Promising Young Woman Will be the Female Movie of the Year. Here, let’s get straight to the point. Say this with me, “Siri, create a reminder for me for April 17th at noon”… and she’ll say, “What would you like to be reminded about Dave?” Then you say… “To watch Promising Young Woman in the theaters tonight.” Perfect. Now, the rest of this post is 100% redundant and irrelevant. But I’ll guess I’ll tell you a bit about the movie regardless…
It appears that Promising Young Woman, starring Carey Mulligan…and produced by Margot Robbie, is a movie about a woman getting revenge for “protective white males” date raping women…specifically her. Or, more accurately, attempting to. Here, trailer…this will explain what I am so intelligently trying to elucidate for you.
We (I am… I don’t know who the others would be in that we over there) are hearing that the movie seems to be a cold-hearted revenge flick. Apparently, she baits men into attempting to take advantage of her, and then exacts revenge. But, the Quentin Tarantino-esque plot line gets significantly more messy when someone from Cassandra’s past interjects himself into her once clean, just war theory, and messes everything up. Which, means the movie will be talking about date rape, and the inappropriateness of while male “protectiveness” at a much more mature level than just the blood and guts of revenge.
Seems we’ve seen a couple movies like this lately that avoid the pastiche of other revenge flicks to instead talk intelligently about the controversy at hand. The movie that jumps to the forefront is the movie The Spinning Man. Can’t really explain why that particular movie is relevant, as I don’t want to spoil a brilliantly clever movie premise, but just trust me when I say that it is relevant…and you should watch while awaiting the arrival of Promising Young Woman. Another would be The Kindergarten Teacher, which tells the story of a teacher who sees a child poet prodigy in her class, and she takes her obsession with the child way too far. Like this one, it illuminates many issues in our culture about art, and education, and our desire to do the right thing for children in bad situations. Bottom line, it’s a messy conversation. And I’m thinking, Promising Young Woman will be a messy conversation too.
The movie is brought to us by Emerald Fennell, the executive producer and one of the writers for the show, Killing Eve…which, is an epic must watch if you’ve never heard of it. This will be Fennell’s debut feature though, and we are certain it will take her career to new heights as this trailer nearly guarantees.
I’m most excited about the fact that it will make lots of people uncomfortable. Hell, let’s burn all the right (wrong?) guys that are this sick and disgusting. And while we are at it, let’s have a real conversation about this daily tragedy in our society today. Way too many Epsteins and Weinsteins in our society today. Heck, too many entitled men that believe they can take what they want. But I should probably save some of my vitriol for April. If you are wanting another movie that runs this same direction – you have to check out Hard Candy. Promising Young Woman will be hard pressed to give Hard Candy a run for its money, but I’m hopeful it will. We’ll just have to see.
And as a side note, I’m also glad to know that at least you, and I, will have Siri talking to us on April 17th, in order to alert us to go to the theater together, separately…or something.
Edited by: CY
