Blonde

2022 - 9 - 28

Post cover — Image courtesy of "The Guardian"

Some like it overheated: how Marilyn Monroe is betrayed by Blonde (The Guardian)

Andrew Dominik's explicit, button-pushing take on the life of the superstar, uses shock tactics to replace insight and depth.

](https://twitter.com/christinalefou/status/1574785874277064706?s=21&t=_uUV2a5I9oTCKHeZGAatPg)It’s a blinkered worldview that infiltrates the film, whose countless attempts to stun and sizzle converge into a paunchily epic fizzle. Her pillow lips and fawn eyes perfectly mirror Monroe’s own (we also see a lot of the actor’s curves, hence the NC-17 rating). Diehard Marilyn fans who want to get a better sense of the woman behind the myth will be equally disappointed. His film, which jerks back and forth between color and black and white, is a litany of degradations and torments, many of which are served up as slow-motion sequences that had such a deadening effect on this home viewer that a two hour and 45 minute film took some 25 hours to finish. Dominik is the New Zealand-born Australian film-maker behind such grizzly works as The Assassination of Jesse James and Chopper, a crime drama based on the life of an Australian serial murderer known for feeding a man into a cement mixer and convincing a fellow inmate to slice his ears off for him. The ever-growing library of biographies includes volumes by avowed fan Gloria Steinem (who said the vulnerable and childlike Monroe represented everything women feared being) and Norman Mailer (his Marilyn was: “blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards”).

Blonde review: Ana de Armas can't save a cruel portrayal of Marilyn ... (digitalspy.com)

Blonde, starring Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe, is now available to watch on Netflix, but is the fictionalised biopic worth a watch? Our Blonde review.

Only briefly do we see her play Marilyn as the movie star we know her to be. None of the winking charm she demonstrated in Knives Out is here. The real Marilyn, by many accounts, was undeniably gifted and determined to be a good actress, to better her craft.

'Blonde' Is a Wikipedia Rabbit Hole Into Marilyn Monroe (esquire.com)

The perfect film to watch with a phone and the pause button.

When Monroe is negotiating a higher rate for her role in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes – as she points out, she is the blonde being preferred – we see another personality, one which demonstrates a shrewdness and humour that must have been necessary for her to endure as long as she did at the level she was at. Her performance is a life raft. The film is interesting because Monroe’s life is interesting; most things involving film stars, famous athletes and presidents are. He thought she was hot, but treated her like a kid! Was she actually in a three-way relationship with Charlie Chaplin Jr. And so we come to Blonde, the latest production to take on Monroe, who, as the film poster notes, was “watched by all, seen by none.”

Blonde Review: Ana de Armas and Marilyn Monroe Deserve Better (Den of Geek)

Blonde is a beautifully made movie with a superb performance by Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe. So why does it feel so empty?

In certain scenes shot on black and white film, with Dominik recreating the exact blocking of a scene from, say, Some Like It Hot (1959), it took this reviewer a moment to recognize he was looking at de Armas and not the actual Monroe of 60 years ago. And rest assured, Blonde is obsessed with the absence of Marilyn’s father, going so far as to suggest that hole in her formative years is something akin to the Rosebud sled in Citizen Kane. Ultimately, the movie’s pretensions of attempting a quixotic examination of Marilyn Monroe’s sex life amounts to little more than art house cinema proving it isn’t above exploitation. While that is true, there’s still little difference in sentiment from the dismissive studio head Daryl Zanuck who refused to ever take Marilyn seriously and the way Blonde lingers as much or more on the sexcapades of Marilyn’s life than how she felt about the men in them. Instead the movie chooses to revel in the objectification demanded by a misogynistic society, and how eagerly Monroe pursued it. As per the movie, the unlikely pairing was due to the celebrated playwright becoming as attracted to her mind and underrated intellect as he is to her famed physique. It’s even a bit of fitting irony, too, that the most buzzed about element is not the movie star Blonde has ostensibly come to eulogize, but the curiosity factor around the one who seems poised to become an A-list sensation by playing her. Which is why Blonde’s attempt to bury it under so much artifice of its own, and a good deal of fiction from author Joyce Carol Oates—whose Blonde novel rewrote Monroe’s life for the worst—misses out on the opportunity provided by de Armas’ almost-great performance. It’s a shame then that Blonde is no more interested in being kind, or necessarily self-aware, than the legion of wolves who leer at Marilyn for nearly three hours throughout the picture. Given that backdrop, it’s no small wonder Norma Jeane was anxious to become Marilyn after the movie cuts to her adulthood. All the months and years leading up to Blonde’s premiere centered around apprehension in the media over a Cuban woman playing the American movie star. Whereas the male emblem of 1950s sex got a glorifying piece of hagiography courtesy of Baz Luhrmann over the summer, Andrew Dominik’s Blonde is eager to strip away the lairs of popular fantasy (and just about everything else) until all we’re left with is a fragile, scared young woman who was smothered by the adoration that gave her everything…

What happened to Marilyn Monroe's dad? Blonde story explained (Radio Times)

Rather than being a traditional biopic, the film is an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates' fictionalised novel of the same name – mixing fact with fiction to paint ...

