Tag: Alicia Silverstone

Bugonia (2025)

Satire, kidnap drama, politics and more combine in Lanthimos’ partially successful thriller

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Cast: Emma Stone (Michelle Fuller), Jesse Plemons (Teddy Gatz), Aidan Delbris (Don), Stavros Halkias (Casey), Alicia Silverstone (Sandy Gatz)

The world sometimes feels like its racing towards hell in a handcart And those on the bottom surely can’t help but look at the super-rich and wonder what on Earth do I have in common with them? But some, maybe particularly beaten down by life, may conclude something different: I’ve got nothing in common with the super-rich, because they are literally not of this Earth. That they are mysterious aliens who walk among us, planning to wipe us out. Bugonia takes a deep dive into the troubled, damaged psyche that can embrace the worm-hole of conspiracy theory, as well as the uncaring platitudes of the mega-companies that (maybe) rule the world.

Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) is the CEO of Auxolith, an all-powerful pharmaceutical company that operates (at times) right on the fringes of legal. She becomes the target of beaten-down beekeeper Teddy Gatz (Jesse Plemons) and his loyal learning-disabled cousin Don (Aidan Delbris). Teddy is certain Michelle is from the planet Andromeda, that she can contact her mothership through her hair and that her mission is to wipe out mankind. Locking her in the basement of his farm-house, they enter into a mix of interrogation, battle of wills and wits and fluctuating power balances. Is Teddy deranged, vulnerable or misguided? Is Michelle scared victim, arch-manipulator or heartless CEO?

All this plays out, often in tight close-up, in Lanthimos’ jet-black comedy, which is two parts social satire to one part blisteringly nihilistic view of humanity and our future. As Burgonia’s carefully oscillates from one side to another, its political views and stances can be hard-to-perceive, but it certainly suggests Lanthimos has hardly the highest hopes for future. This helps make the film fresh, engaging and challenging. It’s constant cuts from one ‘side’ to the other, also means these two rivals rarely share the same frame, visually imposing their distance and rivalry – Lanthimos even uses non-complementary framing to place them awkwardly together, two people with no common ground.

While Teddy nominally holds the cards as the kidnapper, he’s so clearly such a weak, scared, vulnerable character (often framed weakly within the film) it’s hard not to feel sorry for him. Similarly, Michelle may go through some truly ghastly treatment as Teddy tries to unmask her ‘secret identity’, but remains such a forceful, dominant character (“I’m a winner and you are a fucking loser” she rants at Teddy at one point), framed with such utter assurance, her bland corporate indifference to others and willingness to manipulate the fault-lines in her kidnappers relationships (especially the gentle, child-like Don) never make her feel like a victim but just as dangerous as Teddy.

Teddy’s crazy, flat-Earth-mindset (and Lanthimos punctures each chapter with a view of an increasingly flat Earth, which is at first a darkly comic hat tip and then takes on a second chilling meaning late on) ranting and raving is presented as both darkly funny and also unsettling in how he can use it to justify any violence. Sure, it’s funny that he shaves Michelle’s head and covers her with cream to ‘weaken her influence’, or with gentle earnestness stresses he leads the human resistance to Andromeda (membership currently two). Slightly less funny that he insists he and Don chemically castrate themselves so as not to be seduced, or that pumps Michelle full of over 400 volts to try and unmark her (all while insisting her is a humanitarian, but as an alien Michelle technically has no human rights).

But then Michelle’s corporate coldness is rarely absent. She may remember all her staff’s name with a practised efficiency, but there is a degree of empathy missing in her, replaced with pragmatic hardness. As it becomes clear Teddy’s selection of her is (perhaps) more connected to her drugs companies treatment of his mother (Alicia Silverstone), her blasé assurances that everything was done legally and lack of any real guilt speaks volumes.

Lanthimos always keeps us guessing with Michelle: at moments she will switch from fear and vulnerability, to suddenly snapping back with utter authority, absorbing all the power in the room from the frequently hapless Teddy. Teddy in fact increasingly resembles a lost little boy (he even cycles through town with the relentless pedal-turning speed of a toddler), way-out-of-his-depth and at times all but deferring to Michelle’s advice about her own kidnapping.

