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The Favourite Movie Review

The Favourite is a 2018 period film directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and starring Olivia Colman, Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz. It’s such a frustratingly bad movie.

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“Some wounds do not close.

I have many such“

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I continue to absolutely hate the work that Yorgos Lanthimos puts out. To me, this one is slightly better than his previous movies because those films were just so insufferable, but this is also a bad film by all means and the fact that he gets so much attention for making movies about nothing strikes me as pathetic, snobbish and just plain wrong.

This film is about Queen Anne and it follows her close relationship with two cousins who are competing to be her favorite. This film made up almost everything! There is one scene here which I really enjoyed and that is that rabbits sequence, but when I’ve read that even that is made up entirely as the rabbits were eaten or deemed as pests during the 18th century, I came to dislike that scene as well.

None of this happened. The queen did not have sexual relationships with women and the entire film plays like a bad fan fiction which is unnecessarily raunchy, crass and crude. Nobody spoke “fuck” in the freaking court in the 18th century. Absolutely nobody. That was the time when the ladies and gentlemen, especially those in power, were just that – ladies and gentlemen. The speech was dignified and subtle. In this movie, it’s modern, stupid and just plain insulting the audience’s intelligence.

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Now, ‘Amadeus’ is an entirely made up film, but that film is about something. It’s about the dangers of jealousy and about the feeling of injustice. So it’s okay to make up a historical film, but still have it make sense and have a strong message. This movie, however, doesn’t have any point to it whatsoever and it’s literally a giant waste of time.

Olivia Colman is the best actress here as her performance is very good. Emma Stone is also reliably strong, but Rachel Weisz needed more screen time herself as she’s the one who got the least to do here. All of them are very good, there is no denying that. But all of them played supporting characters and ultimately none gave an Oscar-worthy performance in my opinion, especially because the characters themselves are so badly written and unlikable. Comparing this to the greatness that is ‘All About Eve’ is honestly the biggest insult to me.

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The Favourite looks great owing to a terrific cinematography and exquisite costume design. The score is also quite memorable. So the audio-visuals are good and I do approve of those technical nominations, but the other Oscar nominations are ludicrous, especially for Best Director, further proving that the Academy simply lost their touch as they no more know how to distinguish between what is a good and what is a bad movie.

I found the dialogue absolutely horrible and it insulted my intelligence to be honest with you. The same goes with the script which is plain terrible and again about absolutely nothing. The emotional investment is estranged as the characters are so disgusting. Lanthimos’ direction is plain atrocious and his commitment to create the most unrefined movie paid off as there are at least three scenes of vomiting here. Bravo, sir, you made “high art” here.

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The Favourite looks and sounds good as the acting performances are fine, the costumes are great and the score is memorable. That’s pretty much where the positive critique ends for me as this movie is otherwise terrible. Yorgos Lanthimos continues to be one of the worst and most overrated directors working today and this is yet another of his movies which favor sensationalism over anything that even remotely resembles a good story. The dialogue is insulting to the audience’s intelligence and the crude scenes are unnecessary and they plague the whole movie which is simply historically inaccurate. And you can make an inaccurate film, but make it be about something, but The Favourite is a film about nothing. It has no point to it whatsoever, no message, no emotional resonance and at the end of the day no story to speak of. Today, art still exists, but people’s perception of what is considered art has become, like this movie itself, very depraved.

My Rating – 2