So, "Cruella"
Estella Miller is a girl born with two-tone hair, picked on by her peers by learning to fight back of her own accord, and living with her mother (Emily Beecham) poor and outcast. When her mother visits a mysterious fashion designer known as "The Baroness" (Emma Thompson, I will GET TO HER) to obtain some money, she falls to her death in an accident, and the girl is forced to live on the streets. She grows up to be an adult thief (Emma Stone) and accomplished pickpocket accompanied by her fellow orphans Jasper (Joel Fry) and Horace (Paul Walter Hauser, a rising star who's fucking amazing wherever he shows up and who I will also get to), but wishes to follow her dream of becoming a fashion designer...
First of all I would like to congratulate the movie on creating a universe in which heterosexuality is non-existant, just in time for Pride Month!
Seriously, this is some Baz Luhrman "too camp to be gay" stuff on screen. My fiancee wonderfully summed it up as "for a movie with so much of the straight flag colours on screen, it is remarkably gay". This will receive a cult following in a few years time, mark my words: this movie belongs to the LGBTQ+ community now, and definitely not by design.
It's slow to start, but hits its stride thanks to a FANTASTIC pantomime level performance by Emma Stone (international treasure she is) and Emma Thompson basically showing us her resentment over not being cast in "The Devil Wears Prada" and nobody watching her performance in "The Legend of Barney Thomson". It is a delicious, hammy, ludicrously camp meeting of minds.
The film is style over substance to the ultimate degree (despite some fun jabs at the job market and meritocracy), with a pumping 70s aesthetic and ludicrous stylistic choices giving it a flair and reminding us that this comes from the director of "I, Tonya"; yet that more than carries it through its batshit, live action cartoon sequences which will be marmite to most.
Fry and Hauser are, respectively, charming and the best parts of the film not called Emma.
Way more fun than I thought it would be
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