Bugonia becomes a dance, not only between truth and fiction, but between two strikingly very different people, one so accustomed to power than even when in a nominally powerless situation they don’t feel anything but a winner, the other a desperate, scraggy haired loser who seems unable to really process what he should do to win a hand where he seems to hold all the aces. To make it work you need two electric actors: Lanthimos has this in spades with two trusted collaborators.

Stone’s ability to switch between corporate fear, desperate negotiation and earnest insincerity are as striking as her ability to keep her character so utterly, eventually terrifyingly, unknowable. In every second of Bugonia you can never be certain exactly what sort of person Stone is playing, her sociopathic assurance both understandable in the situation but also deeply unsettling. Plemons’ gives Teddy a child-like earnestness and desire to do the right thing that underpins his unhinged, ludicrous conspiracy theories, making him someone we both pity and understand is capable of doing terrible things for reasons he can justify to himself. Credit also goes to Aidan Delbris’ affecting performance as the gentle, easily-led Don.

Bugonia may well over-play its hands at points. It’s hard not to expect some sort of twist coming our way – I’m not sure how many people will be surprised by how the film plays out. It’s nihilistic ending feels a little too hard-edged and pointed for a film that hasn’t, until that point, embraced that level of flat-out cynicism. A clumsy introduction of a cop with a shady past is thrown in merely (it seems) to give us another reason to feel sorry for Teddy. Lanthimos’ at points engages, not always successfully, in a level of body horror that wouldn’t feel out of place in the excesses of Cronenberg. But then there are moments of real wit: the paralleled cuts of both Teddy/Don and Michelle going through their fitness regimes, a painfully uncomfortable bolognaise meal that tips into a full-out barney between the two stars, it’s unsettling near-finale in Michelle’s office and the playful realisation that much of the truth was there from the start, but hidden.

Bugonia might be a little too scatter-gun and self-consciously crazy to be a really effective satire, but with two terrific performances and an unsettlingly tense shooting style from Lanthimos (with echoes of everything from Dreyer to Hitchcock) there is enough of interest there to keep your mind bubbling even after it’s hard-hittingly sour ending.

Love's Labour's Lost (2000)

Shakespeare meets Musicals in Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost

Director: Kenneth Branagh

Cast: Alessandro Nivola (King Ferdinand of Navarre), Alicia Silverstone (Princess of France), Kenneth Branagh (Berowne), Natascha McElhone (Rosaline), Carmen Ejogo (Maria), Matthew Lillard (Longaville), Adrian Lester (Dumaine), Emily Mortimer (Katherine), Timothy Spall (Don Armado), Nathan Lane (Costard), Richard Briers (Nathaniel), Geraldine McEwan (Holofernia), Richard Clifford (Boyet), Jimmy Yuill (Constable Dull), Stefania Rocca (Jaquenetta)

Love’s Labour’s Lost is one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known comedies. There is a reason for that – it’s simply not that good (it’s certainly the weakest Shakespeare play Branagh has brought to the screen). I’ve sat through some turgid, and terminally unfunny, stage productions of the play in the past – but this movie version presented something different, as Branagh plays fast and loose with the script and turns it into an all-singing, all-dancing musical, with only the barest sprinkling of Shakespeare dialogue.

LLL isn’t really about anything. The King of Navarre (Alessandro Nivola), invites his three best friends (Kenneth Branagh, Adrian Lester and Matthew Lillard) to join him in three years of academic study, during the course of which they will forsake all female company. Of course, no sooner than the deal is made but the Princess of France (Alicia Silverstone) and her three companions (Natascha McElhone, Emily Mortimer and Carmen Ejogo) arrive in Navarre. Will love blossom to prevent the plans of the King? You betcha.

It’s slight stuff. The play always feels a little bit unfinished – it ends with the lovers separated (or as the play puts it “Jack hath not Jill”) but with hints of hope. It’s oddly structured – more like the first part of a series of plays than a standalone (the lovers don’t get together until almost Act 4, and the men and women spend very little time together). There is a series of dull sub plots revolving around the academics of Navarre, with whole scenes made up of obscure Latin jokes. As the icing on the top, a clown and a foppish Spaniard form a bizarre love triangle with a busty country wench. None of these plots is really resolved at the end. It’s a play that focuses a lot more on floral dialogue and intricate poetry rather than narrative.

