{"id":8386,"date":"2020-04-14T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-04-14T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=8386"},"modified":"2020-04-13T22:18:27","modified_gmt":"2020-04-14T02:18:27","slug":"bombshell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2020\/04\/14\/bombshell\/","title":{"rendered":"Bombshell."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Bombshell<\/em> (Apple<\/a>\/Amazon<\/a>) feels very much like Vice<\/em> for the #MeToo movement, taking a true and important story \u2013 the downfall of Roger Ailes as his decades of sexual harassment and assaults came to light \u2013 and trivializing it through an excessively slick, shallow script that is only salvaged by strong lead performances from Charlize Theron and Nicole Kidman. I was entertained, as I was by Vice<\/em>, but I was not informed, and I don’t think the movie did enough to explain how the situation was allowed to persist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The script has a glib approach where Megyn Kelly (Theron)\nand Gretchen Carlson (Kidman) often break the fourth wall to tell the viewers\nbackground information relevant to the story, such as how Fox News operates\nbehind the scenes or what Ailes’ history was prior to founding Fox News and\nbuilding it into the country’s biggest cable news network. Bombshell<\/em>\nthen takes us through three roughly simultaneous storylines, one around each of\nthe three main women in the film: Kelly’s meteoric rise at the network and Donald\nTrump’s subsequent attacks on her after she challenged him on his history of mistreatment\nof women; Carlson’s lawsuit against Ailes for sexual harassment, claiming she\nwas demoted from her show for illegal cause; and the fictional Kayla (Margot\nRobbie), a wide-eyed ingenue who calls herself an “evangelical millennial”\nand ends up another Ailes victim. The three stories eventually intersect as Kelly\nand Carlson independently look for other women to speak up against Ailes. (Ailes\nand Fox settled with Carlson, Fox paid off Ailes’ contract by way of firing\nhim, and Ailes was dead within a year.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bombshell<\/em> looks incredible. Theron is a ridiculous\nlikeness for Kelly between the hairstyling and makeup, for which the movie won\nits lone Academy Award, and her mimicry of Kelly’s voice and delivery. Kidman’s\nnot quite as dead a ringer for Carlson, but is pretty close. I thought John\nLithgow did his best with Ailes, making him into a blustering, lecherous\ntyrant, although the physical resemblance isn’t there. Nearly every on-air\npersonality at Fox who gets a moment in this film is played by someone who\nlooks just like them, however, which you could view as incredible dedication to\nverisimilitude, or a big fat missing of the point, that it is story that\nmatters, not imitation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Theron and Robbie were both nominated for awards, Theron for\nBest Actress and Robbie for Supporting, but I don’t think either deserved the\nwin and thought Robbie was better in a smaller role Once Upon a Time in\nHollywood<\/em>. Kayla is written so thinly and Robbie has no room to do anything\nexcept show some gross emotions, mostly because she’s a prop for the plot, not\nan actual person or a fully-developed character \u2013 she’s there to give Ailes\nsomeone to harass while we watch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that’s biggest problem with Bombshell<\/em>: it’s so\nconcerned with making things look right that it doesn’t bother telling the\nstory behind the story. How Ailes got away with this for nearly twenty years \u2013\nand probably longer, although the story doesn’t touch anything he did prior to\nFox News \u2013 is never addressed, nor does the story touch on the toxic corporate\nculture within Fox News, or why the Murdochs didn’t care until they did care,\nor, perhaps most interesting of all, why so many women stayed quiet. If\nanything, the movie blames the victim a bit when Kayla confronts Megyn to ask\nwhy she waited ten years to talk about Ailes harassing her. It’s a jarring,\nwrong note for a movie that seems so eager to tell you it’s right. This story,\nand these women, deserved a lot better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bombshell (Apple\/Amazon) feels very much like Vice for the #MeToo movement, taking a true and important story \u2013 the downfall of Roger Ailes as his decades of sexual harassment and assaults came to light \u2013 and trivializing it through an excessively slick, shallow script that is only salvaged by strong lead performances from Charlize Theron […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1143,1077,215],"class_list":["post-8386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2019-best-actress-nominees","tag-2019-movies","tag-movies","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8386"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8386\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8388,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8386\/revisions\/8388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}