[subscribe now](http://radiotimes.com/magazine-subscription?utm_term=evergreen-article) and get the next 12 issues for only £1. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to the [Radio Times podcast](https://www.radiotimes.com/podcasts/). [Film](https://www.radiotimes.com/movies/) coverage or visit our [TV Guide](https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/tv-listings/) to see what's on tonight. Even the actual identity of her father has not always been certain. See my attorney.'" [How to watch new Marilyn Monroe drama Blonde](https://www.radiotimes.com/movies/how-to-watch-blonde-netflix/) [Blonde review: A brutal but beautiful look at Marilyn Monroe](https://www.radiotimes.com/movies/blonde-review-netflix/) [Did Blonde's Marilyn Monroe and John F Kennedy story actually happen?](https://www.radiotimes.com/movies/blonde-marilyn-monroe-john-f-kennedy-true-story-netflix/) He wouldn’t recognise her, he said ‘No, I don’t know who you are. [terms and conditions](https://www.immediate.co.uk/terms-and-conditions/) and [privacy policy](https://policies.immediate.co.uk/privacy/). [Variety](https://variety.com/2022/tv/global/marilyn-monroe-documentary-charles-stanley-gifford-mediawan-1235222789/) that the evidence was "irrefutable". [Blonde](https://www.radiotimes.com/movies/blonde-movie-release-date-netflix-marilyn-monroe/) finally arrived on Netflix on Wednesday 28th September 2022.

Blonde movie review: Ana de Armas is otherworldly in Netflix's ... (The Indian Express)

Blonde movie review: Ana de Armas channels Marilyn Monroe in director Andrew Dominik's complex 'biopic', which defies Hollywood tradition with the force of ...

De Armas has somehow summoned the spirit of Marilyn Monroe herself to take control of her body, and the result is stunning. The camera in the final shot gives the impression of being physically removed from its tripod and placed on the floor, as if the filmmaker is saying, “The show’s over. Determined to halt the generational trauma that she has inherited from her mother, Marilyn is conflicted between the desire to have a child and give it the life that she never had, and the fear that she might instead end up giving it the life that she actually did. In the most memorable of these sequences, she frolics on the beach with playwright Arthur Miller — her third husband — and discovers that she is pregnant, as Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds swoon. Dominik also reclaims some of the most iconic moments in Marilyn’s life from the perverts and the paparazzi that authored them. Pulling the curtain on that famous photograph of her in the white dress, the filmmaker reveals that it was staged as an open-air ogle-fest where thousands of frenzied men nearly trampled upon each other to catch a glimpse up her skirt. It’s a mood piece, a tone poem, and in a year that has given us the almost unbearable [Elvis](https://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/hollywood/elvis-baz-luhrmann-bizarre-biopic-is-like-sanju-kgf-7995798/), it’s a feral shriek of dissent against formulaic Hollywood biopics. But later, they seemingly make up for it by having a drugged Marilyn puke directly on the lens, ostensibly on you and I. Blonde is very much a #MeToo movie that presents Marilyn and her daddy issues as an archetype. If that film was a meditation on stardom made to cosplay as a revisionist Western, Blonde is a meditation on celebrity culture that channels the elevated horror films of Ari Aster and David Lynch. And it takes a while to acclimatise to the film’s inhospitable temperature — it opens with a haunting sequence in which young Marilyn’s mother drives them directly into flames because she wants to see ‘hell up close’, and subsequently busies itself by subjecting Marilyn to a sustained series of nightmarish intrusions into her life. [The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford](https://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/hollywood/the-assassination-of-jesse-james-by-the-coward-robert-ford-brad-pitt-casey-affleck-andrew-dominik-film-about-celebrity-culture-8175441/).

Why is Blonde rated NC-17 on Netflix? (Dexerto)

Blonde, the Marilyn Monroe movie starring Ana de Armas, has arrived on Netflix - but why is it rated NC-17? Here's your spoiler-free answer.

“It’s a film that is supposed to create controversy and discomfort. The official synopsis for the film reads: “Blonde boldly reimagines the life of one of Hollywood’s most enduring icons, Marilyn Monroe. It’s important to remember this: while it may feature recognizable moments from her life, it is not a biopic, as it’s based on Joyce Carol Oates’ novel.