“THE BRIDE!” (quotation marks co-sign the exclamation point’s insistence that this is not the same as THE BRIDE starring Sting) is a wild and incoherent movie, both for good and bad, and not really in the ways I expected. The trailers suggested a stylized rock musical sort of approach, but they did that by emphasizing the occasional stylistic diversions (a dance fantasy, a James Whale homage). For the most part the world of the movie is more normal and literal than that, grounding the absurd premise “What if the monster and bride of Frankenstein were alive in the thirties and sort of turned into Bonnie and Clyde?” So you got these two heightened monster characters interacting with mobsters and getting chased by cops and regular stuff like that.
In the opening seconds we learn that it’s way more convoluted than the trailer conveyed, with a concept I’m not sure even the full movie gets across with clarity. You see, Academy Award winner Jessie Buckley (MEN) plays Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, famed author of Kenneth Branagh’s version of Frankenstein. Her soul is trapped in some sort of purgatory where she says she’s been for centuries (though the movie is set in 1936, which is 85 years after Shelley’s death). She says that Frankenstein “wasn’t the half of it. What I wanted to write…what I needed to say, I couldn’t.” Whatever great story she had in mind she never got to put on paper because of a brain tumor, so she possesses a lady in Chicago named Ida (Jessie Buckley, JUDY), sometimes but not most of the time speaks through her, and… somehow causes her to live out her life as that unwritten story? Pretty ballsy of writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal (THE LOST DAUGHTER) to write a story and have Mary Shelley declare it better than Frankenstein. (read the rest of this shit…)
Look, I’m not one of those people who brags about their ignorance like it’s some badge of working class authenticity. I’m mostly a smart guy, and would love to be smarter. But I’m honestly admitting here that I’m not all that qualified for the works of William Shakespeare. I’ve enjoyed some of the adaptations, mostly the more stylistically adventurous ones like 
WOMEN TALKING is the new best picture nominated film from writer/director Sarah Polley, who is minor-key beloved as an actress for people around my age (THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN, GO, 
MEN is this year’s film from Alex Garland (writer of 28 DAYS LATER, 
Before the 2019 awards season dissipates entirely from memory I want to get my thoughts down about one of the movies I watched. As I’ve said before, one of the reasons I like following the Oscars is to get myself to watch a few things that I wouldn’t otherwise, for a little of the ol’ BoH (Broadening of Horizons). I always bring up the example of when I had no interest in 
