![]() ![]() The director also leans too hard on a John Powell score whose moodily percussive singsong tends to overwhelm rather than deepen Alice’s mounting sense of dread. Again and again she falls back on derivative, unilluminating beats, as when the horrors of daily drudgery are conveyed by repeatedly smash-cutting to closeups of sizzling bacon and eggs. At a certain point - around the time Alice’s eyes fall on a secret folder labeled “SECURITY RISK” (because “PLOT TWIST INCOMING” would’ve been too obvious) - what’s meant to be creepily insinuating in “Don’t Worry Darling” turns laughably blunt.Īnyone who was rightly charmed by Wilde’s 2018 directing debut, “Booksmart,” with its furious pacing and whip-smart comedy, may be surprised by the peculiar leadenness of this sophomore slump. Then again, “clue” might be too subtle a word. Among the exceptions are Frank’s wife, Shelley (a nicely chilled Gemma Chan) Peg’s husband, Pete (Asif Ali) and Margaret (KiKi Layne), a depressive insomniac whose violent unraveling provides an early clue that all is not well. Notably, too, not every resident of this community is white, which is one sign that this isn’t the typical Hollywood ’50s flashback. Who exactly is Frank (a silky-smooth Chris Pine), the combination corporate boss, town mayor and cult leader who exerts such a hold on Alice and Jack and the other couples living in this sunbaked utopia? What is the nature of the Victory Project, the top-secret government enterprise that employs Jack and the other husbands on their block? The answers threaten to push Alice through the proverbial looking glass, whether she’s beholding a nightmarish vision in the mirror or cleaning a large window that suddenly closes in on her, underscoring her entrapment with an all-too-literal thud. And Pugh’s Alice, at first cheerfully accepting of the status quo, soon starts asking dangerous questions. It helps that Alice has a husband, Jack (Harry Styles), who’s more or less the anti-Ralph, and not just because he thinks nothing of sweeping the dinner plates aside and treating his wife as a tabletop amuse-bouche.Īfter a while, though, you might be reminded of a very different Alice, the one who finds herself adrift in a strange, often sinister land where everything and everyone is a surreal imitation of life. That’s true even if Pugh’s Alice seems to inhabit a brighter, comfier (if less funny) vision of 1950s domesticity than “The Honeymooners,” one that’s awash in Midcentury Modern splendor and sits at the end of a picture-perfect desert cul-de-sac. Watching her go about her daily routine - cooking every meal, cleaning the house from top to bottom and venturing into town for the occasional grocery run - you might be reminded of Alice Kramden. The most likely contender for a future list would be last year’s “Girls Trip,” but it’s still too soon to tell whether “grapefruit” will become a verb or not.In Olivia Wilde’s trouble-in-paradise thriller “Don’t Worry Darling,” Florence Pugh plays a devoted housewife called Alice, a common enough name that here evokes a few famous antecedents. For one thing, Hollywood doesn’t make many comedies anymore, and when it does, the movies don’t necessarily get an audience big enough to shift our collective habits. You’ll notice there aren’t a lot of examples from recent years. Others grabbed our attention with a single snippet of dialogue. Some comedies, such as “Clueless,” have copious lines to choose from. Looking back at the past 40 years, we picked 40 movies that changed the way we talk, and selected some of the most-repeated quotes. A lot of others had us mimicking characters without even thinking about it, to the point that it became second nature to not just say “great success,” but to say it in a faux-Kazakh accent, just the way Borat does. ![]() ![]() It’s not the only comedy with pithy, repeatable dialogue that weaseled its way into our vernacular so completely that we started to forget about the source. In the mid-1990s, suddenly every teen was dishing out a blase “whatever” when they weren’t totally buggin’ or Audi. “Clueless,” for example, influenced the way an entire generation of kids talked. Some movies have a way of infiltrating our everyday conversations. ![]()
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