I passed.
I was taking my 11-year-old to an 11 a.m. birthday party for his friend, more likely turning 12 but possibly also turning 11. It was at a place called TimeZone which has bowling, video games and laser tag. It's a fairly standard location for the birthday party of an 11-year-old, or even a 12-year-old.
The location was the Pacific Shopping Centre in Werribee, about 20 minutes from my house, and the precise physical location of Time Zone within that shopping center (I'll use the American spelling when referring to it casually) was directly next to the Hoyts theater. Before I left the house, I'd done the reconnaissance work to figure out what movie was starting right around that time, and on a Sunday morning, there were a number of options, but only one where I hadn't seen it, I remotely wanted to see it, and it would end by the time I needed to collect my son.
Although I had decided against going to that one movie that perfectly fit my needs, I still walked up to the Kiosk at 10:57, when at least ten more minutes of trailers could still be expected for the 10:50 start, and flirted with the idea once more. I went so far as to see how much it would cost, and I guess the $23 was enough to turn me away.
Yes, I'm just not that interested in Babygirl.
I haven't heard anything really negative about it. In fact, one podcaster I listened to recently -- a woman in her 20s, so take the age (not the gender) with a grain of salt -- raved inarticulately about how much she loved it. And "love" is not too strong of a word for how I felt about Halina Reijn's last film, Bodies Bodies Bodies.
But I couldn't pull the trigger, and it wasn't only because I was interested in having a breakfast sandwich and a coffee, and writing this post. (In fact, that it is the exact thing I am currently doing.) No, there were plenty of other factors that made this particular movie a non-starter for me.
1) The $23. It's much less than I paid per ticket when I took my kids to see Captain America: Brave New World on Thursday night, as Hoyts charges an outrageous $33 per adult for what they call their X-treme Screen, which is barely any bigger than a normal screen. (Fortunately, I got them both tickets at reduced kids prices.) But it's much more than the $0 I usually pay at participating cinema chains that take my critics card. Besides, Captain America was a unique set of circumstances where I could really kill multiple birds with one stone, as it was also an excursion to buy birthday presents for my wife, and I could review that movie and rank it for the current year. Perhaps still smarting from the nearly $200 I spent on dinner, the movie tickets and movie snacks, I wasn't so eager to shell out another $23 for a movie I didn't really want to see, and one that I couldn't rank for the current year -- or really review, since it's already been out a couple weeks now in Australia, having debuted in the U.S. in 2024.
2) I'm a little over Nicole Kidman in these roles. Babygirl is Kidman's second 2024 movie (along with A Family Affair) in which she has an affair with a much younger man, a definite way of flattering the 57-year-old who has done everything within her power to create the illusion that she is still in her 40s or even her 30s. I didn't particularly care for the other one, so I didn't think this one would be much better ... and even though I have never considered myself a plastic surgery shamer, I must admit I am finding it harder and harder to look at this treasure of an actress and not be distracted by the mistakes she's made in her quest for the fountain of youth.
3) I'm a little over this recent trend of trying to reinvigorate the erotic thriller. I haven't really cared for any of the more prominent examples that immediately jump to mind (Deep Water, Fair Play), and I kind of feel like these movies should have stayed in the 1990s.
4) I have been inundated with ads for Babygirl when I'm playing Lexulous on my phone. They tend to show about a ten-second montage of images and dialogue from the movie and then play it over and over again until you are finally allowed to click out of the ad and get back to the game. So even if I were game for the subject matter, the repetition of the same footage and dialogue might have already irked me terminally.
5) Then there's the fact that I am not a big Harris Dickinson fan. I think he might have a bit of a bully look to him. So it makes it more problematic that one of the ads focuses on him dancing shirtless to George Michael's "Father Figure," a focal scene that has already come up multiple times in the limited discussions I've heard of this movie, and makes me roll my eyes because of the way it's talked about as some moment of great inspiration, when it really seems more like the stuff of basic bitch thirst traps.
Well, sometimes it's nice not to indulge every movie-related life hack that comes your way. It's what separates us from the animals.
And now that I've almost finished my coffee and have finished this post -- which I won't publish until tomorrow because I've already published today -- I have more than 90 minutes of window shopping, reading, and other aimless meandering to look forward to.
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