Branagh addresses a lot of these problems by simply trimming the play to the absolute bone. I would guess at least 65% of the dialogue has been cut – probably more. Although this means some roles are now so small they feel like sketches (in particular many of the more working-class characters and academics), it does mean that this has a bit more narrative thrust and energy than most productions. Moving the setting to 1939 also gives a good context to the play, and places the political issues into an understandable context. It also gives a tension to underlie the lightness of the rest of the play. Branagh manages to remove most of the cumbersome exposition dialogue by replacing it with a series of 1930s-style cine-news reels (spryly voiced by Branagh himself). He even resolves the “cliffhanger” ending of the play with a similar device (reflecting the tonal shift at the end of the original play), which helps to ground the otherwise lightweight play in a very real world, where war carries a cost.

Of course, the main invention was to replace the intricacy (and obscurity!) of some of the dialogue with song and dance routines. The songs are carefully chosen from the great musical composers of the 1930s and 40s, and are delicately interwoven with the dialogue. Now for the purist this could of course be a source of fury, but when the material is one of the weaker plays, getting this “greatest hits” version of the text alongside some excellent songs works really well.

The song and dance numbers also have a certain charm about them. Most of the cast are not especially talented singers and dancers – only Nathan Lane and Adrian Lester have song and dance experience (and it certainly shows when Branagh allows them to let rip). The actors went through an extensive “musicals boot camp”, which certainly taught them the steps, but the musical numbers still retain a charming amateurishness about them. Sure it helps a truly gifted dancer like Adrian Lester stand out, but it’s also quite sweet to see actors like Richard Briers tripping the light fantastic. (Check Lester out at around 3:10 in the video below).

The real issue with some of the actors chosen is less with their song-and-dance strength, but that their acting strength doesn’t quite cut the mustard. Branagh’s delivery and comic timing is spot on, and McElhone is a worthy adversary cum love interest for him; but Nivola and Silverstone are a little too out-of-their-depth to bring much more than blandness to their key roles. Amongst the supporting roles, Nathan Lane stands out in making Costard actually quite funny, but Lillard mistakes gurning for wit. Mortimer and Ejogo are engaging but have precious little screentime.

The film is shot with Branagh’s usual ambition on a set that has a deliberate air of artificiality about it, evoking the classic 1930s studio musical. All exteriors deliberately feel like interiors, and there are homages aplenty, from Singin’ in the Rain to Ethel Merman. Each musical number has its own unique feel and the majority are shot with Branagh’s usual love of long-take. Some of the numbers stick in the head longer than others – but that’s just the nature of musicals. Particularly good are I Won’t Dance, I Get a Kick Out of You, I’ve Got a Crush on You, Cheek to Cheek and a steamy tango to Let’s Face the Music and Dance.

LLL doesn’t want to do anything more than entertain – and sometimes it probably tries a little too hard to be light and frothy, as if Branagh was consciously kicking back after the mammoth undertaking of his uncut Hamlet. Perhaps that is why LLL appealed to him – Shakespeare comedies don’t get less treasured or more inconsequential than this, so he had total creative freedom to do what he liked, in a way that a Twelfth Night or a Much Ado About Nothing wouldn’t allow him. It’s the sort of film you need to plug into the mindset of – and some aren’t going to be able to do that. It’s not a perfect film, but the lightness Branagh handles things with pretty much carries it through.

Perhaps that lightness however is slightly the problem: in Branagh’s previous films he found a perfect mixture between influential reimaginings (Henry V), wonderful crowd-pleasers (Much Ado) and reverential labours of love (Hamlet). People probably expected something else from him than a high-budget, lightly amateur musical with precious little Shakespeare in it. I think this partly explains the hesitant response this has received from the public and critics since: it’s just such an unlikely ideal that people didn’t seem to know how to respond to it.

