Let women tell women’s stories! It’s not difficult, Hollywood, and it leads to Margot Robbie being allowed to indulge her wonderful screwball sensibilities while whacking male jerks who desperately deserve it. (Yan’s first film, dramedy Dead Pigs, got only a tiny release in China in 2018, and I demand now to see it immediately.) The script is by Christina Hodson, who wrote the unexpectedly charming Transformers movie Bumblebee. This is kidding-not-kidding on celluloid. Bird of Prey is only her second feature, which is difficult to believe she juggles a lot of disparate and contradictory elements not just successfully but with an easy self-assurance, marrying playfulness and violence - hello, glitter bullets! - and snark with underlying seriousness. Why, it’s almost as if the gleeful psychedelic anarchic nonsense of Birds of Prey, celebrating with exuberant visual merriness women who are OFFICIALLY DONE WITH MEN’S BULLSHIT, were a satirical sendup of gloomy male-centered pomposity in ways beyond the one that has to do with superhero movies.ĭirector Cathy Yan comes kinda outta nowhere with this bonbon of feminist fury. Woman’s best friend? A rescue hyena you can play Lady and the Tramp with… Which is bad, but at least we don’t have a body count.) So Birds of Prey makes women lashing out in big loud aggressive ways an ironically comical spectacle: Haha, isn’t this delightfully absurd? Unlike Joker, which attempts to make us feel sympathetic toward a man committing very realistic crimes the likes of which men commit all the time in response to dissing no more and no less humiliating than the ones women swallow on a regular basis while also somehow managing to refrain from homicidal rampages. (Women hurting most often turn on ourselves. Because we wouldn’t do that - that would be wrong. This movie could not be more fantastical, what with its depiction of not one, not two, not three, but four women who resort to outrageously violent sprees the likes of which we never actually see in the real world from women in response to the accumulated and very real slights the world heaps upon us. There’s the thing that distinguishes Birds of Prey from, say last year’s Joker. But this is a fantasy, is it not? Girls night out…Īh, and there’s the rub. Okay, sure, Margot Robbie’s ( Mary Queen of Scots, Slaughterhouse Rulez) Harley Quinn may be unreasonably slender, given her diet of fried sandwiches and sugary breakfast cereals and alcohol and spray-can cheese, and will hence never be subjected to shaming for her poor food choices like we mere-mortal, realistically chubby junk-food-gobbling women frequently are. I mean, for real, as bone-deep satisfying as it is to see a wronged woman blow up some urban infrastructure as a response to being dumped by the official Worst Boyfriend Ever (that would be The Joker, Batman’s nemesis, for the comic-book uninitiated) and to fuck up some random asshole dudes in bone-crunching ways for misunderestimating her, it is equally gratifying to behold a woman onscreen reveling in the glory that is junk food. (But yeah, no: that title is as unwieldy as stiletto heels, and must die.) Mmmm, so good and greasy and glittery is Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn. With a side of hangover-killing egg-bacon-and-cheese sandwich. Behold ladyrage given full candy-colored, sparkle-sprinkled voice.
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