You can be alone, with a camera in your hand, and you can walk. In that moment, the medium sheds the expectations attached to narrative production. You don't need to have something specific in your mind. You don't need to have in mind that you have to do something with it at some point. This is freedom.
Between the usual superhero action and sleeper hits at the box office, one of the more unusual films released this year was Bugonia. The new thriller from director Yorgos Lanthimos and producer Emma Stone--who also stars in the film alongside Jesse Plemons--wasn't a box office hit, but it's certainly an unforgettable movie. If you missed it when it came out, you can preorder it now ahead of its December 23 release, with options for a limited-edition 4K Blu-ray, standard 4K Blu-ray, standard Blu-ray, and DVD.
Bodies, for Lanthimos, are ill-fitting shells. Uncomfortable carapaces. We wear them, often awkwardly, because we have to, but we're typically struggling with the urge to take them off, trade them out, or-having failed to control our own-control those of others. Bodies betray us, fall apart, stop working, or inadequately represent our true selves. Maybe, if we're determined enough, we can inhabit a different body by taking someone else's.
At the end of Save the Green Planet! the twisted 2003 Korean sci-fi black comedy directed by Jang Joon-hwan, the CEO kidnapped by a conspiracy theorist who believes him to be an alien in disguise is revealed to be... an alien in disguise. Escaping from his captor, the CEO returns to his alien spaceship and orders the destruction of Earth, having become disgusted with the "failed experiment" that is humanity.
In the lobby of the Culver Theater, a tattooed barber named K.C. shaved heads bald in exchange for free tickets for Bugonia. First in line was Matt Lopez, a 29-year-old Disneyland ride operator. "Ever since I saw the trailer about six months ago, I'm like 'yeah, I'm definitely down for this,'" he said as his shoulder length brown locks were lopped off. "So if I'm able to see this early and get a free haircut at the same time, it's a no-brainer."
Greek weird-wave titan Yorgos Lanthimos has opted for a slight change of tack with Bugonia. After two ambitious projects - the Oscar-winning Poor Things and the more coolly received feel-bad anthology Kinds of Kindness - the director offers a lean and mean thriller with more focus and momentum than any of his work since The Killing of a Sacred Deer.
I don't know about looking down on us, but one of my favourite people who has ever lived is Carl Sagan and I fell madly in love with his philosophy and science and how brilliant he is, the Oscar winner said. He very deeply believed [that] the idea that we're alone in this vast expansive universe not that we're being watched is a pretty narcissistic thing. So, yes, I'm coming out and saying it: I believe in aliens.
