[LaLaLand]

Okay I watched this last night.

Main thoughts:

1. Far too graphic, unnecessarily so. Doesn't do anything except make you feel "yuck".
2. Why's she topless for 70% of the movie?
3. Beautiful to look at, especially the black and white shots and the red carpet scenes with all of the flashbulbs from the paparazzi cameras etc.
4. I can still hear an overwhelming Spanish twang.
5. Loooooong!

I'm kind of "meh" about this which is weird considering how shocking it was to me. "Unnecessary" is the main word that comes to mind.

Spoiler:

The abortion scenes and the threesome scenes (and that bit in the movie theatre omg) bother me - they did nothing and served no purpose to the character or the movie except to just shock - were those "inside" shots of the speculum really important? If they weren't in I'd have liked this much more tbh (plus it'd cut down the hella long runtime which really did feel long at some points). Also her meeting with "The President" - just ew.

There were bits I thought were really powerful though - the scenes with young Marilyn and her mother were extremely harrowing and the sequence that followed her meeting with "The President", the nightmarish invasion of her home and what followed after. Her severe breakdown was excellently done I think too. Also - the scene where she's walking the red carpet during the premiere of "Some Like It Hot" and the camera just pans across the men in the crowd whose mouths have been distorted and stretched I thought was genius.

de Armas really embodied Monroe too. Like there were shots and sequences that I had to kind of double take at where I thought they'd snuck in real footage of the real Marilyn. Crazy.

The potential for this to be like a watershed movie I think was huge but it just fell flat because of favouring the shock factor more over the substance. I know it's a film based on a book and they're just following the plot of that but overall I'd have much rather had a more PG-13 movie that still dealt with everything in this.

7/10.

(Can definitely see de Armas getting Best Actress for this btw, regardless of the movie's reception).