Sunday, September 27, 2020

I think you've got the wrong movie

One of my favorite movies of 2019 was a delicious little slice of nastiness called The Perfection, about cello prodigies and the terrible things done to them to make them that way. In fact, I liked it so much that I watched it again on Friday night, only 15 months after my first viewing. 

As this was a polarizing one -- some people hate it -- I thought it might not hold up. It did. 

I was on its Metacritic page after the fact, to see what others were as wickedly tickled by its perversities as I was, and found that it has a very respectable score of 60 -- which is a good score for a movie some people hate. That means most of the people who don't hate it like it quite a bit.

I also noticed a very funny ad on the site, one that couldn't have been more confused in its messaging to prospective customers of both the movie and the streaming service it was advertising:


Yes, you read that correctly -- it is an attempt to sell Disney+ to people who watched The Perfection.

I don't want to give you too much of an idea why that's so crazy if you haven't seen The Perfection. So if you haven't, please go do so -- if you have a stomach for darker and more explicit content -- and consider this your SPOILER WARNING for the rest of this post.

The Perfection is a movie that features the following, in approximately this order:

1) The vacant eyes of a recently deceased elderly woman, lying in the bed where she died. 

2) Two women talking about getting wet as they watch two other people carrying on an affair in view of their spouses.

3) Those same two women having an erotic evening at a dance club and then sex back at the hotel. 

4) Fears of contagion in the form of multiple people vomiting yellow vomit.

5) A woman seeing maggots in her own yellow vomit. 

6) A woman accidentally shitting herself as she fails to get off a bus in time.

7) A woman seeing spiders in her yellow vomit and then unidentified bugs breaking through the skin of her right arm and then swarming that arm and hand.

8) A woman chopping off her own right hand with a meat cleaver in order to rid herself of the bugs.

9) A naked man approaching a teenage girl whom he intends to rape for failing to play her cello perfectly, flanked by two other men who will either do the same or act as an accessory.

10) A woman tasing, repeatedly kicking, and then kidnapping another woman in the trunk of her car. 

11) The aforementioned accessories being fatally poisoned, and a female accessory fatally stabbed in the back.

12) A woman threatening to and actually beginning to penetrate another woman with the stump where her hand used to be.

13) A man stabbing through a woman's forearm and running the knife up and down through the wound.

14) A man beaten repeatedly with an iron fire poker.

15) A man with his arms and legs cut off being kept alive by medical equipment as he is forced to watch an unusual cello duet where each woman provides one functional arm to playing a single cello.

So, just your average Disney+ film, am I right?

Of course, I know this is just a template, and whatever title you happen to look up on Metacritic gets inserted into the ad, the same way your own name gets inserted into an email from Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi. I checked another movie on Metacritic just to be sure.

But as I had never seen this ad before, it certainly made for a funny first introduction.

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