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I’ve not seen Blonde, and at this point, if I did watch it, it would be in the spirit of opposition research. The reviews have been pretty savage; both audience and critics’ scores are bad. So: your assessment is widely shared. People praise a couple of individual performances, but most think the movie misses badly, both thematically and in execution.

At this point, I confess to a morbid interest in such misses. This was a well-financed, highly hyped production with a lot of big names attached. How did it go this wrong? Did no one see this coming? Such things happen: Don’t Worry Darling (which I’ve also not seen) is this year’s other notorious example.

DWD had already been flagged as a trainwreck in the making before it premiered, and one of the liveliest lines of discussion was sympathy for Florence Pugh, who everyone likes, having gotten stuck in it. Flo was a trooper and saw it out (as did Chris Pine), as professionals are supposed to do. She was then conspicuous for doing the absolute bare minimum on promotion — probably no more than what she was contractually obligated to do. The bad blood was thick enough on that to choke the sharks. The problems there mostly point to the director, who may have gone from Annointed One to pariah in one film.

And we probably shouldn’t forget the new team at Warner Bros. Discovery cancelling the nearly completed Batgirl and writing the whole think off as a tax loss. That film had been developed when WarnerMedia was in full grovel mode to the DIE zealots, and there was already a blackwashing backlash attached to it. But there was also a lot of buzz that it was just flat out bad. A lot of money. A lot of big names. Some stupid decisions. An expensive writeoff. I feel sorry for the actors involved; the failures here had to do with the producers, writers and directors.

Meanwhile, a lot of excellent work is getting done by the small independent producers working the low budget end of the market. Nowadays, that’s where I look for good movies.