Of course, as anyone who has sat through an average production of the play can tell them, they weren’t missing much from what has been cut – and this is still an infectiously funny, frothy concoction. It may have a slightly mixed acting bag – some of the leads are underpowered, while some strong actors like Timothy Spall are underused – but the actors do seem to be enjoying themselves, and this enjoyment basically communicates to the audience. It’s not a concept that could have worked with a long running time, but it sure works for the short term. It’s an odd concept – and it was a huge box office bomb – but it’s one that works.

Clueless (1995)

Alicia Silverstone leads her in crowd troop in neat Jane Austen reimagining Clueless

Director: Amy Heckerling

Cast: Alicia Silverstone (Cher Horowitz), Stacey Dash (Dionne Davenport), Brittany Murphy (Tai Frasier), Paul Rudd (Josh Lucas), Dan Hedaya (Mel Horowitz), Elisa Donovan (Amber Mariens), Justin Walker (Christian Stovitz), Wallace Shawn (Mr Hall), Twink Caplan (Ms Geist), Breckin Mayer (Travis Birkenstock), Jeremy Sisto (Elton Tiscia)

The 90s saw a rash of films that reworked classics into US high-school settings, aimed squarely at the teenage market. One of the most successful of these was Clueless: a decent, just-smart-enough reimagining of the plot of Jane Austen’s Emma.

Austen’s wealthy, match-making heroine here becomes Cher Horotwitz (Alicia Silverstone) – queen bee of the in-crowd in her high school. Like Emma Wodehouse, Cher is smart, beautiful and taken to meddling in the lives of those around her, sure she knows best about how they should behave – and whom they should date. She can be selfish and self-obsessed, but beneath it is fundamentally good-natured. When new girl Tai (Brittany Murphy) arrives at the school, Cher sees the scope for a makeover project – but it’s Cher herself who undergoes the greatest transformation.

The obsessions with status that populate Austen’s world actually translate very well into the high school setting, with its in and out crowds. It also a very neat restructuring of the novel, hitting all the basic plot points of Austen’s story, with some smart translations into the modern world (Christian – the Frank Churchill role – is particularly well updated). The film is sprinkled with sharp lines and snappy dialogue exchanges, and the cast are certainly in on the joke, walking a fine line between parody and playing it straight. This all contributes to the film’s fizzing energy and its charming momentum – you can see why teenagers loved it, as Heckerling has a wry wink at the camera at the concerns of teenagers, but also celebrates their potential for fun and friendship.

Watching the film over 20 years on, it’s remarkable how successfully it used the limitations of Alicia Silverstone to such great effect. It’s a bit bizarre to think Silverstone was considered the next big star of Hollywood, considering how few of her films have made any impact since this. However, here her lack of depth and shading, her unmodulated voice and rather bland style somehow work perfectly with a character who is superficial and who believes she is far cleverer than she actually is.

Clueless is that strange thing – a star-making turn that didn’t make a star, but Silverstone clicks perfectly into this role, making Cher engaging and rather charming despite her self-obsession. She delivers what the film requires in spades, even if Cher’s late character blossoming seems something required for the film’s plot rather than growing truly organically over the course of the film.

This abrupt burst of “learning and growing” partly clunks because Heckerling shies away from Emma’s more negative characteristics – tellingly, Emma’s public shaming of another character is here given to a different character. Can’t have anyone not liking the heroine for a second can we? In fact this determination to make Cher constantly as likeable as possible does rather miss the point of the original novel. It also reduces the “tension” (we all know how stories like this end!) of whether the heroine has driven her love interest away through her mistakes and missteps – and with less for the heroine to learn about herself, and less damage to repair in the relationship with the object of her affections, there’s proportionally less emotional impact to the final happy ending.

Speaking of that romantic plotline, you also can’t talk about the film without also commenting on the fact that it makes a bit of a fudge around the attraction between Cher and Josh, who (the film is at very great pains to point out) are not actuallysiblings, but do share the same father/step-father. It’s actually quite a weird twist, but I suppose just as retrospectively unsettling as Mr. Knightley loving Emma from afar from a ludicrously young age. It’s funny though to watch the film fall over itself to hammer home the non-family relationship between the two characters early on, so we don’t start shrieking “incest” by its conclusion.

All in all, the film – like its heroine – is a sweet, but superficial, candyfloss concoction, without the depth that could have lifted it from pleasing popcorn fare to satisfying story.