Re: Promising Young Woman: Law-and-order campaign against the rights of the accused Archived Message Posted by Raskolnikov on March 31, 2021, 7:42 am, in reply to "Promising Young Woman: Law-and-order campaign against the rights of the accused" I saw this last night and didn't think it was as bad as the reviewer in the OP; have you seen it? What did you think of it? The male characters being uniformly amoral, rapists in waiting is particularly glaring. Most other reviews I've read mention that it's not just the men Cassie goes after: she also goes after two women who were involved in the original assault and one of those incidents paints her in a particularly bad light (the child kidnapping). Having said that, if a film had reversed those gender stereotypes or made all its female characters such caricatures, the director would be lynched although I suspect a lot of people would claim those films have been made for a long time. The reviewer seems to have missed all the elements of dark comedy (not surprising given the tone throughout) which I thought was the part of the film that worked best. The close-ups of the men dancing is clearly a parody of music videos and similar scenes in films but with reversed genders. It was a pretty amusing scene but the WSWS reviewer doesn't even detail what her objection to this was. The "appeal to cop" ending is more worrying but the attacks on the justice system are surely apt or do you think women accusing men of sexual assault are well served by the justice system as it is? the WSWS review mentions that the film is "animated by the spirit of the provocative campaign over the Brock Turner case in 2016" and leaves it there. That seems rather tone deaf if not outright ignorant as that case contains many of the elements railed against in the film. He rapes a woman who'd drunk too much, gets caught, then gets given a six month sentence because "he's a good boy with a good future". Don't get me wrong, I despise idpol and hate how the mainstream film critics fawn over anything that is written or directed by a woman or someone with the right skin colour or the right "optics" regardless of the quality of the work (a great example of this would be Spike Lee's "Da 5 Bloods" which was a steaming pile of shite that was uniformly praised as it plopped into view in the middle of the George floyd protests and it would be hard to rubbish it at that time. Also, Lee seems to be able to release any old shite and have them fawn over it. I loved his early films ,DTRT, Malcolm X, Clockers even Summer of Sam but god he's been dire for decades now) but this review seems like a tankie looking to demonstrate their class integrity. The appeal to class solidarity over gender at the end is all well and good but that ignores the fact that a lot of the problems the film attacks are real even though idpol is a perfect divide and rule tool. On the other hand, the film itself is overly simplistic and not particularly subtle so perhaps it should be reviewed in kind. I've seen quite a few reviews where the biggest complaint is Cassie is acting "without the consent of Nina" (her friend who was assaulted and started Cassie's crusade) and then a big debate about that which seems like an idpol circular firing squad. Message Thread: Promising Young Woman: Law-and-order campaign against the rights of the accused - Keith-264 March 31, 2021, 12:20 am Re: Promising Young Woman: Law-and-order campaign against the rights of the accused - Raskolnikov March 31, 2021, 7:42 am No I haven't - Keith-264 March 31, 2021, 10:59 am Re: No I haven't - Jackie April 2, 2021, 1:25 pm Why, is it a competition?....nm - Keith-264 April 2, 2021, 6:34 pm   Searching