’t! What does make its way on screen is a well-intentioned, visually sumptuous story that is both very watchable and also way dumber than it thinks it is. Do you have some idea in your head as to the movie’s “twist”? I can almost guarantee you’re right. ‘DWD’ unpacks lots of big ideas about gender and agency but seems only sporadically interested in really playing with them. Hell, the final fifteen minutes turn into narrative whack-a-mole, every answer yielding ten more questions, and this hard-to-shake-sense that director Olivia Wilde and writer Katie Silberman just… didn’t think a lot of it through? I feel almost misogynist to say as much — feeding into a system that demands female directors hit home runs when we ask no more than singles from their male counterparts — but taking the movie as a Harry Styles-endorsed movie… it’s lacking.

‘Barbarian’

The things that make this movie so much fun also make it impossible to discuss in too much detail. What can I tell you? A young woman checks into her AirBnB only to find the place double-booked. The man staying there gives off vaguely creepy, possibly red-flag vibes. But without local hotel options, she rolls the dice and takes up his offer to share the rental. It’s a horror movie, obviously, and this set-up is part of that… until it isn’t, and the movie becomes something much different — crazier, funnier, scarier, sadder. A cornucopia³ of thrills and chills!

‘Barbarian’ is, more than anything, a horror movie excited to be a horror movie, an antidote to the much-ballyhooed “elevated horror” genre popularized by A24 (who turned writer-director Zach Cregger down!) where scares tend to take a backseat to social commentary. There’s plenty of zeitgeisty stuff to chew on here, too — identifying the “barbarian” of the title, for one — you’ll just taste it more as pleasing after-notes, and not the refreshingly weird, bloody main course.

‘Do Revenge’

“That ain’t it, chief,” I thought to myself for the very annoying opening fifteen minutes of this Gen-Z ‘Strangers on a Train’ update. “Say less,” I said to these Tik Tok caricatures brought to life by a fellow Millennial (cringe!) trying to ape the speech patterns of the generation below. “I don’t love this for us,” I wrote on a Post-It note that I then BeRealed 52 minutes late.

But then the movie became — cue H. Styles — a movie, and a really sharp one about masks and performance and the ways both can ruin our lives whether we’re currently in high school or just mentally stuck there! I’m not gonna sit here and tell you this is some Gen-Z ‘Clueless’ but it’s smarter and funnier than that poster would have you think it is, thanks to punchy filmmaking (writer/director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson) and genuine star turns from Camila Mendes ('Riverdale’, ‘Palm Springs’) and Maya Hawke (‘Stranger Things’), both of whom I’m confident will be around for some time to come. Netflix has spent the last five years turning the very concept of YA into cynical Happy Meal mush but ‘Do Revenge’ gives it fresh new life. I stan.

‘Blonde’

Uhhhhhh….

Speaking as a literary non-hottie, I’m honestly not sure I’m qualified to offer a critique on a movie that has, to put it mildly, made people lose their fucking minds. I am neither a 1) woman nor 2) Monroe scholar, and I do believe in this instance the first carries some crucial weight. If I’m struggling with the now-infamous “vagina shot,”⁴ I can't imagine what it's like to watch that as, you know, a person with a vagina. You're familiar with the term "torture porn"? There are times where 'Blonde' is practically torture SNUFF, borderline-reveling in the misery Monroe faced on set, in the bedroom, in surgery.

Some criticisms do “miss me”⁵ with their focus on historical inaccuracy. 'Blonde', based on a novel of the same name by Joyce Carol Oates, doesn't purport to be any sort of Monroe biopic. But that also doesn’t validate the dramatic decisions Andrew Dominik (‘Killing Them Softly’) makes, whether a made-up threesome with the sons of Charlie Chaplin and Edward G. Robinson or its world record for use of the word “daddy.” Is the movie good? It’s interesting and occasionally boring. Is it immoral?

Uhhhh…….

Bottom line: much like ‘Don’t Worry Darling’, you sort of already know what you’re getting with this one, and I encourage you to adjust your viewing accordingly!

1. this is not even the highest membership level

2. the lack of a comma here has driven me crazy for months now

3. Fall, right?! Lifting Fog is a *theme-forward* publication

4. I think there are two, if memory serves

5. Trying hard to incorporate all the Gen-Z speech I picked up from ‘Do Revenge’